My Life After Now

6

Put on a Happy Face




We all finally woke up around noon, and I ended up giving Max and Courtney the abbreviated version of the evening’s events: cute guy, spent the night at his place, didn’t really remember much else.

“I bet it was amazing,” Max said dreamily.

“Yeah, he really did seem totally into you, Lu,” Courtney said, a touch of envy in her voice.

Their heads were bobbing with romantic ideals of love-at-first-sight and tender kisses and feather beds. I drowned in embarrassment.

“I have to go home,” I said abruptly, unable to keep talking about this.

I drove home in my pajamas.

Dad met me outside before I could even get out of my car. “I’m glad you’re home, Lu. Are you ready to talk?”

“Is Lisa still here?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I think once you talk to her—”

“I can’t deal with this right now, Dad,” I said, walking past him toward the house.

He didn’t follow me. “Well, whenever you’re ready, you know where to find us.”

I ran straight upstairs to the bathroom—keeping my line of vision locked away from the living room and kitchen in case Lisa was there—and stood under the shower until the water ran cold, scrubbing my skin raw, rinsing, and scrubbing again, watching the remnants of last night cascade down the drain.

I spent the rest of the weekend in my room—homework, line memorizing, and guitar practice kept my attention, for the most part, away from the bad places.

Sunday night, Papa knocked on my door. “Lucy?” he called softly.

“Just leave it outside,” I said, assuming he was there to deliver my dinner.

“Lucy, can I come in please?”

I strummed the guitar strings absentmindedly, debating.

“Come in,” I said finally, only because it was him.

“Max called for you. He said he tried your cell but it was off. I told him you’d call him back later.”

My phone’s battery must have been dead. I hadn’t taken it out of my bag to charge it all weekend. “Okay, thanks,” I said.

Papa closed the door behind him and leaned against my bookshelf. “How you doing?”

I shrugged.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

There was a long stretch of silence.

“So that’s it?” I said finally, my voice painted with bitterness. “She’s here to stay? What happened to let’s-all-share-our-feelings-and-sing-‘Kumbaya’-and-decide-together?”

“Lucy, you ran away. You made it pretty clear that you didn’t want to be involved in the discussion.”

“So I freak out one time and now I just have to live with the consequences?”

Papa sighed. “Of course not. If you really don’t want her here, then she’s gone. But I do think…if you just spoke to her, it might help you understand why she’s here. Maybe it will help you feel better about the whole thing.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Or maybe it won’t,” he said. “But I think it’s worth a try. You can’t spend the rest of your life in your room.”

After Papa left, I rummaged through my bag in search of my phone. But as I did so, my fingers grazed something else in the bag—condoms. They were leftover from my Ty days, and I’d forgotten they were even in there. But they triggered something in the back of my mind. There were still two of them, intact and sealed in their wrappers.

I frantically thought back to Lee’s cluttered apartment. There had been dust bunnies, dirty laundry, and a trashcan overflowing with empty soda bottles and crumpled up pieces of paper—but had I seen any condom wrappers? I couldn’t remember.

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Just because I didn’t remember seeing any wrappers didn’t mean they weren’t there. I’d just been in such a rush to get out of that apartment that I hadn’t noticed them. Lee must’ve provided the condoms, which was why I still had these in my bag. Yes, that made sense. Even though I had been on the pill for over a year, I never had unprotected sex. Never, ever, ever.

But, Lucy, a little voice in my head whispered. You never go out in the city or get drunk or have sex with guys you don’t know, either.

Shut up, I told the voice. I knew myself. And I knew that this was one rule I wouldn’t have broken.

• • •

Sunday night, sleep was out of the question.

Lisa.

Lee.

Ty.

Elyse.

What I did Friday night—that wasn’t me. I’d gone so far in my longing to escape from my life of late that I’d turned into someone else completely. And it just made me feel even worse.

I couldn’t keep going on like this.

I needed to be me again.

There was a song from Rent about the importance of forgetting the past and living for today. I repeated the lyrics in my head like a mantra. Forget regret. Yes. Excellent advice.

The only question was, how?

• • •

I heard somewhere that just the physical act of smiling can actually make you happier. So Monday morning, I slapped on a smile and went downstairs for breakfast, determined to put the events of the weekend firmly behind me. I hugged my dads and uttered a polite “good morning” to Lisa, who was sitting in the chair that no one ever used.

“Good morning,” she responded, surprised.

I coated an English muffin with grape jelly and settled down with yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. But my attention kept drifting across the table. I hadn’t had a chance to really look at Lisa until now. Her hair was short, sticking out from her head in inch-long spikes, and she was wearing deep red lipstick that was either skanky or sophisticated—I couldn’t decide. Her face was fuller than I’d remembered, but there were new creases around her eyes.

Breakfast slunk by in itchiness. It was like it was our first day being filmed for a reality show: the cameras were on us and we knew we were supposed to act normal…but we had completely forgotten what normal was. No one said much of anything, and there were a lot of uncertain glances being darted around. Every clink of silverware against a plate or rustle of a newspaper seemed amplified in the otherwise silent atmosphere. But we got through it.

The week forged ahead, and gradually things started to make sense again. I continued to avoid Lisa, and she avoided me right back. I aced my pre-calculus test and I was the only one who handed in the extra-credit assignment in Honors English. Courtney and Max and I went shoe shopping at the mall. Rehearsals with Ty and Elyse were still uncomfortable, but I was getting better at ignoring them.

I even felt like the smiling thing was working. The more I smiled, the happier I felt. As the days went by, I didn’t have to remind myself to smile at all.