Get Happy (14 page)

T
HE LAST DAY
of the break, Friday, we did another thing from Hayes’s list. It was after we had spent a few days recording. I called my mom and made up a story about how Joy had messed up the schedule and I was on for two gigs: one at five and one at seven. Hayes had all the supplies ready, and as we walked to the corner of Davis and Sherman, he described this article he’d read about a guy who went on a sort of happy campaign in Washington, DC. “He and his friends stood on a busy street corner at rush hour and held up signs to make passing motorists smile,” he said.

“Just the phrase
passing motorist
makes me smile,” I said. “Did it work?”

Hayes stopped in front of a burger joint. “We’ll find out.” He tore open a package of poster board and took out two markers.

“So …,” I said. “What do we put on the signs?”

“Anything that’ll make somebody honk or smile or laugh or wave. We want to try to get as many people as we can to respond in the next hour.” He balanced the stack of poster boards on a fire hydrant. A steady stream of cars rushed by. “What would make somebody happy just reading it?”

My mind went blank.

“A phrase,” he said. “Like
Cheer up
, only more original.”

“How about
Try robust enthusiasm
?”

He laughed and wrote in large letters:

We took turns writing down our ideas.

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded.

We each took a sign, leaned the rest against the hydrant, stood on the curb, and held up our messages.

A car went by and the driver did a funny double take.

We both laughed. “Well,” I said. “It’ll work for us if nothing else.”

“She smiled!” He pointed and waved at the next car and then the next. “Him, too.”

The honks started coming.

A guy in a suit walked by and gave us a huge smile and a thumbs-up.

Hayes looked at me. “It’s going to be hard to keep count.”

A truck approached. “Trucks count for double,” I said, waving my sign and reaching up to pull on my imaginary horn.

The guy honked, and Hayes started jumping and hooting in a hilarious way. Two women walking on the other side of the street stopped to laugh. The whole thing was incredibly cheesy, but you wouldn’t believe how fun it was. For the next hour, we made what seemed like all of Evanston happy. Motorists. Cabbies.
Truck drivers. Moms pushing strollers. Joggers. An old guy with a cane. Every honk, smile, or wave was like a shot of positive energy coming back at us.

As we were packing up our signs, the owner of the burger joint actually came out and invited us to come in for free burgers and fries. When we were done, who should walk by but little Lindsey, the adorable six-year-old I rescued from the mean girl in that basement, and her mom. The mom was talking on her cell phone, with little Lindsey walking two steps behind her, wearing leotards and — get this — the fake gold pearls from her party around her neck. Lindsey’s eyes lit up when she realized who I was and she pulled on her mom’s sweater. “It’s her,” she whispered.

Her mom gave me one of those distracted nodding smiles.

“Hi, Lindsey,” I said. “You look beautiful with your necklace. Are you just coming from a ballet lesson?”

She nodded, wide-eyed and smiling, so thrilled that I remembered her name, and pulled at her mom’s shirt again. Her mom recognized me and lowered the phone for a second. “Oh, look who it is! Linz already requested you for next year’s birthday party.” I could
tell she wondered what Hayes and I were doing with those signs, but she went back to her cell conversation, her smile dropping. “You need to pick her up tomorrow at nine, Kevin. That’s what we agreed on.” She pulled Lindsey along, but Lindsey kept looking back at me, her little legs pudgy and pink, her eyes full of admiration.

“One of your fans?” Hayes asked.

I nodded.

Joy Banks and Cassie Lott could eat that with a side of fries.

We got our food and walked down Church Street toward Northwestern, talking and eating.

The day had been overcast, but now it was clearing and the sun was setting. We crossed Sheridan Road and took a trail through some trees, and the ground became sandy, and suddenly, there it was in all its glory … the lake. No matter how often I see it, I am always amazed by how big it is. When I was little, I called it Michigan Ocean. That evening, in the fading light, the water was a beautiful greenish gray, the waves small and gentle, the water folding right at the shore, as though each wave were happy to come home.

We took off our shoes and walked in the cold, damp sand as far as we could one way, talking and stopping to skip rocks, then we turned around and walked back and sat on the sand facing the lake, the only people left on the beach, the sky now dark.

“So do you know Ray’s?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“It’s over on Prairie Avenue. It’s this old house where they have live music. They have open mics one Saturday each month.”

“That sounds cool,” I said, already getting nervous.

“So …” He smiled at me.

“Is this on your list?” I asked.

He nodded. “Say yes. We can do a duet.”

“When?”

“Next Saturday, April fifteenth.”

The date came with a shadow attached to it, which flickered across my mind. It was the date of Keanu Choy’s lecture, but I decided it was a perfect day to play music with Hayes.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.” He fist-bumped me, and I added, “If you get a reward for doing everything on that list of yours, I want a piece of it.”

He laughed.

I looked out at the lake. The half-moon lit a path on the water, leaving the rest black and mysterious.

“What made you start your list in the first place?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I was depressed. My brother left for college, and my parents split up. School was stressful. I hated being there, but I hated coming home because my mom had taken all this stuff with her and it didn’t feel like home anymore.” He picked up a rock and tossed it.

“Where is she?”

“In Waukegan.”

“Did she just leave out of the blue?”

“No. They were fighting. She said they tried.” He smiled and shrugged again.

“Did you get a choice about whether to go with her or stay with your dad?”

He nodded. “I didn’t want to move. School was bad enough here. It would have been worse to move.”

“So at some point, you got the idea to make the list?”

“I got tired of being depressed and — there’s that
whole New Year’s resolution thing that people do — so I decided to make a list and gave myself a deadline. I figured if I started doing something, I’d feel better.”

“It’s working, right?”

Hayes smiled. “Yeah.”

“I’m glad.” I dug my toes into the cold sand. We sat quiet for a few moments, listening to the lapping of the water against the shore. Way out in the distance, a speck of light from a boat danced in the dark, and to the right, Chicago lights glowed. “So what’s left on the list?”

He turned and smiled, and even though his features were dark, I felt a rush of heat move from his eyes straight into my own. “I don’t know if I’m ready to confess,” he said. “After the open mic, I’ll only have one thing left to do, but it’s kind of scary.…”

“Scary? I didn’t think you were scared of anything.”

“Me? Not scared? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m scared.”

“You are not. You walk up to people and shake their hands, you audition for jobs, you put on cowboy suits and face small children, you sing in the street, you do good deeds. You’re the most together person I know.”

“I was terrified to shake your hand, terrified at that
audition, terrified when we were all in that van driving to the first party, terrified to sing with you and Fin on the street.”

“You were not.”

“I was.” He looked out at the lake. “You’re the one who’s not afraid of anything.”

I laughed. “Me? I am filled to the brim with fear.”

“Minerva Watson? You’re kidding? You and Fin do what you want. You’re known for that.”

“And I am secretly an internal wreck,” I said. “If you could see the real me, you’d be horrified.”

“Let me see …” He leaned in, with this joking expression, as if he were trying to see the real me in the dark through the portals of my eyes. I made a funny expression and leaned in closer, too, as if I were trying to peer through the darkness to a deeper Hayes. Then his face softened and the moonlight flickered in his eyes. I stopped breathing. My body was sitting on the sand, but my soul or my spirit or whatever you want to call it was traveling through the light of his eyes and really seeing him.

Then I panicked and started doing the Get Happy song and dance. He laughed and let the moment go.

My phone buzzed, and it was my mom, worried because it was getting late. While I was calming her down, Hayes got out his phone and whispered that he was calling his dad to ask him to drive me home.

“I’m getting a ride home, Mom,” I said. “I’ll see you in, like, half an hour.”

Hayes made his call and agreed on a pick-up spot with his dad. We said good-bye to the lake and walked back to Sheridan Road and hung out there, talking and waiting.

Right as the car pulled up, Hayes stopped me, and said, “Wait,” And then he made me hold out my hand.

“Your plakette, my lady,” he said, and dropped a warm smooth stone into my palm.

He held open the car door for me, and when I got in, his dad turned around and — big smile — shook my hand.

In the car, he gave his dad a hard time about what he was listening to on the radio and they teased each other about it in a cute way. I sat in the back and held myself very still, watching the moon follow us home.

Once, when I was six or seven, we took a trip to my aunt Joan’s ranch and — I remember this moment
vividly — she brought a candy dish down from a high shelf and held it in front of me and said, “Take as many as you want, Minerva.” The dish was full of perfectly smooth round candies in pastel colors, and I scooped up a handful and walked around, holding myself very still so that I wouldn’t lose a single one.

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