More Happy Than Not (29 page)

Thomas sniffs. I look up. His eyes are red and watery. I haven't seen him cry since Brendan laid into him. “Remember back in June when we left that Leteo rally? You agreed with me that everyone serves a purpose. Is our friendship really so worthless now?” he asks.

When I don't answer, he turns to Genevieve. “I'm going.”

It doesn't sound like an invitation, but she looks at me one more time before following him anyway.

Genevieve is right: I don't want this happiness, but blind happiness is better than inhabitable unhappiness.

After my shift, I
go straight to my building, ignoring Baby Freddy's shouts to hang out. I enter the lobby just as my mom exits the downstairs Laundromat, pushing the heavy load of clothes in a shopping cart. I come up beside her and take over, heading to the elevator.

“Genevieve and Thomas stopped by,” I say, keeping my cool.

She doesn't even try and play it off or explain herself. “Thomas too?”

I press the elevator button. “Yeah. Did you only recruit Gen for the mission?”

“Outside your family, she loves you the most,” Mom says. “I thought that was my best shot.” Maybe so, but I guess Gen thought bringing along the guy I want to be my happiness might be a better bet. That girl is really something else. “I'm
tired of this fight, Aaron. I know it's my responsibility as a parent to give you the life you want, especially since I failed at getting you your own room and finding you a father who didn't get so lost in his own head, but I don't want to lose my son.”

The elevator arrives but we don't get on. “I just don't think I'm that different from him.”

“You are, my son, you are. You are kind and too good for the bad you've lived through. If you're sure, if you promise me that in this moment, you'll forgive me for signing off on your procedure, I'll do it.”

I hug her, promising over and over that this is what I want, what I
need
, that there would never be any reason to forgive her.

“Hold on,” she says. Here we go. “I'll sign off on one condition. I want you to visit Kyle and his family on Saturday.”

I get to see Kyle. That's more than enough.

9

KYLE LAKE, THE ONLY CHILD

W
hen Kyle and Kenneth were younger—twins still so identical even I couldn't tell them apart—they made up this game called Happy Hour. They didn't know what “happy hour” meant in the real world, but they heard it enough from grown-ups. They would come home from school and shout, “Happy Hour!” whenever their parents asked them to settle down and do their homework. They'd be granted one hour of playtime, relax time, whatever, before having to do work and chores. Happy Hour changed as they got older, transforming into a therapeutic judgment-free hour of bitching.

I don't even know who Kyle bitches to now.

It required a lot of back and forth, but my mom teamed up with Evangeline to make this meeting happen. Mom had to sign a permissions request and a confidentiality form, and some other papers promising never to disclose the location of the Lakes to anyone except me.

I'm not sure what the penalties are, but I guess it would just be really shitty of her to send the block flooding to 174th Street, right off the Simpson Avenue train stop. I guess their housing budget post-procedure wasn't very high; otherwise, they would've escaped to the deep end of Queens, not thirty blocks and several avenues over from where they started.

When I get to their apartment building, right beside a video rental store with a
closing
sign, I feel shaky. I press the intercom.

“Who is it?” Mrs. Lake asks.

“Aaron,” I say.

They buzz me in without a word. I walk straight to apartment 1E and knock twice. Both Mrs. and Mr. Lake—their first names lost on me—look taken aback when they open the door; it's the wounds on my face, no doubt. I'm surprised at how happy I am to see them considering how little time I've wondered about them. But now I remember the sleepovers where Mrs. Lake would play video games with us, and I remember the times Mr. Lake would accompany us on school trips to the Bronx Zoo, always sneaking us candy. I hug them both at once.

They welcome me inside. It hurts to see an apartment so different from the one I saw my friends grow up in: the walls are beige, not rust orange; the windows have bars, like a prison cell; the TV in the living room is gigantic, not the flat screen Mr. Lake won from a sweepstakes last year. The game consoles are all still here, but all of Kenneth's trivia and soccer games aren't. The cat-shaped clock Kyle gave Kenneth for their tenth birthday isn't hanging in the living room like it was in the last apartment. It really is like Kenneth never existed.

“You want some iced tea?” Mr. Lake offers.

“Just water, please.” Iced tea brings back another memory: of Saturday mornings over at the old Lake apartment. We had cereal in bowls of iced tea because we all don't like milk.

She brings me the water and they sit across from me.

“How are you both doing?” I ask.

“Do you want the truth?” Mr. Lake replies.

I nod, knowing I'm about to regret it.

“Hurts every day,” Mrs. Lake chimes in. “There's no forgetting. You see Kyle, and you expect big brother Kenneth to be tailing after him. There are still mornings where I almost ask Kyle to wake his brother up. It doesn't matter that it's been ten months or that we're in a new home. I can never believe I lost one of my boys.”

Mr. Lake stays quiet. He used to make jokes about how Kyle isn't actually his own person, just an alternate-universe version of Kenneth-gone-wrong.

“I miss when Kenneth would get rage-y whenever someone called him Kenny,” I say. As soon as the words come out, I wish I could take it back. It's not like I was invited to share a story, but I can't stop. All at once, I'm spilling out more and more things about Kenneth, like when he faked his eye exam in order to get glasses so people could tell him and Kyle apart. And when they dressed up as storm troopers for Halloween. And that time we were with Brendan in the band room while he rolled up a blunt, and Kenneth discovered he could play clarinet—which I hope to God still exists somewhere in this fake home and isn't in the hands of some stranger. The Lakes are crying by the time I have to take a breath.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

“Don't be
. . .
Aaron, thank you,” Mr. Lake says, staring into my glass of water he's still holding. “We never get to talk about our son anymore. It's
. . .
energizing to hear someone remember him so fondly. Makes me feel less crazy, like I didn't just make up this second son.”

“How do you do it? How do you not find yourself banging down Leteo's doors to give you the same procedure Kyle got?”

“We couldn't dishonor his existence like that,” Mrs. Lake says. “Parents have done it and it breaks my heart tenfold. You move on, you have to—but you don't write someone out.”

Mr. Lake looks at the timer on the microwave. “Kyle should be getting home soon, Clara. We should fill Aaron in on everything.”

They tell me the story of why Kyle thinks they moved. He had a history of fights with Me-Crazy—no love lost for that psycho when the Lakes moved away—starting from slaps to the back of the head on the school bus to being pushed into lockers and eventually straight-up fistfights. Whoever served as the architect for Kyle's blueprint—not Evangeline, I learned—tapped into very real emotions to create a very believable narrative that would never send Kyle back to our block. He just accepts his new life as a barber's apprentice, and boyfriend to some girl Mrs. Lake hopes is around forever.

The intercom buzzes.

“Always forgetting his keys,” Mrs. Lake says. “Why don't you go wait in his room? We'll send him in to you.”

I head to his room and Mr. Lake issues out one more obvious and painful reminder: “Aaron? No Kenneth
. . .
”

I nod, even though he can't see me. If there's one thing that hasn't changed, it's the smell of week-old socks and underwear. Kenneth wasn't exactly a laundry fan either, the two of them putting it off until Mrs. Lake gave in and did it herself. But everything else is different, like the queen-sized bed Kyle now has—bunk beds gone—and the memorabilia from times I wasn't around for.

The door opens. Kyle, an oblivious “only child,” walks into his room and laughs at me. “Your face is busted, Aaron.”

There's no hug or fist-bump or how-have-you-been moment. We just are, like we were never separated at all.

“Me-Crazy got me, too,” I say, careful with my words. I'm crossing a field of mines. I want to tell Kyle that Me-Crazy is in jail, but maybe he'll think the block is safe for visits. God knows what would happen if someone, just to be a dick, straight up told him he went through Leteo and unstitched his shielded memories. “I see why you bounced.”

Kyle leans against his wall, a map thumbtacked to the space above him. “I couldn't keep risking it. Good thing our lease was up anyway so we could get a fresh start. Shittier neighborhood, but some good people here.”

“I hear you got a girlfriend,” I say, picking up a handball from his bedside drawer. I toss it to him. “Who locked you down?”

We play catch as he tells me all about Tina, a Chinese American girl he met when she brought her little brother into the barbershop. Kyle was giving a Caesar cut and almost messed up. His mentor thought he was distracted because of the work, but
it was all because of Tina. I try to pretend I'm interested, but find myself almost tuning out until he asks: “How's Genevieve?”

“We broke up.” I remember what Thomas told me when he broke up with Sara. “We just weren't really right for each other anymore.”

“Damn, man. Any new prospects yet?”

“Nope,” I lie.

I want to come out to Kyle, but he'll have no idea what I'm talking about if I ask him to set the clock for a judgment-free Happy Hour. He's changed—not matured, but he's
been
changed, obviously. Maybe this new Kyle will be cool with Side A. Maybe it'll make him uncomfortable. I used to know the person in front of me and I'm tempted to bring him back, to unwind him, since Kenneth's death is his fault and he should have to live with that. He should know about how Kenneth could walk on his hands, how Kenneth always ate junk food and never had a single cavity, how Kenneth casually played ding-dong-ditch on his neighbors to get a rise out of us.

He should know Kenneth, his twin brother, existed. But it's not my decision to make.

I hang around for a little while longer until it's time for him to shower and meet up with Tina. He puts his girl first now, which I like. I promise to visit him again sometime soon, and he tells me to tell everyone on the block he says what's up. I hug Mrs. and Mr. Lake again, whose faces silently plead:
Don't forget.

10

LETEO: TAKE TWO

I
t's the day of my procedure and I'm standing on the corner, outside the Leteo Institute.

Memories: some can be sucker punching, others carry you forward; some stay with you forever, others you forget on your own. You can't really know which ones you'll survive if you don't stay on the battlefield, bad times shooting at you like bullets. But if you're lucky, you'll have plenty of good times to shield you.