The Things That Make Us Happy
By Veronica Meliksetian
2020 Winter Showcase Fiction Award Winner
-1 | before
“So, how do you like it here so far?” asks the girl across the fence.
There are two ways to answer any question– lie or tell the truth. But here, lying would be too obvious, and honesty would be too harsh. I shrug instead, hands shoved into pockets, lips shut.
“Yeah, moving must be rough. I’ve only ever lived here.” She nods back towards her house a mere six feet away from my own, bangs bouncing back before coming to rest against her forehead.
Moving must be rough; that’s a nice way to put it. The act of moving–packing boxes, sorting through clothes that kind-of fit, selling stacks of old books from under my bed– wasn’t that bad. It was refreshing. It was starting over, which is always sort of nice in the same way that it’s always sort of scary. Even driving from Connecticut to Washington (State, not District) was bearable. You really catch up on sleep while the landscape of the entire United States flies by, unacknowledged.
Arriving was the bad part.
Pulling into an unfamiliar driveway on an unfamiliar street, in a town 2,852 miles away from your home– that was rough. Stubbing your toe on the top step of the walkway because you’re used to three instead of four, was rough. Losing your mattress and a box of clothes in the move, was rough. Knowing that you left someone behind, stumbling through their own unfamiliar environment, was unbearable.
“Yeah,” I finally say. “Moving was difficult. I guess staying in one place has its downsides, too, though.” I don’t know how much I believe the latter, but it sounds like something I’m supposed to say. And the longer I look at the girl, the more she looks like someone who, though capable of more, has only left the state to go to Disney Land–making her someone that needs to hear that last part.
The girl leans forward, elbows resting on the posts of the chain link fence, as if she plans on being here for a while and wants to get comfortable. “I mean, traveling’s cool,” she says. I almost snort when she starts telling me about the vacation she took earlier in the summer–Disney World. Slightly different from Land, but basically the same. Worse, if anything.
I stop listening after she said, “My mom downloaded the app because my cousins wanted to meet all the characters.” It’s not fun being right when there’s no one to laugh with. Not that I’m dying to make fun of this girl; she seems alright so far, and I’m not exactly in a position to be turning friends away. If my brother was here, I would’ve been struggling to hold back an abrasive laugh instead of politely nodding along to the story, squinting against the midday sun. I wouldn’t care about making friends–why bother when you have one built-in? I used to wonder if I would be friends with my brother if he wasn’t that. Almost always, I end on a strong no. I don’t think he’d want to be friends with me, either.
The girl across from me comes back into focus, gesturing at something, arms extended fully. It would be nice if I knew her name, but I’d been trying to find my missing stuff when her family came over to “welcome us to the neighborhood!” and even the thought of bringing it up now, at the end of this conversation, leaves me fighting back a shameful blush. She probably doesn’t remember my name either… The thought disappears quickly–I know she does.
“Hey, it’s been a long day and I still have a lot to unpack…” I don’t think I’m cutting her off as her hand gestures seemed to be the grand finale of the story, but I trail off, giving her a chance to talk over me, just in case.
“Oh, yeah, sorry! You must be exhausted.” If this was someone else, anyone else really, I would’ve taken that last bit with a healthy serving of sarcasm. But she didn’t seem to mean anything more than, “You look like you spent 44 hours trapped inside a car, but I, the human embodiment of a golden retriever, can’t say that, so I’ll keep it polite.”
“I’ll see you around…” More of a fact than anything else. I mean, we live next door to each other. I’ve already thrown her a half-hearted smile and wave and am mid-escape when she calls out.
“Hey!” Maybe she doesn’t know my name… I turn to see that she’s already hopped the fence and is walking toward me. She digs through her back pockets as she approaches, stopping in front of me with a crumpled gum wrapper in hand. I watch her scrawl her number on the translucent scrap, hoping she doesn’t actually expect me to use it. It smells like bubblegum when she hands it over, and I slide it into my back pocket without a glance.
“See ya around!” She says, jumping back over the fence, making it look easy.
1 | begin
“Blythe, your boxes are in your room. What are you looking for?” My mom barely glances up, sorting through boxes labeled kitchen, uniform block letters with a subtle slant–my brother’s handwriting. The same writing is on the side of the boxes outside my room, where my half-cursive mess should be.
“Those aren’t my boxes; they’re Noah’s.” I sit down on the edge of the kitchen counter, waiting to see how she’ll react. If she’ll scratch her nose and change the subject, braid the ends of her hair to avoid looking at me and mumble a response under her breath, strained. But there is no tensing of her shoulders, no discomfort in her voice, when she finally replies.
“Yours must be in the guest room, then. Sorry, Bee.” I can’t tell if she’s genuinely unaffected by his name, or if she’s gotten better at faking it. Lingering a while longer, I decide that it’s genuine, but run up the stairs before she can give me reason to think otherwise.
–
She’s wrong about the boxes. The guest room, which I know will never house an actual guest, is already unpacked and assembled, empty boxes stacked in the doorway as if guarding what hides inside. Back home, we didn’t have a so-called “guest room”–we had a pullout couch in the living room that worked “just fine” according to Grandma. My brother and I didn’t share a room, so what was meant to be a guest room was surrendered to us, much to the annoyance of my hoarder father. Hoarder isn’t really the right word, but I refuse to call him “a collector.”
Dad started off with buying model ships from the old-white-people garage sales in our old-white-people neighborhood. That turned into building his own, which evolved into putting tiny ships into glass bottles. He’s a few years off from calling himself Captain – that’s how Noah put it anyway.
And before 11-year-old me kicked Noah out of our shared room, the bottled boats lived proudly on bookshelves in the guest room, dusted biweekly, repaired as needed.
Dad was excited about having twins from the second he found out. But Noah and I both came to realize that he’d wanted two of a kind, not one of each. Two sisters who wouldn’t hate each other and would love to share a room until the day they went off to college. Two brothers who weren’t slobs and didn’t fight and would tolerate sharing a room until the day they went off to…wherever it was they went. When he got one of each, his excitement didn’t waver much. Until we turned eleven and he realized he would have to make a major sacrifice. He said goodbye to the display shelves, the room he’d made his personal dock, and packed most of the bottles up to stash in the attic, collecting dust no one bothered to brush off.
But now, with only one twin, the boats are back, reclaiming their positions on the bookshelves in the guest room, guarded by their former cardboard cages.
I didn’t know anything about boats, except for that they’re historically named after women. My mom has one, though “Elizabeth” was fairly popular among queens. I have one, but Dad had to paint over the original name since the kits he bought didn’t really aim to have a large variety of names. Noah wouldn’t let Dad name one after him–my brother was the one who told me that boats were women and didn’t want one to have his name. He turned out to be wrong. They’re named all sorts of weird things, and “Noah” wouldn’t even be in the running. We didn’t talk much by the time I found out, and I never bothered telling him. He wouldn’t have cared.
Now, 18 and alone, I feel the urge to do what I kept my brother from doing as a kid. Taking one of the heavy glass jugs and watching it shatter. No one would need to know–I could say that it cracked on its journey here, and all it took was a light dusting to make it sink.
Noah, despite not having his own, did have a favorite ship. It’s sitting on the top shelf now, forcing me to stretch and stand on my toes just to grab the neck of the bottle. The bottle’s small compared to what Dad usually worked with, light enough to hold in one hand. In the past Noah had taken out the cork and tried to do the same with the ship, resulting in tears in the tea-dyed sails and chips in the main-mast. It’s a pathetic thing in comparison to others on the shelf, and I doubt anyone will miss her. I let it roll over in my hand, looking for a date or signature on the base, only to have the entire ship detach, floating freely in the bottle. Aside from the small clink from the hull hitting the glass, the whole thing is very anticlimactic. Maybe I’ll send it to Noah like this, and he’d finally be able to get it out.
–
Across the hall in my own room, I set the broken ship down on the bottom shelf of my bookshelf. Once there are actual books on it, the S.S. Noah will be out of sight and hopefully out of mind. The room I’d claimed as my own was the smallest. I didn’t care; I just wanted the windows. One was useless, directly facing my neighbor. If they opened their blinds, I would have a perfect view of their entire room. It had a window seat, though, so as long as my neighbor didn’t make a habit of opening that window and staring at me, I wasn’t going to complain. The other opened out into the backyard, which wasn’t so much a yard as it was the beginnings of a forest. One of many in the area, I assumed.
I hadn’t bothered reading up on Olympia or Washington before we arrived. There was no time, and frankly, no point. It wasn’t like I could’ve uncovered some grizzly murder or notorious cult and changed anything. We were moving no matter what, and for once in my life I didn’t have the energy to fight. I put that energy towards reminding myself that I’m only here for the summer. Washington didn’t fit into my plan, so much as exist, when I was applying to college a year and a half ago. And before life as we knew it ceased to exist, I was planning on spending an unreasonable amount of money at NYU.
When my life went down the crapper, so did the money. Dad said it was for the best, but I knew he didn’t believe it. None of this was “for the best.” Except maybe my windows and the sunroof positioned directly above my bed. What Hartford lacked in stars, Olympia overcompensated for. Or so my mom told me in an attempt to “get me on board!” And since this is the only good thing going for me, I’m committed to spending the next four months in this bed, wasting time trying to remember something that no longer exists.
The longer I sit cross-legged in this skeleton of a room, the worse I feel. I have a bed frame without a mattress, bookshelves missing books, a desk without anything that could possibly go on or in it. And if I sat and thought about it for too long, I could connect this all to me and my brother, one twin without the other, on opposite sides of the country. Good thing I’m not doing that, then.
Instead, I walk back downstairs and continue the search.
–
When we went on family vacations, my favorite part of the trip was unpacking. Unpacking my suitcase in the hotel and shoving everything in the closet or the drawers under the TV. Unpacking back at home, dumping the contents of my suitcase on to the floor before deciding if it went to the laundry bin or my dresser. Unpacking there was full of anticipation. It was looking at the clothes I brought and planning out outfits, or when I was younger, saving my stuffed animals from the suffocating suitcase. Unpacking at home was less rushed, mainly because I was exhausted, but also because I already felt nostalgic for the places we’d been. It was finding a stray map from Copenhagen, or pesos from Argentina shoved into a pocket, forgotten. Nothing made me happier than unpacking.
I guess the things that make us happy can change.
–
Dad hasn’t been inside for a while, unless he’s left his door-slamming habit behind and is a quieter man now. He wasn’t a big fan of the move because he was leaving his friends behind, which is why I try not to hold it against him when I glance outside and see him next to my boxes, chatting with the neighbors – on the hunt for new friends already.
Because of his overly social tendencies, we’d grown up surrounded by adults and all of their adult friends mingling and what not, while us kids ran around trying to remain unseen and out of trouble. Noah never mastered the art of invisibility, but now, approaching the boxes without as much as a glance from my father or the neighbors, I know that I have. And I love it. Honestly, it just confirms my suspicions. My brother’s good at causing a scene, while I prefer cleaning it up, or watching from the sidelines.
Lugging a box–full of books, I’m sure–to the porch, more than a small part of me misses my brother. If Noah was with me, we would’ve snuck off by now. We’ve been here since eight in the morning, and for most, unpacking would be enough for one day. My brother, however, is not like most, and would be off exploring every inch of the neighborhood, creating a mental map miles better than anything Apple or Google could give you.
I could go now. Forget about unpacking and wander off. With the box in my arms, standing on the porch steps and looking off towards the streets stretching on past our own, I know I won’t go. Maybe if Noah was here. But if Noah was here, we wouldn’t have moved in the first place. I try not to hold that against him. Instead, I sandwich the box between my chest and the side of the house, propping it up with my knee and pulling the door open before sliding in backwards, doing just fine on my own.
Bio:
Veronica Meliksetian is from Edison, NJ, and is graduating January 2022. She hopes to travel in the spring of 2022 and wants to work in publishing! She was one of the Fiction submission winners for the Winter Creativity Showcase.