Happy Again Read Free

single poem she wrote, which she did, a little sheepishly, since some of them were quite obviously about him (particularly the one called “Him”).
    Better than Wordsworth was always his response, until one day she’d asked him to name a single Wordsworth poem, and he couldn’t. That’s why you’re better than him , he’d written back, and she couldn’t help laughing.
    They mused about when they would see each other again, but Ellie was stuck in high school in a small town in Maine for another year, and once his press tour was over, Graham would be leaving for Vancouver to shoot his next film.
    “Any chance his publicity tour will include Henley?” her mom had asked, unhelpfully, one night when she caught Ellie out on the porch swing, staring at the bluish screen of her phone.
    “Unlikely,” Ellie told her.
    Still, it was fun to imagine.
    She took to daydreaming: sitting in a school assembly, wondering what would happen if Graham walked through the double doors of the gymnasium, or ducking through the branches on the way down to the water, picturing him sitting on the rock— their rock—with the ocean at his back and a huge smile, waiting there just for her.
    But this wasn’t a movie. And things like that didn’t happen in real life.
    Their lives had intersected briefly, here in this small corner of Maine, and maybe that was it.

Six
    After a while, the spaces between e-mails grew longer—not so much because it wasn’t the same as it used to be, but because it wasn’t enough anymore.
    They knew now what it could be like when they were together. And so being apart—even when connected by the thin thread of an e-mail chain—just wasn’t good enough.
    Besides, they were both busy. Ellie was applying to colleges, and Graham’s tour meant long days filled with press junkets and photo calls, followed by long plane rides to do the whole thing over again in the next city. Ellie read about all of it in Quinn’s magazines as they sat together in the ice-cream shop where they both worked after school.
    “It’s not like we promised each other anything,” she said one day, tossing a magazine aside. It slid along the counter, then fell onto the floor in a heap of crinkled pages. Neither of them moved to pick it up. It was a cold, rainy day in October, which was the off-season for tourists. Nobody was coming in for ice cream.
    “Stop being so sensible,” Quinn said, leaning against the counter. “You’re allowed to be frustrated.”
    “Well, what am I supposed to do?” Ellie asked. “Hop on a plane to Sydney or London or Vancouver? Tag along like some kind of weird groupie while he gets interviewed and goes to parties and hangs out with Olivia Brooks?”
    “Now you’re just being dramatic.”
    “I can’t be too sensible and too dramatic at the same time,” she pointed out with a sigh. “All I’m saying is that it was probably doomed from the start, right?”
    “Still overly dramatic,” Quinn said, raising one eyebrow. “But I take your point. It’s admittedly a little easier when your boyfriend sits behind you in physics.”
    “You sit behind him ,” Ellie said, laughing in spite of herself, “so you can look at his answers.”
    “Yeah, well,” Quinn said, flushing a little, as she did whenever the subject of Devon came up, “that’s not the point.”
    But more weeks slipped by, and the fewer e-mails that passed between Ellie and Graham, the more ordinary they became. Instead of their sharing secrets, trading intimate thoughts and feelings, the correspondence started to feel like an activity log, nothing more than a generic report on what they were each doing from day to day.
    The week before Christmas, Ellie learned she didn’t get into Harvard after applying early action. She couldn’t have known then that she’d be accepted only a few short months later; at the time, it felt like the worst kind of failure, and she was absolutely crushed. Her first instinct, of course, was to write to