This Is What Happy Looks Like(10)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

“I have a feeling you can do better anyway,” she said.

For years after that, the frames housed Ellie’s construction-paper drawings, brightly colored sketches of trees and boats and lobsters. And when she was older, she switched to poetry, filling them with her favorite stanzas, each one scrawled in her tiny handwriting. Customers began to linger in that corner, perusing the shelves, lost in the words, and they became as much a draw as anything else in the shop. The ones with poems about Maine were scooped up by the tourists almost as soon as they were set out, and once, when Ellie went to a party hosted by one of her classmates, she saw that the frame his mom had bought months ago was still empty of a family photo. But it was there in the foyer anyway, featuring a poem by W. H. Auden, Ellie’s favorite.

As she walked into the shop this afternoon, Mom was opening a brand-new carton of frames, and when Ellie was close enough to get a look, she began to laugh.

“Those aren’t—”

“I know,” Mom said with a groan. “They sent us the wrong ones.”

“Maybe some gift shop in Maryland can use them.”

“Who’d want a picture frame with a crab on it?”

Ellie rolled her eyes. “Who’d want one with a lobster?”

“Hey,” Mom said with a grin. “Don’t knock the lobsters. They’re our bread and butter. So to speak.” She began to pack up the frames again, wrapping them in tissue paper. “How come you’re late? Were you busy gawking at movie stars like everyone else in this town?”

Ellie hesitated, then shook her head. “Quinn had a little milkshake mishap just as I was leaving, so I helped her clean up.”

“See,” Mom said, sweeping aside the box. “That’s why you should only be working here. We’re nothing if not tidy.”

Ellie raised her eyebrows pointedly at the mess of inventory, the random items strewn about so that the whole shop felt like a maze, and they both laughed. But it was clear she was only partially joking about the second job. When Ellie had started taking shifts at Sprinkles a few months earlier, Mom wasn’t thrilled about it.

For as long as Ellie could remember, money had been an issue. When she was younger, it had never seemed to matter. They had everything they needed, the two of them. But this fall, she’d be starting her last year of high school, which meant that college—and the staggering cost of tuition—was looming ever closer. Ellie didn’t want to go to a state school; she had her heart set on the Ivy League, and so they’d already started talking about loans, the paperwork piling up on Mom’s desk, columns of numbers and percentages, line after line of fine print. This, alone, was enough to make Ellie feel guilty, enough to set her heart beating fast with worry whenever the subject came up.

But a few months ago, she found out she was accepted into a summer poetry course at Harvard. The program was impossible to get into, and Ellie had only applied on a whim after seeing a flyer taped to the bulletin board of her English classroom, never thinking she might be chosen. There were only fifteen high school students from across the country who would get to spend the first three weeks of August studying poetry while staying in the Harvard dorms. But the program cost just over two thousand dollars, and there were no scholarships or financial aid.

The night she told Mom about it, she’d seen the hesitation in her eyes.

“It sounds like a great opportunity,” she began, choosing her words carefully. “And I’m so proud of you for getting in. But—”

Ellie didn’t let her finish. She couldn’t bear it. “And they gave me a scholarship too,” she found herself saying, relieved to see the light go back on behind Mom’s smile, the worry replaced by a look of pure pride.

“Of course they did,” she said, giving her a hug. “I’m so happy for you.”

Ellie had needed to let them know she was coming by the end of May. At that point, she had exactly $178.24 in her savings account, and no plan whatsoever for how to make up the balance by the time the course started and the payment was due. But she sent back the form anyway, a check mark in the box beside the words “Yes, I will attend!”

The job at Sprinkles helped. But even with that and her pay from Happy Thoughts, Ellie’s calculations showed that at the end of the summer she was still going to be short by half. Quinn had offered to lend her some of it, and as much as Ellie appreciated the gesture, she knew not to count on that. Money had a habit of slipping through Quinn’s fingers pretty quickly, her paychecks usually disappearing the same day she got them; a few hours of online shopping and poof, they were gone.

But she dreaded having to give up her spot in the course to some trust-fund kid who’d spent her summer lying by the pool at a country club. There was no way she couldn’t go, and there was no way she could ask Mom to help make up the difference when they were just getting by as it was. It only made it worse that Ellie knew she’d say yes. It didn’t matter what she needed to do—sell the shop, donate a kidney, rob a bank—Mom would make it happen, which was precisely why Ellie could never, ever ask her.

Since school had let out, she’d started to become more desperate, working all day at one job or another, and then babysitting at night. She could see that Mom was worried about her new industrious streak, the way that work was taking over her summer.

“You’re sixteen,” she said. “You should be out getting into trouble.”

“I’m fine,” Ellie told her, again and again.

Now, as they stood there on opposite sides of the counter, the wind chimes tinkling in the breeze from the window, Ellie was sure they were about to stumble into the discussion once again, the same one that had lately been running on an endless loop like a bad recording. But there was a reluctance in Mom’s eyes that matched Ellie’s own. Neither of them wanted to talk about this; neither of them wanted to argue.

So when the door banged open, Ellie whirled around with a rush of relief. It took a moment for Quinn to emerge from between the T-shirts that were hanging near the register, and when she did, Ellie could see that her face was flushed.

“Okay,” she said, her hands held up as if she were about to perform a spell. “Okay, okay, okay.”

Mom leaned forward and turned to Ellie. “Is she having a nervous breakdown?”

“This is serious, Mrs. O,” Quinn said, sinking onto a blue beanbag chair. “This is, like, a dire emergency.”