Chris Vanjonack

AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner

Elizabeth Kaplan's Best Day Ever

At sixteen years old you find yourself in the woods of your New Jersey neighborhood, October 2012, wandering like always alongside Elizabeth and Riley, just shooting the shit, looking for a place to smoke, when, by chance, you happen upon the Best Day Ever Machine.

Elizabeth leads the way, following the Passaic River as it curves through grass and underneath orange foliage, talking about classes, parents, imagined trips to bullshit cities, Grey’s Anatomy, boys. “Matt and I found this place the last time we went out,” says Elizabeth, nodding towards a treehouse coming into view  just a few yards out from a sandbank littered with leaves and glass and empty cans of Coors Lite. “Might be fun to hotbox, but I mean, screw him, right?”

Elizabeth always wants to talk about boys, and Riley does too, even though it makes her blush and even though she talks about saving herself, and you’re okay talking about boys, but what you really want to talk about is girls, although you’re not sure how to just yet, or what to say about them, and so instead you say, “Fuck that nerd,” and start towards the red oak towering in front of you. The tree is massive and skeletal, and the shelter is decrepit, but Elizabeth’s enthusiasm carries your spirit.

You stand at the base and stare upwards. “Is it sturdy?” Riley asks.

“Better question is if it’s haunted,” Elizabeth says, beaming with unattainable energy. She tests the lowest plank, flashes a thumbs up, and scrambles up the trunk. You follow, and then Riley, and it is inside the treehouse that you discover the Best Day Ever Machine, positioned without fanfare in the corner of the shelter. It is small, rectangular, and box-shaped, and you identify it as the Best Day Ever Machine because the words BEST DAY EVER MACHINE are written across it in yellow, bold-faced lettering, center-aligned above cartoon depictions of cash and cars and supermodels. Elizabeth picks it up and examines it. Underneath the images are the words Wouldn’t YOU like to know when you’ll FINALLY be HAPPY and on the top of the device is a tiny red button that says, TELL ME.

“Was this here last time?” Riley asks.

Elizabeth shakes her head. “This is wild,” she says, and you scoot a few inches closer, ostensibly to get a better look at the machine, and sit cross-legged, conscious beyond belief of the two or three inches between your knee and Elizabeth’s. She hands you the machine, and on the back of the box, you discover a paragraph-long explanation of the device’s utility. “Huh,” you say, running your thumb over the faded paint job. “Can you believe anybody would buy this crap?” You scan the testimonials printed on the back. “The Best Day Ever Machine helped me hold onto hope in my darkest moments,” you say, voice dripping sarcasm, “because at least I knew that something better was coming.”

You read another, this one from a woman whose fiancé proposed on the exact date prophesied by the machine, and another from some guy in Tulsa who won the lottery. You neglect to share the final testimonial, which is delivered by a high school sophomore who explains how, thanks to the machine, he has a pretty good idea of how long it will be until he kisses a girl for the first time. You wonder how long it will be until you kiss a girl for the first time, and the thought makes your cheeks flush.

“We’ve got to try it,” Elizabeth says. She loves this kind of thing. Her older brother used to work at the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum in Atlantic City, and her visits sparked an appreciation for the kitschy and the downtrodden. She’s constantly dragging you to thrift shops and pitching future trips to ridiculous places: Atlantic City, of course, but also Roswell, New Mexico, Cut and Shoot, Texas. Those sorts of places. Anywhere it might be funny how sad everybody is. “Who’s up first?” she asks.

“I’ll go,” you say. Not expecting much, you press the TELL ME button and wait for something—anything—to happen, for a few seconds, several seconds, a minute, until the machine makes a gurgling noise and spits out a long, thin slip of computer paper from a dispenser on the side of the box that reads:

12/25/2019

“Jesus,” you say. “Christmas?” The suggestion spits in the face of your burgeoning punk-rock ethos.

“Could be worse,” says Elizabeth. “Imagine if it were Valentine’s Day.”

“Yeah, that’d blow too.”

Riley presses the button next. It takes a little longer this time, and when the machine finally spits out a date she laughs and clasps her hands together, and you roll your eyes.

08/13/2025

Then Elizabeth:

03/22/2002

“The fuck,” she says, running her fingers over the ink. “My sixth birthday was the best day of my life? I don’t even remember it.”

“Piece of crap,” you say. “Like the best day of my life would be on Christmas.”

“And besides,” says Riley, “what does best day ever even mean?”

“It’s got to be like, cool shit,” Elizabeth says, dreamy. “The happiest day of your life. I’m thinking Red Rocks concerts and twenty-first birthdays.” She discards the box onto the floor. “What crap. Nobody has the best day of their life before they graduate high school.” She looks at you, grins. “Although, who knows. Christmas, 2019—we could raise all kinds of hell.”

You laugh to disguise the look on your face—a slight curve of a smile, awestruck and hopeful—and roll a joint as Elizabeth cues up a Dead Kennedys song. “You’ll dig this one,” she says, and you smoke up, give Riley a little crap for not partaking, waste away the afternoon and then head home to forget about the whole thing, for a night, for a month, two months, three, negligent of your discovery’s magnitude until a full 66 days later when Elizabeth is killed in a head-on collision on her way home from a pep rally.

*

Poor Elizabeth.

Not Beth.

Not Liz.

Not Lizzy.

Elizabeth. Four whole syllables she would never let you out of saying.

“I can’t believe it,” Riley says, sitting on a sewage drain the afternoon after the accident, dangling her legs over a septic pond and smoking her inaugural cigarette. This is Riley’s first encounter with death, and you have to give her credit, you guess, for tackling it in style, even if she’s on the verge of tears and coughing every few seconds. “Do you want to pray with me?”

You do not, and besides, you’re used to death. Or, at least, you decided that you were used to death, in the bathroom, minutes after the principal’s announcement over the PA system. Sobbing and heaving and already exhausted with hurt, you reminded yourself that when you were eight, your grandfather died of a stroke, and that when you were fourteen, your father was pronounced legally dead for a full thirty-seven seconds in a restaurant after a heart attack. And so now, of course, you can handle this.

Riley takes your silence as an invitation to continue talking. “It’s just so scary, you know?” she says at the tail end of a long cough. “Like, we never could have guessed.”

Due to a nasty bout of mono that kept you holed up in your bedroom for the better part of sixth grade, you’re a year older than the rest of your graduating class, older than Elizabeth will ever be. You’re quieter, too. Angrier and worldlier on account of, again, the thirty-seven seconds your father spent dead and also because you’ve been to Florida. And so it is with great gravity that you take a drag of your cigarette, spit in the water and say, “Let’s not fuck around here,” because deep down, all three of you knew that things weren’t getting any better for Elizabeth.

And you know exactly when they’ll be best for you.

*

Walking home that afternoon, from the sewage drain, you decide to mold the shape of your life into one where, by Christmas of 2019, you’ll have a best day ever you can be proud of. It’s a little freaky, knowing that you’ll be as happy as you’ll ever get in just a few years, but there’s something hopeful in the implication that the ache you feel in your chest over Elizabeth won’t last forever. That it will dull.

You begin this process of reshaping as soon as you get home. You throw away old photographs. Movie tickets. Mixtapes. “Don’t worry about it,” you tell your father when he catches you in the bathroom, blasting Sleater-Kinney and shaving your head. “I’m just going through a permanence.” He stands in the doorway and his face is white. He asks if you want to talk about it and you turn up the volume.

That night, you make a list of all the things you want in life. You want a partner. But before that, you want many partners. Or maybe you don’t want partners at all; maybe you just want people. Friends. Cool friends. A community. You want to do shit that matters. Or at least shit that’s interesting. You want to save the rainforest. You want to go to concerts every night, meet rock stars, mosh around the clock. You want to be comfortable, normal, and exceptional.

The contradictions are numerous, but right now, you mostly just want to have fun.

You decide you’re not having enough of it, and so after the funeral, during Elizabeth’s reception, when Riley asks for you to come, “play at her house later,” her accidental phrasing serves as confirmation that your time together has reached a natural endpoint. “I didn’t mean to say it like that,” she says. You’re sitting in the Kaplan living room. Elizabeth’s mom is acting so quiet and so polite that it’s almost spooky, and not one of the adults in attendance has anything useful to say to you. “We could watch a movie or something,” Riley suggests. “Stay up late.”

Your hair had weighed you down, your past had weighed you down, and now Riley, too, is an anchor. “I’ve got plans tonight,” you tell her.

“What about tomorrow?” she asks, and she sounds nervous, sad. Her funeral clothes should make her look older, but somehow she’s never seemed younger or more girlish. “We could talk about it more,” she says. “Elizabeth.”

“Oh, Riley.” You put your hand on her knee, and from a distance, it must look to the other mourners like you’re comforting her. “Two roads diverge in a mellowed wood before me,” you say. “And one sounds way more fucking fun than the other.”

*

Fun turns out to be hard work.

In between sleep, classes, and night shifts at the cheesesteak joint, you balance a headlong dive into the punk scene, a raging appetite for suburban destruction, and a never-ending hangover that somehow always peaks during math class. In the mornings you chug Red Bull, in the evenings PBR, and in the afternoons you strut through the halls of your high school, taking turns spitting the word “penis” with increasing volume alongside your new friends, pausing only when you walk by Riley, who looks disappointed maybe, or wounded. You don’t like running into Riley, not even in passing. It makes you wonder about her life and remember about Elizabeth.

During this period, you spend a great deal of energy dating boys and feeling bad about yourself. The longest is Shitty Bassist, who plays all-ages shows and drinks too much. You bum around his gigs on Friday nights, wipe the Xs off your hands in the ladies’ room, and afterward, you help him carry gear back to his car, where he shoves his amp into his trunk and kisses you underneath elm trees. One night he wraps his car around a pole and earns a court date, so you dump him and spend a couple months with Roars-During-Sex Dude, and then hang for a bit with Anxious Virgin. At a house party the week before you graduate, you down two shots of Fireball and kiss a girl for the first time. She presses you against the laundry machine and avoids eye contact when she catches you staring across the auditorium at graduation six days later. You turn away to find Riley locking eyes with you, and now you’re the one looking down.

*

August 2014, and at the tail end of that breathless summer, you leave for school in Boulder, where you settle on a double major—marketing for your dad; journalism for you—and tell everyone that you’re going to be a music journalist. You get way into pot, and not long into the spring semester, you date Closeted Communications Major, only to ditch her, cruelly, on the whim of a drunken, 3:00 am epiphany.

“This isn’t it,” you say.

Fueled by Pop-Tarts and Svedka, sophomore year you move with hungover grace from partner to partner across a campus that hasn’t got shit on you. One night at a kegger, you tell Knows-Too-Much-About-Doctor-Who Chick all about the Best Day Ever Machine. You’re just drunk enough and there’s just something about the way she smiles that makes you want to hand over every piece of yourself. “Cool, I guess,” she says, once you’re finished. “Weird.” You hold your tongue, tell her you need a minute, take a walk, throw up in the bushes, and call Riley.

“I’m so scared,” you say when she picks up. You haven’t spoken since high school.

“Hey, come on. Where are you?” Riley asks. “Are you safe?”

“I have only four more years,” you say. “That’s not enough time for anything.”

“It was a fluke,” she says, and her voice shines through with a familiar kindness. “And besides—stop crying for a second, come on—there’s no such thing as best day evers, but even if there were, as long as in four years there are people who matter to you, who love you, then you’re okay. Even if you don’t see them—even if you just feel them, feel love, from me, from your dad, from Elizabeth, even—that’s not a bad best day ever.”

“But what if that’s all there is?”

“You’re no—”

You return to the party, kiss Knows-Too-Much-About-Doctor-Who Chick on the neck, lead her to her bedroom, and God, how she comes, how you both come, how her voice quivers nervously across so many unreturned voicemails in the weeks to follow.

*

Senior year of college, October 2017, you slow down a little, draft album reviews during your last gen-ed requirement, and become enamored with Activist Girl. She’s a year older than you, working on a city council campaign, and you’re dangerously into her from the start. She’s covered in tattoos, which is cool, and she wears the same flannel every day, but what you like best about her is that she calls you on your crap. That she gives a shit.

You first meet at a house party, where she catches you standing alone in the kitchen, scratching at a beer label. “You know that means you’re sexually frustrated, right?” she says, and later that night, once she’s finished, asks, “How was it?”

“Amazing,” you answer, breathless, but you can’t shake the feeling that she was asking about more than just the oral, about your entire life, which is building slowly to a climax larger than one she could ever give you. As you get closer, though, you begin to hope—no. Fear? No. Decide?—that perhaps she’ll be part of it. The weeks turn to months, and one morning you wake up to the unfathomable reality that you are a college graduate who loves her girlfriend.

*

In June 2018, you submit your resume for countless positions across the Denver Metropolitan Area. You brace yourself for radio silence from Denver Westward and Scene Magazine, but it still hurts like hell that the only three interviews you’re able to lock down are for marketing jobs. The first is a disaster and the second is mediocre, but the third offers you the job within 24 hours. “We’re still small,” they tell you. “You’ll be our Don Draper.” When you express skepticism, they add, “Well, maybe our Peggy, but still.”

You sleep on it. Turn them down.

“I only want to do shit I care about,” you say, and the explanation impresses Activist Girl more than your father.

That August you move in with Activist Girl and take a job as a bartender. The hours suck but the tips are decent and you like how loud everybody is. You’ve stopped introducing yourself as an aspiring journalist. “So, what do you do?” people ask, at parties, and you tell them, “I take it day by day.”

Some nights you have good nights, some nights you have bad nights, and some nights, you shut down for ill-defined but urgent-feeling reasons and make Activist Girl feel bad about herself. Through every variation, she tells you that she loves you.

“I love you too,” you say, sometimes with a period and sometimes with an ellipsis.

You’re beginning to accept that you will never review albums for NPR Music. Or write for Pitchfork. You will never be Chuck Klosterman; you hardly even write anymore. It all feels so out of reach that it makes you sad to think about. Still though, you want to be happy, you’re trying to be happy, and so it is with characteristic defiance that you strive towards what Activist Girl calls mindfulness. “Today could be positive,” you say each morning, to the mirror, until after countless repetitions you wake up to a New Year’s Day snowstorm, your body filled with heat and dread at the realization that December 25th, 2019 is now printed on your wall calendar.

You keep trying to wake up on time. You exercise. Call your dad. Give yourself a reward each day. A Long Island. A hot bath. A breakfast burrito.

Nine months off from Christmas, though, and these changes aren’t changing things. You make lists of all the things you have in life, highlighting the good in blue and the bad in red and playing addition and subtraction, trying to determine what change could possibly make so big a difference in so short a window. A new fear grips you: that Riley might be right, and that the Best Day Ever Machine might not even be real. If the best day of your life isn’t imminent, then how can you justify the damage you’ve wrought: the severed ties and broken relationships and the way you punish Activist Girl for loving you? There’s no way to talk to her about this, there’s no way to talk to anyone, no way to know if your anxiety is even warranted. You find yourself seeking shit shows, wasting away at dance clubs and dive bars, drinking too much, smoking too much, only to constantly catch yourself sober, staring off a balcony, arms against the guardrail, consumed by the thought of how different things might be if only you were different.

Seven months off.

Four.

Two.

“I want you to know that I’m really, really in love with you,” Activist Girl tells you, late one night, her hand shifting across your backside.

*

In mid-November, you get blackout drunk and throw a fucking fit when Activist Girl tries to you put you to bed. The next morning you wake up to a killer hangover, an exhausted girlfriend, and shards of broken glass still scattered across the kitchen tile. “You really fucked up,” Activist Girl says. You start to apologize and she cuts you off. “You’re never home. You’re never sober. You look right through me.” Her voice cracks. “Get your shit together.”

Late at night a few weeks later, at the start of December, you’re watching SVU reruns when you catch a commercial for a self-help agency. The ad shows a disaffected 20-something literally sleepwalking through her black-and-white existence, starting out the day with a bland bowl of cereal in what really appears to be your kitchen, driving to work in what appears to be your beat-up station wagon, and wasting away behind the counter at what appears to be your dead-end job, only to be suddenly awoken to a whole world of color when a customer slips her a business card emblazoned with the words THE AGENCY AGENCY.

The ad is a little like The Wizard of Oz, you think. Deeply fucking stupid.

“Would you ever consider something like that?” asks Activist Girl. When you don’t say anything, she adds, soft and hopeful, “It could be really good for you,” and you know that what’s left unsaid is: for us.

*

It’s December 20th, and upon arriving at the Agency Agency office, a cheerily-dispositioned receptionist hands you a clipboard and some paperwork. Rather than asking for your medical history, the paperwork wants your history. Your parents’ background. Your upbringing. Childhood traumas. Teenage anxieties. Platonic relationships. Romantic relationships. Your dreams. Your hopes. Your failures. The boring, no-frills details of your daily grind. In the comment spaces, you write about your father, your degree, your job, your girlfriend, your recent bout of post-graduate ennui—everything but the Best Day Ever Machine.

Once you’ve finished the paperwork, you wait for someone to tell you what to do, at first patiently, and then not so patiently, and finally, after 20 minutes, you ask the receptionist, “How long is this going to be?”

“Wonderful!” she says. “You may now head in to see the Agency facilitator in room 203. All you had to do was ask. See, all along you had the ag—”

You roll your eyes and walk through a hallway, then into a small office, where a middle-aged woman shakes your hand and instructs you to sit. “So,” she says, flipping through your paperwork. “It seems you’re worried that things are fine but not good, that you’re okay but not happy, and that if you continue down this trajectory you will become actively unhappy.”

“Pretty much,” you say. You neglect to tell her that you’re pretty sure you’re days away from peaking. That you’re scared it won’t even be notable. Just another fucking Wednesday. You’re even more afraid of what is sure to follow: quiet and decline and disappointment.

“Now then,” says the woman. “Are you familiar with the 2004 film, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story?” You start to say something about how Ben Stiller has kind of fallen off the face of the Earth lately, but she silences you with the flick of her index finger. “Please,” she says. “Watch with me.” She clicks a button on a remote control and a small TV in the corner of the room flashes to Dodgeball’s opening scene, which finds Vince Vaughn—who’s just playing Vince Vaughn basically, but a version of Vince Vaughn who runs a commercially unviable gym—passed out on the couch in his cluttered living room as his dog licks his crotch.

This continues for maybe 45 seconds, and then the Agency facilitator pauses the DVD. “From the opening scene alone, we can infer that Peter LaFleur drinks too much, that he is out of shape, alone, and uninspired. He is the protagonist of this film, and as audience members, we are trained to know that these flaws will be rectified by the closing credits. With his gym on the brink of closing, Peter engages on a quest not only to save his gym, but to save himself.”

You’re about to ask this lady how many times she’s seen Dodgeball, but before you can, she puts her hand on your leg. Squeezes.

“You need to understand,” she says, “that you are the protagonist in your life, and that you must be your own inciting incident. Other self-help agencies will offer meditation, prayer, spiritual healing, couples therapy—these are all well and good, but we believe true change comes through an actionable upending of your own status quo. This is the tough part. Your gym will not be threatened with foreclosure; you will not be bitten by a radioactive spider; droids will not crash-land on your uncle’s property. If you do not act you will simply grow old. Die. The impetus for change must come from you. You must choose to be Vesuvius or Pompeii.”

Her hand is still on your leg, which is weird, you think.

“Say it,” she says. “Say that you will choose to change.”

“I’ll—I’ll change.”

“Wonderful.” She takes her hand off you and leans back. “I’m now going to ask a series of questions that may seem extreme, but that are designed to remind you that at any moment, you may choose to radically alter your circumstances.”

“Go for it,” you say.

“Have you considered quitting your job?”

“No, I need the money.”

“Destructing your relationship?”

“I want to save the relationship,” you say. “I want to keep it.”

“What if you moved to a new city?”

“It would just be the same old shit in a new place.”

“Embarking on a life-affirming road trip?”

These questions are bullshit. “Can’t I just get fucked up in Atlantic City?”

“Absolutely not,” she says. “It is our counsel that you avoid substances and situations that give you a false, amplified sense of narrative ownership. It would be advisable that you—” She cuts herself off. “Wait,” she says. “Atlantic City?”

“Yeah,” you say. “So?”

“It’s just that Las Vegas is the usual reference point for this kind of impulse. Tell me— why Atlantic City?”

“I had a friend,” you say, and you catch your voice growing smaller, which surprises you, because this is stupid. “Who died. We used to talk about taking trips together, once we could afford it, once we could drive. To shitty places, mostly. You know, like, ironically? It was her thing,” you say. “It was our thing. We always wanted to go together.”

The agency facilitator pauses, flips through her notes. “I don’t suggest this often,” she says, “because we believe it’s important to live forwards instead of backward, but sometimes agency comes from having control over our history.” She taps her pen against her knee. “Have you considered returning home to seek closure in unresolved trauma?”

Hey, you figure. Maybe. Yeah. You’ve got a lot of shit.

*

Vegas?” Activist Girls asks, after you lie to her, convincingly, about where you are going. “Are you serious?” She leans against the kitchen counter and frowns.

You shrug like it’s no big deal. “They said I should go somewhere exciting to frame my happiness.”

Activist Girl is stuffing envelopes to send en masse to your district representative, whose name you can never remember. You’re not even sure what she’s protesting, which you feel awful about, but not awful enough to ask. “I thought they generally suggested bigger-picture changes,” she says. “Not vacations.”

“I’m optimistic,” you say.

You’re leaving first thing in the morning, and you’ll be back on the night of the 23rd. Activist Girl is taken aback by the time frame but tells you that she supports you. She’s sad you’re leaving, so close to Christmas, which she doesn’t care about really, but which does tend to heighten her seasonal depression. She had assumed you’d watch Die Hard together. “When I get back,” you say. “Promise.” You do the dishes, pack, and go to bed, but Activist Girl is restless. “Are you up?” she asks. “What are the odds of you showering before your flight?”

“Like, zero.”

“Give me your arm.” She turns on the lamp by her bedside table and puts the tip of a pen against your skin. Across the canvass of your forearm, she writes, “If lost, please call,” and then the ten digits of her phone number. “Wait, one more thing,” she says and then adds, “…just call. Don’t return.” She smiles.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Don’t catch anything.”

“Oh my god.”

“Take the overhead walks when you can. And if you marry anyone, I’ll kill you.”

“I’m all yours,” you say, but she won’t return your smile. She touches your face and speaks very slowly.

“Are you happy?” she asks.

You tell her that’s a big question. That you have more good days than bad. That you wouldn’t change much. That you love her. But that sometimes you do wish for more, some intangible excess. That you feel like you’re floating through life. Like there’s no point to anything. That nobody even knows what happiness means, anyway. The word’s been bastardized, you say, by advertising. Pop music. There’s nothing wrong with longing.

“I know I’m happy,” Activist Girl tells you, “because you’re right here next to me.” It’s meant to make you feel better, but it doesn’t, it makes you feel worse, and so you hold her, say something kind, pretend to sleep, leave without kissing her forehead, take a Lyft to the airport and fly not to Las Vegas but to your hometown, to Rutherford, New Jersey, where you have every intention of digging up old shit.

*

So.

Why lie about jetting off to Vegas instead of Atlantic City, which is at least closer to where you’re actually headed? The answer stumps you up until takeoff, when it dawns on you, talking with a woman who sneezes incessantly and is headed to a funeral, that nobody—nobody—goes to New Jersey without a reason.

*

Upon landing at LaGuardia, you hop on a bus and ride it back to Rutherford, past MetLife Stadium, the restaurant where your father died for thirty-seven seconds, and so many bars that you and Elizabeth fantasized about getting hammered at together. “We’ve got to drink at least once at the Rainforest Café,” she would say. “At the Chuck E. Cheese.”

You like to imagine what she would have been like drunk.

Funny, you think. She would have been so funny.

You poke around Riley’s Facebook page and find the name of the library she works at, and when you step inside, you see her shelving books and barely showing. You remember scrolling past a post about her pregnancy a few weeks ago. Riley smiles as she works, one hand on the slight bulge of her stomach.

You consider your entrance. Will you open with a one-liner? Will you say something dramatic? Will you approach her with your hands in your pockets and a “Long time no see,” looking punk as fuck like the whole world has changed in the intervening five years but that you, impossibly, have stayed the same, raging against the tidal waves of maturity, too cool for school, just like when you were seventeen and shouting profanity across the hallway?

You step forward, say her name and raise a sheepish palm. “Hi,” you say.

*

“You look good,” Riley says, once she’s off. You’re sitting across from each other in a booth in the library coffee shop. “You haven’t aged a day. Still spunky, you know? Like in high school.”

“Jesus,” you say. “Don’t call me spunky, that’s disgusting.”

“Excuse me?”

“Spunk is like—jizz, you know? Cum?”

“Gross.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I’m saying.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood.” You lean forward. “My day’s coming up.” It’s not registering, and so you make a think-about-it motion and add, “You know—my best day ever.”

“I don’t want to get into this,” she says, and you surprise yourself with a, “No, come on, please,” and tell her that it keeps you up at night. That you’re scared. That you’re dreading a near future where you—not some far-off, future-version you in your thirties or forties, but this current, contemporary, you version of you—are as happy as you will ever be.

“Don’t you ever think about it?” you ask.

“I don’t even remember mine.”

You tell her that you are losing your cool. That it’s driving you crazy. That you don’t have anyone else to talk to. “Nobody would believe me,” you say. “I need to know.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re doing here,” Riley says.

You tell her that you want to go back to the treehouse, find the Best Day Ever Machine and press the button once more. “It if it gives me the same date, then we’ll know it’s legit,” you say. “And if it doesn’t, then we’ll know that you’re right.” You pause. “Will you help me?”

Riley doesn’t say anything. She looks down at her coffee, thinking.

“I don’t want to do this alone,” you say. “You were a good friend to me. Or whatever.”

“You were awful,” she tells you, and you know, you know.

*

It’s tough in the snow and without Elizabeth, but together, after a few false starts, you make your way onto the trail that will lead you to the treehouse where, years ago, you discovered the Best Day Ever Machine. As you walk, Riley tells you that she’s due in five months. “It’s a boy,” she says. “Well—we don’t know, but like, we know, you know? We’re going to name him Thomas.”

“I could never have kids,” you say. It’s not something that you and Activist Girl have ever really talked about, but you have a sense that the conversation will ruin you. It’s the way she smiles when kids run by her at the movie theater. How she is with her niece. This photo she was tagged in a week before you started dating, where she’s holding a friend’s newborn son and smiling like you have still, to this day, never seen her smile. You hate thinking about it. It wraps your stomach up in shame for reasons you can’t articulate. 

“John helps,” Riley says, as she trudges through the white. “He’s been great about it. His whole family. You could meet him if you wanted. While you’re home.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Of it hurting?”

“No.”

Riley puts her hands in her coat pocket. “For a while, I was afraid it would never happen.” She ducks under a branch and turns to face you. “Now I’m just excited,” she says. “What’s your girlfriend’s name again? I love seeing y’all’s photos.”

You’re not interested in the conversation that Riley is aiming for. “I lied to her,” you say. “About being here.”

“Oh,” Riley says. You can see her breath. “Why?”

“She doesn’t know any of this,” you say. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.” It’s all a tangled mess: Activist Girl and Elizabeth’s death and the Best Day Ever Machine and the way you treated Riley. “I just keep thinking about those trips we never took. You know, with Elizabeth, to Roswell and Atlantic City and that town in West Virginia with all the Mothman crap. How sad it is that Elizabeth never got to go, and how it’s a different kind of sad that you and I never went.”

“I’ve been to Roswell,” Riley says. “Last year. With John.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“We never would have gone on any trips,” she says. “You abandoned me.”

You’re about to explain, but the sight of the familiar sandbank cuts you off. You look up to see a scorched expanse of dead trunks, stretching out several yards. The treehouse has burned, you realize, and with it the Best Day Ever Machine and your hope for clarity, which, just moments ago, still burned like an early morning hangover.

*

“It was just an accident,” Riley says, after the long, silent walk back to her car. She can tell that you’re upset because you’re not even being a dick to her. “Just an awful, no-good coincidence, that Elizabeth was the one whose best day ever was in the past, and that Elizabeth was the one who died a few months later. That’s all it was. Dumb luck. A dumb piece of plastic.”

You don’t say anything.

“I miss her too,” she says. “But Elizabeth’s sixth birthday? She probably threw a temper tantrum. She even told us, all those years ago, that she couldn’t even remember it.”

“Holy shit,” you say.

You know someone who might.

*

“I don’t think we should do this,” Riley says, as she pulls in front of the Kaplan house.

“Look at it this way,” you say. “It’s an opportunity for catharsis. This might even be good for her.” You get out of the car, climb the driveway and knock on the front door, where the widowed Mrs. Kaplan, small but sturdy, answers, “Can I help you?”

“I don’t know if you remember us, Mrs. Kaplan,” you say, respectful, solemn, hands in your back pockets. “We’re—we were Elizabeth’s friends.”

“Oh,” she says. “My.”

She invites you inside and you accept, sit for tea. Mrs. Kaplan rambles about her sister, and when the conversation turns to it, Riley talks at length about her pregnant stomach and you just feel so agitated. The first available segue, you say, “Elizabeth’s been on my mind so much lately.” You tell her that you’ve been feeling lost, that you wish you might still have a compass like Elizabeth to guide you. You explain that one of your last ever memories of her daughter was in English class, maybe a week before the accident, when, sharing out a writing exercise, she told the class that one of her happiest memories was her sixth birthday. “And we were just wondering, Mrs. Kaplan, so long as it wouldn’t be encroaching, if you had anything left from that day. She was always so sullen in her yearbook photos.”

“I don’t remember that day at all,” Mrs. Kaplan says. “There’s so much that I don’t remember.” She looks through a cabinet in the living room and pulls out a box of VHS tapes. “Here it is,” she keeps saying, digging through the box, and then, “Oh, wait. One moment.”

“You really don’t have to do this,” Riley says, quiet, as Mrs. Kaplan takes out a tape labeled SPRING 2006 and blows dust from the plastic. She pushes the tape into the VCR and fast-forwards through highlights of Elizabeth’s ninth year. She goes a little too far, rewinds and presses PLAY. On the television, it’s 2006, in the same living room where you are now sitting, only Elizabeth is alive, and her father is alive, and the furniture is contemporary. You and Riley are there too, sitting on either side of Elizabeth as Mrs. Kaplan marches a cake to the table. Someone shuts off the lights and the entire party breaks into “Happy Birthday.” Elizabeth allows for a shy, embarrassed smile as her friends and family sing to her in the cramped glow of her kitchen, her face just barely illuminated by the six candles sticking out of the frosting. There’s something profound in this: her entire world in a single room.  Elizabeth blows out the soft flames. Everyone applauds, and a sinking feeling overtakes your stomach.

So this is all it ever was? A feeling of being loved, of being seen?

You want to reject it, but it moves you. Your legs shake like you haven’t eaten all day, and you feel that you must return immediately to Activist Girl, to Janet, to sleep curled against the sweaty curvature of her body, wake up to her snoring, watch Die Hard on repeat.

You are so sorry. You are so hungry for home.

“We don’t have to watch anymore,” you say, but then, through grainy, low-quality footage, Mrs. Kaplan re-enters the frame with a stack of presents, and Elizabeth freaks the fuck out. She screams and claps and she’s so excited that it is almost uncomfortable to watch. She grabs the largest present and rips into the wrapping paper to discover a Barbie Princess Castle. She shakes the box, laughs, and reaches for another gift. She tears into it and finds a LEGO set. In another, a Furby. Elizabeth is so overwhelmed that she squeals and jumps up and down, completely oblivious to your jealousy, to Riley’s discomfort, to the embarrassed contortion of her mother’s smile. 

Oh shit, you realize.

This is joy. This is happiness. This is having everything, everything and more, standing at the center of attention and not giving a shit. This is an unencumbered euphoria, ripe with alcohol and ecstasy, and myriad sexual encounters with eccentrics of all shapes. This is the stuff best day evers are made out of—the kind of unselfconscious joy usually reserved for children.

And goddamn, in just a few days, it’s coming for you.

The tape ends, and Mrs. Kaplan stands to shut off the TV. Her hand is shaking and her eyes are sunken. “I hope this was what you were looking for,” she says.

*

Riley shuts the car door and glares at you. “You’re beaming,” she says as she starts the engine.

“Now we know,” you say. “I know.”

She pulls out onto the iced-over street and talks at you the whole drive to your bus stop. You stare out the passenger window. The sun is setting over the suburban skyline and you barely even listen to Riley. You know that she’s angry or sad or whatever, but you don’t care to hear the particulars. This was never about Riley; it was always about you. Imagining the 25th, you’re excited in a way you haven’t been since you were a kid, dreaming of a future that should have been so, so bright. Christmas won’t make up for anything, but at least for a moment, you’ll feel the way that Elizabeth did; at least the best day of your life will be a banger.

Riley snaps her finger. “Hey,” she says. “Are you even listening to me?”

“No,” you say. “I’m really not.”

She pulls into the Transit Center parking lot and puts the car in park. “I wish I could say it was good to see you.”

You feel a brief flash of sympathy for Riley. You wish she could see the world as you do. That she wasn’t so stuck, and that she knew that there is nothing she has built that can’t be broken. “You should come with me,” you say. “You and me: let’s go to Atlantic City. It’ll be just like we always talked about. It’s what Elizabeth would have wanted.” She starts to protest but you interrupt her. “Leave your husband. The hell with your kid. Have a little agency for once.”

She stares at you for a moment, her mouth open. “You’re despicable,” she says, quiet, sad. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

“It sounds like I’ll be just fine,” you say. Your best day ever is in four days, and there is not a thing that can hurt you. You open the door and step onto the curb.

“You know what?” Riley says. “I bet Christmas really will be the best day of your life. I bet you’ll be just a little higher, a little drunker, a little more fucked up than normal.”

“Merry Christmas, bitch,” you say, not quite as loud as you intended. You slam the door and Riley peels out of the parking lot and into the darkness, and finally, you’re alone.

*

It’s December 22nd, 2019, and your Greyhound is forty minutes late, but you arrive in Atlantic City all the same, and upon entering your hotel, you purchase a souvenir cup that you refill with alcoholic slushy drink you don’t even know how many times. You spend hours playing penny slots as cocktail waitresses bring you free drink after free drink, winning $18.00, losing $6.00, winning $10.00, losing $20.00, bathing in constant reminders that you are the hero of your story, that you deserve to win the jackpot, and that you will, probably, if you just keep playing and just keep drinking. You do keep drinking, and soon it’s very late and you’ve neglected several text messages from Janet, a couple phone calls. Your phone buzzes once more and you ignore her, bouncing from bar to bar and club to club where the drinks are always free and you are always dancing. You go down in a bathroom, get finger-fucked on a dance floor, and by the end of the night you just need to sober up, so you march around town, hands in your pockets, and envision the next couple nights, marching like ants one by one into Christmas, when maybe you’ll try cocaine, maybe you’ll do molly, fuck so hard you defy gravity.

Near the boardwalk, a grotesque Santa Claus charges tourists four dollars for photographs and a nervous 21-year-old poses with women wearing bikinis and Victoria’s Secret wings. They smile like on postcards until the camera flashes and then the boy reaches for his wallet. Elizabeth would have cackled, you think, and you want to cry. You collapse onto a bench in front of the Tropicana and rub your temple as waves roll up the gray shoreline before you.

This is exactly the kind of adventure you imagined when you were young, only you weren’t supposed to be alone. You were supposed to be surrounded. You wish that she were here now, that you were young again, that you could stay young. You wonder if you would have gotten a different best day ever if Elizabeth had lived, if one person could ever really be enough, if one life could be. You want a second chance so badly. Dad came back, and you wonder if you could, too.

You feel like throwing up and do your best to gulp it down. You gag, touch your face, and run your hand through your hair, catching sight of the faded ink that Janet scrawled across your forearm two days prior. “If lost please call,” are the only words you can make out in the dim lighting, and you should call her, you think, as you fumble for your cell phone. Or Riley. Or the girl you just ate out. Or the chick who fingered you. Staring at the cracked screen of your iPhone, you understand at last that you have what you’ve always needed at your fingertips.

You should call her, you think.

Sometime in the next three days, you should call someone.

E.M. Stormo