What the fuck is a good life

THE BIG PACKET was from Stanford. Maddie took it to her bedroom, hid it under her bed without opening it, but her dad already knew.

Of course he knew.

He had probably called the admissions and records department to find out if she’d gotten in. They weren’t supposed to tell him, she was pretty sure, even though he was the currently serving as interim dean of Arts and Literature. She was supposed to have rights.

“Madeleine,” he said across the table at dinner. “Seems like we should congratulate you.”

She’d lived with him her entire life, and every time he said her name, it gave her a sick feeling like something bad was about to happen.

She didn’t believe in God, but she had prayed to the Universe not to get into Stanford. If she got in, she was going to have to go. The tuition would be all paid for, so her parents would only have to pay living expenses. She’d have to live in a dorm on campus, which was basically like saying her dad could just drop by any time he wanted. She’d probably see him way more than she did now, with his ninety minute commute and long work hours.

“Don’t look so thrilled about it.” He smirked like he was winning an argument they weren’t having. “You can choose whatever classes you want, and I’ll help you get into a good sorority.”

“I’m not going to be in a sorority,” Maddie said, like it wasn’t obvious from her turquoise hair, her rainbow leggings, the antique black slip she wore as a dress. The torn Saint Vincent t-shirt she had put on for dinner, not because she was modest, but because she felt weird and naked any time her parents saw even a little of her skin.

“We’ll see,” her father said. His lips were dark from the foul-smelling Fernet cocktail he always drank with dinner, for my digestion, he said.

Maddie’s mom didn’t say anything, never said anything. Maddie thought of her kind of like a hungry sewer rat, angry and mean but too starved to lash out.

* * *

“What’ll I do when you’re at Stanford?” Maddie’s boyfriend Casey asked. He was twenty-two and had an apartment in Berkeley with three roommates.

He lit the bong, sucked in an eight-inch column of smoke. It came pouring out of his nostrils like a dragon when he spoke.

“I just don’t know if I want to live in the South Bay,” he said. “It’s really expensive down there.”

No one invited you, is what Maddie wanted to say, but she just shrugged. The oxy was starting to kick in, and she didn’t like mixing it with weed. She knew it was kind of a trashy drug, but it was the only way she could stuff down the dread that was rising around her, past her chest and towards her shoulders and up around her chin and soon to reach her mouth and her nose, at which point she would suffocate.

She kept a little shrine on her bookshelf with a Saint Janis Joplin candle she'd bought online. Sometimes when she was confused, she tried to make decisions based on what Janis would have done.

* * *

Sampson’s father wanted him to go to college. That was the way to a good life.

What Sampson wanted to know was: what the fuck is a good life?

His dad meant a job, of course. A job with an okay paycheck and half an ounce of dignity. The dignity you should just have for being a human being. Shouldn’t have to go to college to be a human being with dignity.

That’s the way it was all set up, though.

College taught Sampson some really useful shit like when to use a semicolon. And then it taught him that there’s income inequality and a housing affordability crisis and that black people have seven years less life expectancy than white people.

Which, based on personal experience, seemed right to Sampson. His mother, who was black, had died of breast cancer two years ago when he was seventeen, while his father, who was white, was very much alive in the big house in Westchester where he lived with Sampson’s stepmother and two half-sisters.

Black people die younger because the stresses of racism, college told him. Then they docked ten points off his social justice project for using a semicolon incorrectly.

Sampson told college, I’m going to the streets.

What’s the streets, college said? We were not made aware of these streets you speak of.

College didn’t know shit.

* * *

Leda studied Maddie’s face in profile. They were smoking weed at their favorite spot in the hills, on a broad, flat rock that always got warm from the sun. From this spot, you could see everywhere Leda and Maddie lived and everywhere they ever went—their houses, their schools, the whole East Bay and across to San Francisco. The Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Don’t go to Stanford if you want don’t want to,” Leda said. “Come to Berkeley with me and Alisha.”

Maddie blew smoke out of her nose, looked out at the view. From this angle, her nose was kind of big, Leda thought, with a funny bump in it. You couldn’t tell when you looked at her straight on. From straight ahead, she was just pretty in a normal way. The big nose made her look less pretty and also more interesting.

“That’s so close,” Maddie said. “I just want to go as far as possible.”

Leda got it; Berkeley was right there, always there. They could literally see it right now, way down below them: the sprawling green lawns, the concrete buildings. The Campanile so giant you could spot it from San Francisco, from a landing airplane, a tiny toy clock tower halfway between the bay and the hills. Leda didn’t love the idea either, of staying within Berkeley’s safe and powerful realm. Not going away, not becoming her own independent person in a new place, not removing herself from the ongoing drama of her parents and their never-ending divorce.

But part of her felt relieved not to have to do it.

She watched Maddie looking out over the bay. She had this feeling that Maddie was seeing a broader view, something beyond what Leda’s eyes could see. Sometimes it was annoying, like Maddie was doing it on purpose, looking down on everyone like she was so above them all. But even if she was, the larger view was still there. Maddie knew more things than Leda, in school definitely, and about stuff like drugs definitely. But in some other way, too, some way Leda couldn’t name but no question it was there. That unnamable thing that made everyone so fascinated with Maddie all the time, made them say, Maddie’s so mysterious.

Is this about your dad, Leda wanted to ask, but she didn’t, because Maddie never talked about her dad. If her dad came up, Maddie always changed the subject. Everyone knew Maddie hated him, that something about him was fucked up even if no one was quite sure about the specifics. He was a professor, like Leda’s dad, and they were pretty much all fucked up in Leda’s experience. But also, parents were pretty much fucked up in general. They gave you all these bad feelings, this deep shame you’d do anything to get away from, but you were stuck with them until you turned eighteen, and then, in a way, for the rest of your life.

“Have you ever thought of just not going to college?” Maddie asked.

Leda laughed. No, she’d never thought about not going to college, and neither had Maddie, she was certain. You don’t grow up in the town next door to Berkeley so you could not go to college. No one’s parents bought a tiny overpriced house in one of the top public school districts in the country so they could not go to college.

And if you happened to be so smart that you aced your SATs on the first try—while all your friends were enrolling in test prep, obsessively researching the average scores at their dream schools, praying to the test gods for easy vocab words, for just fifty more points this time—if colleges were basically begging you to enroll and your biggest problem in life was poor me I got into Stanford, then you could pretty much shut your face about not going to college. 

* * *

Classes at Columbia were easy, which was lucky because Maddie had no time for homework. With no money from her parents, she couldn’t afford the dorms, but she found a cheap shared walk-up in Queens. She took out loans, waitressed nights and weekends. The only time she had to read was the forty-five minutes on the subway, so she learned to speed through it, a new page every ten seconds, silently cataloguing whatever she’d need for the discussion later.

For work she had to wear a black miniskirt and a button-down white shirt. The manager Rochelle told Maddie to buy the clothes at Filene’s basement. She found a skirt for seventeen dollars, had to buy three shirts since they got dirty after one shift. On the way home, she bought a two dollar bag of potatoes from a produce store and lived off those between her comp meals at work.

It was a good job, considering. Rochelle took good care of everybody, and the girls who worked there were nice. One of them, Florence from France, had a boyfriend who was a coke dealer, and she always brought some to share. The owner was an asshole, always on about running a high class joint, but he didn’t usually come in.

To stay awake for class she took the Adderall she’d stolen from Leda’s brother before she left California. The classes were pretty much the same as high school: read this, discuss, write a paper. The only one where she learned anything was history of social justice, which was her favorite class, and also the one where she met Sampson. He did aid work at a Tent City in midtown.

“It’s the most fulfilling work,” he said.  

His eyes looked like golden marbles, and they lit up from inside when he talked. She wanted to go to Tent City with him, but she didn’t have any time.  

“I think next semester I can work less,” she told him. “Maybe I’ll drop a class.” 

“You shouldn’t screw up your studies,” he said.

“This is more important,” Maddie said, and she meant it.

A rosy blush spread over his cocoa-colored cheeks.

There was something between them. Maddie knew it was something special because after they snorted some meth at her apartment, they spent twenty four hours slamming their bodies into each other like they were trying to meld into a single being, even though Sampson was supposedly gay and Maddie was supposedly scheduled for a double-shift.

* * *

College told Sampson that people were hungry. What they didn’t tell him is, there was no one stopping anybody from bringing hungry people some food. So he took his book money, went to Wegman’s, bought ten loaves of bread and ten packets of cheese and a giant bag of apples, brought them to the park where the people without houses slept.

The next day he did the same thing, and the next. The day after that his bank account was empty. He went to class, and the professor said, Sampson, why don’t you have the books?

It’s all good, Sampson said. I’ll just sit here and take it all in.

But they said he had to leave. No books, no college. No college, no decent-paying job with one-half ounce of human dignity.

Sampson didn’t see dignity in letting people freeze to death half a mile from where he was listening to a lecture on the failures of late-stage capitalism. 

When Maddie said shooting up will kill you, Sampson said:

You know what will kill you?

College will kill you.

* * *

Leda stopped texting Maddie after six months of not hearing anything back. She’d been worried at first, how Maddie never responded, or if she did, days later, as though no time had passed, and always something strange and disconnected.

Like if Leda texted, Hey, miss you, how’s Columbia?

She might hear back two weeks later: Sorry, love, you are special to me even if things aren’t always what we think they are. 

It was strange, how you could go to college and just get consumed. Even a genius like Maddie. Leda sort of got it. She was busy with her own stuff. Too many classes, too much homework, more than you could literally do in the hours between one class and the next one if you expected to eat and sleep and shower. Then you had to party really hard on the weekend, drink yourself near unconscious to try to shake off the stress.

She texted Casey to see if he’d heard from Maddie.

She’s fine, Casey texted back.

Leda wasn’t a big fan of Casey, but he definitely loved Maddie. As far as Leda knew, they were still together, long-distance. At least that had been the arrangement when Maddie left.

If Casey said Maddie was fine, she was probably fine.

*  * *

Maddie couldn’t figure out how people managed to do all the normal things: texting and watching TV and going to the store and the post office and the doctor. The world was in so much pain that it hurt Maddie just to get up in the morning. She’d always felt that, all the suffering in the world, the children dying in Syria and Yemen, the Palestinians bombed, the Rohingya massacred and driven from their homes.

Now the suffering was right in her face, every day. There needed to be some way to clear your mind of what you’d seen at Tent City, the people abandoned like trash on the road. The old man whose eyes welled with tears as he told Maddie about the people who had once loved him.

“My kids used to talk to me,” he’d say, squinting his eyes like the sun was in them. “But now—”

He’d shake his head instead of finishing the sentence. Maddie would study his dark skin creased like a crumpled napkin, his gentle smile. Maybe he’d been a bad father, she thought, but at least he was a nice person.  

She stopped taking phone calls, stopped answering texts. From her parents, from Casey, from her high-school friends. Even if she wanted to tell them what was going on, this thrilling but dangerous planet called New York, it hurt too much to try and sum it up.

She had to memorize a poem for English 101. She picked Robert Frost: some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. It was the only thing that made sense to her. Desire and hate were so tied together, and obviously the world was ending.

After their Tent City runs, she and Sampson would get six-dollar egg and hash brown dinners from the all-night diner near Grand Central Station.

“If this is gay.” He put the salt shaker on one end of the table. “And this is straight.” The pepper shaker on the other end of the table. He traced an invisible line between them with his finger. “Then I’m about here.” A spot on the line, significantly closer to the salt.

Maddie didn’t usually think of it as a scale that way, but if she had, she was probably the same distance from the pepper as he was from the salt. But that’s not how she thought of it. She thought of it more like if Sampson were a salt shaker, she’d be right the fuck on top of that salt shaker, all the time, as much as the salt shaker would let her until it got understandably annoyed and told her to get lost already.  

“Like, when I have sex with you, it’s sweet,” he said. “But when I fuck a guy, it’s like, crazy. Does that make sense?”

She studied his face for some sign of malice, a smirk on the lips, cold contempt in the eyes. If she said something like that to somebody, it would be a deliberate stab in the chest. But his lips were soft as he sipped his green tea, his eyes earnest and open.

“You should have made pepper the gay one,” Maddie said. She took a big gulp of too-hot coffee, felt the flesh of her tongue burning.

“That shit’s bad for you,” Sampson said. “Gonna keep you up all night.”

“Don’t you go worrying about me,” Maddie said.

* * *

Sometimes Maddie thought the thing with her dad and the pills was a dream. Probably because after it happened, no one ever spoke about it, like it had never happened. But also her memory of was like how you remembered dreams. Some parts didn’t quite make sense, and the parts that were clear were so clear, more like scenes from a movie than events from her life.

The strongest image, the one that flashed into her head at random times, walking in the front door or visiting a friend’s house: her dad on the living room floor.  Unmoving, frozen in such an awkward position with one leg propped on the seat of the couch. His face was gray, but—she walked closer to look at him—his chest was rising and falling.

She must have been ten or eleven, because she was definitely holding a copy of Anna Karenina in her hand, which she spent a couple years reading on and off during late elementary school.  

The other image she remembered was the orange bottle, the little white pills spread across the oatmeal colored carpet. More and more white pills, like when you saw one ant wandering across the linoleum, and then you saw ten ants and then a hundred.

She remembered running to her bedroom and slamming the door.

She remembered sitting in the tiny space between her bed an bookshelf for hours, book on her lap, willing her brain to follow along with this boring scene about a horse race, like if she could just pay attention she could leave her own world and join Anna and Vronsky’s. She remembered sitting there for hours, forcing herself to care about the boring horse race, until finally at the end of the chapter the horse fell down and broke his back and needed to be shot dead. She remembered closing the book then, holding it against her chest with her eyes closed, begging the universe to stop displaying all its horror at once. 

She remembered her mother’s voice through the door of her bedroom, screaming her name like someone was dead.

Maddie! Maddie!

Maddie’s heart raced like it was possibly going to explode.

Was dad dead?

And if so, was she sad? She thought she might be sad. She didn’t like him, not any more than she liked Cody DiVittorio who was the meanest kid in her school, but she didn’t want to find either of them lying dead on her living room floor.  

She walked into the living room, came face to face with her mother. Her mother screamed.

Screamed loud and long and in terror, like Maddie was a ghost. Screamed words that ran together in Maddie’s memory into one long, angry shriek.

Then her mother held out a closed fist like an accusation. She unclenched her hand to reveal a dozen little white pills.

“No.” Maddie shook her head. “Those aren’t mine.”

“I know they’re not yours,” her mother hissed, closing her palm around them. “They’re mine.”

Maddie scanned the living room looking for her father to see if he would explain. The place where he’d been lying on the floor was empty. It didn’t sound like he was anywhere in the house, or if he was, he was hiding, silent.

“Who told you to touch my things?” her mother said. “No, I want a response. Who told you?”

The question froze Maddie still, one of those terrifying questions from furious adults who fully knew there wasn’t an answer.

Maddie whispered: “No one told me.”

Sometime later, she remembered her father bending her over his knee and spanking her, while her mother watched, supervising. It seemed like you wouldn’t spank a ten-year-old; that was one of the parts she wondered if she had made up or gotten confused about. But the memory was so vivid. A sickly taste of iron in her mouth. Shame and anger curdling her blood, the slap of her father’s open palm against the back pockets of her jeans. 

* * *

Sampson’s boyfriend in Tent City was a bipolar kid named Freddy, which always made Maddie think of Leda’s brother Freddy. He was wiry and Asian like Leda’s brother, but instead of playing video games all day, Sampson’s Freddy liked to skateboard and listen to electronic music on this Sanyo boom box from like 1990 and rap his own lyrics at the top of his lungs.

“Y’all gonna call me, cuz I’m the MAYOR. Y’all got demons, but I’m the SLAYER.”

It was annoying, but Maddie put up with it so she could be around Sampson. Sometimes they invited Maddie to hang out with them in Freddy’s tent, which might mean to shoot up or freebase or just smoke some weed. But they always got all cuddly, entwining their tattooed forearms, and then it would be time for Maddie to leave.

“Bye, girl,” they’d say, so gay, even though neither of them ever talked like that outside the tent. Outside the tent they talked like dudes, all that mumbling and chin tucked and bro, yo, bro.

Maddie would go back to her apartment, listen to Les Miserables over and over. Sampson had gotten her into it. That was something only she knew about him, something he never told Freddy or anyone else at Tent City, that he was a giant musical theater geek. At Maddie’s apartment he would play the soundtrack, mouth the words to his favorite parts: Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men? It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!

“They sing this at the protests in Hong Kong.” Voice choked up, hand clutching his heart like the music was breaking it.

The songs that made Maddie cry were the ones about Eponine, about how the man she loved never even really saw her.

She wished she had one of those families who would come save you when you hit rock bottom. A mother who would hug you and call you sweetie, a father who would lift your starved body in his arms like you were still a baby, even though his back wasn’t really up to it anymore, would carry you to the car and buy you a plane ticket and take you home to feed you crackers and soup and ginger ale until you regained your strength. 

* * *

“So, like, do you ever talk to Maddie?” Alisha asked.

They were at the big salad place in Berkeley. Saturday afternoon, and it was packed with students. Preppy students in Cal sweatshirts, hipsters in boldly patterned pants, everyone with backpacks or tote bags or arms full of textbooks for the studying they would theoretically do later on.

“Sure, yeah.” Leda wasn’t sure if she was lying. How long had it been since their last text? “Well, maybe not for a while.”

Leda had started putting Maddie in a category of things like the war in Syria or the lady who sobbed in her wheelchair on the corner of Haste and Telegraph so that Leda always had to cross to the other side of the street. Things like news stories about abused animals, like that weird milky film that rolled across her vision and made her scared she was going blind, her mother sending confusing texts about how I’m going to murder your brother and Leda knew it was just an expression but still. 

“Someone I know ran into Casey and he said they broke up,” Alisha said.

Leda wondered who the someone was. Alisha only knew Maddie through Leda, wasn’t friends with Casey or any of his friends.

“Oh, yeah, I knew that,” Leda said, even though she didn’t.

“So that’s probably good,” Alisha said. “That guy seemed like such a creep.”

Leda nodded because it was true. He was a total creep, and she’d always kind of hated him.

She looked down at her giant salad, the thick whole-grain bread on the side, and wondered how she was going to chew and swallow and digest all that. Her stomach felt like someone had poured lead into it.

There was probably something she was supposed to do to help Maddie, but it was terrifying to think what that was. It was hard enough just dealing with college, having to pay bills, buy books, plus manage the ever-present dread that she would miss an assignment for one of her four impossibly hard classes, forget to study for an exam, mess up the reading assignment and be humiliated in front of everyone. Not to mention the deeper dread that she would remember to do everything she was supposed to and it still would never, ever be good enough.

* * *

Leda emptied her bank account to buy the ticket to New York that summer. A ridiculous flight with connections through Los Angeles and Orlando, but it was cheap.

She didn’t ask Maddie if she could come to New York. She just texted her: I’m on my way.

Maddie opened the door to her apartment looking like how Leda envisioned New York. Unhumanly thin like an exotic bird, high cheekbones and giant eyes with too much dark shadow. Leda could feel her shoulder bones through her t-shirt when they hugged hello.

“I got you this.”

Leda pulled the necklace from her bag. It had reminded her of Maddie right away when she saw the street vendor selling it in Berkeley: a long string of beads shaped like kidney beans, turquoise stones and smoke-colored glass. Looking at Maddie now, it didn’t seem to match her at all. Her bright dresses and teal hair had turned monotone, clothing all black and gray, hair bleached colorless.

Maddie looked at the necklace like it puzzled her, then dropped it into her pants pocket. She showed Leda around the apartment, unrentable by California standards, dark and musty with a slanted floor that shook underfoot. Leda wondered if it was a squat. Leda wanted to talk, but Maddie said she needed to get some sleep. They went to bed early, Maddie on her mattress on the floor, Leda on a sheet next to the mattress. There wasn’t really any stuff in the room, one small dresser with a few books and a saint candle stacked on top, closet empty except a winter coat and boots.

The next day, Maddie took Leda to see tourist stuff. Since neither of them had any money, they couldn’t go to museums or plays, but they walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, went to the nine-eleven memorial, looked at the Statue of Liberty from Battery Park.

“This place is so mean,” Maddie said. “No one gives a shit if you live or die.”

Leda watched how Maddie’s black jeans slipped around her hips, threatening to fall off, how her skinny ankles showed over her black wedge boots. Leda felt impossibly puffy and unglamorous in her skirt and sneakers, belly bloated from a year of nonstop studying and drinking.

At night they sat on Maddie’s mattress and shared a bottle of wine in mismatched juice glasses. 

“Everyone’s worried about you,” Leda said. “What have you been doing?”

“Nothing much,” Maddie said. “I was in love with this guy, but that’s probably over.”

Leda nodded. She knew how that was, guys not caring that you loved them, guys who couldn’t clarify whether or not it was over. It could definitely mess you up.

Maddie reached her skinny fingers around Leda’s wrist, looked straight into her eyes.

“It’s so nice having you here,” Maddie said. “I know we haven’t really been in touch, but when I talk to you, I feel like no time has passed.”

Leda looked at Maddie, the dramatic earnestness in her eyes. In some way, she felt like that too, like no time had passed. In some other way, she felt a kind of creeping premonition that this was the end of things, that Maddie was gone off somewhere and they would never see each other again.

* * *

Sampson was gone, and no one at Tent City knew where. Even Freddy didn’t know.

“Beats me,” he mumbled, headphones still on. “Thought you were gonna tell me, but I guess not.”

“What are you going to do?” Maddie asked.

“About what?”

Freddy made figure eights in front of her on his skateboard like he didn’t care to talk, scraping the edges of his wheels on the concrete.

She tried again: “How are you going to find him?”

He skidded his skateboard to a stop. Shook his head, bopped his chin to the beat in his headphones.

“Girl he GONE. You best move ON.”

“Oh, no, I just meant about—” She tried to sound casual, like the thought of Sampson having left to some unknown place forever wasn’t the most horrible thing she could imagine. “I just wanted to make sure he’s okay and whatever.”  

“You don’t even gotta be here. Either of you.” His eyes shifted sideways, across the ripped tents, the discarded pieces of broken grills and bicycles, the stacks of dirty clothing, one as high as Maddie’s head. The porta-potty provided by New York City’s commission on homelessness. “I’m a refuGEE, got anxieTEE. No one in they right mind ever gonna hire ME. Man, if I didn’t have to be here, I’d be gone in a second.”

“I was just trying to help out,” Maddie said.

“You wasn’t helping.” Freddy was getting loud, louder than usual even. His skateboard was under his arm, and he was pacing back and forth in front of his tent. “You was just playing. Helping is helping, playing is playing.”

His hands shook as he took a vape pen out of his pocket, pushed the button on it a bunch of times, trying not to let the skateboard fall out from under his arm.

“I hope he goes real far away and figures his shit out. You, too.” He took a hit from the vape, exhaled it straight at her face. She closed her eyes, waved the vanilla smell away. “You way too messed up to be helping.”

When she opened her eyes, Freddy was back in his tent. She looked over at the sweet old guy she wished was her father, hoping for a look of encouragement, a sympathetic smile, but his face was blank like he had no idea who she was.

* * *

“You’re going to North Carolina for an accounting internship at my old partner’s firm,” Sampson’s dad said.

Sampson wanted to say no, but he couldn’t. This was all set up, paid for, the transportation, the subleased room. And he had nowhere else to go. He’d shown up in Westchester sick and groveling, track marks, hallucinations. All he’d wanted was money for rehab, and that’s what he got: the best facility in Westchester County, horses and swimming pools and the whole thing. But after rehab, there were conditions.

“I get it,” his father had said, stern and self-important. “Your mother died and you were acting out. So that’s your one pass. Don’t screw up again.”

Sampson wanted to spit at him, to say get my mama’s name out your mouth.

Instead he nodded, said, “Sure, pops, yeah.” Watched his father nod back, satisfied.

It was for chumps, accounting. Sampson was sure of that. About as capitalistic as you could get, counting dollars like they were the most important thing in the world.  He thought about making a break for it, but then he’d just be back on the street. His body had already given him three warnings in the form of emergency Narcan that the street would kill him sooner than later. The last time, when he woke up literally next to a dumpster, he’d made a deal with the universe: find me help, and I’ll never let this happen again.

His father sent him down to North Carolina on a bus, which was obviously a dick move, but actually the bus ride was kind of meditative. He brought a couple books but reading made him carsick, so he just stared out the window at the endless stretch of trees along the highway. The signs on the road told him they were in Pennsylvania, then Virginia, places he’d never been before. Places that sounded scary and racist to him. From out this bus window they just looked like places, a bunch of trees on the side of a road. Tree, tree, tree, all the same, as though to tell him, you ain’t special.

You ain’t too good to be an accountant.

You ain’t shit.

It was going to be boring as hell, so basic, the most normal, boring life. But boring might be okay. No decisions, no obligations, no needy people making him feel like he owed them something, some part of him. He was taking it all back. No one was getting an ounce more of him. No needing to take care of anyone but himself.

That could be okay for a while.

* * *

The necklace made Maddie feel guilty every time she saw it in the back of her drawer. Looking at it reminded her of how she’d reacted when Leda gave it to her in the doorway, so fresh and bright and pleased with herself. How Maddie had recoiled at the bright colors, the turquoise that hurt her eyes, that seemed like didn’t belong anywhere near her body. It reminded her of the hurt in Leda’s eyes when her gift was rejected.

Like the necklace, Leda had gotten too bright for Maddie: filled out and pimple-cheeked, like a college student on a TV show, shiny and unkempt and thriving.  

Saint Janis, Maddie had asked the candle after Sampson disappeared. What the fuck am I supposed to do with my life?

Saint Janis replied, Go back to school.

But Janis, Maddie said. You never finished college.

Janis laughed her scratchy cackle, winked her tiny eye at Maddie. Being Janis Joplin isn’t always the best thing for you. Lord knows it wasn’t the best thing for me!

Maddie enrolled at CUNY.

Everyone in her life had always talked shit about community colleges: her parents, her friends, her teachers especially. Keep screwing up and you’ll end up at City College, her sophomore geometry teacher used to say.

And yeah, there were some unruly kids in her classes. But there were plenty of cool ones, plus the professors were smart, about a thousand times smarter than her professors at Columbia. Unlike the professors at Columbia, who seemed like they’d come off a conveyer belt, the professors at CUNY were, like, actual people. Maddie’s English professor was a slam poet, and her psychology professor had track marks down her arms that matched Maddie’s own arms.

Maddie wore Leda’s necklace the first time she went to see a poetry slam featuring Professor Lynelle Jones. It was still hard to wear colors the way she used to, to draw attention to herself. But the bright turquoise made Maddie feel hopeful, curious about all there was out there in the world. It made her feel, for the first time, like a college student.

“This life might not be a good life, but it’s your life,” Lynelle Jones said, while everyone around Maddie cooed and nodded their heads, snapped their fingers in agreement. Then, punctuating each word:

“You—

don’t—

have—

to—

want—

what—

they—

tell—

you—

to—

want.”

Maddie felt like a poser snapping her own fingers, but she couldn’t help it. They were the best words she’d heard since she’d come to New York, maybe the best words she’d heard in her entire life.

You don’t have to want what they tell you to want.

She took her little notebook out of her bag and wrote it down. Her class notes were in there, but also other notes about life, so someday when she got brave enough to try poetry herself she’d have something to start with.  

If you like it, share it! ledalevine.com/good-life