The Dare You! producers have put us up at a quaint, homey hotel that overlooks the Puget Sound. We arrive just in time to see the sun begin its descent below the mountainous horizon in the distance, and it’s as remarkable as anything I’ve ever seen — orange and ruby and breathtaking and magical and ethereal and perfect. The sun rises and sets every day. We go round and round every day. We walk the same path, the same destiny every day.
Vanessa and I stand silent in the window, as the sun dips, then dips lower, then lower still below the jagged peaks of terrain, and I wonder just how impossible it is to change that — that path, that destiny, if it can even be changed at all. Even though I’m here, in Seattle, not there, stuck in New York, where I was a day ago, or a week ago, or a month ago…how hard must one have to work to shift the pieces in her fate?
“I hope you’re not doing what I think you’re doing,” Vanessa says later, when she emerges from the shower, with a white robe wrapped tight and a towel like a turban around her head.
I shutter my laptop quickly. “I don’t know what it is that you think I’m doing, so I can’t say.”
“You’re looking at Shawn’s Facebook page.”
I stare at my toes.
“The blue reflection on your face gave you away.”
“I could have been looking at anyone’s page.”
“But you weren’t.”
“He’s my husband. Did you know he knows the Zuckerbergs?”
“I don’t care who he knows. You’re on a break.”
“Well, I could have been looking at Theo’s,” I say, as if that would have been any better. Ex-boyfriend, on-a-break husband. Really, it’s splitting hairs here, in terms of google-stalking.
“Well, you could have been looking at Theo’s, but you didn’t reply to his email. So if you’re looking at Theo’s page and wondering if you should reply, then you should actually…you know…do something about it. Resist inertia.”
I sigh and collapse on the bed, pulling the pillow over my head.
“Look, can I just say something?” she asks.
“Go ahead,” I answer from underneath the pillow.
“I know that Shawn’s leaving gutted you.”
“It did,” I say, my voice muffled.
“But did it really?”
I sit up quickly.
“Of course it did!”
“Okay.”
“Shawn and I did everything together!”
“Uh-hum.”
“What?”
“That’s a reason to miss someone, to be sure. That’s not a reason to be married to someone.”
“What the hell, Vanessa? Just because I don’t, like, sit here and sob into my figurative Cheerios, that doesn’t mean I’m not gutted.” I sit up straighter. “He’s my husband. He’s basically my whole life. I pretty much counted on the fact that he was my meant to be.”
“Maybe you counted wrong.” She says this quietly, and if I listen closely enough, I can hear the devastation that the words imply.
Instead, I lean back against the headboard, and she moves next to me, shifting the computer to her own lap.
“We’re just on a break,” I say. “In August, everything could be different.”
“You’re right,” she said. “But only if you open your eyes and write your own map instead of following it.”
“Step three in my dad’s table of contents. I get it. You don’t have to feed me the self-help stuff. And when I said ‘different,’ I meant that maybe Shawn will reconsider.’”
“I knew what you meant.” She scoops the laptop off the bed and rests it on the desk, out of my clutches. “But my point is that if you chart your own course, maybe you’ll be the one who reconsiders first.”
—
Bookmarked Favorites
Facebook/Login
Shawn Golden
Friends: 2254
City: Palo Alto
Occupation: Taking over the world!
Relationship status: Married
Religion: HTML
Shawn was at Chipotle Mexican Grill (21 mins ago)
(me: great, he’s putting on weight!)
Shawn listened to Arcade Fire on Erica Stoppard’s Spotify list (3 hrs ago)
(me: Arcade Fire? He doesn’t like hipster music! And who is Erica Stoppard?)
Shawn changed his hometown from New York City to Palo Alto (1 day ago)
(me: only temporarily, and that sort of violates the rules of our agreement!)
Erica Stoppard to Shawn Golden (2 days ago): S, it was so cool to meet the god of coding at The Wine Room last night!!! Don’t be a stranger! Thanks for the friend request! So glad Cilla Z introduced us!
(me: WTF?)
Shawn Golden is now friends with Erica Stoppard and James Pichard.
Shawn logged into JDate.com: The Place for Jewish Singles. (4 days ago.)
(me: shit.)
Google.com/search
Search terms: Erica Stoppard
14
Daring Yourself to a Better Life!
By Vanessa Pines and Willa Chandler
PART ONE: REVISING YOUR MASTER UNIVERSE WAY
Welcome readers! We are so glad to have you along for our journey, our journey of dares, our journey of how we changed our own lives! We know that bookstores are littered with self-help books, and we’re not going to make you promises (like they may) that by merely reading this, everything will change. No. Nothing is that simple. This isn’t the quick fix. For the quick fix, we’ll direct you to the book we are arguing against: Dr. Richard Chandler’s Is It Really Your Choice? Why Your Entire Life May Be Out of Your Control. Why yes, we really did go and mention the competition. Why? Because we want you along for the ride only if you are with us. It is that type of book. You’ll be dared to make hard choices. You’ll be dared to reconsider old truths. You’ll be dared to make yourself uncomfortable and maybe even temporarily unhappy. And if you’re not interested in being this sort of daring, by all means, set the book down now and pick up Chandler’s, which is on the display case at the front of the store (for those of you browsing at Barnes & Noble, not just downloading the sample Kindle chapter, unsure of making the commitment).
But if you stick with us, we will change your life. Chandler will tell you that you cannot change your life. But he’s wrong. If you are daring enough to turn left when you always imagined you would turn right, if you swing for the fences when you’d much rather sit on the sidelines, if you do the opposite of your own low expectations, then you will change your Master Universe Way. Or as we prefer to call it, your master plan. Or how about, just…life? Destiny isn’t something that just happens, as Chandler would argue. Destiny or fate or whatever is meant to be is something that you steer yourself.
Don’t believe us? In the ensuing chapters, read about how we changed our own lives, and then come back here, to the bookstore, in this aisle, or log back into your Kindle, and dare to pick up the book and start a journey of your own.
—
Vanessa wakes me up early, too early, even though I am still on New York time. I haven’t slept well, haunted by the notion of Shawn skulking around JDate, and skulking around Erica Stoppard, who has a remarkably light Google footprint, despite my better efforts at prying. I pieced together a few facts: that she may or may not have been from Chicago; that she may or may not have been a tech reporter of some sort, but even that proved thin — a byline here and there, nothing conclusive. She appreciated hipster photos — with odd lighting and skewed perspectives — as profile pictures, and thus I couldn’t even assess if I’m prettier than she is. And she is friends with Cilla Z, who I have used my detective skills to identify as Priscilla Zuckerberg, Mark’s wife. Well, great.
I marinated in all of this quasi-info throug
h the night, sleep coming in fits and starts. I finally fell into a deep sleep at around 2 a.m., but was shaken from it shortly thereafter with a dream of Erica Stoppard, who was dressed as a tragic Brooklyn hipster — a half-skewed beanie atop her head, a worn peasant shirt draping her lithe torso, a wrist covered in prayer beads, a knitted scarf swirling around her neck — slowly smothering me to death with my pillow.
“It’s six-thirty,” Vanessa says, shaking my shoulders. “Get up. Come on, we have to go.”
“It’s six-thirty!” I mumble. “Who needs to be anywhere?”
“We’re due on the mountain.” I can hear her shuffling into her sneakers.
My stomach coils, and I pull my knees into my chest. I’ve had a near-paralyzing hatred of snow-capped peaks since childhood — ever since my parents took us on a day hike in the Alps when I was eight, and I wandered off and lost my way and couldn’t read my map because it was in French. I cried for three hours on the path because I was convinced that my dad would leave me there “because this is what the universe dictated.” Finally, a kind German couple wearing lederhosen walked me down and reunited me with my parents under the gondola. I was safe, and I had been found, true. But at eight, you don’t forget that feeling of abandonment, that disorientation and the worry that your parents might not be out there searching for you anyway. That you might be the only one who was frantic. Even today, tucked under the duvet in my haven of a hotel room overlooking the Puget Sound, I can feel the panic weighing in my chest, the confusion, the total sense of loss that my eight-year-old self felt.
“Come on.” Vanessa throws a pillow at my head. “My first dare for you: crack the code in the Master Universe Way.”
“I don’t really see how me climbing a mountain has anything to do with the MUW.”
“Please don’t call it MUW,” she replies. “A) That sounds like some sort of noise a French cow would make. And b) you will. You will see exactly how climbing mountains has to do with the Master Universe Way.” She retreats to the bathroom, the latch clicking.
I debate disobeying her and refusing to relinquish the comfort of the Egyptian cotton sheets, but there’s no point in arguing with Vanessa. There never was, and to be honest, her hard lines and assuredness were a bit of a relief for someone like me, all grey, all middle ground, all soft edges.
As if she can discern my thoughts, she bellows from the bathroom:
“Listen, Willa! We have a contract with Random House and the Dare You! team, and I have a plan. This is my job, and frankly, you could use the distraction, not to mention the free therapy that this project is providing, so get your ass in gear.”
She’s not wrong, so I do.
The rush hour traffic is grueling. For a city so intent on clean living, you’d think more people would walk the walk (figuratively) and carpool. A few really determined bikers whiz by, all spandex and neon and wind, but mostly it’s just a crush of cars, everyone staring down at their phones, texting or tweeting or emailing, as we crawl forward.
“I really don’t want to do this,” I grumble as we accelerate through the sloth and turn south on the bend in the highway.
“What would you rather be doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the entire point,” she answers, and then we both fall silent as Mount Rainier unfolds in front of us, its majesty demanding silence, its expansiveness — the crystal blue sky, the white-capped peak, the wisp of clouds floating atop — demanding respect. For a moment, we just absorb and acknowledge its beauty, accepting the fact that this world is pretty damn magical, that its magnificence can still surprise us. It’s easy to forget that. Especially when you’ve had a few weeks like mine.
“I still don’t get what climbing a mountain has to do with proving my dad wrong,” I say about thirty minutes later when the radio signals have faltered and we only have AM news to keep us company. “I hate hiking. I’ve told you that a thousand times. I hate mountains too. They’re cold, and they are not meant to be scaled. Do you know how many people die every year mountain climbing?”
“Do you?”
“Well, no. But that’s not the point.”
“The Master Universe Way is, as your dad calls it, ‘God’s Plan.’ Has it ever occurred to you that the fear that was planted in you at eight — the fear of mountains — is a fear of much more than that? That it’s a metaphor? And that you’ve allowed this fear to become, well, your own Master Universe Way for your life?”
“Whoa.” I flex both hands in the air. “That’s too much for this hour. I was only eight. It was just a mountain.”
We pull alongside a minivan with the bumper sticker MOMS FOR MARIJUANA.
“And yet you’ve never gone back up one.” She clicks down the blinker to shift lanes. “And I’m not a shrink, but I think that this could be a pretty good metaphor.”
“So you think I’m unconsciously blaming my entire life on my eight-year-old self?”
Rather than answer, she accelerates, changes lanes, and gives marijuana mom the finger as we fly by.
—
It’s nearly ten when we finally pull into the state park. There are trailers and caravans in the parking lot, hikers and families and more than a few leftover hippies who look very much in need of a shower. They’re all consulting their maps, packing up their GORP. One particularly beleaguered mom is wiping down her son’s face with a Wet-Nap while he tries to shimmy away and yells, “Gross! Stop! Disgusting!”
Vanessa eases the car to a halt, and I snap off my seat belt. She refused to stop along the way, insisting that we be here by ten to get in the full hike. My brow and palms are already sweaty with nerves, my stomach is flip-flopping with disgust. Why did I let her talk me into this? Who cares if I undo my Master Universe Way/Plan? The MUW is a stupid fucking premise to begin with! Who doesn’t know that? If I didn’t have to pee so badly, I’d never leave the car.
But nature calls. “I have to find a bathroom. Back in five.”
I slam the door and run, and if Vanessa answers, I don’t hear her. I find a fairly horrifying bathroom just left of the ranger’s station. It has no soap, a shred of toilet paper, and a foggy mirror, in which I make out an exhausted, disheveled version of my face. I can’t believe I look like this. Have I always looked like this? Why hasn’t Vanessa said something? I dare you to use better moisturizer!
I pull my hair back into a braid but mostly decide to forgo vanity because we’re just hiking, and it’s not as if I’ll run into Shawn. Or anything. I dare myself not to care, which, if I really considered it, wasn’t too much of a dare because I’m not sure how much I cared in the first place. My ragged face in the mirror serves as exhibit A.
And exhibit A is exactly why my heart stops — literally stops — when I stumble out of the bathroom and I see him standing by the car, talking to Vanessa as if nothing has happened, nothing has changed.
Not Shawn, of course. He’s too busy listening to indie bands with Erica Stoppard and breaking bread with the Zuckerbergs.
No, it’s Theodore.
He was supposed to be in New Orleans! I never would have agreed to Seattle if he hadn’t been in New Orleans!
He turns and sees me, and my instinct is to run. But the adrenaline is too much in my legs, too much for my brain, so instead, I am stuck, paralyzed, too shell-shocked to do anything. He waves, and I must wave back. Because then Vanessa shouts:
“See? This is what I mean. The theory of opposites! Reorganizing the Master Universe Way! You couldn’t do it, so I did.”
—
Finally, I start breathing again. And then my brain starts working again. And next, naturally, the first thing I do is flee. Straight up the hill, straight past the ranger’s station, straight by a family with four kids who are in better shape than I am. I can hear Vanessa yelling:
“Wait! Stop!”
> And then one of the kids from the family in my wake starts yelling over and over again: “Wait! Stop!”
And then everyone on the trail turns to look at me.
But no matter. I keep hauling uphill for a good two minutes more until I am certain I’m going to puke. There’s a reason that Shawn and I quit jogging on Sundays.
I stick my hands on my knees, my head between my thighs. At least I got a jump on them, at least I’ll have a few minutes to formulate a plan, I think. To tell Vanessa that she had no right! to meddle like this, even if I did agree to let her meddle but not with this!; to tell Theo that maybe he should take a goddamn hint and that when someone doesn’t accept your friend request, maybe it’s because she doesn’t want to be friends.
But before I can figure out a way to resolve any of these questions, a pair of orange Nikes present themselves on the ground in front of me.
“Hey,” he says from above.
I gnaw on my lip and wish that I’d gotten more sleep, taken the time to maybe brush my hair, adjust my braid so it wasn’t tilted to the left side of my head.
“I thought I had a least five minutes on you.”
“I’m used to you running,” Theo offers. “So I was ready.”
—
“You’re supposed to be in New Orleans,” I say, once I have wearily made my way upright.
“Vanessa called, so I came home.”
“Just like that.”
“Why should it be any more complicated?” he says.
“Things usually are.” Why is my life so goddamn complicated?
“Only if you make them more complicated,” he says. “At least, that’s what I’ve found.”
“Well…emailing your ex-girlfriend on Facebook to tell her about your revelation due to your testicular diagnosis tends to complicate things.”
“Touché.” He smiles.
“Whatever.”
“Vanessa said you wouldn’t write me back but that you wanted to.” He gazes across the landscape for a beat, then half-laughs. “God, that sounds so trite now that I say it out loud. I’d never tell my clients to hedge their bets on advice like that.”
The Theory of Opposites Page 11
