More Happy Than Not

by Adam Silvera

  Praise for More Happy Than Not

  “Silvera, like [Benjamin Alire Sáenz], is a beautiful writer. Aaron’s story is heart-wrenching, funny, inspirational, and eye-opening. This is a really special novel from an extremely gifted new writer.”

  —Bustle

  “Silvera’s debut is equal parts gut-punch and warm hug, not to mention sweet, funny, creative, and a really welcome entry to YA with regard to having characters coming from a lower socioeconomic background.”

  —BN.com

  “Adam Silvera’s debut novel, More Happy Than Not has everything a reader could want: a cool setting, intriguing characters, and a romance that’s more than just your average love story.”

  —Hypable

  “Silvera’s debut novel asks some intense questions about love and sexuality . . . A stunning novel.”

  —Huffington Post

  “Poignant . . . So engrossing that once you start it, you won’t be able to put it down. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

  —TeenVogue.com

  “This is a cry-on-the-subway book, so watch out.”

  —MTV.com

  “Every now and again I read a book that requires me to drink several glasses of water afterward because I’ve cried myself dehydrated. This is one of those books . . . My goodness, it is incredible.”

  —Eric Smith, author of Inked

  “Aaron is one of the most interesting, authentic teen narrators I’ve met, and his story is told with incredible courage and unflinching honesty. Silvera managed to leave me smiling after totally breaking my heart. Unforgettable.”

  —Becky Albertalli, author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

  “Adam Silvera explores the inner workings of a painful world and he delivers this with heartfelt honesty and a courageous, confident hand. Combine these with a one-of-a-kind voice and a genius idea, and what you have is a mesmerizing, unforgettable tour de force.”

  —John Corey Whaley, Printz-Award winning author of Where Things Come Back

  “Adam Silvera is a voice missing in YA fiction. The honesty of his words and his ability to tell a story make you realize that we’ve been waiting for him. I’m blown away.”

  —Holly Goldberg Sloan,

  New York Times bestselling author of Counting by 7s

  “A debut as deft as it is sharp, as honest as it is assured, and, above all, extremely moving. Silvera pulls his punches with an energy, daring, and intensity that left me spellbound—and reminded me why I love to read.”

  —Adele Griffin, author of The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone

  “An important new voice in YA literature. In More Happy Than Not Adam Silvera has created a passionate, searing narrative with characters who feel unique and totally familiar. I found myself rooting for Aaron Soto and his family from page one . . . An unforgettable read.”

  —Alex London, author of Proxy

  “Inventive and daring, Silvera’s gritty debut kept me turning pages until 2 a.m. His writing crackles with challenging questions, searing and timely.”

  —Aaron Hartzler, author of Rapture Practice

  “Adam Silvera’s More Happy Than Not is a fantastic magic trick I haven’t stopped thinking about since I finished reading and suspect will stay with me for some time to come.”

  —Jasmine Warga, author of My Heart and Other Black Holes

  “Adam Silvera harnesses a certain reckless energy and unleashes it through the voice of Aaron Soto. Aaron Soto is astounding, full of heart, wit, youthful energy, and a deep desire to be honest about who he is in the world. He sinks into your skin so you can’t stop thinking about him even when you aren’t reading. High on story, character, and some perfectly executed twists, I loved this book.”

  —David Arnold, author of Mosquitoland

  Copyright © 2015 by Adam Silvera

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Soho Teen an imprint of

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Silvera, Adam, 1990–

  More happy than not / Adam Silvera.

  HC ISBN 978-1-61695-560-1

  PB ISBN 978-1-61695-677-6

  eISBN 978-1-61695-561-8

  [1. Memory—Fiction. 2. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 3. Gays—Fiction.

  4. Coming out (Sexual orientation)—Fiction. 5. Single-parent

  families—Fiction. 6. Bronx (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 7. New York

  (N.Y.)—Fiction. 8. Youths’ writings.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.S54Mor 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014044586

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For those who’ve discovered happiness can be hard.

  Shout-out to Luis and Corey, of course, my favorites who

  sucker punched me in the best ways.

  PART ONE: HAPPINESS

  1

  SUCKER-PUNCHING MEMORIES

  It turns out the Leteo procedure isn’t bullshit.

  The first time I saw a poster on the subway promoting the institute that could make you forget things, I thought it was a marketing campaign for some new science fiction movie. And when I saw the headline “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow!” on the cover of a newspaper, I mistook it as something boring, like the cure for some new flu—I didn’t think they were talking about memories. It rained that weekend, so I hung out with my friends at the Laundromat, chilling in front of the security guard’s old TV. Every single news station was interviewing different representatives of the Leteo Institute to find out more about the “revolutionary science of memory alteration and suppression.”

  I called bullshit at the end of each one.

  Except now we know the procedure is 100 percent real and 0 percent bullshit because one of our own has gone through it.

  That’s what Brendan, my sort of best friend, tells me at least. I know him as much for his honesty as I know Baby Freddy’s mother for her dedication to confirming the gossip that comes her way. (Rumor has it she’s learning basic French because her neighbor down the hall may be having an affair with the married superintendent, and the language barrier is a bit of a block. But, yeah, that’s gossip too.)

  “So Leteo is legit?” I sit down by the sandbox no one plays in because of ringworm.

  Brendan paces back and forth, dribbling our friend Deon’s basketball between his legs. “That’s why Kyle and his family bounced,” he says. “Fresh start.”

  I don’t even have to ask what he forgot. Kyle’s identical twin brother, Kenneth, was gunned down last December for sleeping with this guy Jordan’s younger sister. Kyle was the one who actually slept with her, though. I know grief just fine, but I can’t imagine living day by day with that—knowing the brother I shared a face and secret language with was ripped out of my life when the bullets were meant for me.

  “Well, good luck to him, right?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Brendan says.

  The usual suspects are outside today. Skinny-Dave and Fat-Dave—who are unrelated, just both named Dave—come out of our local bodega, Good Food’s Store, where I’ve been working part-time for the past couple of months. They�
�re throwing back quarter juices and potato chips. Baby Freddy glides on by with his new steel orange bike, and I remember when we used to give him shit years ago for still needing training wheels—but the joke is on me since my father never got a chance to teach me to ride at all. Me-Crazy is sitting on the ground, having a conversation with the wall; and everyone else, the adults mainly, are preparing for this weekend’s community event of the year.

  Family Day.

  This will be the first time we’re celebrating Family Day without Kenneth and Kyle, or Brendan’s parents, or my dad. It’s not like Dad and I were gonna have father–son wheelbarrow races or father–son basketball games; besides, Dad always paired up with my brother, Eric. But father–son anything would’ve been better than this. I can’t imagine it’s any easier for Brendan, even though his parents are both alive. It might be worse, since they’re just out of reach in boxy jail cells for separate crimes: his mother for armed robbery, his father for assaulting a police officer after he was caught dealing meth. Now he lives with his grandfather who is thugging it out at eighty-eight.

  “Everyone’s going to expect smiles from us,” I say.

  “Everyone can go suck it,” Brendan replies. He pockets his hands, and I bet there’s weed in there; dealing pot has been his way of growing up faster, even though it’s pretty much what landed his dad in prison eight months ago. He checks his watch, struggling to read what the hands are saying. “I have to go meet someone.” He doesn’t even wait for me to respond before he walks off.

  He’s a guy of few words, which is why he’s only my sort of best friend. A real best friend would use a lot of words to make you feel somewhat good about your life when you’re thinking about ending it. Like I tried to. Instead, he distanced himself from me because he felt as if he had a duty to hang with the other black kids—which I thought and still think is bullshit.

  I miss the time when we took full advantage of summer nights, ignoring curfew so we could lie down on the black mat of the jungle gym and talk about girls and futures too big for us—which always seemed like it might be okay, as long we were stuck here with each other. Now we come outside because of routine, not brotherhood.

  It’s just one more thing I have to pretend I’m okay with.

  Home is a one-bedroom apartment for the four of us. I mean, three of us. Three.

  I share the living room with Eric, who should be home any minute now from his shift at the used video game store on Third Avenue. He’ll power on one of his two gaming consoles, chat with his online friends through a headset, and play until his team bows out around 4 a.m. I bet Mom will try and get him to apply to some colleges. I don’t plan on sticking around for the argument.

  There are stacks of unread comics on my side of the room. I bought a lot of them for cheap, like between seventy-five cents and two dollars at my favorite comic shop, without any real intention to read them from start to finish. I just like having a collection to show off whenever one of my more well-off friends comes over. I subscribed to one series, The Dark Alternates, when everyone got into it at school last year, but so far I’ve only gotten around to flipping through them to see if the artists have done anything interesting.

  Whenever I really get into a book, I draw my favorite scenes inside them: in World War Z, I drew the Battle of Yonkers where zombies dominated; in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, I drew the moment we meet the Headless Horseman because that was when I suddenly cared about an otherwise so-so ghost story; and, in Scorpius Hawthorne and the Convict of Abbadon—the third book in my favorite fantasy series about a demonic boy wizard—I drew the monstrous Abbadon being split into two from Scorpius’s Sever Charm.

  I haven’t been drawing very much lately.

  The shower always takes a few minutes to heat up so I turn it on and go check on my mom. I knock on her bedroom door, and she doesn’t answer. The TV is on, though. When your only living parent isn’t responding, you can’t help but think of that time when your father was found dead in the bathtub—and the possibility that beyond your home’s only bedroom door life as an orphan awaits you. So I go inside.

  She’s just waking up from her second nap of the day to an episode of Law & Order. “You okay, Mom?”

  “I’m fine, my son.” She rarely calls me Aaron or “my baby” anymore, and while I was never a fan of the latter, especially whenever my friends were around, at least it showed that there was life inside of her. Now she’s just wiped.

  Beside her is a half-eaten slice of pizza she asked me to get her from Yolanda’s Pizzeria, the empty cup of coffee I brought her back from Joey’s, and a couple of Leteo pamphlets she picked up on her own. She’s always believed in the procedure, but that means nothing to me since she also believes in Santeria. She puts on her glasses, which conveniently hide the sunken lines around her eyes from her crazy work hours. She’s a social worker at Washington Hospital five days a week, and spends four evenings handling meat at the supermarket for extra cash to keep this tiny roof over our heads.

  “You didn’t like the pizza? I can get you something else.”

  Mom ignores this. She gets out of bed, tugging at the collar of her sister’s hand-me-down shirt she recently lost enough weight to fit into because of her “Poverty Diet,” and hugs me harder than she has since Dad died. “I wish there was something else we could’ve done.”

  “Uh . . .” I hug her back, never knowing what to say when she cries about what Dad did and what I tried to do. I just look at the Leteo pamphlets again. There is something else we could’ve done for him—we just never would’ve been able to afford it. “I should probably shower before the water gets cold again. Sorry.”

  She lets me go. “It’s okay, my son.”

  I pretend everything is okay as I rush to the bathroom where steam has fogged up the mirror. I quickly undress. But I stop before stepping in because the tub—finally clean after lots of bleach—remains the spot where he took his life. His memories sucker punch my brother and me at every turn: the pen marks on the wall where he measured our height; the king-sized bed where he would flip us while watching the news; the stove where he cooked empanadas for our birthdays. We can’t exactly just escape these things by moving into a different, bigger apartment. No, we’re stuck here in this place where we have to shake mouse shit out of our shoes and inspect our glasses of soda before drinking in case roaches dived in while our backs were turned.

  Our hot water doesn’t run hot for very long so I jump in before I miss my chance.

  I rest my head against the wall, the water sliding through my hair and down my back, and I think about all the memories I would want Leteo to bury. They all have to do with living in a post-Dad world. I flip over my wrist and stare at my scar. I can’t believe I was once that guy who carved a smile into his wrist because he couldn’t find happiness, that guy who thought he would find it in death. No matter what drove my dad to kill himself—his tough upbringing in a home with eight older brothers, or his job at the infamous post office up the block, or any one of a million reasons—I have to push ahead with the people who don’t take the easy way out, who love me enough to stay alive even when life sucks.

  I trace the smiling scar, left to right and right to left, happy to have it as a reminder not to be such a dumbass again.

  2

  A TRADE DATE

  (NOT A DATE WHERE YOU TRADE YOUR DATE)

  Last April, Genevieve asked me out while we were hanging out at Fort Wille Park. My friends all thought this was an epic case of gender role-reversal, but my friends can also sometimes be close-minded idiots. It’s important for me to remember this—the asking-out part—because it means Genevieve saw something in me, the life of someone she wanted to lose herself in, and not someone whose life she wanted to see thrown away.

  Trying to commit you-know-what two months ago was not only selfish, but also embarrassing. When you survive, you’re treated like a child whose hand has to b
e held when crossing the street. Even worse, everyone suspects you were either begging for attention or just too stupid to get the job done properly.

  I walk the ten blocks downtown to the apartment where Genevieve lives with her dad. Her dad doesn’t really pay her a whole lot of attention, but at least he’s alive to ignore her. I buzz the intercom and am desperately wishing I could’ve ridden a bike here. My armpits stink and my back is sweaty, and the shower I just took is now completely pointless.

  “Aaron!” Genevieve calls, sticking her head out from her window on the second floor, sun rays glowing against her face. “I’ll be down in a sec, I gotta wash up first.” She shows me her hands, wet with yellow and black paint, and winks before ducking back in. I’d like to think she was drawing a cartoonish happy face, but her hyper-imagination is more likely to draw something magical, like a yellow-bellied hippogriff with pearl-black eyes lost in a mirrored forest with nothing but a golden star to guide it home. Or something.

  She comes down a couple minutes later, still in the ratty white shirt she wears to paint. She smiles before hugging me, and it’s not one of those half smiles I’ve grown used to. There’s nothing worse than seeing her sad and defeated. Her body is tense, and when she finally relaxes, the pale green tote bag I got her for her birthday last year slips down her shoulder. She’s drawn a lot on the tote; sometimes there are tiny cities, other times it’s an imagining of a song lyric she loved.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hi,” she says back, tiptoeing to kiss me. Her green eyes are watery. They remind me of a rain forest painting she gave up on a few months ago.

  “What’s wrong? My armpits stink, right?”

  “Totally, but that’s not it. Painting is stressing me out like whoa. You’re rescuing me just in time.” She punches me in the shoulder, the aggressive way she chooses to flirt.