Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center Page A

miserable by being the pure opposite of all those things.
    They loved him. We’d been here two hours, and he was already the king of the group. He was just one of those guys, it turned out, who always had something funny to say. Plus, he was confident without being pompous. He was interested without being anxious. He was laid-back without being a slacker. He had something for everyone. The hard-core guys could talk hard-core hiking with him. The sorority girls could ask him to adjust their pack straps. He was infinitely likable. To everybody. Except me.
    I was fully aware how crazy it was, but the more they liked him, the less I did. This was supposed to be my trip! It was like he’d taken it over, somehow, and squeezed me out. We were enemies now, after all, if only in my mind. We were like the broken-up couple whose friends had to choose sides. Except we had never been a couple, and there were no sides left because everybody had already chosen him.
    There it was. If he was happy, I had to be unhappy. If he fit in, I had to be left out. Especially since I still wasn’t talking to him. If he was the person everybody was gathered around, I didn’t have any place to stand.
    At the Pantry, we measured and bagged up ten days’ worth of dehydrated food, as well as mixtures of spices and dehydrated milk, lemonade, and cocoa. We got the glorious, unbelievable news that butter can last for weeks unrefrigerated without going rancid, and the same was true of cheese. Each cook group would carry its own cheddar wheel so thick it had to be cut with a wire, and enough butter to last until the re-ration at the midway point. Apparently, someone was going to ride up into the mountains halfway through with a full load of replenishments on a caravan of donkeys.
    â€œDonkeys?” that guy Mason asked.
    â€œNo cars. No ATVs. Just living, breathing nature.”
    â€œWhat happens if we run out of food before that?”
    Beckett shrugged. “Then we eat each other.”
    There was a limit for the packs based on each person’s size, and yes—they weighed us one by one on a scale and called out the results. The big guys carried more than the small girls, which is why they got the gas cookstoves and the giant wheel of cheese. My own pack weighed in at seventy-nine pounds, which seemed like plenty. I was issued flour, dehydrated milk, a bag of homemade granola, and hot chocolate.
    Packs full, we practiced putting them on. You can’t just hoist a pack that heavy straight up to your back from the ground. You have to kneel down like you’re proposing marriage, pull your pack up onto the shelf of your thigh, then wriggle it around onto your back. Beckett had us practice. I took it very slow, worrying that I might drop it, or strain something, or otherwise humiliate myself. Because the only ways I knew how to shake off embarrassment were: (a) to leave the room, or (b) to laugh it off with a friend. Since I couldn’t leave, and I had no friends, the stakes were pretty high.
    I would have expected to have a simple but clear education about the wilderness by the time we finished our orientation. The basics, at least. But Beckett, for all his posturing, talked in scribbles. He gave lines of information with gaping spaces in between, and after listening to him for five straight hours, all I knew for sure was that dandelions were edible, singing on the trail would keep the bears away, and we had to drop iodine in our water bottles every single time we filled up or risk an intestinal infection called Giardia that would have us “spewing out of both ends.”
    When Beckett dismissed us for dinner with instructions to meet at the lodge entrance at six the next morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had only a tiny fraction of the information we were going to need.
    I asked him about it on the way out the door, but he said, “It’s all in the handouts.”
    â€œThe two handouts?” I