Reasons to Be Happy by Katrina Kittle Page A

deal.
    Deal with what I wanted to know. Why was life so hard for me? Why was I such a baby? I didn’t know, but in our pact of honesty, I promised to let Aunt Izzy know when I wanted to binge and she would help divert me. I was supposed to go do something else really active, like run. I couldn’t imagine being able to divert a binge once one took hold of me—it felt like being possessed—but I said I was ready to try. Heck, I’d do just about anything to get rid of the DRH.
    What’s DRH? My Disgusting, Repulsive Habit. No more SR, because it’s no longer secret, and it’s not a remedy for anything.
    So, sure, I’d try to divert a binge.
    Fortunately for me, Ghana turned out to be quite the diversion.
    • • •
    Once Aunt Izzy woke up, it was nothing but go go go . She and her crew had already been over here five different times, beginning three years ago. That day, they were visiting an orphanage in Kumasi to do some follow-up. We weren’t going to spend a lot of time in Kumasi; the heart of the documentary was a group of orphans in a smaller village called Tafi Atome (pronounced like Taffy Ah-TOE-may).
    Aunt Izzy’s crew was small on this trip. She had a bigger team back home for editing and production, but here, she’d brought just three other people and they had the weirdest collection of names. Pearl Hays was her main assistant and a camera person. Just like her name, everything about her was round and pale. Wide in the hips, well-endowed in the boob department, with a natural sway when she walked, she wore her almost-white blond hair in a thick braid down her back. She was a big woman, fat by L.A. standards, but she knew how to dress for her size, and she never apologized. She could laugh louder than anyone I’d ever met.
    Dimple Singh—is that the coolest name or what?—was a skinny Indian woman who did sound production. Everything about her was straight and flat compared to Pearl. She kept her hair cut short, which made her dark eyes stand out even more.
    The cinematographer was the only man on the trip and won the prize for the absolute best name. Kick McKew was originally from West Virginia. His funny expressions and his soft hill accent always made me grin—like, when we stepped out of the compound of our hotel, lugging equipment to Ben’s van, Kick said, “Whew. It’s hotter than the hinges of hell.”
    He was right. The heavy air pulled on my limbs as I moved through it.
    Once in the van, crawling through snarled, chaotic traffic, Kick announced, “Well, we’re off like a herd of turtles.”
    I glued myself to the van windows, leaving nose prints I’m sure.
    Women (and some men) carried outrageous things on their heads —loads of firewood, flats of sunglasses, a tall stack of pillows, metal tubs piled with plastic bags of water (that the entire team and Ben made of point of telling me never to drink). These people talked, walked, and gestured without their loads ever losing balance.
    Traffic careened along, sometimes five vehicles competed with each other across what looked like three lanes, with plenty of bicycles and motor scooters whizzing between them too.
    At every intersection people walked between the rows of cars selling maps, toothbrushes, dried plantain chips, peanuts, pastries, and cassettes.
    The heat wrapped itself around me, giving me the woozy sensation of an out-of-body experience. The smells were so intense, the sun so piercingly bright, the sounds so jarring.
    A girl my age rapped on the side of the van, thrusting her open hand through my window. “Please. Please,” she said. The entire right side of her head was blistered from a burn, with actual bubbles in the skin. Her right eye was gone, the lid pulled taut so that only a small slit of emptiness showed above her stark cheekbone.
    Thank God I was sitting down, because my legs went totally weak. I felt all my joints and limbs just disconnect from my body, like the slightest breeze (not that there was much chance of