Page 40 of The Luck of Finding You
“Thanks for letting me cry. Please, never bring it up again.”
“I promise.” And I mean it. I won’t bring it up unless she does. Even though I have a million more questions. I’m just hoping that at some point she’ll open up to me more than she has. Maybe I should put out a branch.
I let out a slow breath. It’s now or never, I guess. “Do you want to know why I’m so positive all the time?”
Tally looks at me with curious eyes, but I can also see the relief in them from the subject change. “You definitely border on annoyingly optimistic all the time. Like, is life really good enough to smile all the time?”
“Is it really such a bad thing to look on the bright side of things?” She’s not the first person I’ve ever asked that question to. I get it, my personality can come off as overly positive at times. But I’m not one to stand and shout about how you always need to look for the bright side of things because sometimes there just isn’t a bright side of things. I do make an effort to find the good and take risks and chances. Now anyway.
Tally ponders this for a second. “Maybe not. But definitely right now. There’s not really a bright side to our situation.”
I swallow. She means The Book Shop, right? That has to be what she means. “We’re hanging out tonight. We’re friends now. That’s a bright side.” It’s the brightest side in all of this. More than I ever could have hoped for. Well sure, I’d like to be more than friends. But I’ve spent the last five years wondering and thinking about Tally. Now that she’s sitting right in front of me, I can wait a little longer for her to be okay with the idea of us as more than friends.
“Your entire life changed in a week!” Tally cries. I didn’t realize she was so upset about this. “You had to move across the country, all because your grandma, who isn’t even here now, said so.”
I shrug. “It was time for a change.”
“That big of a change?” Tally is incredulous and I get why. She’s lived here her entire life, and if I were to guess anything about her, it’s that she’s not planning to go anywhere for a long, long time. “You were just okay with it?”
“Yeah.”
“Please tell me, then, why are you so happy and sunshiny all the time? If you weren’t anything but genuine, I would truly think it was forced. But you really don’t seem like it was that big of a deal to move here.” Tally is watching me curiously again.
This is it, time for me to get real with her. Bare a part of me that I haven’t even told Annie. Sure, Annie knows what happened, but she doesn’t know why it impacted me the way that it did.
“Last summer I went on a camping trip with my buddy Sam,” I tell her, and just like when I was reading, I slip into the familiar cadence of storytelling. “I am not a super outdoorsy guy, but we go on some sort of trip together every year. Last year we were camping up in the mountains in Colorado. I couldn’t even tell you where we were. We’d hiked almost all day and finally got to the spot that Sam had picked out beforehand.”
I pause. If I closed my eyes right now, I’d be right back there. I’d be able to see the small space we’d found in the middle of a grove of trees. How the bugs were so loud that night, which now feels like it was some kind of warning.
“We set up camp, and he got a fire going so we could make dinner. We spent the hours before bed drinking and complaining, which is what we always end up doing when we get together.”
Tally laughs. “You complain? I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I sure do. I was at this point in my life where everything was making me unhappy, and I was just going through the motions. I was so mad that Sam had decided we were going to go camping for our annual trip. We take turns picking every other year. We’d never gone camping before because he knew how much I don’t like it.” I pause to look at Tally. “Don’t get me wrong, I love being outside. But I also love to go back to a cabin or hotel at the end of the day.”
“Same.” Tally smiles at me, distracting me for a moment. I could get lost in that smile, the one that fills her whole face and lights up her eyes. It feels like a special treat to get it tonight since I haven’t seen it directed at me the whole time I’ve been here in Provo.
I smile back, then look away. Telling this story feels so incredibly personal, and I want to share it with her. But it feels too intimate to be looking at her while I tell her what happened next.
“I was exhausted by the time we finally went to bed, and we were both asleep within minutes. I woke in the middle of the night, feeling super disoriented. I got up to pee, just to sort of wake myself up because something felt off. When I was walking back to our camp, I heard what I thought was Sam rummaging through our cooler. The one we’d tied up the night before. I was about to head into our campsite when I heard a whistle from above me.”
My palms start to sweat, like they always do when I get to this part.
“I looked up and saw Sam sitting in the tree. He gestured for me to climb up there with him. I did. There was a bear in our camp.”
Tally gasps.
“That’s not even the craziest part.” I wipe my hands on my pants. I can do this, I am alive and well and sitting on the couch with Tally. I am so grateful I’m here with her, but there are still some days when I wake up and can’t believe that I’m alive. “We sat up there for what felt like hours, waiting for that bear to wander off or fall asleep so we could go to the car, but then it started to rain. The bear by this point had eaten our food, ripped a hole in Sam’s tent, and was wandering around our camp chairs. We were stuck and very, very wet.”
“You all right?” Tally’s voice startles me. I blink and the living room focuses into my view again. Tally has moved closer to me again, her hands still in her lap, concern heavy on her face.
I nod. “I am. It’s—it’s a lot though.”
“You don’t have to rush.” Tally gives me a closed-lipped smile, and a vision of me pulling her against my chest and lacing our fingers together flashes through my mind. I clasp my hands in front of me to stay focused on my story.
“The rain got heavier and heavier, and then at some point we heard more than saw the flash of lightning.”
Tally is like a statue beside me. Mom and Annie both cried when I got to this part, but I don’t think Tally will. She’s not exactly weepy.
