People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (best story books to read .TXT) 📕

“Your mom,” I say.

“She was being a therapist when she said this,” Rachel argues, by which I know she means, Sandra Krohn was being decidedly Dr. Sandra Krohn, in the same way that Rachel is sometimes decidedly Art School Rachel, not that Rachel was actually in a therapy session. Beg as Rachel might, her mother refuses to treat Rachel as a patient. Rachel, however, refuses to see anyone else, and so they remain at an impasse.

“Anyway,” Rachel continues, “she told me that sometimes, when you lose your happiness, it’s best to look for it the same way you’d look for anything else.”

“By groaning and hurling couch cushions around?” I guess.

“By retracing your steps,” Rachel says. “So, Poppy, all you have to do is think back and ask yourself, when was the last time you were truly happy?”

The problem is, I don’t have to think back. Not at all.

I know right away when I was last truly happy.

Two years ago, in Croatia, with Alex Nilsen.

But there’s no finding my way back to that, because we haven’t spoken since.

“Just think about it, will you?” Rachel says. “Dr. Krohn is always right.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”

2

This Summer

I DO THINK ABOUT it.

The whole subway ride home. The four-block walk after that. Through a hot shower, a hair mask, and a face mask, and several hours of lying on my stiff new sofa.

I don’t spend enough time here to have transformed it into a home, and besides, I’m the product of a cheapskate father and a sentimental mother, which means I grew up in a house filled to the brim with junk. Mom kept broken teacups my brothers and I had given her as kids, and Dad parked our old cars in the front yard just in case he ever learned to fix them. I still have no idea what would be considered a reasonable amount of bric-a-brac in a house, but I know how people generally react to my childhood home and figure it’s safer to err on the side of minimalism rather than hoarding.

Aside from an unwieldy collection of vintage clothes (first rule of the Wright family: never buy anything new if you can get it used for a fraction of the price), there isn’t much else in my apartment to fixate on. So I’m just staring at my ceiling, and thinking.

And the more I think about the trips Alex and I used to take together, the more I long for them. But not in the fun, daydreamy, energetic way I used to long to see Tokyo in cherry blossom season, or the Fasnacht festivals of Switzerland, with their masked parades and whip-wielding jesters dancing down the candy-colored streets.

What I’m feeling now is more of an ache, a sadness.

It’s worse than the blah-ness of not wanting anything much from life. It’s wanting something I can’t convince myself is even a possibility.

Not after two years of silence.

Okay, not silence. He still sends me a text on my birthday. I still send him one on his. Both of us send replies that say “Thank you” or “How are you doing?” but those words never seem to lead much further.

After everything happened between us, I used to tell myself it would just take time for him to get over it, that things would inevitably go back to normal and we’d be best friends again. Maybe we’d even laugh about this time apart.

But days passed, phones were turned off and on in case messages were getting lost, and after a full month, I even stopped jumping every time my text alert sounded.

Our lives went on, without each other in them. The new and strange became the familiar, the seemingly unchangeable, and now here I am, on a Friday night, staring at nothing.

I push off the sofa and grab my laptop from the coffee table, stepping out onto my tiny balcony. I plop into the lone chair that fits out here and prop my feet on the guardrail, still warm from the sun despite the heavy cloak of night. Down below, the bells chime over the door to the bodega on the corner, people walk home from long nights out, and a couple of cabs idle outside my favorite neighborhood bar, Good Boy Bar (a place that owes its success not to its drinks but to the fact that it allows dogs inside; this is how I survive my petless existence).

I open my computer and bat a moth away from the fluorescent glow of its screen as I pull up my old blog. The blog itself R+R couldn’t care less about—I mean, they evaluated my writing samples from it before I got the job, but they don’t care whether I maintain it. It’s the social media influence they want to keep cashing in on, not the modest but devoted readership I built with my posts on shoestring-budget travel.

Rest + Relaxation magazine doesn’t specialize in shoestring-budget travel. And though I’d planned to keep up Pop Around the World in addition to my magazine work, my entries petered off not long after the Croatia trip.

I scroll back to my post about that one and open it. I was already working at R+R by then, which meant every luxurious second of the trip was paid for. It was supposed to be the best one we’d ever taken, and small slivers of it were.

But rereading my post—even with every hint of Alex and what happened scrubbed out of it—it’s obvious how miserable I was when I got home. I scroll further back, scouring for every post about the Summer Trip. That was what we called it, when we texted about it throughout the year, usually long before we’d nailed down where we would go or how we’d afford it.

The Summer Trip.

As in, School is killing me—I just want the Summer Trip to be here already, and Pitch for our Summer Trip Uniform,