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“Ow!” I screech.
“That’s for reading this depressing, hard stuff over the loudspeakers.”
“Wait, it wasn’t me. I—”
She cracks my knuckles a second time.
“And that’s for breaking the smoothie machine! They say it might take twenty-four hours to fix it. Twenty-four hours! That’s like a lifetime!”
Daniel paces the room. He’s a little scary. In fact, I’d give him just about anything that would increase his happiness right now before he goes commando on me. “We saw the security camera footage—she kissed you! And you handed her the backpack. We know you’re in this together. All the order stations have been hacked into so when you try to order a CESSNAB product you get rerouted to a book called My Happiness Wants Your Happiness to Go to Hell with quotes like ‘Read a damn book already. It won’t kill you.’ ‘People screw up all the time. Deal with it.’ ‘Not everybody gets to be famous.’ ‘If you’re so special, why am I so annoyed?’”
“Read that really bad one, Daniel!” Ruth says.
Daniel flips on a screen and reads the word flashing there. “No.”
“I want a smoothie,” Ruth says quietly.
Daniel’s face is so close to mine I can see the acne cream on his chin. “You’ve hurt a lot of people today, Cameron. And now you’re going to have to pay.”
“What if that hurts my happiness?”
“Little late for that. Friend.”
“Okay. I’ll leave. You know? I’ll just leave and never come back.”
Ruth hits me with the book again so hard I swear Beowulf is lodged in my cheek. “Ow! Quit it!”
“No, Cameron,” Daniel says, stepping back. “Your lack of complete happiness is a threat to our happiness. It’s like a cancer. And you know what you have to do with a cancer?”
“Hope it goes away?”
Ruth drifts closer and I flinch, but five hundred years of the world’s least exciting literature does not come near my flesh.
“No. We have to cut it out so the good cells can continue to grow.” Daniel turns to the commandos. “Get him on his feet and meet me in the church. We’re going bowling.”
Ten minutes later, with two CESSNAB camo’d goons on either side of me, I’m half dragged into the packed Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack ’N’ Bowl to face my doom. The church band is plugged in; they’re playing an uptempo tune with a vaguely rock-pop beat. My head still hurts from where Daniel smacked me with the gun, but I think the words say something about happiness only belonging to the right kind of people.
Daniel cuts a path through the throng and the band fades into a little feedback and then nothing. He stands in Lane #7, right under the big-screen TV that shows the dancing pins when you make a strike. The pins usually say things like Wow, you’re awesome and The universe loves a winner, so the universe must really love you! The screen’s off today. I imagine the pins have heard all about me and Library Girl and the supposed revolution and they’re scowling and flipping me the bird and gathering implements of torture.
Daniel holds out his hands like a preacher. “Friends, I want you to know that the smoothie machine is being fixed.”
The walls of the church shake with the sound of applause, wolf whistles, and whoo-hoos.
“I also want you to know that even though Cameron has hurt our happiness, he’s really hurt his own happiness more. This is what happens when people don’t embrace the positive. But are we going to let Cameron disappoint himself?”
“No!” the CESSNABers shout.
“That’s right. Cameron is part of our specialness, and we’re going to prove that our way is the right way, the only way. The universe wants Cameron to be happy, and all he has to do to be forgiven is to bowl.”
Daniel flicks the switch, and the ball machine thunks and rolls into action. My favorite, the purple one with a really high shine, shimmies up to my hand and waits.
“Daniel …,” I start, but he forces my hand onto the ball, his smile like a rictus grin. “Pick it up, Cameron. Crusaders, let’s give our troubled friend a little inspiration.”
The band kicks in. Ruth’s shaking a tambourine, and I don’t mean to brag, but my tambourine solo totally kicks hers to the curb. For half a second, I consider staying. Maybe I could find that bliss state again. Maybe I could stay here, follow all the rules, be safe always. But as soon as the thought enters my mind, another one swims in and eats the first one like a shark. Fuck that, it burps.
“Here goes nothing.” My fingers sink into the holes of that purple beauty; I pull back and throw the ball into the lane, where it sails down the slick middle like it’s always done, heading for a perfect strike. But the ball veers off course. It drifts toward the gutter like it has every time I’ve ever bowled here, but instead of popping back out, it slinks into the loser trough with a loud rumble and disappears. Not a single pin falls. There is complete shock and silence.
“That can’t happen,” Daniel says, eyes wide. “Everybody’s a winner here.”
