We were sitting in the café by the large storefront windows of Barnes and Noble, sipping Writer’s Chai and café au lait. It was Sunday afternoon, nearly melting into evening. The snow on the sidewalk outlining the bookstore was charcoal and chocolate. Cappuccino machines and cash registers whirred, buzzed, and dinged. Moms walked by with their Gap babies in strollers that sported their own Global Positioning Systems; couples in neutral and black sweaters walked arm-around-waist, gazing fondly through Buddy Holly glasses into each others’ eyes. I pretended to read an article about kitten cloning while Jana browsed a novel. My article was simply a distraction, its topic not entirely foreign to my ex-science semesters and living in the area of my brain relegated to sci-fi and pop culture. Frankly, I could have cared less whether an adorable kitten or a herd of crazed cheetahs was cloned. I was too busy contemplating our recent luck in the parking lot.

"Good parking spots are like men," Jana had said to me in her car. “All the good ones are taken and the only ones left are handicapped. I know if I find decent parking that something is going wrong in my love life.” She maneuvered her car, Delilah, into a stall near the front middle of the lot. “Dammit, a good one.”

I laughed. I try not to give into her cynicism, but lately, my life has been, well, worthy of it. I’m twenty-two, single, recently graduated with my BS in English, and making a living off of editing term papers for frat boys and linguistically challenged high school students with rich parents. I work in an office, too, but I try not to refer to that side of me as having to do with myself, that bastardization of writing talent and waste of my education. I don’t even get to deal with words, syllables, punctuation or alliteration. Just numbers. Three-nine-seven, dash, seven-one, dash, fifteen-oh-two. Some words, I guess, if you count street names, cities, states, last names that sound like noises I’ve heard pour from a gurgling stomach – Orgfanellaugh – and first names spelled by neo-hippies – Knikole. But overall, I consider myself on the brink of something. Something bound to happen, hopefully positive, most likely neutral, possibly negative. Yet I remain, eternally yours, sincerely and optimistically, Haley.

“I’ll be right back,” Jana said to me as she slid off the tall stool.

I wondered whether the stools were designed to make college students feel more at home or to elicit nostalgia in the Baby Boomers. Which won – the desire to sip a Sex on the Beach or to slurp a chocolate malt with my beau who had just given me his letter jacket and class ring? Either way, my feet dangled and I didn’t like the way my thighs looked: squished against the stool and wider than I remembered.

The music was perfect, a mixture of the jazz greats and new singers reproducing the standards. Luck Be a Lady. Mack the Knife. I Get a Kick Outta You. Buzzing saxophones, alluring flutes, and the tsch-ta-ta-tsch of the snare. The upright bass—I could see the fingers plucking and pulling on the strings, his red hair falling in front of his closed eyes, his eyebrows pointed and wrinkling his forehead. His lips, pursed and pouty while he neared orgasm from…music, the beat, the final pure love left in his life and where was I? Nowhere to be found by no one, hidden in the back of the crowd, standing on my tip-toes hoping to catch a glimpse – yes, maybe I could see him again if that tall guy in front of me would just leave – peaking between shoulders of six foot giants. Close, but not quite. Just lose myself in the music, in the soul of the song, rock back and forth on my feet, bouncing a little, nodding my head and trying that hip-hop side to side neck motion like an exotic bird.

“So what do you think?” Jana was suddenly back on her stool, looking at me. She held several books in her hands. “Haley?”

“About?”

“About whether there is a happy book. What part did you hear? You were nodding the whole time I was talking to you.”

“Right, right. Sorry, just spaced. Ok, so a happy book? Just a happy story or does it have to be an entire book?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t really come across either; only kids’ books are happy and they’re so short.” She set a large, colorful book on the counter. “Spot’s First Easter” was scrawled in block letters above two round, yellow dogs. One, the mommy dog I presumed, was three times larger than the spotted baby dog. Both held baskets in their mouths and still managed to smile. The trees behind them were bouncy and brilliant green. The pages were cardboard. “See? In this one, Spot goes looking for Easter eggs, finds all of them under those flaps, doesn’t break anything, and shares them with his mom,” she said.

I remembered the book. I loved flipping the rocks and seeing those pretty eggs underneath, all pink and purple polka-dots with blue zigzag stripes.

“Well, it’s got to be happy, I mean, it’s for kids,” I said.

“Right, we can’t go around telling kids how shitty life ends up or they’ll never consent to write their little paragraphs about ‘when I grow up, I want to be a’ whatever. Books are the pediacare-opiate of the masses,” said Jana. “You know, there’s no sense in blaming violence on video games, then. We raise them on candied disillusionment, fairy tales and Prince Charmings, and wonder why they turn so pissy in their teen years when everything gets fucked up.”

“Right. Wait, no. There’s got to be an exception. There’s always an exception to every rule. If I learned nothing in Physiology, which you could almost say is true, I learned that much. Exceptions.” My voice trailed. I looked down at my hands holding the magazine and tossed it frisbee style down the counter. It slid to the end and plopped onto the ground. Oops. “Oh, I loved Anne of Green Gables. Now there’s a happy book for you—”

“Not exactly. It’s full of trials and tribulations, a girl who retreats into her imagination to keep her sanity, who suffers from an overly conservative socio-political atmosphere, whose parents are tragically dead—”

“And all this time I thought it was a wonderful story about a girl’s imagination and her power to overcome the odds. Bosom buddies.” I chuckled. “But sure, if you look at it that way, Anne’s life wasn’t happy.” I paused and glanced outside. It was dark and the street lights created halos in the fog that was enveloping the parking lot. Everything glowed a subdued, creamy yellow. “Wasn’t the book happy overall, though?”

“Should books be happy?” she asked me.

“That depends. Are they or are they not intended to reflect real life? Is life in general happy?”

“Well look at this one.” She held up a memoir of a girl who had struggled with bulimia and manic depression. “You’ve got all these pages of the pure shit that was her life, right?” She fanned through the first seven-eighths of the book. “And then here, at the very end, maybe thirty pages, is how her life is happy now, how she’s got a loving boyfriend and a dog, how her mom loves her. She’ll probably get rich off of the book and Oprah appearances. And then there’s always at least ten blank pages at the end.” She cocked her head to the side and pulled on her short, shiny hair. Her legs reached the substitute footrest under the counter and didn’t dangle like mine. “Why is that, anyway? At the beginning and end of chick books there’s always these extra pages.”

I shrugged. “To take notes?”

“I know!” she said, excitedly slapping my knee. “I’ll ask someone who works here. I’ll make it my mission to find an actual ‘happy book.’” She finger-quoted herself.

I watched her walk away, past the tall shelves labeled Biography and Social Issues, turn left and pause by Wines & Spirits, and then disappear behind the Customer Service sign. I picked up my article from the floor and lost myself in the GTTCAGTA of the cat’s DNA. I recognized the words – ribosomes, genetic code, nucleic acid, neutrosomes? – but their definitions swam away and I swished them around my mouth with my chai. Writer’s chai, what a joke, what a gimmick. But I bought it. Just like with those cats, people bought the idea. They think they’re getting one thing, the duplication of some furry creature they dote on and nearly kill with their overindulgence, and then the clone doesn’t even look like the original.

I set aside the magazine and pulled a wrinkled essay from my bag. It was about fraternity life and the benefits thereof. Charming. My red pen rested next to my elbows. Jana came back, followed by one of the employees, associates, rather. He was about five-nine, five-ten. Brown hair and a full brown beard. Mid-twenties, wearing a plum shirt and coal slacks. Nice looking other than the beard.

“So my friend and I were discussing books and whether a purely happy book exists. Do you know of any?” she asked him. “But not those chick books, the chicken soup ones which really just are little sad stories with happy endings.” She touched his arm.

“You mean like ‘20,001 Things to be Happy About?’” he suggested.

“No, something with a plot,” I said.

“Oh. Well that’s a different breed altogether. Something with a plot, eh?” he mused, stroking his beard. I heard it bristle against his fingers, a muted scratching. He was silent for a while. “I’ll have to get back to you on that one. You’ll be here?”

I nodded and watched him fade into the background. “I’m sure there has to be one somewhere. Life isn’t purely bad. Is it just that it’s easier to write about the sad things?” I said to Jana.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Or because the human condition is such that sadness is supposed to be a foreign emotion?” I struggled to find the words for the thoughts that suddenly shot at me. I looked at my knees, at my shoes, wishing the ideas whispering gibberish in my ear would write themselves where I could read them. I refused to give into any sort of pessimism. “Happiness doesn’t strike an atonal chord. We don’t try to explain away something that makes sense and so we spend all this time writing about crap, getting it off our chest, trying to find a reason for it and a way to escape it. Besides, it seems purely false to dissect happiness and turn it into a neurotransmitter of some sort—”

Jana looked beyond me while I talked. I resisted the urge to turn around and see what was more interesting, but my words still faltered and died away.

“Ok, let’s say there is such a thing,” she said. “What would be the conflict? The provocation to keep it moving?”

Maybe that’s why children’s books are happy. The conflicts their protagonists face are imaginary monsters under the bed, a ‘no-good-very-bad-day’ that moving to Australia could solve, a bully at school who is punished and remorseful for stealing lunch money, a dog who gets hit by a car but survives and brings the little readers on a tour of a veterinarian’s office.

A cry of “no, mommy, no” permeated the hushed conversation around us. I turned and saw a child, about two years old, swinging from his mom’s hand as she tried to walk with him out of the magazine aisle. He was executing the “I’m refusing to walk so you’re going to have to drag me away screaming” tactic. He held a bright yellow Sesame Street book in his free hand and wore a blue and red striped polo shirt and jeans. Cute. The toddler suddenly quieted as his mom sat down next to him at the end of the aisle. She looked entirely unphased and unaware that so many heads had turned at her child’s outbreak. She began reading the book to him.

“See? It’s the pediacare-opiate,” Jana quipped. “You know what I realized? This book thing of mine is like that instance with you and Matt from a couple weeks ago.”