Read Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel for Free Online

tried to keep my head high, tried to act like the leader of the pack I was when I was in Hawaii. But the moment I walked into Melissa’s brownstone, I was transformed back into Hannah Goodman, class outcast. No one turned around when I entered the room like they’d done in Hawaii. No one even noticed at all. The huge smile I wore was greeted with blank stares. My tanned skin, which I thought made me glow, was becoming warm and itchy. I quickly downed a beer to get a bit of a buzz—I figured that if I felt giddy enough, I could fake my confidence.
    By the time Logan and his friends walked in, Libby and I were firmly ensconced in a corner. I turned to see him—you could feel his presence as he walked into the room—and he looked even more handsome than he had in Hawaii. I fingered my shell necklace and walked over to him, but it was already too late. It was obvious. I may have been the coolest girl in Hawaii, but back here in Manhattan, I was a nobody. And no one in the New York City prep school scene wants to be with a nobody.
    He walked by me and pretended he had no idea who I was. I would like to say that I was crushed, that my heart was broken, but the truth is, I had a feeling that this would happen all along.

 
    Seven
    It’s raining. I figure that my grandmother will take this as an opportunity to have her event planner come by and work on my welcome-to-the-Hamptons garden party, but she has something else in mind.
    My grandmother wants to organize her photo collection. I didn’t even know she had a photo collection, but it seems she does. And a quite extensive one, at that.
    In her bedroom there is an enormous trunk, the kind that people used for trips on cruise liners across the Atlantic. A traveling chest. The sort of thing that isn’t used anymore because it’s too large and bulky to travel with. When I saw it in her bedroom on my first day here, I’d assumed that it was part of the décor—it’s a Louis Vuitton with faded leather, beech-wood slats, and a “V” hand painted on the top. Then there are the labels: Greece, Cannes, Spain, the Bahamas. They read like a diary from her life.
    “What is this?” I ask, running my fingers over the customs stickers.
    “My photographs,” my grandmother answers, and inserts a key. The trunk squeaks open, and as I peer in, I can see that it’s filled with old photographs and albums.
    “I never knew you had this,” I say, and my grandmother gives me a sly smile. She is very much an open book, so I’m surprised to have discovered something about her that I didn’t know before. Why would she store all of these old photographs in a trunk? Why is she traveling with them?
    “Makes me look like an old lady,” my grandmother says, almost under her breath.
    “No,” I say, “it doesn’t. You know, people who’ve lost their homes in fires say that the thing they most wish they’d run back for is their photos. Photographs are important.”
    We sit down on her bedroom floor, next to the trunk, thousands of pictures splayed at our feet.
    It is like a map of my grandmother’s life. And my life, too. My grandmother is seated over by the black-and-white photos, but I’m surrounded by swaths of color. I see a few of her past husbands—the Mattress King with a glass of sangria in one hand and my grandmother in the other; the pop star, performing at the Carlyle in New York City; and even one of the Senator, when they were at an NRA fund-raiser in upstate New York. My grandmother stops and stares at one photo in particular, so I lean over and snatch it from her hands. It’s a picture of her with her first husband.
    “Rhett Butler,” I say.
    “Oh, him,” she says. “I was just looking at that photo to remind myself of how young I once was.” And then, before I can formulate my next thought: “Look at this photo.”
    I scoot over.
    “It’s all of you, isn’t it?” I ask.
    “Yes,” she says. “That’s me, that’s your grandfather, and that’s your