Happy Again

by Jennifer E. Smith

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Ellie O'Neill and Graham Larkin fell hard for each other when a misspelled email address unexpectedly brought them together. Now, over a year has passed since they said goodbye with the promise to stay in touch, and their daily emails have dwindled to nothing. Ellie is a freshman in college and has told herself to move on, and Graham has kept himself busy starring in more movies, as well as a few tabloid columns. But fate brought these two together once before--and it isn't done with them yet. In this sequel novella to This is What Happy Looks Like, Jennifer E. Smith revisits two beloved characters to tell the story of one magical night in Manhattan. When Ellie and Graham come face to face once more, can they get past the months of silence and the hurt feelings to find their happily-ever-after again? Word Count: ~18,000

Release date: April 14, 2015

Publisher: Poppy

Print pages: 84

Sample

One

Even before she saw the explosion of flashes at the far end of the block, Ellie knew somehow that he was there.

It had been exactly one year, two months, and twenty-one days since she’d last seen him, but he’d always been like a radio signal, scrambling her thoughts. Just being near him was enough to fill her head with static.

It was her first time in New York City—a weekend trip with her new roommate and a couple of other girls from their dorm—and standing beneath the towering buildings, the sky fading above them, she couldn’t help being shocked by the smallness of the place.

For more than a year, the world had felt too big.

And now here she was in the middle of Manhattan, one of the largest cities on the planet, surrounded by thick crowds of people hurrying home from work and out to dinner, carrying umbrellas and suitcases and shopping bags, wearing hats and sunglasses, staring at guidebooks and phones, many of them drifting in much the same direction, drawn like moths toward the huge, sweeping spotlights set up in front of the Ziegfeld Theater, where they stood on tiptoe and craned their necks and whispered to those who were next to them, trying to figure out what all the fuss was about.

And somehow, in the midst of all this, he was here too.

Ellie had known it even before she saw the police barricades, before she noticed the red carpet and the lights and the security guards, before she saw the glowing marquee.

There were a thousand reasons to dismiss that prickle up her spine. The odds of this happening were insane. To stumble across him here, of all places, after all this time—it was too improbable, too coincidental, too unbelievable.

But still, a part of her knew.

That radio static, that tingling, fizzy lightness that was clouding her head: It was the world shrinking again. It was the awful, lurching nearness of him.

It was the unexpected jolt of joy at the thought.

And that’s when she saw it: the name at the top of the marquee, laid out in black print across the white background so that, from a distance, it almost looked like a chain of letters typed across a too-bright computer screen, like an e-mail, like a message, like a memory:

GRAHAM LARKIN


Two

As it turned out, she’d been nervous about this weekend for all the wrong reasons.

When Lauren, her new roommate, had asked if she wanted to drive down to New York for the long weekend with her and some friends, Ellie’s first reaction had been panic. Her first response to most invitations was panic, but she’d been at Harvard for three weeks now, and she’d vowed to get better about this.

After all, college was her chance to leave the old Ellie behind. The one who preferred books to people and who had only ever really had one friend; who enjoyed hanging out with her mom more than with kids her own age and who scribbled poetry on napkins; who missed even the most obvious pop-culture references and worked three jobs.

The old Ellie was shy and quiet and a little bit awkward. She tried her best not to stand out, wore flats so she didn’t look too tall, tied her red hair back into a ponytail, and made an effort to go unnoticed whenever possible.

But she wanted college to be different.

She wanted to learn how to ignore her instincts.

She wanted to fit in.

So far, Harvard had already taught her a lot: that she should never be late to her Shakespeare section, or leave her toothpaste in the communal bathroom, or eat the tacos in the dining hall.

But she’d also learned this: that making new friends was not something that came easily to her.

Pretty much every night so far had been a struggle between the awareness that she should be going out and meeting people and having fun and the much more powerful temptation to put on her pajamas and burrow under the covers with a book.

“You’re welcome to come along,” Lauren always said as she finished getting ready, pinning her short, dark hair up on one side and putting on her bright red lipstick. Ellie could never tell if her roommate really meant it or if she was just being polite, and a part of her was curious what would happen if she actually said yes. But in the end, it didn’t really matter, because she never did.

“Maybe tomorrow,” she said again and again.

Sometimes she sat with them in the dining hall—Lauren and her two friends from the floor above, Kara and Sprague—and they were all perfectly nice to her, even though Ellie mostly just ended up smiling and nodding like some kind of good-natured idiot when she was around them.

But it was pretty obvious she didn’t fit in. If this had been a game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Others, even a three-year-old could have picked her out. It was partly that they wore expensive clothes and talked about vacations to places like Bali and Rio as if they were nothing. And they all used similar phrases, a shorthand that was like a whole new language to Ellie. Even their names—a surprising number of which sounded like last names but were actually not—suggested a certain kind of background: Collis and Smith and Conway and Sprague.

But it wasn’t just that. It was that they were all so effortlessly cool. And they all seemed to know almost instinctively how to navigate something as big and unknowable as college: how to find parties, how to schedule their classes just right, how to look like they belonged.

Because they did belong. In fact, they all seemed to know one another already: from boarding school at Andover or Exeter, from lacrosse camp in New Hampshire or their country clubs in Connecticut, from summers in the Hamptons and ski vacations in Aspen and carpooling up from “the city” (which Ellie had wrongly assumed meant Boston but had turned out to mean New York).


Nobody, of course, knew the financial-aid kid from a small town in Maine.

Watching them, Ellie often felt like a scientist observing some strange new species of bird, these girls who were so impossibly confident. She cou. . .