This Is Really Happening by Erin Chack

This Is Really Happening by Erin Chack

Author:Erin Chack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2017-03-09T13:44:38+00:00


* * *

Class started the next day. I arrived to British & Irish Poetry embarrassingly early and took a seat in the back of the classroom, which wasn’t really a classroom at all but a beautiful Kensington apartment that the program had retrofitted with desks and a projector. I checked the gold-faced clock above the double doors, and in the time that remained before class, I ripped a sheet of paper out of my notebook to write a letter to my boyfriend, Sean, at his college in New York.

I had covered an entire side of notebook paper with my sloppy handwriting when I looked up to see Alijah taking a seat next to a boy in the front of the class. From their familiar greetings, I figured they already knew each other back in Boston, two best friends who decided to level up their best friendship with a four-month romp in a foreign country. Alijah seemed so different around him, not aloof like she’d been at the elevators. I watched her unmistakably pantomime changing her own diaper, her legs in an awkward squat as she pretended to remove what appeared to be a very heavy load. The boy played along, puffing invisible baby powder on her butt. I went back to writing my letter, somehow feeling more alone as the classroom filled up.

Studying abroad in London had been my big plan. After recovering from cancer I decided not to pass up any new experiences that came my way, even if they made me feel sweaty and weird. It sounds cliché—the cancer survivor with a new zest for life, next on Oprah!—but it’s actually just vain. I realized if I had died, my obituary would have been about two lines long: “Here lies Erin. She never even went to Europe. But she did go to Niagara Falls once, which is . . . cool, I guess.”

London seemed like my best option. I was studying journalism, so I had to go somewhere I could speak and write the language, which left only England, Australia, and Canada (and you can’t go to Niagara Falls twice. Your eyes will gloss over and you’ll walk into traffic and get hit by a car and die).

An English-speaking country also meant I wasn’t limited to only hanging out with people in my program. This was important because I’d need all the friendship opportunities I could get. For the first time in my adult life I’d be really, truly away from my friends and family. Not a car ride away, but away away. If I didn’t jive with the other kids in the program, I had an entire country of people I could befriend. Our common language meant I could theoretically walk up to anyone on the street and say, “Cool face, want to get a beer?”

The decision to go to London was easy enough, but the actual act of leaving ate me up. I had only recovered from cancer a year and a month earlier, and my mom was sixth months into her own remission.



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