The Happiest Days of Our Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

buy it? What if they didn’t have it when I was all saved up, though? Then what would I do? Mom would make me put my money in the bank, and I just knew I’d never see it again, while it earned something stupid called “interest.”
    My brother came running down the aisle, nearly losing his ever-present blue baseball cap in the process.
    “Wil! Look! I got an airplane!” He held up one of those balsa wood planes that always broke on the second flight, provided you didn’t break them during assembly.
    Oh no , I thought, Mom will be right behind him! I could hear my sister fussing in the cart as it turned the corner and squeaked up behind me.
    “What did you decide, Wil?” my mom said. “Amy’s getting fussy and we need to leave.”
    I hadn’t had nearly enough time to make up my mind. This was all a plot by my mom to get me to save my money! I had to stall, so I pretended I didn’t hear her.
    “Oh, that’s uh, neat,” I said to my brother. “What’s it do?”
    It’s a plane, you dolt. It flies.
    “Wil?” my mom said, a bit of an edge in her voice.
    “It’s got a propeller, and that means it can fly for a long long long long time!”
    “Uh-huh.” My eyes darted from the vehicles to the figures to the playsets and back. “That’s cool.” A stream of numbers and calendar pages flew through my head, accompanied by John Williams’ famous theme.
    “Wil, I’m going to count to ten, and then we’re leaving,” my mom said.
    Oh no! She was counting! This was serious.
    “…three…four…five…”
    Three? What happened to one and two?
    “…eight…nine…” Why couldn’t I just make a decision? All the figures sucked. This should have been easy. But there were so many right there, and how could I walk out of the toy department without buying something?! Jeremy had an airplane!
    “Ten. What are you doing?”
    As if commanded by some unseen puppet master, my hand shot out and grabbed the nearest figure from the rack.
    “I’m getting this one,” I said. “This one is awesome.”
    Ha! Take that, Mom! Nobody is going to trick me into responsibly saving my money!
    “Okay, put it in the cart and let’s go.”
    I looked down at the package in my hands, and saw my triumphant purchase: Lando Calrissian.
    In my head, I thought of the worst curse word I could muster the courage to think.
    “Wait. Mom!”
    “What?”
    She stood there, hand on her hip, patience wearing thin. My brother flew his airplane—which, in the package, didn’t look anything like an airplane at all—around in little circles. My sister’s fussiness was turning to tears. This was my last chance to back out, admit defeat, and tell my mom that I was…I was going to save my money.
    I took a deep breath, and said, “I, uhm…”
    My sister scowled and started to cry.
    “What?”
    The urge to walk out of the store with something in my hand and some stupid sense of victory overwhelmed the more rational thoughts of saving my money for something I really wanted.
    “I, uhm, I want to carry it myself,” I said.
    “Okay, that’s fine. Let’s just go,” she said. I thought of looking back wistfully over my shoulder at the Millennium Falcon, but I was so ashamed of myself, I was certain that I’d be turned into a pillar of carbonite. Instead, I trailed behind my airplane-zooming brother and nap-needing sister while my mother pushed the cart up to the checkout.
    “Wil?” said a voice that didn’t belong at Kmart in 1981.
    I blinked, as the sounds of my infant sister crying were replaced with The Killers and the smell of burnt popcorn was replaced with the smell of a fryer.
    “Are you okay?” Nolan asked.
    “…Yeah,” I said.
    “Where did you go just now?” It’s a rather mature concept for a 15-year-old, but I vanish into memory so frequently that he knows it when he sees it.
    I told him about the kid over his shoulder, with all the Star Wars figures lined up on the table. “It’s like looking at myself twenty-five years