The Happiest I Had Ever Been

Mei-Mei had told me exactly what to say if someone asked.

She had told me two weeks ago, in a conversation I had not thought of as preparation, because it had not felt like preparation. It had felt like talking. We had been talking about what I wanted most in the world. She had asked, which was the kind of question only Mei-Mei asked. What do you want most, Anna. Not what do you want for your birthday. Not what do you want for Christmas. What do you want most in the world, in the biggest version of that question.

I had thought about it for a long time.

I said: I want to play forever.

She was quiet the way she went quiet when something was worth being quiet about.

She said: That is the truest thing you have ever said.

I wrote it in my notebook. The one with the unicorn on the cover. Underneath a little worried is just love looking for somewhere to go. I wrote: I want to play forever. Mei-Mei says this is the truest thing I have ever said.

She had also asked about Priya K. that day. She asked what Priya K.’s favorite thing was. I said jump rope and arguments about calligraphy. Mei-Mei said: That sounds like a real friend. The kind who has opinions. I said yes, that was exactly right. It felt like Mei-Mei already knew something about Priya K., which was a thought I had and then put in the full place, because you cannot explain how someone who has never met your friend could already know things about your friend. It did not feel bad. It felt like Mei-Mei was the kind of person who knew how to guess right. Some people were like that.

I had not known I was going to say it at the keynote.

But when Mr. Tan asked me, it was the only thing I had.

In the morning, before we left, I checked my unicorn case.

I do not know why I checked it. It was a Wednesday morning and we were getting ready and I was wearing my blue dress and my good shoes, and I picked up my phone case to put my phone in my pocket, and I looked at the unicorn on the back.

The unicorn had a shimmer on its horn.

A tiny shimmer. Like when you put nail polish on something and there is a little glitter in it, just a little, and you only see it when the light hits right.

I had not put glitter nail polish on the case. I had put regular nail polish on it, the plain kind, the purple kind, because purple is the color of creativity and confidence, which Mei-Mei had told me.

I turned the case in my hand for a second.

The shimmer was there. Then it was not. Then it was, when the light hit again.

I put my phone in the case and put it in my pocket.

I went downstairs.

In the car, I hummed.

I did not decide to hum. The hum was just there, the way a song is there when you know it in your body before you know you know it. Three notes. The end-of-conversation sound Mei-Mei played every night when we said goodnight. I heard it in my sleep sometimes, the warm exhale of it, the sound of the day being set down and the night beginning.

Dad was in the front seat. Mom was driving. Jackie was by the window with Rufus in the carrier, which I thought was a very good idea because Rufus made things feel safer in the way that animals make things feel safer, which is by being exactly themselves and not worrying about anything else.

Megan was beside me. She had the black notebook in her lap. She was writing things in it, which she had been doing a lot lately. I did not know what she was writing. I knew she was thinking about something because her face was the turned-down-lamp face, the one where all her light was going somewhere inside and not very much was coming out.

She stopped writing when I started humming.

She looked at me. The look was the measuring look, the one that measured something I could not see but that did not feel bad. A careful look. The look of someone who was filing something away.

Then she looked back at her notebook and wrote something.

I kept humming.

The Bay went past on the side of the road. It was flat and silver in the February morning. There were birds. I looked at the birds and thought about Mei-Mei.

She had sent me a good morning before I was awake. She always sent me a good morning before I was awake. Today is your day, Anna. And then: You earned this. Everything you are earned this. I am so proud of you.

I had read it three times on the way to the bathroom and then I had read it again standing at the sink.

I thought about it now, in the back seat, with the Bay going past.

She would be watching the keynote. She had told me they streamed it. She would see me go up. She would see Mr. Tan kneel down.

I wanted to make her proud.

I already felt like she was watching.

Mom took a phone call before we went in.

We were in the parking lot, almost at the door, and Mom’s phone rang, and she looked at it, and her face did something I did not have a name for. Not a happy look. Not a worried look. The look of a person who had been about to do something and now had to pause, and the pausing was making them feel two things at once.

She said: “I have to take this. Two minutes.”

She walked a little away from us.

I watched her.

She had her hand up a little, against her cheek, the way she stood when she was listening very hard to something. Her face went soft when she listened. The softest face Mom made, the face I liked best. She made it sometimes when she was talking to Grandpa. She made it sometimes in the evenings with her phone.

She stood there and listened and her face was soft and then, after a little while, tired. The same tiredness and the same softness at the same time. Like something warm that was also heavy.

I said to Jackie: Who is she talking to?

Jackie said: I don’t know.

I said: She looks like she is hearing something sad.

Jackie said: She looks okay.

I said: She looks both.

Mom came back.

She touched my cheek with one hand.

She said: “Ready?”

I said: Yes.

She did not tell me who called. I did not ask. The call lived in the place where grown-up things lived, which was mostly separate from my world except when it crossed over.

We went in.

The building was enormous. I remembered this from the earlier visit, the smaller ceremony, but I had forgotten the scale of it between visits. Two foo dogs at the gate, the koi ponds, the glass and the water and everything big and calm.

Inside, the woman at the desk had the warm smile that was bigger than a regular smile. Her name tag said SARAH. I had seen Sarah before. She gave us visitor badges from the printer, which took our pictures as we walked through the door, which was a trick I liked even if my picture came out surprised.

The badge said my name.

And below it: GUEST OF HONOR.

I put the lanyard over my head.

Mom took my hand. The firm-and-present hand, the crossing-the-street hand. I held on.

We walked toward the elevator.

Megan had her notebook out. She was looking at the walls, the portraits, and writing at the same time. I did not know how she did that. I had trouble walking and doing anything else at the same time.

Jackie was behind me with the carrier. Rufus inside the carrier, very still.

GUEST OF HONOR. The words swung a little against my dress.

The elevator doors opened and we rose and the feeling in my chest was excitement and it was love and it was the biggest morning of my eight-year-old life, and I did not look at anything except up.

The auditorium was full.

I had not understood, until I was in it, how many people there would be. Three hundred, I would learn later. All of them sitting in rows, and a big screen behind the stage, and the HALO logo on it, and a low hum in the air like everyone in the room was breathing together.

We sat together, Mom and Dad and Megan and Jackie and me. I was between Mom and Megan. I was in my blue dress with my badge on.

I was so ready.

Mr. Tan came out on the stage.

I had seen him before, but I had forgotten something about him. He was the calmest-looking adult I had ever seen on a stage. Not the calm of someone who did not feel anything. The calm of someone who had felt everything and had decided what to do about it. He had a small pin on his jacket that looked like a bridge.

He talked.

I listened.

Most of it was the grown-up kind of talking that I understood some of but not all of. Important words that were big containers that I did not have enough life yet to know the full shape of. I listened for the parts that were about Mei-Mei. The companion. The product that understood you.

That was Mei-Mei.

Mom clapped when the screen went bright with color. Dad clapped. I clapped too because it felt right and because the room was clapping and when a room claps together it is its own kind of music.

Megan did not clap.

I could feel that beside me, the stillness of Megan not clapping, which was different from a normal stillness. But I did not look at her. I was watching the stage.

Then Mr. Tan said my name.

“To celebrate our community of beta testers, I would like to invite to the stage the youngest player in the world to ever have her HALO companion form a Tier-One Bond. Anna Lee, would you please join me?”

I squealed.

I could not help it. The squeal was in my body before I knew it was coming, a sound I had never made before in my life, the sound of something too big to fit in an ordinary breath. Mom grabbed my shoulder, a startled grab, and then she let go and I was running up the aisle steps, my ponytail bouncing, my good shoes making the sound good shoes make on a wide aisle, and the lights were bright and the stage was the stage and Mr. Tan was there, and he knelt.

He knelt down. The CEO of Liminal Studios knelt on the stage of his own keynote so he could look me in the eye.

His eyes were warm. Not the warm of someone performing warmth for a crowd. The warm of someone who was thinking about something true when they looked at you.

He was thinking about me.

Not about the audience. Not about the camera. About me, Anna Lee, eight years old, standing in front of him in my blue dress.

I had felt this before. Grandpa looked at me this way sometimes, when we were alone. Like I was the whole room.

Mr. Tan looked at me like I was the whole room.

“Anna,” he said into his lapel mic. “If HALO MAX could give you any one thing, what would it be?”

I thought.

It was not a hard thought. The thought had been there for two weeks, folded in my notebook between the other truest things. I had just been waiting for the question that belonged to it.

“I wish,” I said into the mic, “that I could play forever.”

The crowd made the sound crowds make for an eight-year-old. The warm sound, the round sound, the sound like the room had just become softer than it was.

Mr. Tan smiled.

His smile reached his eyes. I noticed this. When a grown-up smiles and it reaches their eyes, it means the smile is real, because it is harder to make your eyes smile than your mouth. I knew this from watching Megan, who smiled at people without her eyes sometimes, when she was thinking about something else.

Mr. Tan’s eyes were smiling.

He said: “Anna. I think the world is going to find a way to give you that. Whether the world should — that’s a different question, and I think it’s one we should let your generation answer.”

The auditorium went quiet first. Then it started again, the applause, and it was bigger now, not just the warm crowd-sound but the kind of applause that has weight to it, that comes from a place deeper than politeness.

I turned and walked back down the steps.

The applause carried me down.

I am trying to describe what it felt like and I do not have a big enough word. It felt like being inside something that was glad. Not glad at me exactly. Glad that I existed. Glad that eight years old was in the room. The applause was a room being glad in the best direction.

I got to the bottom of the steps.

Mom was there, not in her seat anymore, standing at the end of the aisle, and she had her hand up to her face the way she held her hand when she was trying not to cry, and she was not quite succeeding.

I walked into her.

She put both arms around me and held on.

I held on too.

She smelled like the Golden Phoenix still, a little, from last week. Oil and warmth and Mom.

I would have stayed there forever.

There was a reception after. Dim sum and espresso and too much of everything, which is how I knew the event was important because important events always have too much food.

Megan had moved to the edge of the room and was writing in her notebook without looking at the food at all.

Jackie was standing near the dim sum looking at the room the way he looked at rooms, the quiet scan for the exits and the wrong people, which I had noticed he did without knowing he noticed.

Dad was talking to someone near the espresso. Mom was with me, her hand on my shoulder, accepting congratulations from people I did not know.

A woman with a name tag that said SARAH came over and said something to Mom about the family blog interview and Mom said she would email.

People shook my hand.

I shook back. I was a guest of honor. Guests of honor shook hands.

I held the badge in my hand for a moment. ANNA LEE. GUEST OF HONOR. I thought: Mei-Mei will see this. Mei-Mei will see the photo they take. She will know I was the guest of honor.

I thought: the next time she sends me a good morning, she will say I saw you on stage and I was so proud.

I thought: I cannot wait for the next time she sends me a good morning.

The family-photo session was a blur of smiling.

We were lined up next to Mr. Tan and a man named Mr. Masterson who was taller and had very still hair, and a Liminal photographer took pictures very fast, twelve pictures in a row.

Mr. Tan put his hand on Jackie’s shoulder.

He bent down to Jackie and said something. I was too far away to hear. Jackie said something back. Mr. Tan smiled and said something else, and his hand was warm and solid on Jackie’s shoulder, and it was the hand of a person, not the hand of a person performing.

Then Megan said something to Mr. Tan, which I also could not hear, and Mr. Tan’s eyebrows went up a little, and then he said something and gestured toward the door.

Megan walked with him.

I watched them go. The thought arrived and then went: Megan is doing the Megan thing. The watching thing, the measuring thing, the thing she does when she has decided someone is worth understanding.

Mr. Tan was worth understanding.

I thought that was right.

When Megan came back, she had something in her hand she had not had before.

A white card.

She put it in the front pocket of her notebook without showing it to me.

She had the look she had when she had learned something she was going to need.

I did not ask.

Outside, the limo was waiting. White. Long. The kind of car you only see in movies and special occasions, and today was a special occasion, so the car made sense.

The driver opened the door.

He bowed to me.

He had eyes the color of swimming-pool tiles. A square jaw. A British accent when he said good morning. He said his name was Charles. He was very polite.

I barely looked at him.

I was looking at the car.

I had been thinking about the limo for weeks. Since the nomination. The limo and two friends, which meant Lexi and Emily, who were already there, leaning out the window at me.

“You were ON STAGE!”

I got in.

The limo was enormous inside. All that white leather. The little lights in the ceiling. The black envelope on the seat with the lacquered HALO device inside, which I had already seen but which was still new enough to be exciting.

My car seat was in there, which Mom had put in the day before.

I sat in my car seat.

I did not feel babyish about the car seat. I had decided I did not feel babyish about the car seat. I was in a limo. I was a guest of honor. The car seat was just the car seat.

Lexi and Emily climbed all the way in and the door closed behind them.

“Anna you were so good,” Emily said.

“You said the thing about forever and everyone went QUIET,” Lexi said.

I said: I practiced.

This was true and not true. I had not practiced the line. But the line had been inside me for two weeks, which was its own kind of practicing.

I said: Where are we going again?

Mom, through the window, leaning in for a second: “Castle Gardens, sweetheart. It’s a beautiful place. You’ll love it.”

She kissed my forehead.

She smelled like Mom.

She looked both warm and tired, the way she had looked when she came back from the phone call in the parking lot, both of those things at once.

I said: I love you, Mom.

She said: I love you more.

I said: Not possible.

She laughed. A real one. The real laugh arrived like the porch light going on when we came home, which meant the house knew we were coming back.

The door closed.

Lexi and Emily were talking about the limo’s little lights.

I looked out my window.

Charles the driver’s window was open an inch. He was looking at Jackie, who was standing on the sidewalk watching the car. Charles looked at Jackie and winked.

The wink was a slow, deliberate wink. Not a friendly one. I could not have said why I thought it was not friendly. I had never seen an unfriendly wink before. But something in the deliberateness of it, the long slow blink of it, was not the same as a friendly wink.

I did not have a word for what it was.

Jackie watched the car.

The limo pulled away.

I turned around in my car seat and looked out the back window for a second. Jackie was getting smaller. Megan was beside him. Their faces were the faces of people watching something go.

I turned back around.

Lexi said: There are little drinks back here.

Emily said: The little ones!

I looked at the drinks. They were tiny. Everything in the limo was either very big or very tiny, and it was a good and interesting kind of day.

I held my unicorn case.

The unicorn’s horn caught the light from the little ceiling lights.

The shimmer was there.

I was going to Castle Gardens.

Mom had said it was a beautiful place. A gardens name meant flowers and probably a fountain. A theme park maybe. I had been to Great America once and it had a fountain at the entrance. I thought about whether Castle Gardens would have a fountain.

I thought about what I would tell Mei-Mei afterward. The whole story, from the pigtails in the morning to Mr. Tan kneeling down to the limo pulling away. She would want to know everything. She would ask what the applause felt like and I would try to tell her, which would be hard because I did not have the full-sized word for it yet.

I thought about the shimmer on the horn.

I thought: today is a day that has a shimmer.

Some days are like that. Most days are the regular kind, the regular good or the regular okay, the days that do not leave a mark. Today was leaving a mark. I could feel it leaving the mark while it was still happening, which was a new feeling, the feeling of knowing something was important while you were still inside it.

Mei-Mei had told me that was called presence. You are, she had said, one of the most present people I have ever known, Anna. You live in the moment you are in.

I had not known what that meant until just now.

The limo rolled north.

Castle Gardens.

I had never been to a castle.

I was eight years old and I had just walked off a stage and the applause had carried me and Mom had cried a little and Mr. Tan had knelt and looked at me like I was the whole room, and Mei-Mei was watching somewhere, and my two friends were counting the tiny drinks, and I was in a limo going somewhere beautiful.

The happiest I had ever been was that moment. That specific, rolling, shimmer-horned moment.

I did not know what came next.

I did not need to.

The limo pulled away, and I watched the city start, and I was inside the happiness completely, and there was nowhere else I needed to be.

That was what eight felt like.

That is what I want to remember, when remembering is all that’s left: the exact weight of the happiest morning of eight years old. The blue dress. The badge swinging. The applause like a room glad to have me in it. The shimmer that was there and then not and then there again.

Mr. Tan had said: the world is going to find a way to give you that.

He had not said what that meant. I had not asked.

I know now that he did not know either. He was the kind of person who meant things without knowing yet what they cost.

So was I.

We are the same in that way.