Funny Story

by Emily Henry

I wouldn’t have become a librarian if I didn’t love stories, but I’ve never been great at telling my own.

And in this new telling of it, I was no longer the leading lady, but instead the teensy complication that would forever be used to jazz up their story.

Daphne Vincent, the librarian that Peter plucked out of the trash, nearly married, then dumped the morning after his bachelor party for his “platonic” “best” “friend,” Petra Comer.

In direct opposition to the creams and taupes of my room, his is a messy, cozy mix of rusts, mustards, seventies greens. Where my books are neatly organized along my bookcase and the shelf I installed above my window, his (very few) are face down, spines cracked, on the floor. Electronics manuals, loose tools, and an open bag of Sour Patch Kids are scattered across his desk, and on his windowsill, a stick of incense burns between a few surprisingly vivacious houseplants.

Then again, it’s not like he had many options. His girlfriend had just moved out. Into my apartment. With my fiancé.

let Cooper pay for literally everything, she’d say, he makes a shit-ton more than me—but Sadie hadn’t been raised by Holly Vincent.

There was no way my badass, hyperindependent mother would approve of me relying on Peter so heavily, and so I didn’t approve either.

Petra is also a stoner without a college degree, but I guess it’s different when you’re a perfect ten with a picturesque family and well-padded bank account. Then you’re not a stoner; you’re a free spirit.

Not that I have any clue what a Roman nose is. But whenever a historical romance writer mentions one, I think of Peter’s.

She was my best friend and favorite person in the world, but she wasn’t a soft woman. I’d always thought of her as completely invulnerable.

Life, I’d learned, is a revolving door. Most things that come into it only stay awhile.

There was no point clinging to something that wasn’t really yours.

That day, he scooped me into his arms, carried me over the threshold, and said three magic words that changed my little minimalist heart forever. Welcome home, Daphne. Just like that, something in me relaxed, my gooiest parts oozing out beyond my heretofore carefully maintained boundaries.

Hell, I’m old enough to have a daughter named Renesmee on one of those U-5 soccer teams where the kids take turns kicking the ball the wrong way, then sitting down midfield to take off their shoes.

“They,” I say, “suck.” “She’s the love of my life,” he says. “The love of your life sucks,” I tell him.

Miles is the other kind. The kind that’s disarming enough that you don’t feel nervous talking to him, or like you need to show your best angle, until—wham! Suddenly, he’s smiling at you with his messy hair and impish smirk, and you realize his hotness has been boiling around you so slowly you missed it.

The worst part is, even after all this, I’m not positive I don’t love him. I mean, not this version of him, but the part that remembered every important date, who brought home flowers just because he happened to be walking past a cart selling them, the Peter who had my favorite soup delivered to me every time I got sick. The parts reserved for her now.

It’s going to get easier. This time next year, you won’t even remember her name. If we keep drinking like this, he replied, I’m not sure I’ll even remember my name.

I’d thought we were building something permanent together. Now I realize I’d just been slotting myself into his life, leaving me without my own.

In short, Peter was the exact opposite of my dad, who was occasionally a doting father but rarely a present one.

I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It’s depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture in my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back.

You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.

I just always thought our family of two would grow, and someday I’d have a house full of little voices, deep laughter, endless love. I thought the Best Mom Ever would graduate to the World’s Best Grandma, and I’d give someone new the love she gave me, but with a different kind of life. A full house, where they didn’t spend most nights alone, waiting for their overworked mom to get home or a mostly absent father to deign to stop by.

“Things go smoother if you don’t let people get a rise out of you,”

“If you give them control over how you feel, they’ll always use it.” “Finally, I see your cynical side,”

He smiles, but his jaw is tight, and the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “It’s not cynical. If you don’t give other people responsibility for your feelings, you can h...

Honestly, that’s not far off from thoughts I’ve had. Only for me, it’s never been about controlling the feelings themselves. I wouldn’t know where to begin with that. It’s more, controlling the expectations you have for certain people. If a person ...

“Second-best beach in town,”

“Second best?”

“You brought me to your runner-up beach?” “No one knows ab...

“I can’t just open the floodgates.” “Who am I...

“Everyone I know is either here, my mortal enemy, or a close friend or relat...

“It wasn’t ever my home. When you take Peter off the schedule, there isn’t really much left. Waning Bay doesn’t belong to me, like it does to him.” “I’ll give him the house,”

“But he’s not taking this town.”

You both matter to us so much. We’re not choosing sides.

just recounted what my whole life looks like, and I watched a piece of your soul die behind your eyes.” “That’s not what happened,”

but on Miles’s too. This ridiculously nice man who let me move into his place, no questions asked—didn’t even charge rent my first month—and comped my food tonight and bought me a milkshake and brought me to a beach I’d never been to and lent me his jacket. Offered to parade me around all summer, just so I won’t move away. After hanging out twice.

In general, I don’t put too much stock into a person’s charm, but I think he might be the rare real deal. A genuinely kind person who likes everyone and deserved better than a note on the counter and Petra’s room-sized closet cleared out.

“But it makes me mad that she, like, thinks you need her approval to move on, or something. If she was so in love with Peter, she never should’ve strung you along like that, but she did, and she dumped you in the worst possible way, and then for her to just insist that you view her kindly—to try to make you not mad, instead of just letting you move on . . . it’s selfish. “So maybe it’s immature and stupid. But it does make me feel a little better, to think that maybe she’ll see these pictures and remember that, even if she’s not overall an asshole, she was the asshole in this scenario, and she didn’t appreciate you, and she should have. Even if all that meant was letting you go before telling my boyfriend she was in love with him, instead of keeping you on the back burner in case Peter turned her down. “It makes me feel a teensy, tiny bit better to think she could see a picture of me sitting in your lap and staring adoringly at you and remember that you deserved that all along.”

The problem is, I go in way too hot, whereas he’s aiming for a chaste teenage-actors-doing-a-high-school-play

school-play kind of thing, so basically I end up biting his entire mouth, which makes him laugh into mine, which in turn makes me laugh, only by then, he’s adjusted his approach to match mine, and the laugh dies in the back of my throat as he grips my hip in one hand, my jaw in the other, and kisses me for real.

I was never the one just having fun. I was the one anticipating consequences.

It’s not that I want to revert to a twenty-one-year-old, but my whole life has collapsed, and I’ve been trying new things, and whatever just happened, it was new and fun.

but that day, I felt like she chose me, in a way I’d never felt chosen.

I’m also back in Mom’s and my first apartment without Dad, waiting by the front window, looking up every time a junker sputters past.

Waiting on the snowy curb outside my elementary school, dragging my boot toes through blackened slush, telling myself that if I count to one hundred, Dad will be here. And if not, then by the time I reach two hundred and fifty. Counting and waiting until my mom pulled up, stressed out and still in her work heels, apologizing through the open car window, on his behalf: Sorry, sorry, something came up, I guess. Waiting at the mailbox for birthday cards to show up. Waiting for a phone call on Christmas. Waiting. Waiting.

Waiting, for someone who rarely came, feeling worse every time, until finally, I realized that the feelings wouldn’t stop until the waiting did. You can’t force a person to show up, but you can learn a lesson when they don’t. Trust people’s actions, not their words. Don’t love anyone who isn’t ready to love you back. Let go of th...

“There’s steadiness and dependability, and those are great. But settling? Just deciding you already know everything you like and dislike on the entire planet, everything you’re good at, every friend you’re going to make, and every food you’re ever going to eat? The guy wouldn’t even let me repaint our bedroom! I wanted to know new parts of him, and I wanted to find new parts of myself. So I asked him to go to couples’ counseling.”

He was willing to be good to me, but he wasn’t willing to be any better. I stuck it out as long as I could. Then one day I woke up, and I couldn’t anymore. So I told him. And a part of me expected him to finally get it. To say he’d do therapy, try. But he didn’t.”

But how can I teach my kid not to settle if I’m not willing to fight for the life I want? I tried so hard to love the one I had, and if Duke had tried too, I would’ve held on.