Funny Story

by Emily Henry

It’s one thing to be replaced by an ex. It’s another to feel like your whole life has been handed over to someone else.

This is your fault, a voice whispers from the back of my mind. You’re the one who built everything around him.

Moved to his hometown. Let Sadie’s and my relationship get absorbed by the four of us, our weekly girls’ nights becoming double dates, our weekend trips replaced with couples’ vacations, our conversations unfolding in our group chat instead of on long phone calls. I’m the one who put all my eggs in the incredibly awkward basket of willfully befriending Scott and the rest of Peter’s Waning Bay buddies instead of making my own—never mind how hard it is to make headway into a group who’s mostly interested in rehashing shared memories. Moved into a house that belonged only to Peter.

Miles was right. I need to stop fixating on how much I’ve lost, and focus on building something new. I already knew my old life was over. Sitting here...

The first we was my mom and me, then it was Sadie and me, then Peter. I’ve always cleaved to the people I love, tried to orient my orbit around them. Maybe, I realize, I’ve been trying to make myself un-leave-able. But it hasn’t worked.

“Not just that. For being my friend. For still giving me a chance, after the last year.”

“I needed one too.” “I’m glad it could be me,”

“I don’t want to play that game anymore,”

“I don’t want you to say things you don’t mean and do things you don’t want to do. It’s confusing.” “Who says I did anything I don’t want to do?”

“I want to kiss you,”

“every time you take a sip of something and make that sound.”

“I want to kiss you every time I walk past your bedroom and hear your laugh through the door,”

“I want to kiss you every time I hear the shower turn on and know that you’re in there,”

“I want to kiss you all the time, Daphne,”

“Sometimes it’s just easier to find an excuse.”

“There’s a lot of shit I don’t like to talk about.”

“The thing is, I have a bad habit of letting down the people I care about. I don’t always think things through, and my feelings aren’t something I can trust.”

“All that mattered was how it affected our mom,”

“If we made her look good, then she loved us. And if we didn’t, then we were ‘out to get her.’

Whenever I did anything that she thought made her look bad, it turned into this huge thing about how I must hate her, to try to hurt her like that. If I was upset, or anxious, or hungry, or even sick, she acted like it was something I was doing to her, and I believed it.”

“I need it to be okay. Because I need to be okay. As a kid, I just felt so fucking scared and powerless, all the time, and now I just need to be okay.”

“I honestly think that’s partly why Petra and I worked together. I’ve never met someone who was so . . . ‘in the moment,’ and that’s where I have to be, because if I think too much about the past or the future, I come apart. So I mostly just keep all of that stuff where I don’t have to think about it.”

“That’s the problem, though. Whenever any of us had a negative emotion, it only made things worse. She turned it around on us, and we’d end up apologizing for being hurt or angry or sad, and I never knew what was right or normal.

Sorry I wasn’t perfect, but you’ll understand when you’re a mother someday. You can’t do everything right, and your kids will hate you for it.”

Feelings are like weather. They just happen, and then they pass.”

“Because I know you think you failed her, but from the outside, what I see is, something’s going on with your sister, and she got on a plane straight to you. Didn’t even ask first, because she knew you’d make space. You’re where she ran when she needed to feel safe.” “Maybe she just didn’t have anywhere else to go,” he

“But neither did I, and you took care of me too. That’s who you are. If I had to be marooned, I’m glad it was with you.” “Me too,”

But also because I can admit what I couldn’t before: I like Miles Nowak enough that he could really hurt me.

(IF I STILL WANT TO)

We’re basically always together, but we’re almost never alone,

24 DAYS UNTIL THE READ-A-THON

Julia with a drive down to a little town called North Bear Shores for a bookstore event with a romance writer Sadie had turned me on to years ago. After the signing, the shop owner and her geology professor wife ended up falling in love with Miles (obviously) and making a donation toward the Read-a-thon.

To picture myself in a place like that. Hosting dinners and watching action movies. Grabbing chai from the café up the street and filling vases with fresh-cut lavender. Drinking wine out back with friends during lightning bug season. I can almost see it. I can almost see a life here.

“He never shows up empty-handed.” As a kid, I loved that about him too. Until I realized his gifts were consolation prizes: Yes, I canceled our spring break visit, but my buddy gave us tickets to an amusement park! I missed your choir concert, but isn’t this candy my chocolatier girlfriend makes amazing?

The last thing I needed was another halfhearted gesture from a man who sort of loved me.

But also, a reawakening of the old hurt. The reminder that my father never found a person he couldn’t love more than he’d ever loved me or Mom, a place he didn’t want to be more than he wanted to be at home.

It is sweet, honestly. Again that weird mishmash of emotions swirls in my rib cage. I like seeing him like this. I also resent it, wonder for the millionth time why Mom and I never inspired this kind of attention or commitment.

His telling of it feels so different from my own memory. What loomed so large for me, bigger even than the magic of being surrounded by bright colors and free books, was being excited to show him what I’d found. Wandering the stacks in search of him. Finally spotting him flirting with a librarian, hardly aware of me there, waiting for his attention. One of my earliest memories of joy, and one of the first times I realized I’d always come in second.

“Maybe because . . . when he’s nice, it’s hard to be mad at him.”

“And you are, so then you feel bad about that.”

I don’t want to go back to feeling unsteady. I don’t want it to hurt every time he lets me down. I already feel it again: the aching emptiness where my dad’s love should be. And this time, I

don’t have my mom nearby, or Peter and the Collinses to fill the gaps. And no matter how genuinely nice Starfire is, it doesn’t change the fact that she’s a woman who paid someone actual money to recount the plot of Titanic to her as a prophecy, and she is worthy of Dad’s love, when I never have been. Just like Petra is worthy of Peter’s. Just like Peter is worthy of the commitment of all those friends from whom I’d worked tirelessly to earn approval since we moved here. The ones who had no time for me since the breakup. Still worthy of Sadie’s love, after I’d stopped being so.

Life isn’t a competition, and neither is love, but I’...

“I just want it to be real.” “What?”

“The memories he has of us,”

“This visit. I want to believe it all means something....

For the first time, I let myself really imagine this lasting. All of it. Dad and Starfire. Ashleigh and Julia. Waning Bay. Miles. I could be happy here. I could belong.

How nice it is to imagine this version of my father—the one who asks questions about my work, who not only shows up for my birthday, but thinks to tell the server to bring a cake with a sparkler stuck in it—sticking around.

And yes, the attention from paid strangers, forced to sing on my behalf, is fairly far from any gift I’d ever want, but it strikes me as the kind of thing normal dads do. Year-round fathers, who measure their kids on doorjambs and teach them to ride bikes and drive them to their first E.R. visit.

Or maybe just fear. That I’m doing what I swore I never would: making space in my heart for someone whom experience has taught me not to trust. People change, I think. I can. Dad can.