Funny Story

by Emily Henry

“You want to watch?” he offers. In there? Too big of a tetanus risk.

His girlfriend had just moved out. Into my apartment. With my fiancé.

AHHHH

Immediately I picture a chocolate Labrador riding in a car, its mouth open and eyes squinting into the wind. The few times Miles and I met before all this,

THATS MY TYPE

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.

Then he nodded, somberly, and headed for the door, totally empty-handed. Like he had everything he needed and not a lick of it was in this house.

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

Until that moment, I’d carried my life like a handkerchief knapsack at the end of a broom handle, something small and containable I could pick up and move at the drop of a hat. And I never knew what it was I was running from, or to, until he said it. Home.

Her voice has the force of a blunt object,

All that to say, I admire and fear her in equal measure.

He fights a smile. There’s something adorable about it, so puppyish that I find myself tempted to ruffle his already messy hair. When I do, his smile just barely slants up. The movement makes his dark eyes glimmer.

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.

For someone with the innate social charm of a mounted fish (me), watching Miles befriend this stranger felt like seeing Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel: impressive, but also dizzying.

I feel like I’m made of nuclear waste.

“I mean, without a date,” he clarifies, completely unnecessarily. “I know,” I say. “I’m bringing my boyfriend.”

GET HIM GIRL

“So he called to try to make you feel so pathetic you wouldn’t come ruin his special day, and you told him we were dating?” “I’m sorry,” I say again. “That fucking rules,” he says. “How’d he take it?”

I love him

“I’ve got stuff to do, but if you hear from your ex, tell him I said…” He holds up his middle finger. “If you hear from yours, tell her thanks for the new boyfriend.” “Gladly,” he says, and turns to go.

There’s being bad at small talk, and then there’s being so reticent that your coworkers assume you’ve recently testified against a mob boss, and I never knew how thin the line between the two was.

I’m nauseated by the thought that maybe she belongs there, in that home I’d thought was mine, while I belong nowhere.

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.

But I’m not anti-schedule. Just anti-wheatgrass.” I accidentally snort, a little disbelieving pony.

“Things go smoother if you don’t let people get a rise out of you,” he says. “If you give them control over how you feel, they’ll always use it.”

If a person lets you down, it’s time to reconsider what you’re asking of them.

“Let me guess: I’m a clueless fool,” I say. He starts the car. “No, just a sweet, naive, beautiful little innocent, raised in captivity by a man who loves wheatgrass.”

annoyingly the voice in my head reminding me of that isn’t my own; it’s Peter’s. And I don’t want it there. It has no right to keep echoing through my skull.

I’m not sure what parts of me are him and which parts are genuinely my own. And I want to know. I want to know myself, to test my edges and see where I stop and the rest of the world begins.

His face remains deeply, painfully earnest. “I don’t want you to move away. I like you.” “You like everyone,” I remind him. “I’m highly replaceable.” He rolls his eyes. “You really think you have me figured out, don’t you?”

The weed has my heart feeling like softened butter even while my stomach boils over with anger.

In general, I don’t put too much stock into a person’s charm, but I think he might be the rare real deal.

My body warms as if I’d cannonballed into a heated pool.

I—and the weed—tell him, “I think you might be the nicest person I’ve ever met.”

“It’s a library, Daphne. If you can’t be a human here, where can you?”

But as an adult, I find kids so much easier to understand. They say how they feel, and they show it too. There are fewer ulterior motives and unwritten rules. Silences aren’t unbearably awkward, and abrupt segues to different subjects are the norm. If you want to be friends with someone, you just ask, and if they don’t want to, they’ll probably just tell you.

I notice someone approaching from the parking lot, seemingly carried on a burst of summer air and sunshine.

“Heavenly,” I say. He is so obviously pleased that I can’t help but feel a crush of affection for him.

“Look, all I’m saying is, be careful,” he says. “That guy’s a mess, and I don’t want to see him drag you down.”

Omg? I hate him so much

“It’s always nice to be reminded that your ex really was as big of an asshat as you remember him being.”

Queen shit

He smiles faintly, tucking my hair behind my ear. It makes me feel like a two-liter bottle of soda flipped upside down, all the bubbles suddenly rushing in the opposite direction.

The way he says it, low and teasing, sends my thoughts scattering like pool balls on a perfect break. I can’t think of a single reply.

What exquisite timing for my identity crisis: he wants to do the smart thing, and I want to have reckless sex with him.

Sadie befriended pretty much everyone she met, but that day, I felt like she chose me, in a way I’d never felt chosen.

The thing, it would seem, Miles has been hiding all along is that he’s diabolically handsome, with angular cheekbones and a jaw that sort of looks like it might cut you if you were to run a hand over it. Or your tongue. You know, whatever. Fairly cruel timing, for us to have just agreed not to cross the platonic-friends boundary.

It makes me feel like I swallowed a sword inside of a helium balloon.

I’m jarred by the casual mention of their parents. It’s like turning over a locked box, only to realize there was a crack in the bottom all along.

So while I’m yawning so hard my jaw pops, 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.

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 the people who don’t hold on to you. Don’t wait on anyone who’s in no rush to get to you.

There it is again, that crack in the box. Just as quickly, though, it’s flipped over, its contents hidden.

The infamous low chortle sneaks out of me, and his smile is so affectionate I wish I could roll myself up in it like a blanket.

“I let her really fucking hurt Julia. And when Julia’s around, it’s hard not to hate myself. All those feelings, they just come back. And my mind starts to feel so loud, and dark. I just want to escape.”

Every time he looks over, it’s like the sun peeking out from behind a cloud, and I do my best to feel content, to be just another person at the edge of his glow.