Funny Story

My roommate’s dark brown eyes are ringed in pink, and he’s in nothing but a pair of boxers and a funky knitted afghan wrapped around his shoulders like a very sad cape. Considering the overall climate of our hotbox apartment, I can only assume this is for modesty’s sake. Seems like overkill for a man who, just last night, forgot I lived with him long enough to take a whole-ass shower with the door wide open.

His chocolate-brown hair sticks up in every direction. His matching beard is pure chaos. He clears his throat. “What’s up.”

“Everything okay?” I ask, because while I’m used to a disheveled Miles, I’m less used to hearing him blast the saddest song in the world.

“Yep,” he says. “All good.”

“Could you turn the music down,” I say.

“I’m not listening to music,” he says, dead serious.

“Well, you paused it,” I say, in case he really is simply too high to remember more than three seconds back. “But it’s really loud.”

He scratches one eyebrow with the back of his knuckle, frowning. “I’m watching a movie,” he says. “But I can turn it down. Sorry.”

Without even meaning to, I’m peering over his shoulder to get a better look.

Unlike the rest of our apartment, which was perfectly tidy when I arrived and is still perfectly tidy, his room is disastrous. Half of his records are stacked atop the milk crates they ostensibly belong inside. His bed is unmade, a rumpled comforter and the sheet untucked all the way around. Two tattered flannel shirts hang out of his mostly closed dresser drawers, like little ghosts he’s pinned there, midescape.

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.

His TV, though, is what catches my eye. Onscreen is the image of a thirty-year-old Renée Zellweger, sporting red pajamas and belting a song into a rolled-up magazine.

“Oh my god, Miles,” I say.

“What?” he says.

“You’re watching Bridget Jones’s Diary?”

“It’s a good movie!” he cries, a little defensive.

“It’s a great movie,” I say, “but this scene is, like, one minute long.”

He sniffs. “So?”

“So why has it been playing for at least”—I check my phone—“the last eight minutes?”

His dark brows knit together. “Did you need something, Daphne?”

“Could you just turn it down?” I say. “All the plates are rattling in the cabinets and Mr. Dorner’s trying to bust down the living room wall.”

Another sniff. “You want to watch?” he offers.

In there?

Too big of a tetanus risk. An ungenerous thought, sure, but I have recently tapped out my supply of generosity. That’s what happens when your life partner leaves you for the nicest, sunniest, prettiest woman in the state of Michigan.

“I’m good,” I tell Miles.

We both just stand there. This is as much as we ever interact. I’m about to break the record. My throat tickles. My eyes burn. I add, “And could you please not smoke inside?”

I would’ve asked sooner, except that, technically, the apartment is his. He did me a huge favor letting me move in.

Then again, it’s not like he had many options. His girlfriend had just moved out.

Into my apartment.

With my fiancé.

He needed to replace Petra’s half of their shared rent. I needed a place to sleep. Did I say sleep? I meant weep.

But I’ve been here three weeks now, and I’m tired of showing up to work smelling like I came straight from the least famous of the Grateful Dead’s spin-off bands’ concerts.

“I stick my head out the window,” Miles says.

“What,” I say.

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, on awkward double dates with our now-partnered partners, that’s what he’d reminded me of. Friendly and wiry with an upturned nose that made him look a bit impish, and teeth that were somehow too perfect in contrast to his scruffy face.

The toll of the last three weeks has given him a slightly feral edge—a Labrador bitten by a werewolf and dumped back at the pound. Relatable, honestly.

“I stick my head out the window when I smoke,” he clarifies.

“Okay,” I say. That’s all I’ve got. I turn to go.

“You sure you don’t want to watch the movie?” he says.

Oh, god.

The truth is, Miles seems like a nice guy. A really nice guy! And I imagine that what he’s feeling right now must be comparable to my own total emotional decimation. I could take him up on his offer, go sit in his room on an unmade bed and watch a romantic comedy while absorbing fifteen hundred grams of weed smoke via my pores. Maybe it would be nice even, to pretend for a bit that we’re friends rather than strangers trapped together in this nightmare of a breakup.

But there are better uses of my Wednesday night.

“Maybe some other time,” I say, and go back to my computer to continue looking for new jobs, far away from Peter and Petra, and far away from Waning Bay, Michigan.

I wonder if Antarctica is in need of a children’s librarian.

One hundred and eight days, and then I’m out of here.

2

BACK IN APRIL

BEFORE I KNEW I NEEDED TO LEAVE

Here’s how the rest of the story goes, when I’m the one telling it: Peter Collins and I fell in love one day in the park, when the wind swept my hat from my head.

I am arguably the world’s worst small-talker, but he didn’t want to small-talk.

When I told him the hat was a gift from my mother, he wanted to know if we were close, where she lived now, what the gift was for, and by the way, Happy birthday, are you a birthday person? And when I told him, Thank you, and yes, yes, I am, he volunteered that he was too, that his family always treated birthdays like huge personal successes rather than markers of time. And when I told him that sounded beautiful, the birthdays and his family, he said, They’re the reason I’ve always wanted a big family of my own someday, and at that point, I already would’ve been a goner, even if he hadn’t asked me right then, as if there wasn’t garbage sticking to my chestnut-brown hair, What about you? Do you want a big family?

Dating in my late twenties had been hell. This was the kind of question I’d usually ask right before the guy on the other end of the phone ghosted me. As if it had been a formal proposition: Should we skip grabbing a drink and maybe freeze some embryos, just in case?

Peter was different. Stable, steady, practical. The kind of person I could imagine trusting, which didn’t come naturally to me.

Within five weeks, we’d moved in together, synced our lives, friend groups, and schedules. At the first over-the-top birthday party I ever threw him, Peter’s and my respective best friends in Richmond, Cooper and Sadie, hit it off and started dating too.

Within a year, Peter proposed. I said yes.

A year later, while wedding planning, we started looking for a house to buy. His parents, two of the loveliest people I’ve ever met, sent him the listing for a gorgeous old house not far from them in the lakeside Michigan town he’d grown up in.

He’d always wanted to get back there, and now that his software development job had gone remote, nothing was stopping him.

My mom lived in Maryland by then. My dad, a title that really deserves to have scare quotes around it, was out in Southern California. Sadie and Cooper were toying with the possibility of moving to Denver.

And as much as I loved my job in Richmond, what I really wanted—what I’d always wanted—was to be a children’s librarian, and lo and behold, the Waning Bay Public Library was looking to fill that exact position.

So we bought the house in Michigan.

Well, he bought it. I had terrible credit and slim savings. He covered the down payment and insisted on paying the mortgage.

He’d always been so generous, but it felt like too much. Sadie didn’t understand my hang-ups—I 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.

He came up with a compromise: I’d furnish the place, add piecemeal to the assortment of furniture we’d brought from Richmond, while he covered the bills.

Most of his far-flung friends had cushy white-collar jobs and could afford to take a separate trip for his bachelor party. Whereas Sadie and the rest of my friends were mostly other librarians—or booksellers, or aspiring writers—who couldn’t afford two separate trips. Thus, she and Cooper would fly in a few days before the summer ceremony instead, and we’d do my bachelorette then.

So, three weeks ago, in early April, Peter trudged out for his Night on the Town and I stayed behind to read in our new butter-yellow Victorian. For the first few stops of the night, he texted me cute group shots. His brother, Ben, up from Grand Rapids, and his high school buddy Scott, with whom I’d finally managed to bond by reading the first four Dune novels, along with some other Richmond friends. They all had their arms slung around each other, Peter splitting center—in every picture—with his willowy, platinum-haired, cat-eyed goddess of a best friend, one Petra Collins.

Petra’s boyfriend, Miles, had not been invited to the bachelor party. Peter didn’t hate Miles. He just didn’t think Miles was good enough for Petra, because Miles is a stoner without a college degree.

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.

Another thing that must, despite my greatest wishes, be mentioned: Petra is preternaturally nice.

She’s that woman who’s instantly familiar with everyone, in a way that makes you feel chosen. Always grabbing your arm, laughing at your jokes, suggesting you try her lip gloss in the bathroom, then insisting you keep it because “it’s better with your coloring.”

I really didn’t want to be jealous of her. It made sense that she went to his bachelor party. She was his best friend. It made sense that I didn’t go. That’s how this antiquated tradition works.

I’d hoped to stay awake long enough to shove a glass of water and some ibuprofen into Peter’s drunken hand when he got home, but I drifted off on the couch.

When I jolted awake at the click of the front door, it was full bright in the living room, so I could see Peter’s surprise at finding me there.

He looked, honestly, like he’d stumbled upon a woman who’d broken into his house and boiled his pet rabbit, rather than his loving fiancée curled on the sofa. But still the alarm bells didn’t go off.

It was hard to feel too panicky with Peter nearby, looking like the very least inventive depiction of the archangel Michael. Six foot four, golden-blond hair, green eyes, and a strong Roman nose.

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

“You’re back,” I croaked and got up to greet him. He stiffened in my hug, and I pulled away, my hands still locked against the back of his neck. He took hold of my wrists and unwound them from him, holding them between our chests.

“Can we talk for a minute?” he asked.

“Of course?” I said it like a question. It was.

He walked me to the couch and sat me down. Then, as far as I could figure, a couple of tectonic plates must have smashed together, because the whole world lurched, and my ears started ringing so loudly I could only catch bits of what he was saying. None of it could be right. It didn’t make sense.

Too much to drink . . .

Everyone went home, but we stayed back to sober up . . .

One thing led to another and . . .

God, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you, but . . .

“You cheated on me?” I finally squeaked out, while he was in the middle of yet another indecipherable sentence.

“No!” he said. “I mean, it wasn’t like that. We’re . . . She told me she’s in love with me, Daphne. And I realized I am too. In love. With her. Fuck, I’m so sorry.”

Some more sorries.

Some more ringing ears.

Some more platitudes.

No. No, he didn’t cheat on me? No, he simply confessed his love to someone who was not me? I was trying to jam the pieces of the puzzle together, but nothing fit. Every sentence he said was incompatible with the last.

Finally my hearing caught on something that seemed important, if only I could figure out the context: a week.

“A week?” I said.

He nodded. “She’s waiting for me now, so we can leave right away. Not be in your hair while you figure things out.”

“A week,” I repeated, still not understanding.

“I looked online.” He shifted forward on the couch to pull a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket, and handed it to me.

Some truly deluded part of me thought it would be an apology note, a love letter that made all of this . . . not okay, but maybe salvageable.

Instead it was a printout of local apartment listings.

“You’re moving out?” I choked.

A flush crept up his neck, his eyes darting toward the front door. “Well, no,” he said. “The house is in my name, so . . .”

He trailed off, expecting me to fill in the blank.

Finally, I did.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Peter?” I jumped up. I didn’t feel hurt then. That would come later. First it was all rage.

He stood too, brows shooting toward his perfect hairline. “We didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“Of course she fucking meant for this to happen, Peter! She had twenty-five years to tell you she was in love with you and chose last night!”

“She didn’t realize,” he said, defensive of her. Protecting her from the blast of this emotional fallout while I was here on my own. “Not until she was faced with losing me.”

“You brought me here!” I half screamed. At the end, it turned into a sort of deranged laugh. “I left my friends. My apartment. My job. My entire life.”

“I feel so terrible,” he said. “You have no idea.”

“I have no idea how bad you feel?” I demanded. “Where am I supposed to go?”

He gestured to the apartment listings, now on the ground. “Look,” he said. “We’re going out of town to give you space to figure things out. We won’t be back until next Sunday.”

We.

Back.

Oh.

Oh, god.

It wasn’t just that I was expected to move out.

She was moving in. After they got back from a sexy new-couple vacation that was being pitched to me like an act of kindness for my benefit. I almost asked where they were going, but the last thing I needed was a mental picture of them kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower.

(Wrong. I’d later learn they’d been kissing along the Amalfi Coast.)

“I’m really sorry, Daph,” he said, and leaned in to kiss my forehead like some benevolent father figure, regretfully shipping off for war to do his duty.

I shoved him away, and his eyes widened in shock for just a second. 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.

As the door fell shut, something snapped in me.

I grabbed one of the bulk containers of Jordan almonds Mrs. Collins had picked up on her last Costco trip, and ran outside, still in the silk pajamas Peter bought me last Christmas.

He cast a wild-eyed look over his shoulder at me as he hoisted himself into the passenger seat of Petra’s open-top Jeep. She kept her face decidedly pointed away.

“You are such a fucking asshole!” I hurled a handful of almonds at him.

He gave a yelp. I threw another handful at the tailgate. Petra started the car.

I chased them down the driveway, then threw the whole bucket at the Jeep. It hit a wheel and went skidding to the side of the road as they peeled off into the sunset.

Sunrise. Whatever.

“Where am I going to go?” I asked feebly as I sank onto the dew-damp grass of our—their—front yard.

I stayed there watching the road for probably ten minutes. Then I went back inside and cried so hard it might’ve made me vomit, if I hadn’t completely forgotten to eat the night before. I wasn’t much of a cook, and besides that, Peter was extremely careful with his diet. Low carbs, high protein. I dug around our understocked cabinets and started making Easy Mac.

Then someone started pounding on the door.

Fool that I am, my only guess was that Peter had come back. That he’d made it to the airport only for a burst of clarity to send him racing home to me.

But when I opened the door, I found Miles, red-eyed from either crying or smoking, and brandishing a three-sentence note that Petra had left him on their coffee table, as if it were a pitchfork or maybe a flag of surrender.

“Is she here?” he asked thickly.

“No.” Numbness settled over me. “I threw some almonds at them and they drove away.”

He nodded, the sorrow deepening across his face, as if he knew exactly what that meant, and it wasn’t good.

“Shit,” he rasped, slumping against the doorframe.

I swallowed a knot that felt like barbed wire. Or maybe it was a tangle of the Vincent family practicality I’d inherited from my mother, that old familiar ability to use those negative emotions as fuel to Get. Shit. Done.

“Miles,” I said.

He looked up, his expression wrecked but with a bit of hope lurking somewhere between his eyebrows. Like he thought I might announce this whole thing was an extremely fun and not sociopathic prank.

“How many bedrooms does your apartment have?” I asked.

3

SATURDAY, MAY 18TH

91 DAYS UNTIL I CAN LEAVE

Honestly, Miles Nowak is a good roommate.

Aside from occasional invitations to watch a movie, or texts to ask whether I need anything from the market, he leaves me to my own devices. After my request that he only smoke outside, he really must have stopped merely sticking his head out the window, because weeks pass without me smelling weed in the hallway. There’s no more mournful blasting of Jamie O’Neal either. In fact, he seems totally fine. I never would’ve guessed he was a man fresh off a horrible heartbreak if I hadn’t seen his face six weeks ago, on the day it happened.

Without discussing it, we pretty easily figured out a bathroom schedule that works. He’s a night owl, and I usually get up around six thirty or seven in the morning, regardless of whether I’m working the library’s opening shift or not. And since he’s rarely home, he never leaves stacks of dirty dishes “soaking” in the sink.

But the apartment itself is tiny. My bedroom is a glorified closet.

In fact, Petra used it as one, when she lived here.

A year ago, the meager dimensions wouldn’t have been a problem.

As long as I could remember, I’d been a staunch minimalist. From the time my parents separated, Mom and I had moved around a lot, chasing promotions at the bank where she worked, and then, eventually, helping open new branches. We never had professional movers, just the help of whichever guy was trying and failing to score a date with Mom at the time, so I learned to travel light.

I made a sport of figuring out the absolute least amount of things I needed. It helped that I was such a library kid and didn’t have metric tons of annotated paperbacks. Books were the only thing I was gluttonous about, but I didn’t care about owning them so much as absorbing their contents.

Once, before a move in high school, I convinced Mom to do a ceremonial burning of all the A+ tests and papers she’d been stockpiling on our fridge. We turned on the little gas fireplace in the living room—the only thing we both agreed we’d miss about that mildew-riddled apartment—and I started tossing things in.

It was the only time I’d seen her cry. 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.

But that night, watching my old physics test blacken and curl, her eyes welled and she said in a thick voice, “Oh, Daph. Who am I going to be when you go off to college?”

I snuggled closer to her, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “You’re still going to be you,” I told her. “The best mom on the planet.”

She kissed me on the head, said, “Sometimes I wish I held on to a little bit more.”

“It’s just stuff,” I reminded her, her own constant refrain.

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

The men hell-bent on proving their feelings for Mom eventually gave up and moved on. The friends from the last school who promised to write faded from the rearview in a month or two. The boy who called you every day after one magical summer night outside the Whippy Dipper would return to school in the fall holding someone else’s hand.

There was no point clinging to something that wasn’t really yours. Mom was the only permanent thing in my life, the only thing that mattered.

When she put me on a plane to send me off to undergrad, neither of us cried. Instead we stood hugging each other so long and tight that later, I found a bruise on my shoulder. My entire wardrobe of solid-colored basics fit into one suitcase, and we’d shipped the jute rug we’d found on clearance, along with a mug, bowl, set of silverware, and hot pot, which Mom joked would allow me to make all of my major food groups: tea, Easy Mac, and Top Ramen.

That was two states and five apartments ago. In all that time, I’d managed to accumulate very little clutter.

Then Peter and I moved into the Waning Bay house, with its wraparound porch. 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.

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. The word stoked an ember in my chest. Here was the permanence I’d been waiting for. A place that would belong to us. And yes, our uneven financial situations complicated that ownership, but while he paid the bills, I could focus on cozying the place up.

My minimalism went out the window.

Now all that stuff—furniture intended for a three-bedroom house—was stuffed into Miles’s guest room. Furniture wall to wall, all of it butting right up against each other, throw pillows utterly covering my bed, like I was some unhinged Stephen King villain who might handcuff you to the headboard and mother you to death.