Funny Story

A FUDGIE, APPARENTLY, is an out-of-towner. A person who cruises north in the summer to buy fudge and use subpar beaches, then flees before autumn. It seems strange that Peter never introduced me to the term, but Miles points out that the Collinses are former fudgies themselves, having moved to their favorite vacation spot when Peter was in second grade.

We drive twenty minutes through the dark before Miles pulls to the dusty shoulder of a country lane, behind two parked SUVs. There’s no sign of a lot, a sign, or a trailhead, just the cars and the woods.

“Is this private property?” I ask, hopping out to follow him into the moonlit forest, bag of fries in one hand and my milkshake in the other.

“It’s national lakeshore,” he replies. “Preserved federal land. There are better-known stretches of beach around here that get crowded, but the best spots are the ones you have to be told about to find.”

“Oh, so it’s exclusive,” I joke.

“Northern Michigan’s hottest club.” He offers me his hand as he steps over a tree that’s fallen across the makeshift path.

“Cherry Hill must be close behind it.” I release my grip on him as I hop to the far side of the log. “That place was packed.”

“We do pretty well all summer,” he says. “We’re still figuring the winters out.” He casts a meaningful sidelong look at me. “So I take a lot of side jobs in the off season.”

I feel myself blush, stop short in a puddle of moonlight.

He stills too.

“That was snobby,” I say. “The comment about the odd jobs.”

He shrugs. “You didn’t mean anything by it.”

I didn’t. But Peter, I can now admit, definitely had.

We start walking again in silence.

“You don’t need to justify what you do for work,” I clarify, after a beat. “I guess I just wanted to believe Peter had good reasons to think you weren’t good for Petra. Because if you were, like, some freeloading jerk, then Peter probably was just looking out for a friend. Instead of, you know . . .”

“In love with her?” Miles says evenly.

“Yeah.” My own voice wobbles. It’s cooler here, in the shadowed woods so close to shore. For some reason, it makes me feel all the more delicate talking about this, too exposed now that it’s just the two of us.

“Hey.” He bumps into me. “Good riddance, right?”

“I just,” I say, “feel really stupid.”

Miles stops walking. “You’re not stupid.”

I look at my feet, and his free hand closes over my elbow, sliding up and down my arm, rubbing warmth into it.

“He told you to trust him, and that’s what you did,” he insists. “That’s what you’re supposed to be able to do with people you love. They just don’t always live up to it.”

Miles ducks his head to peer into my eyes, a funny grin quirking his mouth. “Do you want to get into the car and listen to Adele?”

I laugh, wipe my damp eyes with the back of my forearm. “No, we already agreed: that won’t do any good. Might as well just see this beach. Assuming there is a beach, and you’re not just walking me off a cliff.”

“Would you want me to tell you,” he asks dryly, “or would that ruin the surprise?”

“I hate surprises.”

He cracks a smile. “There’s a beach.”

We fall back into step. The earth goes sandy as we climb. The trees thin, until suddenly we reach the crest and we’re overlooking the steep slope of a dune. At its foot, the dark lake rolls in on the sand, and across the expanse of beach, several bonfires blaze in the dark, several tents ringed around the most distant.

The whoosh and scrape of the tide against the shore dulls the voices and laughter of the other nighttime beachgoers, and it’s easy to imagine that this random group of people might be the last on earth. Station Eleven–style nomads. Or maybe that we’re on a different planet entirely, strangers in a strange land.

“Wow,” I whisper.

“Second-best beach in town,” he murmurs.

“Second best?” I turn. “You brought me to your runner-up beach?”

“No one knows about the other one,” he jokes. “I can’t just open the floodgates.”

“Who am I going to tell?” I wave my arms out to my sides. “Everyone I know is either here, my mortal enemy, or a close friend or relative of a mortal enemy.”

“Yeah, but your mortal enemy just cut you loose.” He gently pushes my shoulder. “Who’s to say I take you to Secret Beach today, and you don’t bring that wheatgrass-loving asshole there next week?”

I shake my head. “I don’t get back with exes. When someone proves who they are, that’s it.”

He studies me, head cocked to one side.

“What?” I say. “You disagree?”

“I’ve only had one other ex,” he says. “We didn’t get back together, but I’m not sure that’s a personal stance.”

“One ex?” I look back at him. “How old are you?”

“I’m not a huge relationship guy,” he says, a little bashful. “Petra was the exception, not the rule, for me. So if she wanted to get back together? I don’t know. But it’s not worth thinking about, since she’s engaged to your ex-boyfriend.”

My stomach tightens. I turn and focus on the moonlight playing across the waves, listen to the crash and roar. “Seems louder than it does during the day.”

“I’ve always loved that.” He tips his head for me to follow him, and we make our way down the dune and to the left, out of the path of any foot traffic that may come up behind us. Then we sit and twist our cups into the sand. Miles pulls the checkered paper fry trays out and sets them atop the flattened bag.

I catch him watching me as I take my first bite. “What,” I say, mouth full.

One shoulder lifts in tandem with the corner of his mouth. “Just waiting to see if you moan again.”

My face heats as I bite into a jalapeño. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The sound you made when you tried the milkshake,” he says. “I want to know if the fries live up to that.”

“Honestly,” I say, “my mouth is on fire right now.”

He grabs my milkshake and lifts it toward me. I lean over the straw and take a slurp. “Better?” he asks.

My teeth start chattering.

He laughs and unzips his sweatshirt, taking it off and tossing it in my direction. Less to me than at me.

“Thanks,” I say, pulling it off my face and then wrapping it around my shoulders and bare back. The smell of the woodsmoke from the winery’s fireplace engulfs me. “Now I know where your smell comes from.”

He balks. “I smell?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, I thought you smelled kind of like gingersnaps. But you just smell like the winery. It’s nice.”

He leans into me to inhale against the fabric on my shoulder. “Guess I’m too used to it to notice.”

“I mean, a lot of times, it’s hiding under the smell of weed,” I say.

He looks at me askance, teasing. “Is that judgment, Daphne?”

“Merely an observation,” I say.

He leans back against the sand, propped up on his forearms. “I’ve been going a little harder than usual.” He eyes me through his lashes. “Not sure if you’ve heard, but I got dumped.”

“Sounds vaguely familiar,” I concede.

“I’m cutting back,” he says.

At that precise moment, I bury my hands in the sweatshirt pockets and am met with a prerolled joint. I pull it out with a laugh.

“I’ve been looking for that.” Miles plucks the joint from my fingers and pops it between his lips. “You gotta light.”

“Sadly, no,” I say.

“No, I mean, you’ve got a light,” he says. “Other pocket.”

“Ah.” I withdraw the neon-orange plastic lighter and snap it open, blocking the wind until the flame catches. He leans in so I can light the end of the tiny joint. He takes a puff, then holds it out to me.

I hesitate, and his mouth splits into a wide smile. “Whatever those D.A.R.E. officers might have told you, I’m not going to force you. It’s just an offer.”

As a devoted fan of control, I never had a big weed phase, but 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.

For three years I’ve been eating like him, exercising like him, working tirelessly to befriend his friends and impress his family, going to his favorite breweries, and all along I thought it was my idea, my life. Only now, without him in the picture, absolutely none of the rest of the picture makes sense.

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.

So I pluck the joint from between Miles’s finger and thumb, and take a hefty pull on it, feeling the sensation spiral through me. When I pass it back to him, he takes one more hit, then stubs it out.

“Does this place have a name?” I ask.

Down by the nearest bonfire, a group in their late teens or early twenties are clinking their beer bottles and cans of hard seltzer together, howling up at the moon.

“I don’t know,” he says, “I’ve only ever heard people call it the spot.”

“The spot,” I say, “sounds exactly like where high schoolers come to smoke weed.”

“True,” he says, “but I haven’t had any luck yet tracking down the stretch of beach where thirtysomethings go to smoke weed.”

“Oh, they’re all just vaping from their beds while watching HGTV.”

“Not us,” he says.

“No, we’re adventurous,” I say.

“Okay, tell me something, Daphne.” He tips his face toward the stars.

I lean back on my forearms. “What?”

He looks over, the left half of his face shadowed. “Where do you go when you’re not at home?”

“Like, other than work?”

“Other than work.” He nods. “Because despite your impressive commitment to the calendar, there actually are slots of time when you’re unaccounted for, but I never see you out. And you’d never been to Cherry Hill, or MEATLOCKER, or here. So where do you go?”

“Nowhere,” I say. “I’m boring.”

“You’re not boring,” he says. “You’re keeping secrets.”

What Ashleigh said comes back to me: a closed book.

There was a time when I was okay at making friends. But that was probably four or five relocations back. Eventually, it didn’t seem worth it anymore, cracking myself open to let someone in, only to have them violently extracted months later when Mom got transferred again.

“Honestly,” I say, “if I’m not at home or work, I’m usually just reading somewhere else. The beach—the public beach—or the Lone Horse Café on Mortimer Avenue. And if I’m not reading, I’m probably working on some program or another. Lots of trips to Meijer and Dollar Tree.”

His eyes shrink to accommodate his spreading smile.

“You’re thinking that all sounds pretty boring, aren’t you?” I say.

He laughs. “No,” he says, a little too vehemently. At the face I make, he relents. “Okay, a little bit. But just because that sounds boring to me doesn’t mean I think you’re boring.”

“Yeah, but you also held up your end of a fifteen-minute conversation with Craig about property taxes, so I think your social standards are exceptionally low.”

“He was a nice guy,” Miles says.

“I rest my case.”

“I like most people. Is that so bad?”

“It’s not bad at all,” I say. “It’s decidedly working in my favor. It just makes it hard for me to realistically gauge how big of a loser I am.”

“You’re not a loser at all,” he says, emphatic.

I roll my eyes. He sits up higher, his face earnest despite his visibly high pupils. “I’m serious. That asshole already took your house. Don’t let him take your self-esteem.”

“It wasn’t really my house,” I say. “It was in his name.”

“It was still your home,” he says.

That word doesn’t gut me quite so bad as usual.

The weed is filtering pleasantly through me, and the night sky is gorgeous, and the air smells like firs and smoke and fresh water, with that little snap of ginger. The truth feels more manageable. I want to manage it.

“That’s what I’m realizing, though,” I tell him, wrapping the sweatshirt more tightly around me. “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,” Miles says. “But he’s not taking this town.”

I cast a sidelong glance his way. “You’re just fine with knowing you could run into them at any point? Doesn’t it bother you that you could be buying toilet paper and Alka-Seltzer and come face-to-face with Petra’s parents?”

He shrugs. “That’d be fine.” He sits up. “Wait—are you thinking about leaving?”

“More like dreaming about it.” I check the American Library Association job portal daily.

“Would you go back to Richmond?” Miles asks.

There’s that little stab of pain that home didn’t summon.

It was my very first thought, when the dust settled. I could go back. To my old town, my old job, my old friendships.

Then, a few days after the big showdown, I finally pulled myself from the pit of despair long enough to answer one of Sadie’s phone calls.

I’m so angry with Peter I could honestly punch him in the face, she told me.

She was apologetic, comforting. But then the unspoken became spoken: You both matter to us so much. We’re not choosing sides.

Like it was a basketball game, and she and Cooper had decided not to make posters or sit in a specific section of bleachers. Like things needed to play out, and then someone would simply have won and someone else would have lost.

I told her I’d never want her to choose sides.

But honestly, I didn’t want it to even feel like a choice. I wanted her to know where she stood. The problem was, she wasn’t my best friend anymore. She and Cooper were our best friends.

They were a unit, and we were another, and that was how we’d fit.

I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done something just the two of us.

And in those days when I was mourning in a puddle, Peter was doing damage control. So if our breakup wasn’t a basketball game, maybe it was a race, and I was too slow.

Sadie and I have barely spoken since that call, and I grieved that loss as much as or more than the end of my romantic relationship.

“Not Richmond,” I tell Miles. That might feel even worse than being here, which was saying something. “Maryland, hopefully.”

Miles does that Labradoresque head tilt of his. “What’s in Maryland?”

“My mom,” I say.

“You’re really close,” he says, half observation, half question.

I pull my knees into my chest and loop my arms around them. “She and my dad split up when I was really young, so it’s always been the two of us. Not in a sad way. She’s the best. What about you? Are you close with your family?”

He scratches the back of his head and gazes out across the water. “My little sister, yeah. We text basically every day. She lives in Chicago.”

“And your parents?” I ask.

“An hour outside of Chicago.” He offers no more. It’s the first time I’ve felt like there’s something he’d rather not talk about.

I feel the tiniest bit disappointed. He makes it so easy to open up. I wish I knew how to do the same.

“Anyway,” he says, “I don’t think you should move to Maryland.”

“I won’t go until you find another roommate,” I say.

“It’s not about that,” he says. “You moved here because of Peter. Don’t let him make you move away too.”

“So you’re saying I should stay, out of spite,” I say.

“I just think it would be shitty to uproot your whole life for this guy twice,” he says.

“Miles,” I say. “I 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,” he says.

“It is,” I say.

“What about your job?”

The ember in my chest flares. “What about it?”

“You’re constantly, like, teaching kids to make bird feeders and running costume contests. It clearly means a lot to you.”

“It does mean a lot to me,” I allow. “Sometimes when I’m running Story Hour, I literally remember partway through that I’m getting paid to do something I love, and it feels like I’m dreaming. Like I might wake up and realize I’m late for my shift at the Dressbarn.

“And there’s this girl Maya, who comes in once a week. Twelve or thirteen. Perfect little weirdo. She reads everything—goes through like five books a week. And we have an informal book club, where I pick something out I think she’ll like, and it goes in the stack, and then she comes back a week later and we just talk about it for an hour while I’m doing admin stuff. She’s supersmart. Has a hard time at school, but you can just tell she’s going to be some great novelist or, like, film director someday.”

“You love it,” Miles says.

“I love it,” I admit. It’s the piece of my life that still feels right, even with Peter excised from the picture.

“Then don’t give it up,” Miles says. “Not for him.”

“Of course, there are also days when I have to spend an hour on the phone with one of our regulars because he wants me to look up a love poem and spell every single word of it for him,” I say.

“Why?” Miles says.

“Sometimes the job of a librarian is to simply not ask. Anyway, I’m keeping an eye out for job postings in other cities, but I can’t leave for eighty-five days.”

“That is . . . extremely specific,” he says.

“It’s when the Read-a-thon happens,” I explain.

“Ah.” He flashes a teasing grin. “Read-a-thon Prep Meeting: Tuesdays from two to three p.m.”

“Do you have a photographic memory?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says. “Also, it’s been a standing appointment on your calendar since you moved in.”

“You’ve been reading it,” I say, unable to hide my glee.

“Of course I have. What’s a Read-a-thon, anyway?”

“A fundraiser,” I say. “An all-night reading thing for the kids, with contests and prizes and that kind of thing. Basically an event to fund other events, because we don’t have any money. Waning Bay’s never done one, but I went to one as a kid, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve basically been working on this since I got here.”

His brow lifts. “And it’s at the end of summer?”

“Mid-August,” I confirm.

After a moment, he says, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to be your tour guide.”

“I’m not doing acid with you, Miles,” I say.

“Good to know,” he replies, “but not the kind of tour guide I’m talking about. I’m going to show you around Waning Bay. We can go out on Sundays, when we both have work off. Starting next week. And then if, by the end of July, you still want to go play Golden Girls with your mom—”

“Do you even realize how cozy Golden Girls is?” I interject, reaching the giggly phase of being high. “If I could move to the set of Golden Girls, I would.”

“That’s what you say now,” Miles says, “but by the end of the summer, you’re going to be head over fucking heels for this place, Daphne. Just wait and see.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say.

“I’m serious,” he says.

“Oh, you’re serious?” I say. “You’re serious that you’re going to spend all summer ferrying a near–perfect stranger around so that she won’t move away?”

“You’re not a stranger.” He knocks his leg into mine. “You’re my serious, monogamous girlfriend, remember?”

I chortle, the high seeming to explode through my veins from the force of it.

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?”

“Am I wrong?” I ask.

He holds my gaze, not quite smiling. We both flinch when his phone chimes in his pocket. He slides it out, his face lit as he reads the message onscreen, a divot etched between his brows.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

His teeth worry at his lower lip. “Petra.”

“Seriously?” I say. “You two still talk?”

“Not often.” He scratches his jaw.

I think about the tense call I overheard behind his bedroom door, wonder if it’s possible he was talking to her, and what Peter would make of that.

“Apparently Katya told her that we were together at Cherry Hill,” he says.

I shift uncomfortably. “And she messaged you about that?”

“She’s happy for us,” he says, voice quiet and flat.

“Well, that’s good,” I say. “Petra’s happiness has always been my utmost concern.”

He looks over at me, slowly starts to laugh.

The weed has my heart feeling like softened butter even while my stomach boils over with anger. At Petra and Peter both, not just on my behalf this time, 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.

I hold my hand out for his phone. He considers for a second, then plops it into my palm.

“Come here,” I say, opening the camera.

His eyebrows pinch in a bemused expression. “Come where?”

I move the remnants of our fries to my far side and pat the space between us.

“Oh, there?” he says. “One foot to my left?”

He doesn’t ask why, just holds my gaze and scoots until his side’s right up against me. “Here?”

My stomach flips at the closeness of his voice. “That’s good.”

I hold his phone in front of us, the camera’s flash turned on, and lean into him. He puts an arm around me and smiles sort of ruefully, unable to muster true joy. At the last second, on a whim, I turn and kiss his cheek as the picture finally snaps.

His face turns toward mine, our noses almost touching, pieces of his chin and cheeks hidden behind the flash’s afterglow.

“Just thought we could make Petra really happy,” I say.

“Really thoughtful of you,” he says, the corners of his mouth curving.

“Yeah, well,” I say, “I thought about taking a video of myself giving you a lap dance, but I don’t have anything to mount your phone on, so this was the next best thing.”

“I will happily go back into the woods, find some sticks, and build you a tripod, Daphne,” he says.

I laugh, busy myself with another sip of milkshake, immediately shivering from the icy cold.

“Here.” He draws me in against his chest, so that we’re almost fitted together like we’re on a sled, him in back, me in front, and his arms folded around mine, blocking the worst of the wind.

I shiver again as I nestle back against him, snapping a few more pictures.

Honestly, my head is swimming from all these unfamiliar sensations, and I’m not sure whether I’m still taking pictures for any reason other than not quite wanting to acknowledge how good it feels to be curled up against him. It’s been so long since I’ve been curled up against anyone.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he says.

I lower the phone in front of me, and glance over my shoulder at him. “I know that.”

“You were probably right,” he says. “They’re probably not even jealous. And even if she was, so what? As it turns out, it doesn’t make me feel any less like shit.”

“It makes me feel less like shit,” I say.

His brow lifts skeptically. “Does it?”

“Okay, not exactly,” I admit. “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.”

His smile unzips slowly, from one side of his mouth. After a long moment, he leans forward and presses a kiss to my temple. “Thank you,” he says, arms tightening around me.

My body warms as if I’d cannonballed into a heated pool. “It’s just the truth.” I turn my eyes to the water, my blood humming with nervous energy.

We’re done taking pictures, but neither of us moves. It feels too good, to be wrapped in someone’s arms, protected from the wind and listening to the lake’s easy rhythm, feeling Miles’s breath move through him until mine syncs up without even trying.

“This is nice,” I say, sort of dreamily and entirely unintentionally. The few times I’ve smoked weed, this has always been the primary effect: a feeling that the cord between my brain and mouth has been snipped, and I have no control over what I’m saying.

Miles nods against the side of my head. “It is,” he agrees.

“Miles,” I say.

“Hm?”

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

“I’m not being nice when I tell you not to move away,” he says. “I like hanging out with you. And you’re the best roommate I’ve ever had by a landslide.”

“You mean I’m clean,” I say.

“Learn to take a compliment,” he says.

“See?” I say.

“See what?” he asks.

I turn to look at him. “Even when you try to be mean, you’re nice.”

His eyes seem to spark when he smiles. “I’ll try harder.”

We go back to sitting there, touching, watching bonfires dance and the water roll.