Next Year, for Sure by Zoey Leigh Peterson

Author:Zoey Leigh Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2017-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

DECEMBER

CHAPTER 11

This Wordless Thing

One thing Chris likes about kissing Emily is this: it’s calming. When they’re kissing, he doesn’t wonder whether Emily likes him the way he likes her. He doesn’t worry that they’re just friends who might dissolve into less. When they’re kissing, they are something.

He’s kissing her now in a parking lot. Or she’s kissing him, which is how it usually works. Chris hasn’t figured out how to make it happen himself—she’s constantly in motion—so he waits, like his grandma used to wait for hummingbirds, standing by her kitchen window, patient, smiling, alert.

Soon they will have to go back to the party. Just a couple more hours, Emily has promised. What Chris would like is a small empty room with just the two of them. It’s almost never just the two of them. And this is the other thing he likes about kissing Emily. No one comes up and introduces themselves—another best friend, another old roommate. No one pulls Emily aside to tell her exciting news. Everyone leaves them alone when they’re kissing. Sometimes people whistle or clap, which is when Chris likes them the best.

—

Back inside, Chris turns it on again, the part of him that does enjoy being here. These actually are remarkable people, Emily’s friends. At a party last week, Chris met a lost legend of underground film, rumoured on websites to be dead, but standing there in the line for beer. They talked for an hour about a final, unfinished film and the agony of living with footage that no one will ever see.

The week before that, a man in a fedora led partygoers in twos and threes through a series of abandoned tunnels beneath the city. The man told stories that may or may not have been true, and Chris felt lucky and grateful, either way, simply to be in this world.

And then there’s Emily. Watching Emily be in the world. Watching Emily be loved, hugged, and picked up off her feet. So Chris switches it on, like a neon sign that says OPEN, and when he is introduced to someone, he asks sincere questions and reveals some true version of himself and does not immediately find an excuse to slip away. When he is pulled on stage as part of an improv sketch, he goes willingly, and when someone in the audience shouts BALLERINA! and another voice, at the same moment, yells CHEWBACCA!, Chris executes a series of slow arabesques he hasn’t done since he was eight years old, all while gargling and bleating and yowling like a lovesick wookiee. And he feels more alive than he can remember ever being, though he would give it all up to be alone with Emily in her room, where tonight he will sleep over for the first time.

—

Kathryn says they’re going to have sex tonight, he and Emily, but they’re not. Chris is fairly certain. Kathryn has been predicting this imminent sex for weeks now, since before the kissing started. Because if I start seeing someone, she says, you better know I’m going to have sex with them.

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