The Canterbury Sisters by Wright Kim

Author:Wright, Kim [Wright, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

I can’t believe none of you heard him,” I’m saying to the others the next morning, as we walk down the country road leading to the trailhead for the day. “He was right under my window, yelling my name.”

“Like Romeo and Juliet,” Becca says. “It’s my favorite Shakespeare play.”

An unlikely choice for a girl who claims to be in search of a happy love story, but then again, Becca’s still in high school. Romeo and Juliet is probably the only Shakespeare she’s ever read and it’s designed to appeal to teenagers, this idea that the star-crossed lovers could have been eternally happy if only their stupid parents had managed to get their shit together.

“Romeo and Juliet crossed my mind too,” I tell her. “But then I thought he was more like Stanley out of A Streetcar Named Desire. Randy’s a little too rough around the edges to play Romeo.”

I’ve decided I may as well confess the whole thing. If I don’t, Valerie might bring it up, and who knows how bad her version of the story will be, me making out with a stranger in my sock feet and bleeding everywhere and not having any money. Which is all true enough, so my only hope is to beat her to the punch and when I finish describing my adventures of the previous evening, everyone laughs. It’s sympathetic laughter, the inclusive kind.

I should go around all day long confessing my mistakes, I think. List them in alphabetical order, like the capitals of the states. Or maybe in chronological order, and then in ascending and descending degrees of severity. Add in accents and hand gestures as I talk, show them what it looked like when I hopped through the bar or Randy threw the dart. It’s a piece of vital information from another lifetime that I keep having to relearn—that when you tell people exactly how and when you screwed up, it only makes them like you better. All the accomplishments in the world won’t earn you as many friends as one embarrassing story, and I remember how I once overheard two baristas in a coffee shop, standing behind the bar steaming their milk and scooping their foam. And one of the girls had said to the other, “What’d you do last night?” and the second one answered, “The wrong thing.” They’d laughed, just as the women on the trail are laughing now, in that true camaraderie that only exists among the fallen. The sort of friendship that can only arise from the ashes of failure.

“He may have been dumb,” I say. “But he was a hell of a kisser.” And at this Claire and Valerie erupt in fresh gales of giggles, which echo throughout the group. Everyone is in high spirits this morning. The sun is bright, the air is fresh, the temperature feels more like October than November, and we have just passed a marker that Tess said indicates we’re more than halfway to Canterbury. The combination of a night

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