Page 43 of Weekends with You

“Right, sorted,” Finn said, pretending to zipper his lips shut.

When the midnight chaos settled into the quiet blank slate that is the start of a new year, we made our way home. The streets were teeming with other drunken partygoers stumbling around arm in arm, shouting resolutions at the top of their lungs.

“Let’s do that when we get home,” I said before contemplating whether I actually meant it.

“Scream our resolutions to strangers on the street?” Jan asked.

“No, just make them, I mean. Let’s all set at least one goal for the new year before we go to sleep tonight, then try to stick to them like proper adults.”

“Can we make a frozen pizza or something while we do it? I’m famished,” Finn said.

“When has anyone ever said no to frozen pizza?”

“I knew I liked you, Lucy.”

We decided to change out of our ski clothes before gathering in the kitchen, which gave me time to grab pens and paper for our final weekend activity. If we were going to do this, we were going to do this right.

“What is this, school?” Finn asked as I distributed the materials.

“Finn, I find it hard to believe you ever touched penorpaper in school.”

“I take back what I said about liking you, you know.”

“Liar.”

“Get on with it, then, would ya?” Jan said, spinning his pen like a drumstick.

“Okay, okay. So everyone is going to write their resolution on their slip of paper, then we’re going to fold them up and put them in this little box.” From behind my back, I produced a box that I’d found in a corner of my studio. “Then someday, once we all accomplish them, we’ll have a ceremonial burning of the papers.”

“You know if there’s fire, I’m in,” Jan said.

“And what if we don’t accomplish them?” Margot asked.

“Would be quite embarrassing, wouldn’t it?” Cal said.

“For you, maybe. Nobody ever really sticks to these things, do they?”

“Margot, would it kill you to just be optimistic? Maybe you never stick to yours because you have that attitude,” Raja said, always coming to the rescue.

“And besides,” I added, “this is supposed to hold us accountable. Cal’s right. It would be embarrassing to be the only one with a paper left in the box.”

“Should we loop in Henry? Even though he isn’t here, it feels weird leaving him out of something significant.” Finn already has his phone out, which made me think it was less of a question and more of an announcement.

“Well, if he wanted to be part of this, he’d be here, wouldn’t he?” Six pairs of eyes shot in my direction, and I immediately knew how I sounded. “But yeah, I mean, I guess you’re right. Shoot him a text, then,” I said, trying to recover. “Now get to work.”

The silence in the kitchen meant everyone was taking the assignment seriously, which was likely just the magic of Warehouse Weekend. When we were all together, we just dove into each other’s ideas, no matter how ridiculous.

As we finished writing, Finn’s phone made a noise. I held my breath, petrified that he’d read Henry’s resolution out loud.

“He said he’ll fill one out when he’s home in February, so his can also be private,” Finn announced. I exhaled, feeling silly for being nervous in the first place. Surely his paper would say something about finding a new place to live and making advancements in his career, nothing we didn’t already know, so I wasn’t quite sure what he needed to be so private about.

We took turns tossing our crumpled papers into the box, which I then closed and stashed above the refrigerator for safekeeping. “Is everyone’s initial on the outside so we know whose is whose?” I received six nods of confirmation. “Good. Now it’s official. We have a new set of goals for the new year, and we have a system to keep us all accountable.”

“This house loves a system,” Raja said.

“It’s the only way to get eight people to cooperate on anything,” Cal said. “Without our systems, we’d be quite a mess.”

“We already are quite a mess,” Liv slurred.