Hope and Other Punch Lines Read online

  “Okay,” he says.

  “If he doesn’t want to make out with you by the frozen fish, there are lots of other guys who will. You’re a catch of epic proportions,” I say, not caring that I sound a little too earnest.

  “No pun intended,” Noah says, but we ignore him.

  Jack leans back against the couch and turns to me. “Wow. That’s so, I don’t know, sweet of you. I feel tingly all over now.”

  “I’m good at pep talks. It’s one of my fortes,” I say.

  “Seriously,” Jack says, and it occurs to me that if you are going to judge someone by their choice of best friend, a way better metric than someone’s outsides, Jack reflects well on Noah.

  “Do I invite him to the party?” Jack asks.

  “Maybe in a casual way? Not in an I’m hoping we’re going to make out sort of way,” I declare with the authority of someone who knows stuff like this, even though I do not know stuff like this. I’m surprised by how civilized things are in this basement of boyness. There is truffle in the cheese. I imagined that we’d play loud video games, that I’d be inundated by the smell of socks, that there would be some awkwardness alleviated by staring at our respective phones. If we were at Cat’s—the old Cat’s—we’d be eating microwave popcorn straight from the bag and scrolling through Instagram.

  “Asking for a friend here,” Noah says. “What specifically would be the way to ask that would say I’m hoping we’re going to make out?”

  “I think it’s all in the subtext. A certain look,” I say. “Also, I’d stay away from the bad puns.”

  “Never. Puns are the tiny hill I’m willing to die on. So subtext like this?” Noah asks, and he stares at me with comically puppy dog pleading eyes and bats his long eyelashes. I crack up. “How’d I do, Abs?”

  “Did you just call me Abs?”

  “I did. Are we not there yet? To the Abs stage?” Noah asks, his face restored to normalcy. He holds up a piece of cheese and examines it from all angles before popping it in his mouth.

  “There is no Abs stage,” I say. “No one calls me Abs.”

  “Asking for a friend here,” Jack says, “but what specifically would be the way to get to the Abs stage if hypothetically there were one?”

  “You guys, I’m telling you there’s no Abs stage,” I say. “Not even hypothetically.”

  “I think there’s an Abs stage,” Jack says. “Definitely.”

  “We’ll see,” Noah says. “I’m optimistic.”

  “Do you normally put out fancy platters like this when you guys hang out?” I ask.

  “I told you we went overboard with the cheese,” Noah says to Jack.

  “No, you didn’t. You said we should get olives too,” Jack says.

  “He’s right. I totally said that,” Noah says, without a single trace of sarcasm. And then he smiles—a big goofy smile—right at me.

  * * *

  —

  When I get home, my mom is drinking a glass of white wine on our front porch. She sits on the swinging bench, which until this moment I always assumed was purely for decorative purposes.

  “What’s up?” I ask, and point to the bottle, which rests next to her.

  “Just enjoying the summer night. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” My mom’s voice has that weird dreamy quality again, like she’s just gotten back from a meditation retreat. I find myself missing the chipper version of her even though her cheerfulness sometimes rings false and grates on my nerves. This Zen impersonator feels foreign. Did someone take away my mother’s coffee and replace it with Xanax? Is she high? As far as I know, my parents don’t get high. Not their style. They prefer endorphins from jogging or a caffeinated kick. If they were to dabble in drugs, it would be of the high-performance variety.

  “I guess,” I say, and sit down next to her on the bench. I ease down slowly, afraid the thing will collapse. The street is empty, and except for the faint buzzing of cicadas, it’s quiet. The sky expands above us, an endless, deep thick purple.

  “Want to hear something awful? Grandma told me that I’ve made her proud as a daughter. It sounded like she had things she needed to say. And you know what I did? I changed the subject to the weather.” My mom takes another sip of wine and closes her eyes for a second.

  “Mom, it’s okay. She knows….”

  “I actually did that. I changed the subject to the weather. What a hot summer we’re having. Like I couldn’t be bothered to hear her out.”

  “You’re allowed to be human occasionally,” I say, and my lungs catch and stutter as if waterlogged.

  “We aren’t even having a hot summer! Sorry. This is harder than I thought it would be,” my mom says, and I slip my hands into hers. She grips my fingers.

  “What is?” I ask.

  “Everything.”

  “Grandma?”

  “All of it. When you pulled up in the car, you looked like a woman, not a girl. And to be honest, before now, I never really let myself imagine it. I dunno, after everything, I’ve been weirdly superstitious. Like if I let myself see you as an adult, something would snatch you away. And now the world is going to.”

  “Mom.”

  “No. It’s a good thing! That’s what’s supposed to happen. I keep thinking about that horrible shooting. The forty-five parents at that middle school getting calls that their kids were never coming home. I’m so, so tired of always worrying about our world splitting into a before and an after again.”

  I ignore the icy feeling climbing up my back, the image of a shard of glass embedded in Chuck’s leg, my cough that erupts just because I’m thinking about it. When I heard the news on the radio driving home earlier in the week, I shut it off.

  An idea comes: Tell her.

  My mother scoots me closer to her on the bench for her own comfort, not mine. I assumed that my plan this summer—my eight weeks of ignorant bliss—was a selfish one, me indulging my need for a little more joy in the before, but I realize with a start that it might also be the right thing, the brave thing, to let the truth stay buried for a little while longer.

  My mother has finally allowed herself the fantasy of my growing up. So much guilt finally giving way to optimism. I will not be responsible for destroying her dreams. Not while my mom’s already in the process of losing someone else.

  “I’m not grown. I’m not even five feet.” I kick up to show her my tiny size-four-and-a-half flip-flops. My toenails are painted with silver glitter. I’m wearing a string ankle bracelet a camper made for me. No one could mistake me for a woman.

  “I didn’t say you looked tall. Pretty soon you’ll be on your own, though. Far away at college.”

  “We have a whole year,” I say, careful to use a tone of not quite promising.

  She pours more wine. Looks up at the sky, now more gray, finding its way to black.

  “Mom, are you okay? For real?”

  “This is what we experts call a midlife crisis. Nothing to worry about.” She smiles and looks like herself. As bright and shiny as my sparkling toenails. Once again the person who used to give my boo-boos magic kisses whenever I fell. Who would sometimes sweep me up so fast, I wouldn’t even notice that I’d touched the ground in the first place. Always with the same refrain: You’re okay, sweetheart. You’re okay. “By the way, your dad is coming over for dinner.”

  “Really?” My dad is never home this early.

  “Well. Lasagna,” she says, like that explains it, when what she really means is he’s checking up on Grandma. I thought one of the reasons people got divorced was so they don’t have to have dinner with each other’s parents.

  My mom pumps her legs back and forth, as if this is a playground swing, as if she thinks we can get somewhere if we push hard enough. I decide to lift my feet and join her. Who cares that we have nowhere to reach for? That our swing may become untethered and co
llapse? I’m looking for joy in this moment.

  We push back and forth till the sky goes fully dark. Till it turns the color of goodbye.

  There’s this great episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee in which Jerry Seinfeld and John Oliver fall in comedy love and talk about how they both have such a compulsive need to make other people laugh that it borders on sociopathy. No matter the circumstances, they’re always looking for the funniest angle. In Trevor Noah’s episode, he tells Seinfeld how stand-up in South Africa was illegal until about twenty years ago because telling jokes was considered a dangerous and powerful expression of free speech.

  I’m pretty sure Jerry and John and Trevor would all agree with me that a really good joke could save the world.

  “Don’t look now,” Noah says, and I reflexively start to move my head, which happens whenever someone says the words don’t look now. “But Cat is here.”

  I catch myself just in time. We are at Moss’s party, loitering in the foyer because he apparently lives in a house on steroids and it’s overwhelming. Two huge columns flank the entrance, each with a giant white marble lion at its side, both of which are currently wearing fluorescent pink Troll wigs. Naked statues spit water into the air at random, a chandelier the size of a horse dangles threateningly over our heads, and there’s gold embroidered into the wallpaper. According to Jack, who it turns out might be one of those people who secretly knows all the good gossip, Moss’s dad was the sixth investor in Snapchat and is now on the Forbes 400 list.

  I shouldn’t be surprised to see Cat. It seems like every teenager in New Jersey is here. Probably even some rich kids from Manhattan who tunneled their way over. Still, I bought into the fiction that my summer life with camp people would be like visiting Vegas—what happens there stays there.

  “Can she see me?” I ask, holding myself perfectly still, like I’m doing the mannequin challenge.

  “Why are you frozen? Move,” Jack says. “Look natural. Be normal.”

  “I forgot how to do that.” Again I have the arm problem. Where do they go? Up? Down? Do I cross them?

  “She’s here with that guy we saw her with the other night at the store,” Noah says, looking over my shoulder.

  “Hans,” I say, and decide to put my hands on my hips, which I read in a magazine is flattering in photographs. I have no idea if it works in person.

  “His name is definitely not Hans. Mike, maybe,” Jack says.

  “It’s Hans in my head. Cat would never date a Mike.”

  “You’re so much weirder than I thought,” Noah says, and then does his cute hair-ruffle thing. He peeks over my shoulder again. “Wow, Cat looks wasted.”

  “You can tell from here?” I decide not to turn around. If I’m careful enough, we can avoid each other, like we did at school. At Oakdale, whenever I’d see anyone who even slightly resembled Cat, any flash of ubiquitous purple hair, I’d hide in a classroom or a bathroom.

  The irony is not lost on me that my reaction to my friend’s having outgrown me is super immature.

  “She’s throwing her arms in the air, waving like she just doesn’t care,” Noah says flatly.

  “She was shit-faced last week too,” Jack says. “I thought she was going to christen my car.”

  “Julia christened my car after Tash’s party,” I say.

  “You’re so not supposed to tell people about that,” Julia says, popping up next to me. I assumed she was off with Zach, taking more photos to glam up her already glamorous-in-a-down-to-earth-way Instagram feed.

  If you don’t take a picture and post it, did it really happen? Cat used to ask. No, no, it didn’t, she’d respond. And then she’d hold out her phone—she had the longest arms—and we’d all pose. Sometimes she’d even say Duck faces, ladies. Here’s the strangest part: I would always listen. I would pout on command if Cat was the one asking.

  “I’m keeping the drink I got you to make up for it,” Julia says. She takes a sip of something that looks like Kool-Aid. Childishly red in a clear plastic cup. “Why are you standing so strangely?”

  “My ex–best friend is over there.”

  “Oooh, I have one of those. They’re seriously worse than bad breakups,” Julia says, and then hands me her drink. “Fine, you need this more than me. And I say that even though Zach is making out with Tash in the corner.”

  I take a swig, and it burns going down. Definitely not Kool-Aid.

  “Zach is a dick,” Noah says.

  “Totally,” Julia admits. “And yet—”

  “Can I ask you something?” Jack asks. “Is it his dickishness that makes you like him?”

  “Who are you?” Julia asks.

  “I’m Jack. Noah’s friend. Abbi’s too.”

  “It’s not his dickishness. That’s not really my thing. I like that he’s full of surprises. Like you don’t expect a guy in a fedora to be able to do a yoga headstand. Look at him. He’s wearing overalls. I mean really? Overalls.” Julia smiles as she says this, her voice thick with affection, even though we’re all looking straight at Zach sticking his tongue down Tash’s throat. They’re no longer in a corner but in the center of the foyer, as if the party should revolve around them.

  “I will never understand women,” Noah says. He takes off his glasses and cleans them with the corner of his shirt, pops them back on. “If I wore overalls you guys would never let me live it down. Why does he get to wear them?”

  “Do you want to wear overalls?” I ask.

  “Not even a little bit, but that’s not the point,” Noah says.

  “It’s all about confidence,” Julia says.

  “But I have confidence!” Noah shouts, trying to make himself heard over the loud thumping music that has started playing. Is that a live band in the backyard? Who the hell is this Moss?

  “Not enough to wear overalls, though,” Jack says.

  “Exactly,” Julia says. “Exactly.”

  * * *

  —

  About half an hour later, one red drink under my belt, I’m feeling warm and loose and happy. Jack, Julia, Noah, and I wind through the crowds with linked arms, a merry band of new friends, and this way, with them literally attached to my limbs, I stop worrying about Cat. There must be at least three hundred people here. In the backyard, four kids with loud electric guitars pound away on a makeshift stage. The only reason this party hasn’t been broken up by the neighbors is because I don’t think there are any. Beyond the huge lawn, all I see are towering walls. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a moat.

  “Have you seen Charles?” Julia asks once we’ve settled into a new spot, a little away from the music so we can hear ourselves talk.

  “Lifeguard Charles?” I ask.

  “Yup. Though I think he just goes by Charles in the wild,” Julia says.

  “Have you seen Brendan?” Jack asks. “He texted and said he might come. What do you think that means?”

  “I think that means he might come,” Julia says, who is now double-fisting the not-Kool-Aid because the line for the bar wraps around one of the verandas and is chock-full of grope-y drunk boys. “Who’s Brendan?”

  “The guy Jack is into who has a questionable tattoo and may or may not want to make out with him near the frozen fish at the supermarket where he works,” I say.

  “There are so many sexier sections,” Noah says. “I don’t get it.”

  “I’d pick the bakery,” I say.

  “Really?” Noah asks, like I meant it seriously.

  “Is there a coffee shop? That would be my top choice. No rotisserie chicken smell,” Julia says. “Or maybe I’d go the whole opposite direction. Lean into it. Sushi.”

  “I hadn’t thought of sushi,” Jack says, considering. “But it’s not just about making out. I actually like him.”

  “How about produce? You’d get those awesome thunder sound effects
before the spritzing,” Noah says. “Very romantic, right? Like a summer rain shower.”

  “You’re cute,” Julia says, turning to Noah. “How old are you again?”

  “Almost sixteen.”

  “Never mind,” Julia says, and pretends to swipe right with her hand. “Too young for me.”

  Noah catches my eye over her head and exaggeratedly cocks his right eyebrow like he’s scandalized. I laugh.

  “Not even a whole year younger than Abbi, though,” Noah says, and this time when he looks at me, he holds the eye contact, long enough that I feel it all the way down to my toes.

  * * *

  —

  We sit on the back steps, me between Jack and Noah, and act like partygoing is a spectator sport. Julia found Charles, and now they’re across the lawn chatting but not really chatting. More like the kind of close-face talking that is the flirty precursor to kissing. If I knew she wouldn’t kill me, I’d totally stand up and cheer.

  “I don’t think Brendan is coming,” Jack says, and leans all the way down to rest his weary head on my shoulder. I pet it because that’s what you do with an adorable head like his.

  “He might,” I say. “And if he doesn’t, I think…”

  I trail off because suddenly Cat is right in front of me, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. We have an unspoken rule. She might not have ducked into as many bathrooms as I did last year, but I know she has done her part to avoid me. Why stop now? I moved on, just like she wanted me to.

  Cat has a goofy smile on her face. Friendly, slightly amused. Like nothing has changed, like the calendar has rewound a full 365 days and we are at this party together.

  “Hey!” she says, not a hint of fear in her voice. I wonder if drinking has made her brave before I remember that Cat has always been brave. Her favorite life hack has always been unearned confidence. If you act like you know what you’re talking about, people believe you, she’d say. If you want something, ask. It’s not that hard.

  This is a lie. It just wasn’t ever that hard for her.