Hope and Other Punch Lines Read online

  “I mean, swoon, am I right?” she asks. I choose to treat this question as rhetorical, because I’m not swooning. Sweating, yes. Pondering how this guy’s outfit came about—the hours he chose to spend chopping his pants and tie-dyeing his shirt with the help of YouTube tutorials. But I’m not even feeling something second-cousins-twice-removed from the swoon. Instead, I’m thinking how sad it is that my plan for a summer of anonymity lasted only two hours. “Let’s go say hi.”

  I have no choice but to follow Julia. The boy, despite his wearing normal, mass-produced and store-bought clothes, somehow looks even goofier than Zach. He has on big plastic black glasses and beat-up black Converse and his hair is ruffled and messy.

  As we move closer, I realize he’s from the class below me at Oakdale. I tell myself not to panic. I tell myself it’s possible my Spidey sense was off this one time, that I recognized him and not the other way around. Maybe he doesn’t know my name. Maybe he has his own reasons for taking a job two counties away and is as psyched as I am about pajama day and will have absolutely no interest in bringing up the fact that an earlier iteration of my face can be found on walls the world over.

  “I like your vibe. Total norm-core, hipster-geek,” Julia says to the boy once we’ve crossed the field. Then she looks at me, up and down and then back up again, a slow, steady, calculating evaluation. “Like her, I guess. But you pull it off.”

  This comment is totally fair. Generally speaking, in both appearance and dress, I’m the human equivalent of a fern—not particularly offensive, but no one is going to be like, “Wow, that’s such a beautiful fern! What amazing combination of plant food and light produced such spectacular results?” This is somewhat intentional, at least on the fashion side. I’m usually better off when I blend.

  “Thanks,” the boy says, a little thrown by Julia. I would bet good money that he’s never heard the term norm-core in his life. “I’m Noah. We go to school together, actually.”

  He looks at me again, and the neck tingles are back. No doubt he’s about to blow everything for me in T-minus three…two…one…

  “You’re Ba—”

  I shake my head, once, hard, the only way I know how—other than tackling him—to signal that he shouldn’t say the words Baby Hope out loud.

  “You’re Abbi, right?” he course-corrects, and my body floods with relief. If it weren’t weird, I’d hug him in gratitude. I decide I like his face. It’s friendly: big brown curious eyes, and ears as enthusiastic about being noticed as mine. Something about his hair and glasses adds a slight wackiness to his appearance, like he’s Clark Kent’s weirdo younger brother who’s super into anime.

  “Hi,” I say, and hold up my hand and give him a dorky wave.

  “I realize it’s summer, but it turns out I’m rising editor in chief of the Oakdale High Free Press. Number one way to pad your college application, if you want to join in the fall,” he says, with purposefully cheesy ironic jazz hands. He then smiles at me, a big splash of a smile, and I smile back.

  “Cool, thanks,” I say. He seems nice. No way he’s going to out me as Baby Hope.

  “ ‘Cool, thanks’? I could pinch your little cheeks. Zach, aren’t you so glad to be done with high school?” Julia asks.

  “Dude,” Zach says, like that’s an answer.

  “Let’s have coffee,” Noah says, all casual, ignoring both Zach and Julia, and his eyes steadily wash over me, as if he is trying to do complex calculations in his head.

  Wait, is he asking me on a date? No. Not possible. Things like that don’t happen to me. To Cat, my former best friend, yes—she once picked up a guy at a funeral—but never me.

  “How’s tomorrow after camp?” he asks.

  “Um.”

  “Did he just ask her out?” Zach asks Julia. “In front of us?”

  “I think he did,” she says, and my face blazes hot and red.

  “Wait, no! I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not asking you out out. Just thought we should have coffee together,” Noah says, still looking only at me. “I’m not creepy or anything.”

  “That was a little creepy,” Julia interjects.

  “I didn’t think you had it in you,” Zach says, and hits Noah on the back with condescending pride. Noah’s smile gets wiped clean, and if it’s possible, his face turns even redder than mine.

  “Not-asking-out-just-coffee sounds great,” I say, because I’m hardwired to try to make other people feel comfortable in uncomfortable situations—which is both my favorite and least favorite thing about myself—and I don’t think I can survive another second of this awkwardness. “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Cool, you won’t regret this, Abbi,” Noah says, again using my name with entirely unnecessary emphasis, like he’s proud of not slipping and calling me Baby Hope.

  “I have a feeling these two will be even cuter than our campers,” Julia says to Zach.

  “Dude,” Zach says.

  Operation Get Answers is on like Donkey Kong. Could I have been suaver—Let’s have coffee? Seriously?—sure. But cut me some slack. I was unprepared. If you had told me this morning that there would be another person from Oakdale working at Knight’s Day Camp and that person would be Baby freaking Hope, I wouldn’t have believed you. God, Yahweh, Allah, the incredible flying spaghetti monster, whatever the hell you want to call him/her/it works in mysterious ways.

  Baby. Freaking. Hope.

  This might actually work.

  As soon as Uncle Maurice, which is what we are supposed to call the camp director—this silver-haired dude with a killer seventies stache—and Zach, my new senior counselor, aren’t looking, I pull out my phone to text Jack. He’s not just my best friend, he’s also the only person in the world who will understand what this means to me.

  Me: BABY HOPE IS AT CAMP. WE ARE HAVING COFFEE TOMORROW. IT’S A SIGN

  Jack: What’s up with the all caps? Who are you?

  Me: You are right. Caps were uncalled for

  Jack: Glad we cleared that up. Also, NOT A SIGN

  Me: I really think she might be able to help

  Jack: She was a baby at the time

  Me: I have a plan

  Jack: You really need to let this go. You sound insane

  Me: You’ve seen the pictures

  Jack: People have doppelgängers. It’s a documented phenomenon

  “Hey, put that away,” Zach says to me, and swats at my phone. “That’s how a kid drowns.”

  My new senior counselor epically sucks. So far today, and I’ve only know him approximately six hours, he has whispered “dibs” in my ear three times when we were introduced to a new girl, and he keeps talking about his “boys back at school,” always in reference to some dumb prank they pulled, like replacing someone’s shampoo with Nair. Apparently It was sick, dude, so sick.

  Just as I was wondering how it’s possible to bro that hard without a keg nearby, he started talking about his meditation practice and his deeply held commitment to veganism. Which is to say: his existence is confusing.

  “Last time I checked, you can’t drown in grass,” I say. Jack would hate Zach, because Jack hates anyone who is easily classifiable, and though this guy falls into two contradictory categories—Zen stoner and frat boy—I have no doubt the hating would still apply. “Uncle Maurice gave us a ten-minute break.”

  “Don’t talk back to your elders,” Zach says, and then laughs his bro laugh, a hard heh, and walks away.

  I give him the finger in my mind.

  Me: My senior counselor is the worst, so don’t crap all over the one thing that has made this day bearable

  Jack: This Baby Hope thing is…unhealthy, and when I say unhealthy I don’t mean calorific

  Me: What are you talking about?

  Jack: I realized today calorific is a word we don’t use nearly enough. Calorific. It’s
funny, no? I feel like there may be a bit there

  Me: Not really. Anyhow, Abbi seems cool

  Jack: She’s a little short for my taste

  Me: She’s a little too much of an actual girl for your taste

  Jack: True. Now are you ready?

  Me: For what?

  Jack: I’m going to be serious with you for a minute and it might get awkward because we’re never serious with each other, but then we can get right back to our regularly scheduled shit talking

  Me: Ok

  Jack: You need to let this 9/11 stuff go. For real. Enough is enough. Consider this an intervention

  Me: I’m not crazy. It’s him

  Jack: Break’s up. Must go do God’s work ringing up tampons and eggplant. Good talk, man

  The first time I realized that I’m going to die, that we are all going to die eventually, I was in the third grade. Of course, by then I had already learned that no one gets to live forever, and that doesn’t mean just the old, just the sick, but babies and mothers and teenagers and real estate agents. Also pilots. And orthodontists. I understood that death was cruel and didn’t play fair. I was, had been for as long as I could remember, the girl who survived, and so for whatever reason—I’m sure Dr. Schwartz, our family therapist, has a working theory—I didn’t think the normal rules of mortality applied to me.

  I was fashionably late to the existential panic party.

  Then one day in third grade, I found myself peeing on my goldfish, Orange, who somehow simultaneously had flat-lined in the toilet bowl and was swimming happily in her small aquarium on the kitchen counter.

  “Mom!” I screamed, thinking at first that I had relieved myself on some other poor fish that had swum its way up our pipes. When my mother realized what had happened—she’d forgotten the crucial step of flushing when secretly replacing my dead fish—she smiled right into my horrified face.

  “Well, now you know.”

  She said this like it was good news, in the same tone she’d used to show me the house she had bought two doors down from my father after the divorce, and then again the first time I got my period. Matter-of-fact optimism in the face of something grim. “That was Orange number nine, may he rest in peace. Number ten seems to be adjusting well to his new bowl.”

  Once I caught up, my previous innocence astounded and embarrassed me. Of course there was no magic tooth fairy who traded cash for slimy canines. And of course I was going to die. It was hard to remember ever being so stupid as to believe anything else.

  I guess it’s easier to give up all our myths at once.

  When the cough came a month ago, tight and jagged and without warning, it wasn’t a total surprise. I’ve known my whole life that there had to be consequences to being The Girl Who Survived. I have been lying in wait.

  I had read about the “World Trade Center cough,” common enough among survivors to have a name. I’d seen the obituaries in the newspaper from 9/11 syndrome, which seemed to increase exponentially in number around the fifteenth anniversary. And I knew what had happened to Connie.

  Standing there in the bathroom with my wad of bloody tissues, like I had stumbled into a crime scene, it became clear: I was next. In a single moment, my expected life span shortened from decades to, if I was lucky, years.

  You would think I’d have screamed for my mother, like I did when I peed on Orange. That I would have handed the responsibility over to someone more qualified to deal with it. That I would have, at the very least, freaked out.

  I didn’t.

  Instead, I flushed the tissues and cleaned the red stain on the bath mat. I washed my face and hands. I deleted my Google history from my phone, in case somehow it showed up on my mom’s computer. In short, I covered my tracks.

  In the days that followed, whenever I felt my lungs start to close and the cough claw at the back of my throat, I’d make an excuse to leave the room. And in that paralyzing calm, I came to a decision. I knew I couldn’t keep this a secret forever; eventually, I’d need medical intervention. But I could give myself one small gift in the meantime: eight weeks.

  One last summer. One last summer before the mobilization of troops and the cavalry of doctors’ appointments and the paper hospital gowns. One last summer of ignorance is bliss, when the cough could be nothing more than a cough. One last summer when no one talks about Baby Hope. (If I need to have coffee with a strange boy to make that happen, so be it.)

  I want one last summer packed full of pure joy: of learning how to box-stitch a lanyard, of singing camp songs, of dancing on fluorescent squares.

  When you think about it, in the context of everything to come, that really doesn’t seem like too big an ask.

  Here are the cold, hard facts: All the people identified in the Baby Hope photo—Chuck Rigalotti, Constance Kramer, Abbi Hope Goldstein, Jamal Eggers, Sheila Brashard, and Raj Singh—survived the attacks of September 11. They were later profiled for the newspaper in the November 1, 2001, issue, where they discussed running to the Brooklyn Bridge. To this day, three people in the background of the photo remain unidentified, and no information is publicly available about any of them:

  A woman in a ruffled blouse and a tight skirt with a big pair of glasses covering most of her face.

  A bald man in a suit and a striped tie, looking over his shoulder, so he’s only caught in profile.

  A man in a blue University of Michigan hat, jeans, and an untucked flannel shirt with two days of stubble; he’s staring straight at the camera.

  No one has ever come forward and identified themselves, though all are believed to have survived.

  It’s number 3 who keeps me up at night.

  “Why don’t you want people to know you’re Baby Hope?” Noah asks as we turn out of the camp gates. We are walking to Starbucks, which, according to his app, should take us no more than eight minutes.

  Did he have to start with the photograph? I could use a little warm-up before jumping into such complicated waters. We could talk about camp. How Zach and Julia like to do yoga together on the south lawn in the morning and it’s weird for everyone. We have a lot of conversational options.

  I shrug and stare straight ahead at the road unfolding before us. There are fewer trees here than in our neighborhood, and the summer afternoon sun gleams hot and bright and unobstructed. I watch my shadow, notice how my arms seem too long relative to my short body. Like a chimpanzee’s.

  “It seems a weird thing to want to hide,” he says again, clearly not understanding that my shrug was supposed to say, in not so many words, Let’s not talk about this. Definitely not now, and maybe not ever. “You’re a national hero.”

  “I am not a hero,” I say.

  “Fine, a national treasure, then.”

  I snort, and then wish I could time travel and stop the sound before it happens.

  “I wanted to leave some of that stuff behind this summer, that’s all,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wonder if it will rain later,” I say, apropos of nothing—there isn’t a cloud in sight—but I need a subject change. I decide to fold my arms across my chest instead of letting them dangle by my sides. I wonder: When did I forget how to walk?

  “Abbi, I need to confess something to you right now and get it over with,” Noah says, with excessive seriousness, and I feel my stomach drop. He must have some terrible ulterior motive for going for coffee. “I’m the worst at small talk. Like I am biologically unable to chat about things like the weather. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” I say, loosening up. “Tell me, what are you biologically able to chat about?”

  “How about big life plans? That’s sufficiently not-small-talky. What do you want to do post-Oakdale?” he asks.

  “Like for a job?”

  “Yeah, and please don’t say weather forecaster. Because then
I’ll feel like a jerk for belittling your life’s passion.”

  “Nope. No big plans as of yet. How about you?” I decide to play it vague. No need to step into the land mine of my future.

  “I want to go to college, in an ideal world, in the Ivy League. Then move to New York. Work in politics. Do stand-up at night. And ultimately have my own political comedy show. Online, I think, because the networks will be totally obsolete by then.” He ticks his fingers with each step, as if this is often repeated or written down somewhere. “Just so you know, I realize how that sounds. Disgustingly ambitious. Also obnoxious. Probably pompous. Supercilious, though I don’t even know what that means, but I like the sound of it. Crap, I’m out of -ous words. I thought I had a few more.”

  “Wow. Those are some e-nor-mous plans,” I say, and he smiles at me, an explosion of delight on his face. These days, I only allow myself one limited daydream about the future: college. In my mind’s eye, it’s glorious: hooded sweatshirts and food trucks and library carrels. Coed dorms and lectures on feminist theory and parties full of people from anywhere and everywhere but Oakdale. I imagine myself happily eating my way toward the freshman fifteen, which might be the answer to the problem of my cavernous chest, and laughing late into the night with the perfect roommate and then sleeping until noon without thinking of the hours wasted. I want to go to school on an urban campus, I think, but in a smaller, nonthreatening city. No New York. No DC. Maybe Philly?

  The one way I can accept this whole getting-sick/limited-time-left-on-this-planet thing is if there are—and I truly believe there will be, there have to be—at least a few good years for me to get used to the idea.

  Connie was ill for half a decade. I tell myself there’s no reason I shouldn’t have a similar trajectory. Five years seems manageable. Five years makes my plan of putting off dealing with the cough for one summer seem totally reasonable.