Hope and Other Punch Lines Read online

  Does Chuck cough too? I wonder.

  “I appreciate you not saying I told you so,” Noah says.

  “I told you so,” I say, and he laughs.

  “So I have a theory that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they eat an Oreo,” he says after rummaging through the bag and pulling out a plastic tray of cookies.

  “You have a lot of weird theories.”

  “Do you carefully open them and go for the cream first? Or do you eat the cookie? Or do you defer to the Man and eat them the way they came? There are a ton of options here,” he says, and there’s something about him spewing pure nonsense that lifts the mood in the car. We are intentionally letting the hard stuff evaporate.

  “That’s three options,” I say, playing along. “Not exactly a ton.”

  “Perhaps you only eat them alone in your underwear. Or on your birthday, the whole box in one go. Or maybe you dip them in milk as a way to evoke nostalgia for your long-lost childhood.”

  “It’s just a cookie.”

  “Technically, it’s two cookies with cream between them.”

  “So you think these things actually matter? How you like to eat an Oreo? You sure this isn’t small talk?” I ask. I let my mind settle on Noah, who I know is trying to distract me, or maybe us, from the scene we have fled. Sometimes it feels like those towers are still falling and will never stop.

  “This is not small talk! Details totally matter. Take your car, for example. She’s still, as yet, unnamed. She’s also immaculate, or was until I got here, and look at this little basket you have in the front: Tissues. ChapStick. Even a flashlight. What is this? Holy crap, do you keep Mace? That’s genius.”

  “Are you making fun of me?” I ask.

  “No! Not at all. I think people don’t pay enough attention to the small things about each other. But that’s the really interesting stuff.” Noah takes his Oreo, manages to split it so that the cream is evenly distributed, and hands me half.

  “I always eat the middle first, and then I regret it because then I’m left with the crappy cookies,” I say. “For the record, I’ve never eaten an Oreo in my underwear.”

  “Interesting, and not just because you mentioned your underwear, though feel free to do that more often.”

  “Come on,” I say, though the corners of my mouth rise and my face grows warm.

  “My point is, your delicate undergarments notwithstanding, if you bother to add up all the details of a person, if you pay close enough attention, that’s how you get to a whole,” he says. His knees are back on my dash, and his hands make a hammock for his head. “And you’re interesting to me because, believe it or not, I’d like to be your friend.”

  “Friend? Or blackmailer?” I ask. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say something like that out loud, like it’s an easy thing to admit, like there are no consequences to opening yourself up to rejection: I’d like to be your friend.

  “I’m a blackmailing friend.”

  “Or friendly blackmailer.”

  “You know what I think?” Noah asks, and turns in his seat to look at me. His big glasses can’t hide the look in his eyes, which, like this day, somehow holds too much: curiosity and playfulness and also pain.

  “About how I eat my Oreos fully dressed or about the fact that I’m joking along with my blackmailer may mean I have Stockholm syndrome?”

  “I think people sometimes get you confused with Baby Hope.”

  “But I am Baby Hope.”

  “No, you aren’t. You’re Abbi Goldstein, a girl who, I’m learning, has a weird affinity for Wonder Woman T-shirts and flip-flops and keeps Mace and also an alarming number of asthma inhalers in her car and feels regret every single time she eats an Oreo. What’s Stockholm syndrome?”

  “It’s when people who are kidnapped start to sympathize with their captors,” I say.

  “I did not kidnap you. For the record.”

  “It was me on the front page of the freakin’ New York Times almost sixteen years ago,” I say. “I am Baby Hope.”

  “No. It was a picture of you. Big difference.”

  “Is there, though? You said yourself that our stories are what make us who we are.”

  “You didn’t write the Baby Hope story. I’m not saying you don’t bear the burden of it, you obviously do, but you didn’t write it. So it’s not yours. Not really,” he says, and I swat away the single tear that makes a slow, unexpected line down my left cheek.

  That might be the most insightful thing anyone has ever said to me.

  When I get home, my mom and Phil are sitting on the couch watching the news. Phil is typing on his laptop, immersed in work, as usual. I notice that my mom is crying next to him.

  “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “The world is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad place sometimes, and it doesn’t need to be,” she says, and then looks back to the screen, which shows the aftermath of another mass shooting, this time at a middle school in the Midwest. Forty-five kids dead in the span of a six-minute spree. I turn away. I’ve seen enough tragic shit for the day.

  “You sure?”

  “Come give me a hug. That will help,” she says, and so I lean down and let her throw her arms around my neck. She inhales deeply—and I realize she’s actually sniffing me, like I still have the comforting smell of the top of a baby’s head—and I stifle my sigh at her overwhelming mom-ness.

  “Your mother is too sensitive,” Phil says, in a patronizing voice, like my mom is both charming and idiotic. Once I’m freed from her embrace, I resist the sudden urge to clock him in the face.

  Forty-five kids dead.

  I don’t do anything, though, because I am me, and Phil is Phil, and also I’ve never hit anyone in my life, other than Jack in the third grade. If I actually did it, put my fist to Phil’s nose, I think his number one concern would be whether he got blood on the couch.

  I kiss my mom four times on the top of her head, which has always been our thing, and run upstairs to my room before I break something.

  I don’t let myself spend too much time thinking about how my mother married a bowl of oatmeal. How she is crying not just about those dead kids, but probably about my dad too. How in fifteen years there might be a me in that Midwestern town who selfishly decides his own personal questions are important enough to awaken half-sleeping wounds.

  I run straight to the guest room, anxious and eager to get a glimpse of my recently arrived grandmother. She’s lying on the bed, the one with the new hospital-like guardrails you can pull up if necessary. Her arms are crossed and her hazel eyes are wide open. Still as a picture. She doesn’t look any different from the last time I saw her, which was a couple of months ago over spring break. She has her long gray hair tied into her signature side braid, like a sister wife, and wears a faded black T-shirt with her lucky blue jeans.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, because that’s how it’s always been between us. No need for formalities, the hellos and the goodbyes and the see you laters of life. We’ve always jumped right in.

  “Playing dead,” my grandmother says, her voice warm and friendly and clear and one hundred percent alive. I feel a rush of relief. With only two words, I can tell she knows exactly who I am.

  “Umm, why?” I step farther into the room and catalog some more. Maybe there are a few extra strands of white in her hair. A few new lines on her forehead. Her hands, which used to be soft and playful, now look ancient and gnarled, hardened at the tips of her long fingers.

  But the rest, the vast majority of her: same.

  Or at the very least: familiar, recognizable.

  “Just practicing,” she says.

  “Doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you need to practice for.”

  “It’s good to be prepared.”

  “No one has said anything about you dyi
ng,” I say.

  “Everyone dies, Abbi Hope. You of all people should know that.” My heart clenches for a minute and I think: She knows. Of course she knows. I feel a burden blissfully unravel. And then I realize she’s talking about 9/11, about the baby me. Of course she doesn’t know about the cough.

  “True. Seems silly to practice, though.” I move closer. I want to hug her, to scoop her up like she’s four years old and toddler-sized. I’ve never before felt that impulse with my grandmother. I used to crawl into her lap and sit on her like she was a comfy chair. I used to slip my snot-covered hand into her hand whenever I could reach, like Livi does to me.

  I used to look up at her. Not down. Never down.

  “Come over here and tell me everything,” she says, and she starts to rise, slow and steady, a multistep process involving her elbows, then her wrists, and then her gnarled hands. Once she’s up, she grabs me in a tight hug.

  “You smell the same,” she says, and it occurs to me that she’s looking at me much the way I’m looking at her. Cataloging my changes.

  “So do you,” I say.

  “I wish I could bottle up your smell. Weird to think that will go. Even my sensory memories are going to escape me.” My grandmother’s voice is resolute. She’s the one who gave my mom her stoicism. In my mother it takes on a cheery perversion, but my grandma is all strong, clean lines when it comes to the difficult stuff. She’s stating a fact, true words without any sentimentality. The day after my grandfather, her husband for over four decades, died, my grandmother climbed out of bed, brushed her teeth, walked downstairs and brewed a pot of coffee for the rest of us. Sliced bagels and set out the cream cheese and lox. Once we had all eaten and caffeinated, she clapped her hands and said, “Okay, where do we start?”

  “Listen, I want to prepare you. Today is a good day. Tomorrow might be bad. That’s how it seems to go with this thing,” she says, and she’s so much the same, so much my grandmother—she’s taking care of me, again making everyone else coffee, when she’s the one in pain—that I ache. “Your mom says I went out without pants. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Apparently you gave the entire state of Maine a pretty good show,” I say, and we sit side by side. I’m cross-legged, like my campers, ankle on knee. “But whatever. You have great legs.”

  “Totally,” she says, stretching them out as if to admire them. Then she takes my hands in hers and stares at my palms. Traces the lines like there’s something to be deciphered, like she’s trying to make my details stay still. “I don’t remember. It’s like it happened to someone else. I asked your mom for a photo for proof. She showed me the police report. Fortunately, there were no actual pictures.”

  “I’m so sorry, Grandma.” I try to imagine what that must feel like. To have whole patches of your memory vanish. Something empty that should be full. I try to imagine having to look at a photo to prove something happened to you, and then I realize that of course I’ve been doing that for forever.

  “Don’t be. Life with a capital L. So, tell me about you.”

  “Nothing to tell,” I say. “You know. Status quo.”

  “I heard Cat dropped you.” Despite myself, I laugh. With my grandma’s martyrdom comes bluntness. When puberty first hit and my face erupted in acne, she’d looked at me and said, “Well, the good news is that awkward phases help with long-term personality development.”

  “People outgrow each other sometimes,” I say, and though I don’t mean it physically, I can’t help but look down at my body. I could easily pass for twelve years old. I wonder if it’s that simple. Not that I’m short, but that I didn’t even try to keep pace with my friends. That they were moving faster toward adulthood—or at least one version of it—than I was. Which is ironic, considering what has happened since. All the ways time has now changed for me and zoomed forward.

  “I say go find new friends,” my grandmother says, and her hands move on to my arms, cradle my elbows, the slope of my neck. Like she’s reading braille. “Ones that fit better.”

  “I’m trying,” I say.

  “Want to practice being dead with me? It’s weirdly fun,” she says.

  “Sure.”

  And so we both fall backward, flat on our backs, and our hands clasp automatically. We may no longer be in her old house in Maine. I may no longer be six years old and entertained by something as small as putting a colander on my head. And yet, we find ourselves palm to palm, like always, each of us reaching for the other.

  Together we practice. We keep our eyes open, though. Just in case.

  Back in the safety of my room, I take out my phone, but I can’t concentrate. Jack texts asking if I am coming over and I write back: Long day. I can’t stop seeing Chuck and his cracked-open face. Or Abbi’s eyes as she leaned in to hug him. Those kids dead on the news.

  Crap. Today was brutal.

  Jack’s doppelgänger explanation is bullshit. Photographs don’t lie. Still, there has to be a way to do this that doesn’t take Abbi down with me. I wish I knew what that was.

  I type: Abbi, I’m sorry.

  I delete. Start over: We don’t have to do this.

  I try again: I’m not really an asshole. There’s something I should tell you.

  On the car ride home, we were able to move away from Chuck. The two of us hanging out in her little Prius, headed somewhere we didn’t mind going. Despite everything, we had fun.

  Not sure why I feel the heaviness again, like Chuck has followed me into this house and up the stairs and into my bedroom.

  I cut and start over: Thanks for today. You’re the best.

  I click send and then power down my phone so I can’t see if she writes me back.

  Three days after the Chuck interview, I’m surprised to find myself, of all places, in Jack’s basement, sitting with Jack and Noah and nibbling on salami from an artfully arranged platter of fancy snacks that includes three varieties of cheese. But here I am on an old couch that looks passed down a few generations and has gaping holes that spit out fluffy yellowed guts, right in the middle of the two boys. We face a dark television set, and we line our feet up on the coffee table, like a picture on an indie album cover. Converse, flip-flops/glitter-toes, Vans. All dirty and well loved.

  “So you going to Moss’s party this weekend?” I ask about an hour into our impromptu hangout. I still don’t know who Moss is, but I like the way it feels to drop his name, to let Noah and Jack think that I am the type of person who gets invited to parties. Which is silly because they know full well that I’m not. In fact, when Noah invited me over this afternoon, he actually said the words You don’t have plans after camp, right?

  “You’re going?” Noah asks. I feel relieved that he doesn’t sound surprised.

  “With Julia. I bet it would be okay if you came too.” I have no idea if it’s okay for me to invite people to the party of a person I have never met. I suspect that as soon as we get there, Zach will work his mojo on Julia and I will again be left to fend for myself.

  And who knows? Maybe Noah and Jack could become my real friends, which is something that would have seemed absurd to me even a week ago. Yet, here we are. Eating cheese and crackers and cured meats. Despite the blackmail, things are surprisingly not awkward.

  Noah looks at Jack, and Jack looks back at Noah.

  “That’d be great,” both of them say, in unison. Then they laugh. In unison.

  “We spend a frightening amount of time together, if you haven’t noticed,” Noah says.

  “That’s why we lured you over. We desperately need to mix things up.” Jack runs his hands over his mini-Mohawk, not so much a nervous gesture, like Noah’s hair rub, as a contemplative one. “Hey, you think I could invite Brendan to the party?”

  “Who’s Brendan?” I ask.

  “So give me your take on this,” Jack says, and leans forward. “There’s this guy a
t the supermarket. He works a lane over. Everyone else thinks he’s straight.”

  “He has a tattoo of a mermaid. A boobtastic one. On his bicep,” Noah says. “I think it’s fair to say he thinks he’s straight.”

  “I never should have told you about that,” Jack says.

  “He has a tattoo? How old is this guy?” I ask.

  “Tattoos. Plural. Seventeen. He’s in community college,” Jack says. “But, like, his tough outsides don’t necessarily match his warm and mushy insides.”

  “Tell me more,” I say, relishing this. I had forgotten how good it can feel to get out of your own head and become invested in someone else’s life for a change.

  “He’s smart and nice, in a good way, not in an annoying way. He gives me these looks. I swear he finds excuses to ruffle my hair. I can’t explain it. I get a vibe. It’s not often I meet, like, good guys who give off a vibe,” Jack says.

  “What kind of vibe specifically?” I ask. “A gay or bi vibe?”

  “The vibe that says Let’s go make out in the back next to the frozen fish because I think I dig you,” Jack says.

  “That’s pretty specific. Why the frozen fish? What about the cup o’noodles?” Noah asks. “Or the aluminum foil?”

  “Noah doesn’t want me to be happy because then he’ll be left all alone in his lonesome lonerdom of loneliness,” Jack says.

  “He’s right,” Noah says, deadpan. “Not about me being lonely, but about me not wanting him to be happy.”

  “So what do you think?” Jack asks me.

  “I’m not going to lie and tell you that the mermaid tattoo doesn’t concern me,” I say with a smile.