CRASH.
Dad and I stand frozen, looking at my bedroom window.
Or what used to be my bedroom window. My kick wasn’t earth shattering. It was window shattering.
Mom is outside again. “What was that?!”
“Watch out for the glass!” Dad shouts. “It’s everywhere.”
“What happened?!” Mom shouts.
“Iaccidentallykickeditthroughthewindow,” I babble. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
That refreshing feeling of freedom I had earlier? Good-bye.
Mom points at Dad. “This is your fault. She should have come back in the house when I said so!”
“I was letting her take a break,” Dad says.
Mom folds her arms. “Yeah, it was a break, all right. A break in the window. At the CHADD meeting, they said to be consistent, Howard.” She walks away, mumbling.
“It’s not Dad’s fault!” I call after her. “It’s mine!” I look at Dad. “Are you going to make me pay for the window?”
Dad hands me the football and puts his arm around me. “No. It was an accident. Nobody’s fault. That’s why they’re called accidents.” Then he lets out a long, twenty-pound sigh.
Everything is always my fault.
Tony wanders the room, explaining our assignment. “Now that we’ve compared and contrasted examples of irony in King of Shadows and the play, I’d like you to write eight examples of irony from your own lives. Any questions? No? Good.” Tony walks over to me and whispers in my ear, “Do you want to sit in the back of the room? This is for a grade.”
“I think I’d like to try sitting here today,” I answer. “You said for smaller assignments I don’t have to move.” Tony nods, then goes to his desk.
“Guess what?” I whisper to my quad as soon as Tony’s gone. Max and Amy don’t look up. They’ve already started writing. “I kicked a football into my bedroom window by accident. Now there’s a hole in my wall where my window should be. I’m so miserable.”
“Why are you miserable?” Trina asks. “A hole in your wall is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. I would paint a bull’s-eye around it. Or a giant eye.”
“Well, my Dad nailed plywood over it until the repair guy comes. So now I have a windowless bedroom, like a dungeon.”
Trina wiggles her fingers. “A dark lair. Excellent.”
“Plus, I have to do homework at the kitchen table in front of my mother,” I continue. “Being grounded is the worst.”
“I’ve never been grounded before,” Trina says. “What’s that like?”
“Super fun. Early bedtime, no social media, no Netflix or sports until my homework is done…no…” My voice trails off. Max and Amy have stopped writing. They’re listening, but something is off. There’s a shift behind their eyes.
Amy doesn’t play sports, Trina isn’t on social media, and Max watches magic videos, not Netflix shows.
My grounded is their normal. I’m making them feel bad about themselves.
I’m in the midst of a conversational accident.
Change the subject. Fast. “It’s not so bad. My brother smuggled in my mom’s Cosmopolitan magazines. There was an article called ‘Are Your Breasts Asymmetrical?’ ” I was horrified to learn, after staring at myself in the bathroom mirror for ten minutes, that yes, in fact, the little bit I have is totally asymmetrical. How did I not notice this hideous deformity before now?
Amy grins when I mention Cosmo. “Have you read that magazine?” I ask her.
She smiles. “Mm-hmm. My mom gets it too.” We both break out into peals of laughter. Amy must know Cosmo is practically like watching an R-rated movie. It’s the most inappropriate magazine ever. Judging from their baffled faces, Max and Trina have never seen it.
Who knew Amy and I could have an inside joke?
“You all need to get back to work,” Tony says, looking over at us.
We whisper quieter. “Drew found all these back issues snooping through my mom’s stuff,” I say. “I read the articles, and he drools over the models in their underwear.”
“Sounds right,” Max says.
“Oh, and Drew found a bottle of Mom’s perfume. Guess what it’s called? Sexy.” I pout my lips. We die laughing, quietly. “Can you imagine if your mom had a perfume called Sexy?” Max doesn’t find that so funny. Maybe boys are more grossed out by that kind of stuff about their moms. He’s back to writing his list of irony examples, but Trina, Amy, and I can’t stop cracking up. Trina snort-laughs so loud, she sounds like a farm animal. It’s hard to recover after that.
“Keep it down,” Tony cautions us. “We have the test coming up, so if you finish early, start the study guide. Use your notes.”
Amy works on the assignment. Trina stares off into the distance like she’s in a trance, then starts writing.
I watch the three of them. I want to go back to talking and laughing. And then it hits me. Hanging out with these three is starting to make me look forward to coming to school every day.
“Ten minutes left,” Tony informs us. He walks up to our quad and whispers to me, “You’re distracted. Why don’t you go in the back?”
I take my paper and pencil, go to my lone table, and get to work. It is easier to focus back there, facing away from everybody. Kelvin is at the other table in the corner. We glance at each other briefly, then get back to work.
Abby Green
Examples of Irony
DEFINITION: Irony: (noun) When the literal meaning of something is the opposite of the intended meaning.
EXAMPLES:
I’m hyper, but I have to take a stimulant to calm down enough to focus. It’s like going upstairs to get downstairs.
The older my mom gets, the younger she wants to look. She is dressing like a preschooler now. She has become Benjamin Button.
My grandparents own a business named Pewter Palace. It is not a palace. It is a flea-market stall the size of a Tic Tac box.
I’m coordinated on a field, track, or court, but somehow can’t walk two feet without bumping into someone or spilling or breaking something.
My teacher thinks I should be a stand-up comic, but no one in my family thinks I’m funny except my brother Drew and my grandpa, and the only reason Grandpa laughs at my jokes is because I’m pretty sure I’m his favorite grandchild. (Although I have a sneaking suspicion he’s telling Drew the same thing.)
As much as I like your examples, I assigned eight, not five. Next time, a little less socializing will give you more time to get that A you deserve!
I can’t wait to make them all fall out of their seats laughing. I didn’t prepare anything, but how different can this be from joking around in class? They laugh at my material all the time.
I’m confident in my new star tank, dragon jeans, and red flip-flops. I skipped my medicine this morning on purpose, because I want to be my true self. It’s not a written test. It’s comedy.
I start, pacing back and forth in front of my audience. “Why do we have to take English? Don’t we already know English? We should all automatically get As.” I’m pacing too fast. I slow down, the way comedians do on TV. “So they make us take English and then what are we forced to study? Shakespeare! WHICH ISN’T EVEN ENGLISH. ’Tis a wholeth othereth language, am I righteth?” I wait. Nothing. Quiet. I spot Sofia and her friends. Their first language isn’t English. That joke couldn’t have been funny to them. I should have thought about that.
I swallow nervously. “So when I first met Tony, he asked me, ‘Have you ever read Shakespeare?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, who wrote it?’ ”
Max laughs a little. So does Trina. But no one else.
What am I supposed to talk about up here? I’m not my sparkly self at all.
“Hello?” I whisper. “You guys are so quiet. It’s as quiet as…as…” Amy’s pretty face catches my eye. “…as quiet as Amy in here.” Everyone whips their heads around to check out Amy, who looks down. “Amy is so quiet, the only way I can tell sh
e’s awake is if her eyes are open.”
I meant that to be funny, but as soon as the words come out, I hear how mean they sound. Super mean. Amy hangs her head even lower.
That was horrible of me.
Embarrassment dries up my throat. I stop looking at faces and instead limit my gaze to the tops of people’s heads. I don’t want to see the way they’re looking at me. Or worse, tuning out entirely, like Sofia. She’s been secretly texting the whole time using a stack of books to block Tony’s view.
I pick up a glass paperweight sitting on Tony’s desk. “Tony, why do you have a paperweight? What are you expecting, a freak storm to blow the windows open and let in wind that will blow your papers away into the stratosphere? What good are paperweights inside? Wind doesn’t happen inside!”
Tony smiles. Doesn’t laugh. Just smiles.
Sofia yawns. Long and loud. The yawn travels around the room contagiously, striking one person after the other.
I feel like I’m trapped in a car with no air. This is a nightmare. I’m bombing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they threw their water bottles and sodas at me.
Why did I think I could perform without a script, unprepared? Why can’t I make them laugh easily, without thinking, the way I do during class?
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrring. The bell goes off. So does most of the class. And so do I.
“Abby!” Tony calls after me. I keep going.
Max, Trina, and Silent Amy catch up with me outside. “You all right?” Max asks.
“You weren’t that bad,” Trina says immediately, which, of course, means I was.
“Yeah,” Amy whispers.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I ask, mortified.
“You need practice, that’s all,” Max says, like my father says to Drew in the backyard even though everyone knows it’s a lost cause. “You got better toward the end.”
Amy nods. How can she be nice to me after what I said about her? “I didn’t mean to single you out,” I tell her. “Well, I guess I did, but I’m sorry about how it sounded. I was…trying to come up with something better, but I couldn’t.”
“ ’S okay,” she says. If I were her, I would want to kill me. I take a good look at her. There’s a sweetness in her face I’m just now seeing. “They were jokes,” she whispers.
Max and Trina start talking over each other in an attempt to comfort me, about how every comedian or actor bombs sometimes, and how I should keep working at it. Max ends his pep talk with, “You’ll get plenty of practice working a crowd at my magic shows. Then you’ll be ready for this.”
“Truth,” Trina says. “You just need some experience, and you’ll be fierce.”
“I already had enough of an experience today, thanks,” I say.
“You’re supposed to learn something from this, that’s all,” she says. Yeah, I’m learning I’m not as good as I thought I was.
Mom’s car pulls up to the curb. “Let’s never speak of this again and if you’ll excuse me, I have to go fake my own death. It was nice knowing you.”
“What happened?” Mom asks when I get in. “Are you okay?”
“Nothing happened. I just tried to do a little comedy routine, and it wasn’t funny. I’m fine.”
“Oh, Abbles. I’m sorry.” She asks a few more questions.
“Mom, leave me alone. Please!”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“I don’t need your help.” Guilt, guilt, guilt. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
I’m pretty stunned by what Mom does next, which is to pull in to a McDonald’s drive-through and get me a chocolate milk shake. She never gives me junk food. “When I was your age and had a bad day, Grandma bought me a milk shake.”
“But it has sugar.”
“We can make an exception today.”
Who is this alien in the form of my mother? “Thanks, Mom.” I put on my headphones, stare out the window, and slurp my shake. It doesn’t make me feel better.
Why didn’t my performance turn out the way I imagined it? I stank. Badly. I didn’t even do any of my characters or accents. I thought today would be like goofing on the teacher or joking back and forth with someone in class, but up there by myself, it was different. My ideas didn’t flow.
Maybe I’m even less talented than Caitlin. Maybe I’m not funny enough to do stand-up or be a professional actress. The Abby Show will never happen.
Have I been lying to myself about having something special inside me?
If I don’t have that spark inside me, then I don’t have anything unique going for me. My brain is just like a dog off its leash, wandering off the sidewalk.
Maybe I’m just an average troublemaker, another underachieving class clown.
Average.
I have to be more than that.
I have to be.
Everything I do lately is a disaster. My comedy debut is just one more failure to add to my list. I could have gotten an A on that irony assignment. Max and Amy got hundreds. (Trina got a seventy, but she doesn’t try, and I don’t think she cares.) I’m so tired of messing up. I want to ace our big test, get it right for a change.
Max suggests we all do a group study session. We meet at Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s our first time getting together outside of school. I just hope Max doesn’t bring up me doing his magic show. I keep making excuses or changing the subject.
“Did you know soldiers in World War One were called doughboys because of all the doughnuts the volunteers gave them?” Max says with his mouth full. He likes glazed, same as me. “And did you know a squid’s brain is shaped like a doughnut? They eat through the hole in it. If they swallow something too big, they get brain damage.”
“Thank you, Captain Trivia.” I lick crumbs off my fingers. “Why do squids even have brains?”
Trina practically downs her Very Berry smoothie in one slurp. “You’re a fountain of information, Max. Where did you move from, Smartville?”
“Close,” he says. “Pennsylvania.”
“Oh, I love vampires,” I say.
Amy scrunches her brows together, confused.
“That was a joke,” I tell her.
She smiles like the Mona Lisa and takes a small sip of her orange smoothie. Sometimes I wonder about Amy. It doesn’t seem like she’s that smart, but she’s a better student than the rest of us. Her notes and outlines are so good I’d pay for them. In fact, she gets the highest grades out of all of us: straight As. I can’t figure out what on earth she’s doing here.
It’s the one thing none of us talk about. Why we all flunked.
“So what were you guys supposed to do on your summer vacation before we took this lovely detour?” I ask.
“Yoga and meditation camp,” Trina says.
I make snoring sounds, fall over, and pretend I’m asleep. Then I pop back up.
Trina giggles. “My parents send me there to help me focus. I went last summer.”
“ADHD?” I ask. She nods. I knew it.
“Like Abby,” Max says.
“No, not exactly like Abby,” Trina informs him.
“Right,” I say. “There are different types.”
It’s obvious Trina has the non-hyper type most girls with ADHD have. Her mellow spaciness reminds me of Ivy Houseman, this girl on my soccer team. Ivy has ADHD but isn’t on meds because she has a heart problem, so she can’t take them. During games she was constantly wandering away from her position on the field and never knew where she was supposed to be.
“A doctor once told me the exact kind I have, but I don’t remember,” Trina says. “My parents told him they didn’t believe in ADHD.”
“Sounds like my Aunt Roz,” I say. “She doesn’t believe in it either.”
“That’s nuts,” Max says. Amy nods, agreeing.
“My parents believe in it now,” Trina says. “But they didn’t at first. They think food, yoga, meditation, and natural remedies are very important. I’m not supposed to eat meat, eggs, preservatives, food coloring, or
processed sugar.”
“How’s that working out for you?” I ask. Trina’s got the worst case of LaLa Land I’ve ever seen.
“It does help,” Trina says. “I don’t get upset or anxious like I used to, and I sleep better. But I think my parents might finally be considering giving medication a try. They’ve never even filled out an IEP for school.” That explains why Trina doesn’t join Kelvin and me at the back tables for tests, or get offered extra time.
“Do you believe in ADHD?” Max asks her.
“Of course,” she answers, holding her cup upside down over her open mouth so the last drops of her smoothie fall in. “I showed my parents this article about scientific proof of attention deficit. It had pictures of how ADHD brains are different and interviews with researchers about genes linked to it. That’s when they started to change their minds. That and me flunking English.” Trina puts her feet on her chair and hugs her knees. “I wasn’t even upset when I found out I was going to summer school. It was the start of a new path, you know? And I got to know you guys.” She grins.
Her words from that first day come back to me: The universe is, like, always surprising us with a new path. I didn’t understand what she meant then, but I do now. Trina may be the most positive person I know. Who else could take a crappy situation like summer school and turn it into a good thing?
“My mom kicked Aunt Roz out of the house because she didn’t believe in ADHD,” I say.
“I wouldn’t mess with your mom,” Max says. I bet he’s remembering that day in Publix when Mom terrorized the cashier. “What happened?”
“She was visiting us from New York. I was in fourth grade, just diagnosed, and she told my mother ADHD was fake. I went, ‘Stop saying that! It IS real.’ Something snapped inside me, like the night I redecorated Finsecker’s neighbor’s car. I threw a glass at the wall. Then Aunt Roz goes, ‘See? What she needs is discipline.’ Mom gave her the boot and she flew back to New York that day.”
“Wow, your mom really stood up for you,” Max says. There’s something in his voice I haven’t heard before. A hard edge.
This Is Not the Abby Show Page 10
