by Katie Henry
I stumble through the doorway, push past a dark curtain, and find myself in a small entryway. Heart still pounding, eyes adjusting from the bright outside to low, artificial light, I realize I have no idea what I walked into. There’s a menu on the wall, under glass. A podium stands at the back of the room, next to a slightly open door, with an open ledger on top. A tall, thin man with an unfortunate goatee suddenly appears in the doorway. He startles when he sees me, then goes to stand behind the podium.
It must be a restaurant, and it must still be open for lunch, because I can hear low noise from the adjoining room. The man—or I guess the maître d’—beckons me over.
I hesitate for a second. I can stay at this random restaurant, where I don’t know what kind of food is served, how expensive it is, or whether it’s secretly a front for money laundering. Alternatively, I can go back outside and risk the chance of seeing my boyfriend.
This should be an easier decision.
With one last glance at the curtain, I walk toward the maître d’. I haven’t eaten all day, and by the time I’m done with lunch, Alex and his friends will definitely have moved on.
“Hi,” I say, raising my voice over the noise coming from inside the restaurant. It’s weird—it’s loud, but almost a singular sound, like a buzzing. I can’t pick out multiple voices. But then again, I usually can’t. “I’m guessing you’re open?”
He looks confused, but nods. “Do you—” he says, and then several other words I can’t pick out. He’s got a low voice, even for a man, and that’s always harder.
I smile. “Sorry?”
I hate always having to apologize for not catching something, but saying “What?” sounds rude, and “I can’t understand you” sounds like an accusation. So I tell everyone “I’m sorry, please excuse me, so sorry.” Over and over.
He frowns. “Do—want a t—”
This time, I catch the “t” sound in the last word. “T” for “table.” Duh. It’s a restaurant, of course he’s asking if I want a table.
“Yes, please,” I say, way too eager. “Thank you.”
He mumbles something else I can’t understand, opening the ledger.
I try not to groan out loud. “Um—”
He looks up, locks eyes with me, and then says a single word, overly slow. “Name.”
“Oh!” I say. “Isabel.”
He looks like he’s got a couple follow-up questions, but shakes his head, opens the door, and ushers me through it.
Inside, I notice three things very quickly:
1. This restaurant has no windows.
2. This restaurant has no food on the tables.
3. This restaurant is not a restaurant.
The tall man points me to an empty table right near the door, and I take it without question, sliding down into a plush chair with a plastic back. I clutch my bag on my lap, trying and failing to process what I’ve just stepped into. My mind is in overdrive, every one of my senses vying to feed information to my brain in the first half second.
It smells like old beer and the cleaning solution they used to clean out the horse stalls at my sleepaway camp, artificially fresh and overpowering.
It looks like if Dracula tried to throw his daughter a sweet sixteen party: a big, dark room lit with red and purple lights. Fake candlestick holders. Black-and-red-patterned wallpaper. But the crowd doesn’t match the decor. They’re mostly young and mostly guys and mostly in jeans and hoodies. So it looks like if Dracula tried to throw his daughter a sweet sixteen but made her invite all the employees of a local tech start-up.
It sounds like—it sounds like someone’s giving a speech. God, maybe it is Heather Dracula’s sweet sixteen. And here I am without anything to give her. Besides my blood.
I swivel around in my chair in the direction of the voice. Behind me, against the far wall is a low stage, the kind you might use for bands without much of a fan base. Onstage is a tall, three-legged wooden stool and a tall, two-legged human girl holding a mic. She’s got big eyes, a wide smile, and a short, messy mop of dark hair.
“So, I have a confession to make, and I hope you won’t think differently of me afterward,” she says into the mic. Maybe this is an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Though it seems weird to hold an AA meeting in a place with a bar. The girl pauses dramatically.
“I,” the girl says, “was a theater kid in high school.”
She doesn’t get another word out before someone in the back cheers, loudly. I expect her to ignore it, but she grins and points toward them. “Oh, you too? No, you don’t have to answer. Only a theater kid would interrupt someone’s set for a half second of attention.”
A set—she said a “set,” not a story or a speech. This isn’t a party or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. This is a “show.” A comedy show.
Everyone laughs. The girl slides right back into her act. “And you know, people always say theater kids are dramatic, but even the most over-the-top fourteen-year-old Hamilton fangirl has nothing on sports people. You guys set cars on fire when your team wins.” She throws her arm wide. “What the fuck! That makes no sense!”
As the audience giggles, I pick up my bag and look for an exit. I shouldn’t be here—I didn’t buy a ticket and I don’t know anything about stand-up, aside from watching my dad watch Seinfeld reruns. I don’t belong here. Best-case scenario, I remain as invisible to these people as I am to everyone else. Worst-case scenario, this girl onstage makes fun of me for her set. That’s a thing comedians do, right? Pick on people in the audience?
“I’m not saying sports fans are bad people,” she continues, almost placating. “But I am saying New York City doesn’t have to grease all the light poles after the Tony Awards.”
Everyone laughs. Including me. I relax my grip on the bag, because whatever, I can stay for a minute. Just to see where she goes with it.
“Can you even imagine what that would look like? A post-Tonys riot?” She takes the mic off the stand and places the stand behind her. “Just like, a mob of upper-middle-class white people marching down Broadway, doing the original choreography from A Chorus Line.”
I’ve never seen A Chorus Line and don’t know if what she does next is the original choreography, but she puts her whole body into it. She’s made entirely of limbs, a self-aware cartoon character high-kicking and box-stepping her way through a fictional riot. She looks totally ridiculous, and she must know that. The audience definitely does, and they laugh louder. But she doesn’t cringe or break character. It’s like she soaks up the laughter, without worrying why it’s coming.
“They’re blocking traffic, bashing pedestrians in the face with their high kicks. Everyone’s chanting”—she crouches down a bit and pumps her fist—“‘BRA-VA, BRA-VA, BRA-VA,’ until eventually it’s just guttural screaming, like—” She pauses, arches her back, makes her hands into claws, and demonstrates this. It’s inhuman. And hilarious.
How does she do that? I wonder. How can she be so sure she’ll be heard, so confident she’ll be liked? Even her clothes are confident; the maroon sweater layered artfully over a half-tucked gray-patterned button-down. Her sleeves rolled up and perfectly cuffed as if she studied a J.Crew mannequin. I can’t tell if I want to keep watching her until the sky goes black and the sun explodes, or if I want to be her.
She points to her right. “There’s a guy in a jersey that says Sondheim on the back and he’s wrapping his hand in a cashmere sweater so he can punch out the lights on the Jersey Boys marquee—”
She takes a beat, then points out to a spot over the audience’s heads. “Dame Judi Dench has stolen a police horse—”
I’m too enthralled to laugh, even though everyone else is cracking up. The girl keeps going, but I can barely hear her over this buzzing in my ears, this itching in my skin down to my bones.
And then she’s putting the mic back on the stand, saying “Thank you! You were great!” and waving as she clambers off the stage and down the stairs, without grace and without shame. The audience appl
auds and cheers. It takes me a second to realize I should be clapping, too, and another second to be certain I still have hands.
The maître d’—or I guess the emcee, actually—takes the stage. He leans into the mic. “Let’s hear it one more time for Mo Irani!”
We clap more, cheer more. She’s settled herself back at a table up front, squeezed in between a couple boys her age.
“All right, all right,” the emcee says, and it’s amazing how much crisper and clearer he sounds to me when he’s got a mic. “We’ve got one more comedian to see, and then we’ll let the Pyramid Lounge get back to being a club, and let all of you get back to your usual Saturday-night plans of, I don’t know, eating pizza while masturbating.”
“Uh, that seems unhygienic, Larry,” someone calls out.
Larry is unmoved. “Don’t be such a puritan.” He glances down at his ledger. “Last up, please put your hands together for . . . Isabel!”
Wait. What?
“No last name,” he adds. “Who knows, maybe it was—what do you call it?—asexual reproduction. Like with nematodes. Anyway, let’s hear it for Isabel!”
Wait. No.
“Isabel?” He squints into the crowd. “The girl who just came in? With the gray coat and the long hair? Kind of spacey, no offense?”
No no no no—
“Is she in the bathroom, or—” He shakes his head. “Okay, whatever, let’s give a big round of applause to all of today’s—”
“No,” I blurt out, and for a moment, I can’t tell if I’ve said it out loud. “Wait.” That was definitely out loud, because Larry stops short, and the audience turns to stare at me. Then I’m scrambling to my feet and screaming into my own brain, What are you doing Isabel what the fuck are you doing
What I’m doing is walking past tables of strangers, climbing up the steps, and accepting the mic from a very surprised Larry.
Larry is gone before I can reconsider, and I am standing onstage.
It smells like old beer, industrial cleaning solution, and my own animal panic.
It looks like an endless haze of red light and the vague outline of human-shaped shadows just beyond the hot, bright glare.
It sounds like silence.
Not my own silence, though I haven’t said anything yet. Their silence. The waiting, watching quiet of strangers who don’t know what to expect from me, because—
I realize it then, with equal terror and boundless relief: they don’t know me.
I’m not their classmate, or girlfriend, or sister, or daughter.
I’m not Isabel, who is so chill, so easy, the calm in the storm.
I’m not anyone to them. So I can be anything I want.
The mic is slipping out of my clammy hands. I adjust my grip, all ten fingers tightly curled around it, refusing to let go.
I think: I can’t do this.
I think: I don’t know how to do this.
I say: “Last week, the weirdest thing happened in my Shakespeare Seminar.”
Chapter 4
CRICKETS. OR, NOT crickets, I don’t understand why that’s still the universal symbol for a silent audience, like we’re all sitting outside on hay bales wondering if this new vaudeville craze is going to take off. The twenty-first-century version is a phone vibrating on silent.
I think: Keep going.
I think: Keep going before they drag you off the stage.
I say: “We were reading Hamlet, because of course we were.” I take a breath, disconnect my brain from my vocal cords, and keep talking.
“The man wrote like thirty plays, but the only one anyone ever wants to talk about is the one with a whiny prince who can’t figure out whether to kill his uncle who is, like, such a cartoon bad guy he’s literally the inspiration for Scar in The Lion King.”
A few chuckles, scattered and—it takes me a second to realize—expectant. They aren’t laughing because it was all that funny. They’re laughing because they’re expecting it to go somewhere. And I have no idea where it’s going.
“I mean, The Lion King is basically Hamlet for kids,” I tell them. “Except Hamlet has more stabbing.”
True. And it gets one laugh, from someone I can’t see.
“Did you know Shakespeare had a kid named Hamnet, who died? I mean, died young,” I clarify. “Obviously all of Shakespeare’s kids are dead now. Death comes for us all.”
Also true. But it does not get a laugh.
“Um. Anyway.” There’s a waver in my voice that wasn’t there before, and I know it’s because I’m panicking. I have to get to the point of this story, and it’s not Hamnet Shakespeare’s tragic ice-skating accident.
“So we were reading Hamlet and we all had to perform scenes because . . .” My face screws up as I think back to Ms. Waldman handing out the assignment. “I don’t know. It was meant to be performed. Yeah, okay, and it was meant to be performed by a bunch of dudes in tights who didn’t bathe, to an audience of drunk people who also didn’t bathe.” I take a breath. “It was like Burning Man. But with more stabbing.” I take a longer breath. “I assume.”
That gets a laugh. A small one. But a laugh.
I think: You can say whatever you want up here.
I think: You can say what you actually think up here.
I say: “My scene partner was this guy in my class named Jack, and he is just . . . the fucking worst.”
The laugh I get there has to be from the sheer earnestness in my voice. Or maybe from the gallon of sweat dripping down my back.
“I’m allowed to say ‘fuck,’ right?” I ask in a sudden rush of self-consciousness. No one answers. “Yeah, of course I can, this isn’t a . . . kid’s birthday party. Actually, it’s funny, when I walked in, I thought this was a sweet six—”
I think: Actually no, that isn’t funny at all, Isabel.
I think: Just talk, just talk before they stop listening like everybody else.
I say: “. . . Never mind. Anyway, Jack sucks. And I hate him.”
On pure impulse, I take a couple steps forward, closer to the audience. I peel one hand out of the death grip I’ve got on the mic and attempt to set the stage for them.
“So he’s Hamlet.” I point out a spot they can imagine Jack standing. “I’m Ophelia.” I point to another spot where she could be standing. The me from last week, who already feels like a different girl entirely.
“And we’re doing that famous ‘get thee to a nunnery’ scene, only he keeps changing his lines. He keeps changing the lines to make me the joke.”
I know I’m just staring at two spots on an empty stage, but it’s almost like I’m there, all over again, and so is the humiliation, and the rage, and the powerlessness.
“So I’m standing there, wondering . . .” I pause and tilt my head toward the invisible Jack onstage. “How was this such a hard decision for Hamlet? The whole murder thing. Because I want to full-on kill this dude who embarrassed me in a bullshit class, but Hamlet looks at his uncle who assassinated his dad and then married his mom and is like, ‘I don’t know, maybe we can work it out at the next family reunion.’”
That gets an okay response, so my mouth decides to continue down the Murder Path while my brain fails to stop it.
“Hamlet acts like it’s wrong to even think about murder, but that might be my favorite pastime,” I say. And then, for no good reason at all, I double down. “Honestly, planning a hypothetical murder is the perfect hobby.”
Well, this is officially off the rails.
“No, hear me out,” I say, aware I just encouraged a room of strangers to plot death like my grandmother encourages people to take up crocheting. “It costs no money. You can do it from anywhere. Your home, school, when you’re stuck on the train—especially when you’re stuck on the train. And man,” I sigh, “is it fun.”
Well, this is officially off the rails, in a ditch, and on fire.
“So go ahead,” I hear myself telling the audience, as if this can’t get worse. “Plan a murder. It’s just like they told
you in abstinence-only sex ed: it’s okay to have murderous thoughts, just don’t act on them until after marriage.” And then, like a spark, I know my next line. “Because they can’t make your spouse testify against you.”
There’s a half-second silence. Crickets and phone vibrations and a train on a ditch on fire and then . . . they laugh. All of them, or it seems like all of them, because I still can’t see, and I can’t feel my legs now, but I can hear. I can hear them laughing. And maybe it’s not as loud as it could be, maybe it’s only out of surprise or pity, but it’s like something warm swells in my soul. I hear them. And they heard me.
It isn’t going to get better than this, and I know it. It’s time to get off this stage, peel off the shirt I’ve sweat all the way through, and forget this ever happened. It’s time to go.
“Thank you!” I shout, as if they’re clapping too loud for me to speak normally, which they aren’t because they don’t know it’s over yet. I struggle the mic back into its stand, then hold both hands up like I’m being robbed in an Old West saloon. “Sorry!”
Larry’s beside me onstage now, and I use him for cover as I speed-walk to the stairs. Like that’ll work on an elevated stage with lights so bright they could stun small animals.
“Give it up for . . .” Larry double-checks his clipboard. “Isabel. Yeah.”
The applause is nowhere as loud or as genuine as it was for the girl who went before me, but it’s there. I walk back to my seat half-dazed, and it’s not until I sink down into my chair and the familiar puffiness of my coat beneath me that I come back to reality. That wasn’t me, onstage. I don’t know who it was, but I could never do that. I could never stand under a spotlight and tell an audience what I really think.
But I did.
It sounds like Larry the Emcee is wrapping things up—thanking everyone for coming, reminding them when the next open mic night is—so I turn away from the stage to gather my stuff. As the room explodes into noise, audience members talking and laughing with each other as they leave, I fumble around in my bag for my phone, hoping Alex hasn’t texted.
