by Katie Henry
Zero calls or texts. None from Alex, and none from my parents. Which is a huge relief. Would it be nice to have some indication someone gives a shit about where I am and what I’m doing? Yes. But in this case, would I have actually told them the truth? No.
Someone taps on my table, and I look up to see the girl who performed before me—the theater girl, the one in the maroon sweater—sidled up to the far edge. Her smile is warm and easy, but I just stare at her, too surprised to smile back.
“You d—have to—” she says, not quite loud enough to top the noise around us.
“What?” I ask, too surprised she’s talking to me at all to use a more polite “Sorry?”
She repeats it. I shake my head and point toward my ear. “I can’t . . .”
The girl hesitates, her fingers still on the edge of my table. Her friend—even taller than her, lanky, with a guitar case slung over his shoulder—is a couple steps in front of her now. When she looks over at him, he nods his head toward the door. She turns away from him, pulls out the chair next to mine, and sits down.
“I said,” she tells me, “you didn’t have to apologize. After your set. Everyone here has seen worse.”
That is almost impossible to believe.
“Really?” I ask her.
“Way worse,” she promises.
I want to believe her.
She throws a question to her friend, over her shoulder. “Do you remember the time that guy threw up twenty seconds into his bit about Tinder?”
“Right into the orchestra pit,” he confirms, heading over. “But I think it improved the joke.”
“The orchestra pit?” I ask, scanning the room for one.
“Oh, not here,” she says. “Another room, across town.”
“Was it here the dude with the soul patch ran way over time and threw his water glass when everyone told him to stop?”
The girl considers, then shakes her head. “No, the emcee was Colin so it must have been at the Forest.”
He nods. “Right.”
“See? You’re not even in the top ten.” She smiles at me, then sticks out her hand. “I’m Mo.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say. Then I think about what I just said. “I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know you, I just heard your, um, set? Your set. It was really funny, and you’re really brave to be that negative about sports in Chicago—but then at the end of your set, they said your name at the end, so I did know your name because of that.”
Mo bites back a laugh. “You talk a lot, don’t you?”
That is the longest string of words I’ve said to anyone since third grade. I choose not to tell her this.
She misunderstands my silence. “That’s a good thing. In this case.”
“What case?” I ask.
“Comedy.” She leans in. “I’m guessing this was your first time?”
“Huh?”
“At an open mic,” she says. “Doing stand-up. Was that your first time?”
I hesitate, because I’m honestly not sure what just happened could be considered anything other than word vomit.
“It’s okay,” her friend says. “Your first time is always awkward.”
“This is Will, by the way,” Mo says. He sticks out his hand, and I shake it.
“This is kind of a weird room for someone super green,” Mo says. “Just so you know.”
“Green,” I repeat.
“New,” Will clarifies.
“We can show you way better places to start out. With bigger student crowds.” Mo tilts her head. “So what are you, a freshman?”
That makes me prickle. Do I really look fourteen to her? People never think I’m younger than I am, only older. “Um, no, I’m a junior.”
Mo doesn’t look fazed. “Oh, okay. We’re seniors. UChicago. Do you go there, too, or—where?”
Oh. Oh.
I think: I go to Davis Preparatory School, which is for high schoolers, which is what I am.
I think: No one here knows what I am. I could be something different.
I say: Nothing, for a very long moment.
I should tell her I’m sixteen. I should tell her I’m not in college. Shouldn’t I? Should I?
She wouldn’t be inviting me to come out with her friends if she knew I was in high school. She probably wouldn’t even be talking to me.
I can tell Mo the truth and risk her not wanting to be friends.
I can lie, and risk getting caught.
I exhale. I inhale. I choose.
“Roosevelt,” I blurt out before I can change my mind. “I go to Roosevelt. By the Loop.”
“Oh,” Mo says. “Cool.”
“It’s funny, I’ve never met anyone who goes there,” Will says.
Yeah, that was the idea.
“It’s pretty small,” I say, trying to picture the flyer in my college counselor’s office. “Close-knit. You know?” I cautiously pump my fist. “Go . . . Lakers.”
Another boy around their age appears by Mo’s shoulder, wearing a leather jacket layered over a hoodie and a scowl.
“I don’t know what’s taking so long, but I’m not sticking around to find out what this shithole is like at night,” he says to her.
“What are you picturing?” Mo asks him.
The boy in the jacket spreads his arms wide. “Cannibalism. Animal sacrifice. Twelve-dollar gin and tonics.”
“What kind of nightclubs do you go to?” Will asks him.
“Because of the decor,” the boy in the jacket says. “Look at it. It looks like—like—”
“Like Dracula’s daughter’s sweet sixteen party?” I blurt out.
Mo cracks up, and the boy in the jacket seems to notice me for the first time.
“Oh, hey,” he says. “Murder Girl.”
“Isabel,” I say, sincerely hoping that nickname doesn’t catch on.
“Jonah.” He glances around the room. “Yeah, teenage vampire seems about right. Let’s go.”
As if on cue, Larry the Emcee pokes his head through the curtain by the doorway. “Why the fuck are you all still here? I’m locking up. Leave.”
Mo puts a hand to her chest. “Larry. What would we do without your chivalry?”
“Your eloquence,” Jonah adds. “Your wit.”
“Leave faster,” Larry says.
They all start for the door, and I scramble to grab my bag and zip up my coat. Larry shuts the door behind us as we exit, Mo and me at the back, the boys ahead of us trading one-liners so fast I can’t make them out. I linger for a moment at the front entrance. What if Alex is outside? It’s been long enough, I can’t imagine why he would be here, but still. I take a breath. It’s fine. He’s probably gone, and plus, I’m with Mo and everyone else. Alex wouldn’t do anything with so many people around.
I shake my head. I’m being ridiculous again. What do I think he would do? That was one time, on the train platform, just one time—
When I step outside, the sun is high overhead, and I blink into the blazing light. I wonder if this is how it feels to leave a cocoon. Or for a snow crocus to poke through the dirt at the first sign of spring. I rub at my eyes. Mo already has her sunglasses on.
“We’re probably going to go get a drink by campus, if you want to come,” she offers.
“I can’t.” Not a lie. I can’t get into a bar. “I have to study.” Also not a lie. I have a math test on Monday.
“Maybe next time,” she says, and my breath catches. She wants there to be a next time. Do I?
“Do you guys do this, a lot? Open mics?”
She shrugs, pulling on a pair of knit fingerless gloves. “Not every night, but once a week for sure.”
I try to picture her life. Days in the library or the dining hall or dusty classrooms arguing about dead men I’ve never heard of and books I’ve never read. Nights with her best friends in dark comedy clubs, under a glowing spotlight. It’s almost like a movie.
“That’s so cool,” I say.
“You should come out with us,” she
says. “I’ll text you, the next time we’re going.”
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“It’s more fun with friends, trust me. And it would be nice to have another girl.” She taps on her phone for a second, then holds it out. “Here, put in your number.”
It’s not as if I haven’t given my number to people I like way less. And it’s not like I’m giving her my address. Or my soul. I type it in and hand the phone back.
“Seven-seven-three,” she says, glancing at the area code. “Are you from Chicago?”
“Yeah, I grew up here,” I tell her. I don’t tell her at least legally, I’m still growing up here.
“Cool. Maybe you can help us find some new spots.”
“Mo—” I take a breath. “I don’t think I can actually—you know.” She says nothing, so I elaborate. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Getting up on stage, the whole thing, none of that was supposed to happen. It was an accident.”
Mo deserves to know that, because she’s serious about this. Comedy. Stand-up. She knows so much about it, she must be serious, and I—I stumbled onstage and stumbled through a murder-fantasy monologue, and I’m stumbling to explain I can’t do this. I wait for Mo to figure that out herself, and to walk away. But she doesn’t.
“What a wonderful accident,” she says, and her whole face breaks into a smile. And I can’t help it. Mine does, too.
Mo pops her coat collar against the wind. “See you later, Izzy.”
Chapter 5
I DIDN’T THINK much of Hamlet, but I’m enjoying the sonnets. They’re so much nicer to read. No duels, no madness, no absurd piles of dead people by the end of Act 5. Just one man telling the people he loves how much he loves them.
Alex and I are in my bedroom, doing homework. Well. I’m doing my Shakespeare analysis for Monday, and Alex is wandering around my room bothering my plants. I decide if he’s not going to do his work, he might as well help me with mine.
“Tell me what you think of this one.”
He groans. “I didn’t take this class for a reason.”
“I have to analyze the rhythm, so I need to say it out loud.”
“It’s Friday. You have the whole weekend. Would you relax?”
“‘Love is not love,’” I read to him, “‘Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / O no! it is an ever-fixed mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’”
I glance up. But Alex isn’t even looking at me.
“What do you think?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I think it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Of course it does.” I look back down at the sonnet. “It means if you really love someone, you love them even if they ‘alter.’ Even if they’re different, someday. Or if they aren’t there, anymore. He’s saying love is constant and unchanging, even if everything else changes around you.”
“Sure.” Alex slides down next to me on the bed.
“Don’t you think that’s—” But before I can finish the sentence, he’s pulled me closer and is kissing me. It’s easy to melt into this, when he kisses me like that. It’s like the universe narrows to a pinpoint, and everything that could hurt me, does hurt me in the real world—all my frustrations and uncertainties and fears—they’re too big to fit inside.
It would be so easy to let the world around me contract and forget what I was thinking or doing before he kissed me. But it’s just—I wasn’t done. I had more to say.
So I do something I’ve never done before: I pull away.
“Not all the sonnets are about love,” I say. So he didn’t like that sonnet. There are 153 others. “Well, they are, but there’s more in them than that.” I ignore the obvious annoyance in his eyes and turn my head back to the book, flipping through the pages. Alex lets his hand drop. “Like this one—I think this one’s my favorite.”
He flops down on the bed, as dramatic as the ingenues in the old movies he likes so much. “Isabel—”
“‘When I perceive that men as plants increase, / Cheered and check’d even by the selfsame sky—’”
“Men are plants?”
“Men are like plants; they grow,” I say. “Under the same blue sky. People change, over time, like plants do, and we all have a prime of life that doesn’t last long.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, getting up from the bed for the phone he left sitting on my dresser.
“It’s like this whole nature metaphor.” I look back down at my book. “Love is a forest, something natural and untamable, or something. And then at the end, he says: ‘And all in war with Time for love of you, / As he takes from you’ . . .” I pause. “‘I engraft you new.’”
I love that final line. I engraft you new.
Ms. Waldman told us “engraft” comes from the Greek word for writing. Shakespeare is immortalizing his love through words. But grafting is something gardeners do, too, when they join two plants into one. They take the roots and the stems of one plant and attach the delicate shoot of another. It becomes one plant, a new plant, stronger than it ever could have been before.
I look up, ready to explain to Alex why I love that line so much. But he’s bent over his phone, texting. I go back to my book, trying to lose myself in Shakespeare, plants, and the idea of unchangeable, ever-fixed love.
“When did you get this?”
I close the book. My closet door is open, and Alex is holding up one of my dresses. A new one. My mom plucked it out of Bloomingdale’s final-sale clearance rack after Christmas, but I haven’t worn it yet. I haven’t even tried it on. My mom shops sales racks with the fervor of a religious fanatic and the aggression of a five-star general, so the dress is more her style than mine: long sleeves, high neck, and a delicate green floral pattern you might also find on vintage curtains.
I’d have gone for something more neutral, personally. Something that makes it easier to blend in. But a gift is a gift.
“A couple weeks ago,” I tell Alex. “My mom bought it for me.”
“I can tell.”
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s like a, what do you call it? Pioneer dress.”
“Prairie dress?”
“Sure.”
Alex is a man of simple taste when it comes to women’s fashion. Leggings. Boots. Tops without ruffles or peplums or necklines that cover the collarbone.
“It’s like something a nun would wear,” he says. “A grandma nun.”
“Nuns usually aren’t grandmas.”
“Huh?”
“They marry Jesus.” I pause. “And I don’t think he puts out.”
“Is that a joke?”
“No. I genuinely don’t think he puts out.”
He blinks at me, then shakes his head and turns away to hang the dress back up.
“You should give it to Goodwill,” he says.
Then he starts texting someone, giving me a prime opportunity to roll my eyes without him seeing.
My phone vibrates. I pick it up. Alex doesn’t notice.
Hey Izzy! This is Mo. We’re going out tonight. You free?
It’s been almost two weeks since I stumbled into the comedy club. I assumed Mo had forgotten about me, or decided the girl who riffs onstage about killing a man is not the girl to add to your team. But here it is. An actual invitation.
I glance over at Alex, who’s buried in his own phone. We don’t have plans together tonight, but I can’t tell him about Mo, or any of this. Not unless I also want to tell him how I managed to end up at a comedy club in the first place, and that story doesn’t paint me as a great girlfriend.
My phone vibrates again.
9 PM list, 930 start @ The Forest
This time, Alex does notice. When he sees the phone in my hand, he instantly loses interest in his.
“Who’s texting you?” he asks, striding over to look over my shoulder.
“Mo,” I say, both hands around my phone now.
&n
bsp; “Mo?” Alex repeats. “Who is he?”
“She,” I say quickly. “I think it’s a nickname—”
“Fine, who is she?”
“Nobody.” He narrows his eyes. I swallow. “I mean, nobody you’d know. She’s in college. We just kind of struck up a conversation.”
“You,” he says, beyond skeptical, “struck up a conversation.”
“She was really the one who—” I cross my arms. “She’s nice. She wants to hang out.”
“What, is she gay?”
I recoil. “Alex.”
“Well?”
“We talked for five minutes, I have no idea.” I throw up my hands. “Why do you care?”
“I don’t care.” He chews on the inside of his mouth. “I’m just wondering.”
“Why?” I press.
“Because maybe she’s trying to get with you. Why else is she texting?”
Is that what he thinks? No one would talk to me unless they wanted to have sex with me?
“You know,” I say, trying to keep my voice even, “it’s possible she wants to be my friend. I’ve had friends before.”
“Friend,” he corrects me. “And it was Naomi Weiss.”
“She counts.”
“Barely.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m the reason people talk to you now. I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it’s true.”
I think: People talked to me.
I think: Just because you don’t care about them doesn’t mean they aren’t people.
I say: Nothing.
It’s like he can read my thoughts, even the ones I never put into words. “Don’t take that the wrong way.”
“How should I take it?”
“All I mean is—I can see what other people can’t, about you. You know? I can see it, but on the surface, you’re not all that . . .” He shakes his head. “I don’t know the word. Approachable, I guess?”
“If I’m that unapproachable, why did she approach me?”
“That’s what I’m saying!” He sighs. “That’s why you need to be careful. Who knows what she wants from you?”
I think: She wants me to be her friend. She wants me to get up on stage and take a risk.
I think: And all you want is . . . all of me.
