by Katie Henry
And then a voice, loud and demanding and male, cuts her short. “You suck.”
We all swivel our heads around, trying to identify just who that came from.
“What’s that, now?” Mo says mildly, her eyes searching through the audience.
“I said, you suck.” It’s easy to find him, now that I’m looking. A red-faced, jersey-wearing dude. Older than me but not much older than Mo, and shaped like an upside-down triangle.
If it were me, I’d have run off the stage already, or maybe be frozen and panicking. It isn’t me, and my mouth is still dry and my heart is beating too fast. But all Mo does is lean down, one hand on her knee, with the expression of a kindergarten teacher about to pluck a glue stick out of a five-year-old’s mouth.
“Ooh. Let’s meet you,” she says, almost gleeful. “What’s your name, buddy?”
“Braden.”
“Of course it is.” She looks him up and down. “Your species is so interesting. The Bradens.” She waits a moment, considering. “It’s fascinating how you all emerge from the womb wearing cargo shorts.”
Everyone giggles. Braden looks down at his cargo shorts. He glares back up at Mo. “Suck my dick.”
Mo blinks at him. She takes a beat. “You’ll have to mark the spot, Braden, because you look like one giant dick to me.”
That gets a bigger laugh, and Mo swiftly turns away from Cargo Shorts Braden.
“So St. Patrick’s Day is coming up.” She smiles. “The Most Holy Day, for the Braden species.” That gets a laugh, too, but Mo doesn’t rest on it, just launches right back in. “St. Patrick’s Day has the weirdest decorations, right?”
I lean over to Will.
“Does that happen a lot?” I whisper.
“What?”
“That . . . guy.”
“Hecklers?” I feel his shoulder shrug against mine. “Sometimes. They’re mostly just drunk people. Mo can handle them.”
I don’t know Mo all that well, but I’m pretty certain she can handle anything.
When it’s Will’s turn, he takes his guitar up with him. He’s the first one all night to sit on the stool, not just use it to hold water or a beer.
“Hello,” Will says, leaning into the mic stand. “I’m Will Nichols and this song is called ‘Things I Think about Instead of Falling Asleep.’
“I think about:
Earthquakes, shark attacks, calling people on the phone, and dying from an atom bomb
Failing tests, failing college, climate change, the time in third grade I called my teacher ‘Mom.’”
“Oh, he changed that,” Mo whispers to Jonah.
“About his teacher?”
“Yeah. It used to be something about going alone to prom?”
“Same rhyme scheme, though.”
I’d sort of assumed once you wrote a set, that was it, but of course you’d change things. It’s writing, I realize, and no one writes a good first draft. Didn’t Ms. Waldman say that? No matter how confident or off-the-cuff everyone might seem onstage, they must have spent hours going over and over their jokes, second-guessing their words and trying out new ideas until their throats went raw.
Will strums faster now.
“When that white lady at the grocery store said, ‘Hi, David, how’ve you been?’
Was she being racist, or do I really look like him?”
He pauses for a beat, almost self-conscious, though I can’t tell if that’s part of the performance or not.
“Or am I racist for assuming she was racist?
Or is David her dead husband and I’m mocking someone with Alzheimer’s disease?
Or could someone just shoot me and end this self-destructive thought spiral, please?”
Jonah’s up right after Will.
“So when I’m not doing this,” Jonah says, “I’m—”
“Jacking off?” someone calls out from the back.
“Oh, is that what your mom calls it?” Jonah shoots back without missing a beat. “Yeah, so when I’m not doing this or fucking your mom on your race car bed, Tyler”—he holds up a middle finger—“I’m a tutor. It’s great. Parents pay you all this money to pretend their terminally stupid kid just isn’t being challenged enough.”
Jonah uses the space a lot more than some of the other comics, I notice. Lots of them stay close to the mic, and of course Will has to, with his guitar. But Jonah stalks back and forth across the stage like he’s rallying troops before a battle.
“I was tutoring this one girl in math,” he says. “Like, third-grade stuff. And all these word problems, they were so stupid. Like, if Johnny has thirty-six apples and Betsy wants twelve of them, how many does he have left. Okay, first off, at this point Johnny has a hoarding problem and I hope Betsy’s staging an intervention. TLC would buy that show. Extreme Apple Hoarders. But in what universe would any of this actually happen?” He stops pacing. “I think word problems should prepare you for the harsh realities of adult life.”
Now he crouches down, as though speaking to a small child. “Okay, Aiden, so if you want a quarter ounce of meth but you still owe your dealer for a half, how much cash do you need to prevent him from breaking both your kneecaps?”
Jonah pretends to listen to the answer. “That’s right, it all depends on the current market price. That’s what we call a variable.”
A comedy show isn’t like a regular show, at least not the ones I’ve been to. When the last performer climbs off the stage, there’s no mass exodus for the door. The audience doesn’t suddenly pull out their phones and battle for the next Uber.
It takes me a second to realize why: there isn’t an audience. There are the people who were going to this bar anyway, and there are the people who finished their set and stuck around to support everyone else. And when it’s over, those two groups both want the same thing: another drink.
Mo and her friends aren’t any different. I sip my Coke through a straw and listen as they hash out the best and worst of their sets.
“The bit about the lady at the grocery store didn’t land,” Will says. “Right?”
“I heard some laughs,” Mo says. “But yeah. I thought it would do better.”
“You know if it was part of a special, and they filmed it, that’s the moment they’d cut to the one Black person in the audience,” Will says. “So all the white people watching knew it was okay to laugh.”
“I think you need to go further with it,” Jonah says. “Alzheimer’s disease isn’t much.”
“Yeah, no, just the slow deterioration of the brain,” Mo says.
“Not much of a closer, I mean.”
Will dutifully types the note on his phone. “Degenerative . . . brain . . . disease . . . bad . . . closer.”
Mo gulps down the last of her beer. “Can we go? Or is anyone getting another?”
The boys shake their heads, and Mo starts to grab for her bag under the table. Then, realizing, she turns to me. “Oh. we’re all going to go hang out in my room. If you wanted to come.”
“Yes,” I say, too quickly, too eagerly. I clear my throat. “I mean yeah. Sure. I can stick around.”
Mo grins. “Awesome.”
“Hey, is your girlfriend coming?” Jonah asks Mo as we all pile our layers of coats, scarves, and mittens back on.
Mo fixes him with a look. “Why?”
“She hates me.”
“She does not—”
“At your birthday, she glared at me like—”
“Well, to be fair, Jonah, you did ask her if she grew up in a cult.”
“Only because she told me she’d never read Harry Potter!”
“Still,” Mo says. “But no, she’s at the Maroon office tonight, working.”
“Mo’s girlfriend is always working,” Will tells me. “You’ll never meet her.”
“She’s a copy editor for our school paper, the hours conflict with, like, every open mic,” Mo explains. “Plus, she gets super embarrassed hearing me talk onstage about sex and dating and stuff.”
/> “Another point for the cult theory,” Jonah says.
“She was not in a cult!”
As Jonah and Mo bicker, Will nudges me.
“So what did you think?” he asks.
“I love this place,” I tell him, turning around to take it in again, a little emptier now. It looks like someone tried to grow a garden in a cave, which absolutely shouldn’t be a good thing, but somehow, it is. It’s wild. It’s weird. It’s perfect. “I feel like . . . I could waste my whole life here.”
“Watch out,” Jonah mumbles through the glove in his mouth. He pulls it onto his hand. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
Chapter 7
“SORRY IT’S MESSY,” Mo says when she unlocks the front door. “Throw your stuff wherever.”
Mo’s room looks like she’s taken her own advice. It’s like a small tornado went through, if a tornado could somehow be artful. I’m the last one through the door, and I take a long moment to pick out what’s underneath the top layer of wool coats and notebooks and lace-up boots strewn everywhere.
A wrinkled buffalo plaid comforter on an unmade twin bed, and resting on the pillow, a half-finished embroidery project with bright red roses and lettering that currently reads:
FUCK GENDER R
There’s a scratched white mini fridge with an even more scratched black microwave stacked on top of it. And right beside that, a plastic milk crate filled with single-serving noodle cups and the kind of sugary kids’ cereals my mom refuses to buy.
This is the first dorm room I’ve ever seen. The first real one, anyway, not an empty model during a college tour or a fake one on TV. Peter’s and Charlotte’s move-in days both happened while I was still at sleepaway camp, so I never saw their dorms, either.
Rainbow Christmas lights frame the window. Stacks and stacks of books overflowing from the single desk shelf and colonizing the floor space by the chair, next to the bed, and on the windowsill. A bulletin board over the desk, every inch of it covered with photos and ticket stubs and a big world map dotted with pushpins.
I’m pretty independent. I get myself to school. I do my own laundry. I can make my own dinner, though it’s likely to be bagged salad. But this is different. A door you can close and know your mom won’t open without knocking. A mini fridge full of whatever you took the time to buy, not what your dad remembered to have delivered. A closet of clothes that’s up to you to wash, but up to you to wear as you see fit, without a dress code or a skeptical parent to question it.
A thousand daily decisions squashed into a tiny rectangular room. Real choices. Real life.
“I like your room,” I tell Mo.
“Oh, thanks.” She throws her coat over the desk chair, already piled with clothes. “Part of me would rather live off campus like everyone else, but you can’t top free rent.”
“Free?”
“I’m an RA.” She shrugs. “So yeah, I guess it’s more a trade. They give me room and board, I drag wasted eighteen-year-olds to the hospital, give out free condoms, and host a finals-week pizza party no one goes to.”
“Are you in the dorms at Roosevelt?” Will asks me.
“No,” I say, before realizing it would have been smarter to say yes. “I . . . live with my parents.”
“Oh, so you’re a commuter.”
That word makes me think of businessmen in cars inching down I-90, but I nod. “Yeah.”
Out in the hallway, there’s the sound of heels clomping on linoleum. Then someone shrieks. I startle, but no one else even blinks. The shriek dissolves into giggling.
“Hailey,” a girl in the hallway whines. “Hailey. Where’s my other shoe?”
Her friend hiccups. “Wha?”
“My shoe. My other—I have one on, but where’s the other?”
“Maybe you weren’t wearing it when we left,” her friend suggests.
“What the fuck, yes, I was.”
A door slams shut. Mo rolls her eyes, like this happens every weekend.
“God,” Jonah sighs. “I don’t miss the dorms.”
“Same,” Will agrees.
“Where do you live, if you’re not in the dorms?” I ask Will.
“Jonah and I are roommates,” he answers. “Off campus.”
It’s not weird for college kids in big cities to have apartments, I know, but thinking about the logistics makes my brain short-circuit. How do they make money for rent? How do you even pay rent—can you put it on a credit card? Or do people use checks? My grandma sends checks to me and the twins on our birthdays, but Mom always converts them into regular money for us. Dad talks about “balancing the checkbook” sometimes, but I have no idea what that actually means.
“That must be so cool,” I say to them. “Living on your own.”
“Yes, so glad I’m going into debt for the privilege of listening to our neighbor’s shitty thrash band practice every night,” Jonah says.
“They’re getting better,” Will says.
“They’re getting louder. It’s not the same thing.” Jonah nudges Mo. “You’re not on duty tonight, right?”
“Nope.” Mo strides over to the bulletin board above her desk. She runs her finger down a pink piece of paper. “Rajiv has the duty phone.”
“Rajiv Shah?” Jonah asks. “Didn’t he used to sell, like, crappy dime bags to freshmen?”
“He still does,” Mo says. She retrieves a brown bottle and a blue one from under the bed. “That’s how I know we’re safe.”
“Sometimes I feel like you’re not a good RA,” Will says.
“Sometimes I feel like you don’t get any whiskey now.”
Will holds up his hands. “Let’s not jump to extremes.”
Mo uncorks the brown bottle with a flourish, and Will hands out red cups from a stack on top of her mini fridge. She passes the blue bottle to Jonah and pours from the brown bottle for herself and Will.
“Whiskey or tequila?” she asks me. I hesitate. She notices. “Or are you not a drinker?”
“No, I mean, I do,” I say, which is true only in the most technical sense. I’ve had champagne on New Year’s with my parents, though my dad finished my glass, and I’ve had sips of terrible, watery beer with Alex at parties, but sips were about all I could stand.
“No pressure. I have soda.” She digs a can of Coke out of the mini fridge.
“Well—” I hesitate. It’s not that I want them to think I’m cool or anything, because no one seems like they care. Why should they? This is college, not Kyle Carson’s rec room. Nobody’s judging the choice I make, and for some reason, that makes me want to choose something new.
“Maybe,” I say slowly, “I could just have a little bit? With the pop?”
Mo grabs a plastic cup off the table and turns back to me. “Do you know the trick with red cups?”
I shake my head. I expect her to place it down lid first and play some kind of shell game, but instead, she holds it closer to me.
“See the first line, closest to the bottom?” She taps on the first indentation on the cup, just about an inch high. “That’s one ounce. One drink, if you’re drinking liquor.” She grabs the brown bottle and pours carefully, stopping when she hits the line. She tops it off with the whole pop can, then hands me the red cup. “As long as you don’t, like, chug it, you’re going to be okay.”
I take a cautious sip. You can barely taste the whiskey.
“You’d fill it up to the next line for wine, and the line after that for beer. It’s actually really helpful, if you care how much you’re drinking,” she calls over her shoulder at Jonah, who’s in the middle of a pretty heavy pour.
“Thanks,” I say. Then, with a sudden wave of self-consciousness, “Sorry for being, I don’t know—”
“Dude, no, it’s fine,” Mo says. “You only just met us, it makes total sense.”
Right. From her perspective, it’s not that I’m sixteen and don’t know how to drink, it’s that I’m twenty and don’t want to be drunk around strangers. But it doesn’t matter why. Wha
t matters is she doesn’t want me to feel uncomfortable. My shoulders loosen. I take another small sip.
“Hey, did you see if Sean was filming tonight?” Mo asks Will and Jonah. “I think that was my best heckler moment yet.”
“Someone was filming us?” I ask, suddenly seized with panic that footage of me could end up on TV, somewhere my parents could see.
“Not you,” Jonah says, with a roll of his eyes. “You didn’t do a set.”
“Sean the Bartender tapes most of the open mics at the Forest,” Mo says.
“He tapes them?” I wrinkle my nose. “Why?”
“So comics can buy them,” she says, like it’s totally obvious. “You can use clips of yourself performing as audition tapes to get into real clubs. Places you have to be invited.”
“Places that pay,” Jonah mutters.
“Even if you’re not looking for that, yet,” Will assures me, “you can still upload them on YouTube. Everybody does.”
“Oh, um—” I clear my throat. “I . . . don’t have a YouTube channel. Or any social media. At all.”
“Okay,” Jonah says flatly. “Bullshit.”
“No, really, it’s true.” It’s not, of course, but I figure this way they won’t try to search for me anywhere. But Jonah still looks suspicious, so I keep talking, letting the lie snake out its tendrils like a vine. “My older brother did all this dumb stuff on the internet when he was in high school.” True, not that my parents know. “So then my mom and dad were really protective of me—like any parents would be—so I just . . . never got into it.”
“And see, here I imagined you with a million-subscriber YouTube account for, I don’t know, baking,” Mo says.
“Or unexpected animal friendships,” Will offers up.
“God, I wish,” I tell him. “I love those videos. They’re basically my whole family dynamic.”
“Huh?” Mo says.
“Oh, I mean—” I hesitate, because this is just something I’ve thought before, not something I’ve ever said. “I’m the odd one out, like that. Like my parents and my siblings are a pack of stunning golden retrievers and I’m the, like, teacup pig trotting behind them trying to make this whole dog thing work.”
