by Katie Henry
“Jeez, sorry.” Jonah rolls his eyes. “We don’t all summer on Martha’s Vineyard.”
“I really have to pee,” Mo interrupts, grabbing for my arm again. “And maybe throw up, but first pee.”
“This is your twenty-first birthday all over again,” Jonah mutters.
“What happened on her twenty-first birthday?” I ask.
“She drank three Long Island iced teas like they were regular iced tea,” Will says, counting on his fingers, “tried to leave the bar with one of the tablecloths tied around her neck like a cape, threw up in a trash can, said we should go ice skating even though it was midnight and August, and finally fell asleep in a Carvel ice cream cake.”
“It was great,” Mo says to me. “You should’ve been there.”
“You were barely there,” Will says.
“I don’t get the issue, Murder Girl,” Jonah says to me. “Just take her in. I mean, you have a school ID.”
“Well—”
Jonah tilts his head. “Do you not have a school ID?”
I swallow. Jonah hasn’t used that tone—half-accusatory, half-suspicious—all week. Maybe he figured, if I wanted to steal Mo’s identity or recruit them all to a cult compound, I would have done it already. He was starting to warm up to me, and now I’m dangerously close to square one.
“Um,” I say, trying not to look as trapped as I feel. “I—”
“All she can do is try,” Will says. “You’ll try, right?”
I could pile lie on top of lie on top of lie. Or I could tell the truth and disappoint people who haven’t disappointed me yet.
Or I could try.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll figure it out.”
Will smiles at me, and for a brief second of giddy idiocy, I feel like I actually will.
“Okay.” I sling Mo’s arm around my shoulder and start across the street. “Let’s go.” She’s a lot taller than me, so her elbow digs into my shoulder blade with every step. I’m basically a human crutch.
“I really want that milkshake.”
“I know, Mo,” I say, trying to sound both comforting and firm, like when I babysit our upstairs neighbor’s toddler. He also slurs his words and demands ice cream at random times. “But you can’t. Remember? Because it’s too early.”
“The Shamrock Shake is a Pisces!” she declares, flinging her arm out. “Empathetic and visionary but elusive!”
“Okay.”
“We understand everyone, but no one understands us. This is our great curse.”
“Okay.” But then— “Wait. If your birthday’s in August, aren’t you a Leo?”
“Yeah.” She hiccups. “But my soul is a Pisces.”
When we push open the door, central heating blasts us in the face. Several feet away, a man built like a refrigerator watches us silently from the security desk.
“You sit here for a second.” I coax Mo down onto the linoleum by the big floor-to-ceiling windows. “I need to, I don’t know, sign you in.”
“Lemme get you my—” Mo digs around in her coat pockets, but unless she’s got a Get-One-Free-Miracle next to her ChapStick and Ventra Card, it’s not much use.
“It’s cool, just . . . don’t move. Okay?”
“I am not moving a muscle,” she says, using several of them to tap me on the nose.
“Great.”
“Especially my bladder muscles.”
“Good plan.”
Walking toward the security desk feels like I’m a third grader about to try out brain surgery. Like I’m not sure how it’s all going to go down, but there’s no way it isn’t a disaster. I started sweating through my green prairie dress hours ago, before I even got onstage, and between my nerves and the heat in here, it can’t be better now. My boots are dripping from the sleet, my coat smells like the beer Mo spilled on me at the bar, and my hair smells like smoke from Jonah’s cigarette.
Who wouldn’t want to let me in, right?
“Hey,” I say, trying to sound casual and mature and not like I’m trying to sneak a drunk girl into a school neither of us attend. “Hi. So I’m a Roosevelt student, but I don’t have my ID—”
“What’s your ID number?” he asks.
Well. Shit.
“So I’m not a Roosevelt student,” I say. “Actually, I’m going to be very real with you here”—I glance down at his name tag—“Patrick. You see, Patrick, I kind of boxed myself into an unfortunate situation where I’ve been pretending to be a student at Roosevelt when, as I said, I am not, but all my friends outside think I am.”
Silence.
“And you might be thinking, ‘What a weird thing to lie about for no reason,’ but the thing is, Patrick, I’m sixteen years old and in completely over my head—not in like a dangerous way. I haven’t been kidnapped, my friends couldn’t kidnap a wet paper bag—not that you can kidnap a—” I take a breath. “Basically, I needed them to think I was in college because I wanted to go to bars with them.”
Silence.
“I’m not an alcoholic! That sounded like something an alcoholic would say, like a child alcoholic, but I barely drink at all. I promise. My friends do, because . . . college, am I right? I don’t know if I’m right, because again, I am sixteen, but my friend over there has had a lot of beer and really needs to use the closest bathroom literally now because otherwise I think she might literally pee on your floor.”
I look over at Mo, still propped against the window. She gives me a thumbs-up.
“So even though I’m sure I sound like a complete basket case right now—what a funny word, basket case. Right?” I laugh, a little. He doesn’t. “Okay.” I put both hands on the desk and go for broke. “Patrick, you seem like a great guy, and it would be so great if we could use the nearest restroom real quick for a second.”
Silence.
And then without taking his eyes off me—actually, without moving a single facial muscle—Patrick pushes a button.
My head whips around at the sound of the accessibility gate to my left buzzing. I whirl back around to Patrick. With raised eyebrows, he indicates his head at the gate.
“Patrick,” I say, with more sincere appreciation than I’ve ever felt for another human soul. “Thank you. You’re too good for this earth.”
He snorts and goes back to his magazine. I rush to hold the accessibility gate open.
“Mo!” I call over to her. She gives me another thumbs-up. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Tonight was really fun,” she says, clutching the shoulder of my coat as we walk through the gate and toward the women’s room sign.
Minus the last couple of minutes, sure. “Yeah, it was.”
“I’m so glad you came out with us.”
“I’m so glad you didn’t get arrested for peeing in that lobby.”
She blinks at me. “What?”
“Nothing.” I push open the bathroom door for her. “I’m glad I came, too.”
Chapter 11
I’M LESS THAN a minute into my set when it happens.
Maybe it’s because I went first, which I never do, except I was late to sign up for a slot this time. Alex called right before I was supposed to get on the bus, and there wasn’t anything I could do except duck into a quiet little café and pretend that I was home, just super swamped with Shakespeare homework, and yes, it sucked that I couldn’t come over.
By the time I got to the venue—the same one I stumbled into two months ago, with its vampire sweet sixteen vibes—this was the only time slot left.
I must have jinxed myself. Because right before I’m about to set up my bit about the unlikely animal friendships . . . it happens.
Someone in the back yells out, something deep and slurred and three- or four-syllabled. He sounds like a dude and pretty wasted, but other than that I’ve got nothing.
“Uh—” I look around to the front row, trying to gauge their reaction and make an educated guess, like I always do.
“. . . If someone tried to talk to me on a plane for six h
ours, they’d become my next murder victim,” I say, but it’s unsteady this time, not at all like it should sound. Half my brain is on my set, and half is still trying to figure out what the guy shouted. But then he yells it again. And that’s when I see two guys in the front row, guys I’ve seen before at open mics and who I’m half sure are both named Aidan—that’s when I see them smirk.
At me.
That guy in the back isn’t yelling for a waitress, he isn’t yelling for his friend, he’s yelling at me. But I can’t see him, which means I can’t understand him. I can’t hear him over the lights in my face and the ringing in my ears.
I don’t know what to do. Ignore it. You’re supposed to ignore it when men yell at you, so that’s what I’ll do. I’ll—
When he yells it a third time, one of the Aidans leans over and whispers to the other. I can’t remember my next line. I can’t remember anything.
“I’m sorry,” I call out into the darkness. “I can’t—” I swallow. “I can’t really hear—”
Then I stop, because where the hell am I going with this? Hey, I know you’re already mad at me for some reason, but I have a complex auditory condition I’d like to explain in depth.
Chair legs scrape. Blinking into the dark pit of humans in front of me, I can just about see a vague blob in the shape of a person, elbows spread all out like a chicken flapping its wings, or—like a man cupping his hands around his mouth.
The fourth time he yells it, in that voice like a giant, drunk bullfrog somehow mastered English, every word is crystal clear.
“SHOW US YOUR TITS.”
Jesus Christ, I think, as if he’s going to be of any help in this situation. Jesus fucking Christ, I think, as if swearing in the middle of his name would make him want to help me more.
The guy must think I’m ignoring him instead of having a minor theological crisis. So he raises his voice.
“I said—”
“Yeah, I heard you!” I yell back. “It’s—not really that kind of dress.”
Oh my God. Why would I say that? What am I trying to do, convince this asshole all that’s stopping me from stripping onstage for his amusement is a high neckline and a finicky back zipper?
Not that kind of dress. Jesus. At this point, it’s a shroud. And this is my funeral.
I envy squirrels. Hamsters. Particularly inbred golden retrievers. Any creature with a walnut brain tiny enough it can only feel one emotion at once. Because as I stand there, it feels like I’m cycling through them all in the space of each breath. Shock and humiliation and rage, rage, fucking rage, and I can’t tell whether I’m more likely to burst into tears or jump behind the bar for a makeshift Molotov cocktail. But when my psychological roulette wheel finally slows, it skips right past Homicidal Thoughts and lands, improbably, on Curiosity.
“Do you actually think I might?” I ask the stranger in the darkness. “Like, do you really think I’m going to do it?”
I’ve wondered this so many times with creepy men, though I’ve never said it out loud. Did that boy on the L last year really think I’d be flattered by his play-by-play description of my body? Did the guy yelling at me from a car by Dearborn and Erie really expect me to swoon at the sound of his wolf whistle? “At long last!” I imagined myself calling back to him, like a maiden from a fairy tale. “For six long years, I have waited at this accursed intersection, pining for the day a brave knight with a vape pen would ask to motorboat me from the back of his friend’s Kia Sorento!”
There’s a moment of silence as I stand under the hot, relentless light. Then:
“NAH,” comes the voice from the darkness.
“So, why?” I try to sound firm, demanding, but it just comes out a whine. “Why would you ask me to show my tits?”
“BECAUSE THEY’RE BETTER THAN YOUR JOKES.”
He collapses into laughter, along with what sounds like half the audience. My face burns, and I know everyone can see it.
“Do you ever watch those videos, on the internet,” I say, trying desperately to recover, “with—um, unlikely animal friends?”
My voice cracks, and I know everyone can hear it.
I’m repeating the rest of my set by rote now, the same way I mumble through church when we visit my grandparents. Without feeling, without energy, without being sure I’m even saying it right and not really giving a shit if I don’t. Like it’s compulsory.
Something tiny and bright flashes in the front row. A phone. Someone is checking their phone, right in front of me, and I don’t even blame them. I’m tired of this set, and it’s mine.
Even as I’m saying my own words, things I came up with and was proud of before Bullfrog Bob, King of the Assholes, decided to share with the class, all I can think about is him. This guy I can’t even see.
Because they’re better than your jokes. Ugh. That was actually a decent tag. You know, aside from being sexist and gross and mean. When I poison this man’s seventeenth beer of the evening, I hope his gravestone reads:
SON, BROTHER, CAME UP WITH A SINGLE GOOD LINE THAT RUINED A STRANGER’S DAY.
I could say that. I don’t say that. I slam the mic back down onto the stand and walk off the stage.
If I had to make a list of the last places on Earth I’d rather be, it would read as follows:
1. The floating mass of garbage in the Pacific Ocean
2. Wherever Bullfrog Bob lives, which I’m assuming is a windowless room filled with empty pizza boxes, unimaginative porn, and a small army of cockroaches he’s named and trained to do his bidding. Like Cinderella, if she were destined to die alone.
3. This bathroom
The door creaks open just an inch. Mo slides her left foot in first, cautiously, as if there’s a possibility being humiliated onstage has turned me feral, and I might try for a chunk of her leg.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” I mumble back.
“You ready to talk about it?”
“I’m fine,” I snap, and then instantly cringe. Maybe Mo was right to protect her vital organs. She plops down next to me anyway.
“So.” I can feel her looking at me, but I keep my eyes focused on the tile. “That was . . . pretty rough.”
God. If she thinks it was “pretty rough,” after all the shows she’s been to and all the things she’s seen onstage, then it must have been brutal. “Yeah.”
“This is my fault,” Mo says.
I sigh. “It isn’t.”
“It’s important you get up in a bunch of different places with totally different vibes,” she explains. “I figured that’s the best preparation for the All-College Showcase for you.”
That makes my throat close up. “Will there be hecklers there?”
“No,” she assures me. “Sort of the opposite problem, the judges barely react to anything. But here—I knew this can be a heckler room. You weren’t ready.”
I’m not mad at her. I’m mad at myself, because I want to be ready. But most of all, I’m mad at the man who thought his opinion on my body was more important than anything I had to say.
“It’s not your fault,” I say. “It’s his fault.”
“He really was the worst.”
“Yeah. And so are they.”
She frowns. “They?”
“Everyone else. The audience.”
“Don’t blame the audience.”
“Why not? They laughed.”
“The audience isn’t your enemy. And if you start to think about them that way, you’ll never get another laugh.”
“But they laughed with him.” I fold my arms across my chest. “He said I wasn’t funny and it’s like . . . the rest of them just believed him! He ruined my whole set.”
She shakes her head. “No. You ruined your set.”
My jaw drops. I didn’t ruin my set. How could I possibly ruin my set when I never got to say it?
“What?” I splutter at her.
“You lost the audience.”
“Lost them?”
“
People start out on your side. They want you to be funny. They’re happy if you’re funny. But you let that guy shut you down, and then the audience couldn’t root for you. They saw you’d lost your confidence, so they lost their confidence in you, too. That is why you bombed.”
“So what was I supposed to do? Get off the stage and punch him out?”
She looks skeptical. “Have you ever punched anyone?”
“No.”
“Then I wouldn’t start with that guy.” She leans against the sink. “But yeah. You were supposed to fight back.”
“With what?”
“Words,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Most people have a couple lines in their back pocket.”
“Huh?”
“Dress pocket, in your case.”
“This dress doesn’t have pockets.”
“Really?” She glances at the side seams. “The patriarchy is cruel.”
“What do you mean by ‘lines’?”
“Oh, you know, a few quippy comebacks you can use against almost anyone,” Mo says.
“Like what?”
“One classic is . . .” She puts on her stand-up voice. “‘Hey, man, let me do my job. I don’t come to where you work and knock the dicks out of your mouth.’”
“Wow. I’m not saying that.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Yeah, it’s pretty homophobic, so I wouldn’t suggest it. But you’ve got to say something.”
“I can’t just ignore them?” That’s what my mom says to do. Just act like you don’t hear them, she told me.
No one does that when Alex is around. I didn’t understand why, at first. He’s not very tall or big, and he looks exactly like the heir to a mid-range-hotel fortune he is. Not exactly intimidating. But then I realized—men didn’t suddenly leave me alone because they were scared of Alex. They’d just decided he owned me.
“You can ignore them,” Mo concedes. “It’s your set and your stage time. But I don’t think you should.”
“Why?”
“The longer you let a heckler talk, the more confident they get. A heckler is the kindergarten bully grown up, just with more sexual frustration and a graveyard of Coors Light bottles on his table.”
“Good detail work there, Mo.”
