This Will Be Funny Someday

by Katie Henry

  “What are you doing?” he shoots back, turning it around to show me the lock screen. My stomach drops when I see the text from Mo.

  Hey when are you leaving your bf’s?

  “It’s just a text from my friend.”

  “Your friend,” he repeats.

  “Yes,” I say, barely above a whisper.

  “Mo.”

  “She’s nice. You’d like her.” I reach out like I’m going to pat him on the arm. “If you met her you’d—”

  He’s quicker than me, though, so he jerks his hand up before I can grab the phone. “The girl I told you to leave alone, right?” Alex stands up, still with my phone in his tightly clenched hand, and starts pacing the floor. He’s getting louder now, and I can feel myself getting smaller. “The one who stalked you on a bus—”

  “What?” I throw up my hands. “I never said a bus.”

  “So where did you meet her?” he demands. “Where was it?”

  I stand up too, then, and just as I get close enough to Alex to see my phone screen, it lights up with another message.

  We’re doing the Forest at 7 if you’re free

  “The Forest?” he asks. “What the fuck is the Forest?”

  It comes out before I can stop myself. “It’s a place with lots of trees, Alex.”

  Maybe it’s the deadpan delivery, or maybe he really is unclear on the concept, because that distracts him enough to lower the phone. I swipe it out of his hand and rush back toward the bed.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demands as he follows a half step behind me. I sit down on his bed, my back to the wall. I’m holding the phone close to my chest now, both hands over it, like I’m a corpse in a coffin.

  “Nothing,” I say, and I hate that it comes out a whine. “My friend texted me and—”

  “That is such bullshit.”

  It is, I think, as I stare up at him, but it isn’t. Why can’t I have a friend without him flipping out? “Why did you pick up my phone?”

  “It buzzed,” he says. “You didn’t hear it.”

  It couldn’t have. I always keep it on silent when I’m with him, always.

  “You shouldn’t have looked at my phone,” I tell him.

  “I’m glad I did!” he explodes, and I wish the wall behind me was a portal. To the Forest, to the gates of hell, anywhere but here. “At least a phone can’t fucking lie to me!”

  “I didn’t lie—”

  “I told you not to talk to her,” he fumes. “I told you and you did. I said I didn’t want you hanging out with her.”

  “You don’t want me to hang out with anyone!” I say, and even though I’m trying so hard to keep it in, a tear drips down my cheek.

  “Oh, now you’re going to cry?” he says, and it’s almost mocking. “Do you think that’s going to work?”

  “I’m crying because you’re—”

  Scaring me.

  Humiliating me.

  Hurting me.

  “Because—” I breathe in. “Because you’re being such an unbelievable jerk!”

  His mouth drops. He clearly can’t believe I said that, and honestly, neither can I. But I keep going, keep talking, letting all the things I’ve tried to push away or keep inside come spilling out. “You’re always checking up on me, you never want me going anywhere without you, you don’t want me to have any friends at all.”

  “When have I ever stopped you from talking to Chloe, or Margot—”

  “They aren’t my friends! They’re just dating your friends. Naomi was my friend.”

  “Again? Really? We’re doing this?”

  “You don’t trust me. Why don’t you trust me?” I ask softly.

  “Why should I trust you?” Alex demands. “Why should I trust you, Isabel, when you’re obviously lying to me?”

  This isn’t like all the lies I’ve told to Mo and everyone else, not even like the ones I’ve told to my parents. And I can’t quite figure out why.

  I lied about being older because I wanted Mo to be my friend, because I wanted to get into bars, because I wanted to get out of my house. I lied because I wanted things.

  But with Alex—when I lie to Alex, or don’t tell him everything, all I want is—

  It isn’t until I look up at him again and see the way he’s bristling that I figure it out.

  All I want is to be safe.

  “Relationships are about choices,” Alex tells me. “That’s what my dad says. You either choose them, or you don’t.”

  The man has been married three times, and I’m 99 percent sure he’s banging his personal assistant. I do not consider him a font of knowledge.

  “You either choose someone, or you choose stuff, like my mom does. You choose what’s important to you.”

  “You’re important to me,” I promise him.

  He folds his arms. “So, choose.”

  I recoil, because I know what he means. Of course I do. We’re in his room instead of mine, the trees outside are bare and frozen instead of orange and brown, but this is last fall all over again. He wants me to lose Mo just like I lost Naomi. And he wants me to choose it.

  But I can’t do it. And I can’t say it. And what comes out instead, before I can think better of it, is:

  “No.”

  He stares down at me. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “You shouldn’t ask me to choose,” I say, “and I’m not doing it.”

  “You’re not doing it.”

  Why does he keep repeating everything I’m saying? “No.”

  Suddenly, Alex wheels around, grabs Titus Andronicus from off the floor, and flings it across the room.

  “Alex, Jesus,” I gasp, “would you calm down?”

  “I’m not going to calm down,” he rages at me, pacing the floor by the bed. “You know why I’m not going to calm down? You did all this shit, Isabel. You hid stuff from me and you’re going places I’ve never fucking heard of with people I told you not to see, and you haven’t even apologized.”

  “I can explain what happened, if you’d just calm—”

  “Not until you apologize.” He wheels to a stop, right in front of me. “So. Do it.”

  “I’m—”

  And it’s on the tip of my tongue. Sorry. But it’s caught inside of me like a pill I can’t quite swallow. Like a lead ball in my stomach. I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry, and I can’t say it.

  No. I can say it. I possess language and vocal cords and, up until recently, a decent sense of self-preservation.

  I can say it. But I won’t.

  He and I stare at each other for a long and silent moment. He towers and clenches his hands and waits for me to say it. I hold the bedpost and lock my knees and know that I won’t.

  Downstairs, there’s a metal clatter, like one of the household staff has dropped a pan. I flinch. Alex blinks. And maybe he remembers then—we aren’t alone.

  “Fine. You know what? Fine.” He tosses my backpack across the room, overhand, and I have to raise my hands all the way up to my face to catch it. “Take your stuff”—he lobs my coat at me the same way—“and get out.”

  All this because of a text? Half a year just gone, because I made a single friend? “I can’t believe you.”

  “Go.”

  My copy of Titus Andronicus is still on the floor. I raise my hand to point it out. “But—”

  “You better go,” he says, another decibel softer, another step closer to me. And he doesn’t say the second part, but I hear it all the same. Before I make you.

  A cobra lily does its damage slowly, inch by inch. But that doesn’t make it any less horrible, if you’re the thing it’s hurting.

  I swallow my heart into my stomach, unstick my feet from the mahogany floor beneath them, and go, leaving Alex and Titus behind.

  In high school comedies, people with no friends eat at a table by themselves, but I guess we’ve upped enrollment this year, because there are no empty tables. I really should have considered this before I got a tray full of food.
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  I can’t sit with Alex. Obviously. I can feel him watching me from across the cafeteria. He took a different seat than he usually does, one facing the door. I wonder if he did it on purpose. To watch me better. Make sure I don’t come too close.

  He doesn’t need to worry. I don’t want to be anywhere near his table. White-knuckling my tray of food, I take an absurdly circuitous trip around the room, hugging the wall. It’s almost like a math problem. If Izzy’s boyfriend just broke up with her and she is pathologically afraid of confrontation, what route will keep the greatest distance between them at all times? Also, he’s the jerk in this scenario, right? Explain your answer.

  I turn to look at the table in the center of the room, a spot both familiar and completely alien. Naomi is looking right back at me, and a part of me thinks maybe she’ll wave me over. Maybe she’ll even get up, cross the room, and lead me back to the place on the bench that used to be mine.

  But she doesn’t.

  When she turns away, it’s like a punch in the stomach. How could I expect anything different, after what happened the last time I talked to her? I want to grab her shoulder, force my way in next to her, beg her to understand why I did what I did. But I don’t understand, either. So how could she? I can feel eyes on my back, and not just from Alex’s table. Everyone is watching me, just to see if I’ll burst into tears, or flip a table, or lie down on the linoleum in silent protest.

  It’s so strange. Half my time is spent pleading with a skeptical audience to like me, listen to me, pay attention to me. And the other half, I’m trying my best to be invisible.

  I guess I got what I wanted, because I’m invisible now. At least to the two people I ever cared about.

  I dump my entire lunch into the trash and leave the tray on top. I’m not hungry anymore.

  Ms. Waldman is the newest teacher at my school, so I guess it makes sense she has the worst classroom. It’s all the way at the end of the third-floor hall, by the lockers that never get assigned, and the hinges on its door creak louder than the floorboards at my grandparents’ house, so her eyes are already on me when I step through the doorway.

  “Isabel,” she says, putting her red pen down on a stack of papers. “Hey.”

  “Hi,” I reply, but then don’t know what else to say. Sorry to bother you? Can I hang out for a while? Or possibly build a fort out of Dostoevsky novels and live there permanently?

  Ms. Waldman watches me flounder for a moment, then pushes her rolling chair away from her desk. She leans forward. “What’s up?”

  I think: Depends on how far we’re going back.

  I think: Six months ago I lost my best friend, two weeks ago a grown man propositioned me, and yesterday, my boyfriend broke up with me.

  I say: “Do you have another copy of Titus Andronicus I could use?”

  She raises an eyebrow. “What happened to yours?”

  “I . . . left it somewhere.”

  “No chance of getting it back?”

  Whenever Ms. Waldman looks at me, it’s like she can cut through my skin, break my ribs, and see right through me. I drop my eyes to the floor and shake my head.

  She scoots the chair back to her desk and opens the bottom drawer. After rummaging through it, she retrieves a battered book and holds it out toward me. I walk forward and take it.

  “Thanks,” I say, trying and failing to smooth down its peeling spine and cracked paperback cover.

  “It’s a different edition than the one we’re using in class,” she says. “It doesn’t have the vocabulary guides on every page.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I know,” she says. “You don’t need that kind of hand-holding.”

  It’s such a small thing, but it’s ridiculous how good it makes me feel. I was never that girl in class, the one all the teachers liked and trusted and talked to like a mini adult. I never felt like my teachers saw me at all, and if they did, they saw the girl who missed every instruction and quietly lagged behind. Ms. Waldman sees something else.

  But then she asks, “Are you enjoying Titus so far?” and the moment breaks. All my sadness and rage and pain come flooding back.

  “I finished it already.” It comes out nearly a snarl, and I don’t know why. It isn’t Ms. Waldman’s fault I stayed up too late reading it last night, curled into the couch corner with my laptop open to a free online edition.

  “Oh,” she says lightly. “And what did you think?”

  “I hated it,” I blurt out before I can think twice, and the vehemence catches us both by surprise.

  If Ms. Waldman was a normal person, she’d say: Okay, let’s not talk about it, then.

  If Ms. Waldman was a self-preserving kind of person, she’d say: Maybe you and the guidance counselor can explore this inexplicable rage toward a play. In her office. Far away from me.

  But since she is not normal, self-preserving, or apparently all that committed to grading papers, she gestures at a desk in the front row. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Yes. I do. I want to talk about Titus Andronicus. I want to talk about Shakespeare and his stupid plays and how his stupid haircut looks like if the ring of Saturn experienced humidity. I sit down. Ms. Waldman slides into the desk next to me.

  “So what struck you?” she asks.

  Nothing struck me. In order, my laptop screen struck the keyboard as I slammed it shut, my computer struck the couch when I threw it down, and my slippered feet struck the hardwood floor as I stalked out of the room.

  I shrug.

  “You’re not the first person to dislike Titus,” she assures me. “The cannibalism is obviously . . . gross. And I had a student once who thought Tamora, Queen of the Goths, was a very problematic representation of his chosen subculture.”

  She smiles. I can’t.

  “Lavinia,” I mumble.

  “What?”

  “I hated it—” I take a breath. “Because of what they did to Lavinia.”

  Her sigh sounds knowing. “Ah.”

  Suddenly, it’s spilling out of me, and I can’t stop. “She starts off the play with Titus basically trading her from one guy to another, which I guess he’s allowed to do because he’s her dad, and then both of those awful men fight over her like she’s a toy. Then a third awful man decides to have her abducted for his own, like, political revenge shit, and so she gets taken to the woods and raped.”

  I take a breath. Ms. Waldman cuts in. “It is a very violent play, I can understand why—”

  “We’re not even done with act two!” I say. “They don’t just rape her. I guess that would be too garden-variety for William Shakespeare. Better have them cut out her tongue and chop off her hands, too.”

  Ms. Waldman is quiet for a moment, and so am I. “Keep going,” she says. “It’s okay.”

  “So there she is. Handless. Tongueless. Fucking traumatized, because how could you not be?” I pause, because I didn’t mean to put it quite like that, but Ms. Waldman says nothing about the swearing. “And still, she does what she’s supposed to. When her dad demands the names of her attackers, she obeys. She uses her bleeding stumps to write their names in the dirt. And what does he do? What does he do, after he’s killed her rapists and made Lavinia help him do it? He murders her. He stabs his own daughter to death because she’s . . . what does he say? Stained. He thinks she’s better off dead.”

  “An unfortunately common sentiment, for the Romans.”

  “No one asked Lavinia. Pretty convenient, taking away her tongue. You don’t have to care what she might have said, if you take away her ability to say anything at all.”

  “I can tell how much this upset you,” she says. “I’m sorry. I thought I covered all the potential triggers at the start of the unit, but clearly I didn’t do a good enough job.”

  “No, I remember, you said it, but—”

  But that was before Mitch. Before Alex broke up with me. I didn’t think it mattered then. And now it does.

  “I didn’t . . .” I swallow. “I didn
’t think it would be like that. She trusted him, and he hurt her.”

  And there it is. The sudden stitch in my side, the splinter under my nail, pain that sears and gnaws and won’t be ignored. I don’t want it. It doesn’t care.

  “I like Shakespeare,” I tell Ms. Waldman. “I do. But I’m sorry, I’m sick of all these plays where girls just get hurt, and called whores, and kill themselves and get murdered because of all these awful, awful men Shakespeare thinks are the heroes.”

  “You know, there are some people who think a woman really wrote all these plays.”

  Yeah, whatever. The more I read about Shakespeare, the more it seems like everyone wants it to be some big conspiracy, plays written by dukes or queens or a secret cabal of influencers. What does it matter who wrote them? The play’s the thing, as Hamlet would say. It’s the words that matter. Not the author.

  But I do know one thing: no woman would write Lavinia.

  “I get it, Isabel. I promise I do.” Ms. Waldman shrugs. “I mean, do you think I enjoy reading The Merchant of Venice?” she asks. “The pages and pages of anti-Semitic abuse heaped on Shylock and his daughter? Terrible stereotypes, the forced conversion at the end? It hurts.”

  “But you love Shakespeare.”

  “I do. It still hurts me.”

  “You said, on the first day, he was progressive. For his time. That when his friends wrote about women and Jewish people, they were so much worse.”

  “That’s true. And I can believe William Shakespeare loved his daughters and thought women were actual people. I can believe he thought Jews were actual people, too. He wrote them that way.” She leans in. “But here’s another thing that’s true: not long after they torched synagogues and destroyed Jewish homes on Kristallnacht, the Nazis broadcast The Merchant of Venice on the radio.”

  That’s so horrible. To make art into a weapon.

  “We’re going to be talking about Titus for the next couple weeks,” Ms. Waldman says. “If it ever gets to be too much and you need to leave the room, just take the hall pass and do it. You don’t need to raise your hand and ask me.”

  I nod.

  “And by the end of the month, we’ll be on to our next play, which I hope you’ll like better.”