This Will Be Funny Someday

by Katie Henry

  “Ready?” I ask. “To see me?”

  “For things to go back to normal,” he says. “It’s going to take a little time.”

  For Jonah, it takes another week. He surprises me one night, showing up halfway through my set. It takes me a moment to place his voice. And then when I do, it might be the first time a comic teared up at a heckle.

  But Mo stays away, week after week. Will tries to make me feel better, saying she’s really busy with school stuff. Or spending time with her girlfriend. Or in California for a long weekend, celebrating the Persian New Year with her parents. I believe him, but there are nights I know they must all be out together, without me. I don’t blame her. I don’t blame them, either. But it slices my heart all the same.

  Will lets me vent about it nearly every time we see each other, because he’s nice like that. And he always tries to get me to see it from Mo’s perspective, because he’s fair like that.

  “She thought you two were so close,” Will explains as we sit at our usual sticky table in the Forest. “That’s why it hurt so much. When she figured out how little she actually knew you.”

  But when he goes to the bar to get another round, I grab my opportunity to talk with Jonah alone.

  “You’re all going out without me, right?” I blurt out. Jonah slowly puts down his water but says nothing. “I only see you guys every couple weeks now and I know it must be because you’re going out with Mo.”

  Jonah shakes his head. “If you know, then what do you want me to say?”

  I start to say I don’t know, but that isn’t the truth. The truth is more difficult, but it’s more important, too. “I want you to say . . .” I gulp. “That it won’t be like this forever.”

  He’s quiet for a while, and the silence nearly swallows me alive. “You’re waiting for things to go back to the way they were.”

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  “Well, stop waiting,” he tells me. “It’s not going to happen.”

  How can he be so sure? It feels almost the same with Will now. “But—”

  Jonah cuts me off with a gesture. “No, Izzy. You lied to us. For months.”

  “I know, and I’m so sorry, I’ve said I’m sorry a million times—”

  “Yeah, okay,” Jonah says. “But apologies aren’t magic.”

  I almost tear up, because apologies are all I have, and if apologies aren’t enough, then nothing is going to be enough. I almost ask him: What else can I do? But then I realize—that’s his point. I’ve done everything that I could to fix my mistakes, but that doesn’t mean they disappeared. I hurt my friends. And hurt lingers.

  “Also,” he continues, “it’s kind of weird for adults to hang out with a high school girl all the time. Things are different not just because you lied, but what you lied about.”

  I didn’t tell them who I was because I thought they’d treat me differently, and I didn’t think that was fair. I didn’t really consider what was fair to them.

  “We’ve got to set boundaries.” Jonah leans back in his chair. “And you’ve got to accept them.”

  I nod. We’re quiet for a while, but this time, the silence doesn’t drown me. He doesn’t have anything more to say. And I have to accept that.

  “You don’t have to invite me out,” I say finally. “Anymore. If it’s too hard for you guys.”

  His response is an eye roll. “So dramatic. Will and I aren’t abandoning you.” He looks over my shoulder and waves. “And not to steal the moment, but neither is Mo.”

  I spin around in my seat. There, standing in the door, is Mo. I get to my feet, but then don’t know what to do next.

  “You guys take your time, okay? We’ll give you space.” Jonah pushes himself up from the table and heads to the bar.

  Mo crosses the distance between us slowly, hesitantly. We stand an awkward distance apart, not quite knowing whether to be within arm’s length of each other.

  “I know I lied to you,” I say. “Like . . . a lot.”

  She nods.

  “And if you can’t forgive me, I get it,” I say.

  She nods.

  “And I’m sorry. I know I said it before, and I know it isn’t magic, but I’ll keep saying it for the next fifty years anyway.”

  “That’s optimistic,” she says.

  “Assuming we’ll still talk in fifty years?”

  “Assuming the world will still exist in fifty years.”

  Touché. She cracks a smile, and so do I. Then she steps forward to close the gap, and I rush to meet her.

  “I’m really glad you picked tonight,” I tell her when we break from our hug. “To come.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

  I flash her my bundle of brightly colored note cards. “I’m trying out something new.”

  “Catcalling is the weirdest thing,” I say into the mic, under the light, before all my friends. “Don’t you guys think?” I pause. “And by ‘guys,’ I mostly mean ‘girls.’”

  “Woooo!” Mo cheers from the audience. Another girl who went up before me claps, too.

  “See?” I point them out. “The exactly two women in this bar know what I’m talking about. I always wonder—what do these guys think is going to happen? Do they think some girl is going to swoon at their feet, like”—I take on the voice of a Disney princess—“‘At long last! 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!’”

  Who would have ever known the things I used to hide inside my head could make people laugh like that? It still doesn’t seem quite real. But I soak up the laughter, without worrying why it’s coming.

  “It’s taken me a long time to realize there are some men for whom the world is made entirely out of stuff to masturbate to. Seventh-grade style. Like they grew out of the wispy little mustaches and basketball shorts as formal wear, but not the constant, inexplicable boners.” I take a step away from the mic stand and try to set the stage for an anecdote. “I used to go to this sleepaway camp, and one time, this boy got a boner at breakfast because of the Mrs. Butterworth syrup bottle on the table.” I smile as I’m saying it, because it really was ridiculous. “I know. But can you blame him? She’s a very proportional condiment. Girls would kill for that waist-to-hip ratio.” I wait a beat. “If Mrs. Butterworth suddenly came to life, she’d be an Instagram influencer selling diet teas that light your intestines on fire.

  “But I think the worst part about getting catcalled is when someone apologizes. Because it’s never to you, right?” I nod, as if I can tell the audience is agreeing with me. “No guy on a street corner has ever been like, ‘You know, after a little self-reflection, I’ve realized that asking you to sit on my face is probably inappropriate stranger-to-stranger interaction.’” As I talk, I walk over to the other side of the stage.

  “One time, a guy said something gross to me,” I say, “but then he realized my boyfriend was next to me and instantly, just like, fell all over himself.” I put on a dude-bro voice. “‘Oh, I’m so sorry, man, I didn’t realize.’ He apologized to him. Not to me! And my boyfriend was like”—no one here will appreciate my excellent Alex impression, but I do it anyway—“‘Oh, it’s cool, no worries.’” I slip back into my own voice. “They were so polite to each other, so sweet, it was like watching the first five minutes of a rom-com.”

  That gets a laugh.

  “So . . . I broke up with him. Because who was I to get in the way of their happiness?”

  And so does that.

  By the time the set is done (fifteen laughs over five minutes, not too bad for all-new jokes) my mouth is bone-dry. Instead of going back to my table, I head straight to the bar.

  “Hey, Colin,” I say, sidling up to the counter.

  “Hey yourself,” he replies. “What can I get you?”

  I point at the tripod and camera set up on the bar, angled toward the stage. “Was that on, during my set?”

/>   The first time I came back to the Forest, I wondered if Colin would have me kicked out, since he knew how old I actually was. But instead, he laid out his terms: I’m still allowed to watch my friends or perform, as long as:

  1. It’s during the week.

  2. I’m chaperoned by someone he trusts.

  3. I maintain a blood alcohol level of 0.000.

  I instantly agreed, and we shook on it. But this is the first time I’ve performed since the fallout, so it’s the first time I know I’m being taped.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, sounding apologetic. “I took over doing it after Sean left.” He shakes his head. “I’m real sorry he did that to you, you know? Doesn’t matter how old you are.”

  “It’s not your fault. Not at all.”

  “Still sorry about it.” He reaches toward the camera. “You’re young. Maybe you can show me how to delete your part from the tape.”

  “No!” I say, with so much force we’re both a little surprised. “I mean, no, please don’t delete it. I want it.”

  “You want it?” He sounds as unsure as I feel, but I nod.

  “Yeah. I want to be able to put it out there,” I explain. “But on my own terms. You know?”

  “Well, okay, but I can’t promise on the quality.”

  “As long as you can hear my voice,” I tell him, “I’ll be happy.”

  It takes Colin twelve hours to send me the video. It takes me fifteen minutes to set up a brand-new YouTube account, three minutes to upload the clip, and thirty seconds to post the link on every social media account I have.

  It takes one weekend for the entire school to see it.

  When I show up on Monday morning, I can feel the eyes on my back, even if I can’t make out the whispers. It’s okay. I’ve got a video with more views than my school has people, a comments section with equal parts praise and horrific ridicule, and a phone in my pocket with a text from a freshman girl I’ve never met, who says she wants to be just like me.

  I want to be the kind of person who deserves that. Today, and tomorrow, and forever.

  Not everyone liked the set, and that’s okay. Not everybody at this school likes me, and that’s okay, too. I have the people I need. Naomi, who meets me by the door of Ms. Waldman’s classroom every day before lunch, so I won’t have to walk alone. Ms. Waldman, whose door is always open. And new people, too—like Ms. Tayhoe, the school counselor. I’d never met her before, but Mom wanted me to talk with her, so I did. I thought it would be too weird to talk about personal things with a stranger, but it wasn’t. She doesn’t judge me; she only listens. And there’s nothing as nice as being heard.

  It doesn’t matter to me that, on Monday, Jack watches the video with his friends at lunch, whispering about how bad I am and how weird I look onstage. Because when he notices me watching him, he looks back at me with a healthy amount of fear in his eyes, and quickly shuts it off.

  And then I see Alex.

  He hasn’t tried to talk to me, or convince me I made a mistake, or grab me in the hall, like I worried he might. I think my mom and Ms. Tayhoe had something to do with it. “The counselor knows how to handle it. She said it happens a lot, unfortunately,” Mom told me. And then her face crumpled. “I’m sorry, Isabel. I didn’t know how much it happened.”

  Alex is at his usual table, in his usual spot, with a new empty place next to him. He stares at me, long and hard. He doesn’t say anything, not that I could ever hear him in a place like this. He doesn’t have to. I got so good at reading his moods, reading his face.

  How could you do this? his tightly clenched jaw says to me. How could you talk about me like that?

  He was never as good at figuring me out—or maybe he never really tried. But I try to tell him, without words, with all this distance between us:

  There are so many things I could have said about you.

  There are so many worse things I could tell the world about you.

  I could tell everyone how he isolated me from my best friend. How he demanded all my time, all my attention, all of me. How he scared me, on purpose, and liked doing it. How he lied to me, made me think I was crazy and unlovable and needed him.

  That’s the worst part. He made me believe I needed him to love me, because no one else would. And he never even loved me at all.

  I know what love looks like, real love, the kind my mom shows me, even if she isn’t perfect. The kind my friends have for me, even when I make mistakes. That unshakable, ever-fixed mark. But I’m not sure Alex has ever seen what it looks like. He’s responsible for what he did to me. That’s a fact. He was damaged long before he met me. That’s a fact, too.

  So I try, in this wordless way, to tell him:

  I hope you treat the next girl better than you treated me.

  I hope you figure out how to care about someone, better than your parents ever cared about you.

  I hope one day you know what it feels like, too.

  We share one last, long look. One last moment of quiet between two people who know each other so well and not at all.

  Then I turn around.

  Chapter 27

  FLOWERS BLOOM ALL year round. In every corner of the earth, in the harshest of climates and most temperate paradises, in the coldest winter snap and hottest dog days of summer, there is always something showing its face to the sun. And something still underground, too, waiting for its chance.

  In the Arctic, cotton grass springs up by the rivers and wetlands, soft and white, like the snow that came before them. In Death Valley, wildflowers carpet the desert deep purple and gold, thriving where so little does and scattering their seeds for the life that’s still to come.

  But here, in June—it’s like the universe unfurls itself. First, so slowly you barely notice it happening, and suddenly, you’re surrounded by summer. Here, in the only home I’ve ever known, daylilies and lavender and roses finally emerge from their buds, with white ash trees green and leafy, and dogwoods in full flower.

  And maybe, so late in the season it seems impossible, a single white orchid, too.

  Not every day in June is beautiful, but Mo and all the other graduates got lucky, because this one is spectacular. The sky is clear and an almost unearthly blue above the University of Chicago’s main quad. Next to me in the guest seating, a family wearing matching pins that say Congrats, Josh slather on sunscreen. I should probably ask for some. There’s no shade here, and I could burn. But the way the sun wraps its warmth around me like a blanket, I can’t imagine putting anything between us.

  I still can’t believe I’m here—I thought you’d need tickets or something for a college graduation. It feels so important, and it looks that way, too, with all the giant maroon banners flapping in the breeze, all the graduates in their caps and gowns, the deans and provosts and other titles I don’t know with honest-to-God robes.

  I went to Charlotte and Peter’s high school graduation, but nothing about that—the scratchy microfiber seats in our school’s stuffy auditorium, the orchestra’s unenthusiastic rendition of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the brag-filled speech by the valedictorian, aka Charlotte’s archenemy—none of that was like this. If that graduation felt like an inevitability, this one feels like a celebration.

  Outside, under the blue sky, with wind whipping around the graduates’ tassels and birds singing in the trees nearby, I’m sitting on my own, but I’m surrounded by hundreds of other people who only want the same thing I do: to see the people we love cross the stage in front of us, and walk out into a brand-new life.

  Jonah is first, and his gigantic family nearly breaks the sound barrier when his name is read. He eats up every second. I try to match their energy when Mo walks next, cheering so loudly the nice family next to me jumps. The way she smiles out into the crowd, I think she can hear me. I do the same for Will and then again at the end of the ceremony.

  How amazing, I think, that this is the way they get to leave. That this is the day, and the place, and the moment they get to say goodbye to a par
t of their lives. Four years. That’s an entire quarter of my entire life. It’s easy to imagine leaving high school behind, but it’s harder to imagine this. If high school feels like preparation for college, then college feels like preparation for . . . life. Real life. And how do you start your real life?

  While the closing anthem plays, and the new graduates stand to file away, I try to capture this moment in my brain. Every sight, and sound, and scent, and lock it safely inside myself.

  Songbirds in the trees, the sun on my face, the grass brushing up against my bare ankles, and the good in everything.

  The aftermath of the graduation is controlled chaos. All the grads are dressed the same, which makes it almost impossible to find anyone. But I do, in the end.

  I get a hug from Jonah, who takes a moment of relief away from the approximately eighty-seven members of his family who showed up. Then Will finds us both, flanked by his parents and two siblings.

  “This is a zoo,” Will says. “We’re going to book it out of here.”

  “Yeah, I know. Maybe we can hang next week, though?” Jonah looks to both of us. Will nods, and so do I. Nothing could make me happier than the two of them deciding to stay in Chicago after graduation.

  Except maybe if Mo had.

  I find her last, after the boys have long since disappeared into the crowds. Her parents were seated in the accessibility section, way up front and way on the far side of the quad, so it takes us a while to spot each other.

  “Congratulations.” I hug her as tightly as I can. “I’m so happy for you.”

  “Yeah,” she says, and her voice is strained, higher than normal. With my hands still on her shoulders, I take a step back so I can see her face.

  “Are you okay?” Her eyes are too bright and her muscles under my fingers too tense for the answer to be yes. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She looks away. “I’m being so stupid. I’m fine—”

  “Mo.” I don’t let go. “Tell me.”

  She stares past me, and I know what she’s seeing. All the classmates she might never see again, under the banners of the school she chose, on the campus that’s been her home for so long.