by Lance Rubin
“BE RIGHT THERE!” Evan barks in his own version of Monsterese before turning back to us. “All right, I gots to jet.” He holds up two hands, one each for me and Leili to high-five, which we do. “Later, guys.” He does this deliberately goofy run up the aisle, elbows all over the place, which is one part funny, four parts huge dork. Still kind of charming, though.
“Wow, he totally likes you,” Leili says.
“I mean,” I say, “maybe not. He only wanted my number so he could send me a photo.”
“Uh, yeah, but why was he taking photos of you in the first place?”
“That’s…a good point.”
“And has he even sent you any photo yet? I think he just said that so he could get your number.”
“I don’t know, lemme check.” By now, everyone has filed out of the auditorium except for Mr. Martinez, who’s sitting in the aisle seat of the first row writing in a notebook. My phone buzzes just as I’m taking it out of my bag, a photo from a number I don’t know along with a message: you funny, gurl.
“He actually sent it,” I say to Leili, but she’s absorbed in her own phone, a concerned look on her face. “What’s up?”
“Oh,” she says, extracting her eyes from the screen to look at me. “It’s nothing.”
“You can tell me.”
“It’s…” She glances over at Mr. Martinez to see if he’s listening. He’s not. “It’s Azadeh. Being annoying.”
“What’d she say?”
“She’s getting a ride home from Roxanne instead of with us. They’re, like, besties now.”
“Awww, don’t be jealous, Lay,” I say, partially because I’m feeling it myself.
“It’s not that.”
“She’s finally getting her revenge, huh?” When the three of us met in third grade, Leili and I became friends first, and there was a tense week or so when Azadeh hated me. I still have this hilarious note she wrote me: She’s my sister, not yors.
Leili laughs, knowing exactly what I’m talking about. “She totally is! Maybe I should—” Her phone lights up in her hand. “Oh shoot, my mom’s waiting outside. Let’s go.”
As she leads the way up the aisle, I sneak a glance at the photo Evan was so eager to send. It’s me on all fours, angrily shouting at Molly Graham-Crockett. Not the most flattering photo—my hair is vaguely rat’s-nesty and light’s reflecting off my glasses so you can’t see my eyes—but I’ll take it. Dog Girl lives.
10
“Lucy! I’m home!” I call out as I walk in through the side door. I feel like I’m back in kindergarten, busting with excitement to show Dad what I made at school today. (It was mainly unimpressive family portraits.)
“Hey hey,” he says. “In here.” He’s in the family room watching a Hannibal Buress stand-up special from a few years ago, laughing so hard at every joke that it immediately lifts my spirits. My dad’s laughter is one of my favorite things in the world—and also, this is not a man worried about a fatal diagnosis.
“Ah, so good,” Dad says, wiping a tear away after Hannibal spends a minute riffing on how horrible it would be to have triplets. “How are you, Banana?” he asks, pausing the TV. He’s the picture of relaxation, his arms draped on the back of the couch.
“Good,” I say, sitting down near him. “I’m good.”
“Great,” he says. “That’s great.”
“How are you?” It comes out sounding more loaded than I intended, but my dad doesn’t seem to notice or care.
“Pretty good,” he says. “You know I love me some Hannibal. Once you texted that you’d be staying after school, I figured I’d keep up our tradition on my own.”
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Dad is back from teaching by the time I’m home from school, so, assuming I don’t have to stay after for a Turtle Times meeting (I write caustic movie reviews), we sit and watch something before we start making dinner. We’ve been working through a rewatch of Season 1 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Dad says Mrs. Maisel reminds him of me (which I like, even though I think it’s mainly because we’re both short, brunette, and Jewish).
“I appreciate that. Tradition is important.”
“Indeed,” Dad says. “What’d you have to stay after for? Newspaper?”
“Well, actually…” I hear a drumroll in my head. “I joined the school improv troupe today.”
Dad cocks his head to the side, like maybe he’s misheard me. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah, I…I decided to try it.”
“Wait a second, wait a second,” he says, a half grin forming on his face. “Just to clarify: You’re aware that Improv Troupe involves performing, right? In front of other people?”
“I am,” I say, unable to hold back a grin of my own.
“My daughter, Winnie, who swore she would never ever perform again ever in her life, has joined a troupe? The kind that ends with the letter e?”
“I mean, I’ve only been to one rehearsal so far, and it was today, so don’t get too excited—”
“I’m gonna get very excited!” Dad takes an arm off the couch to hold it out for a high five. It reminds me of Evan Miller. “This is awesome, Win! You belong in that group. I’ve always said so, haven’t I?”
“You have.” I high-five him.
“Following in the family legacy. What pushed you over the edge? Did Leili finally convince you?”
I think about Evan encouraging me to join. For some reason, I don’t want to get into that with Dad.
“Pretty much,” I say.
“Wow, I owe her a drink.”
“That’s a weird thing to say.”
“You’re a weird thing to say.”
“Thanks.” Calling out my dad, even when he isn’t actually that worthy of being called out, is one of my favorite things to do.
“Seriously, though, this is so exciting, Win. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me and Mom sooner.”
“I didn’t decide to join until yesterday, and I was gonna tell you last night, but then…” It hangs there in the air for a second before Dad changes the subject.
“So the first rehearsal was today? How did it go?”
“Ugh,” I say. “It started out atrocious, but then it got amazing.”
“Wow, better than I would have expected. My first improv rehearsals were almost exclusively atrocious.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really! I was awful. Even once I got better at it, I still had terrible wanna-roll-into-a-ball-and-hide performances. It’s like a muscle you have to build. What games did you guys do? Any Arms? That was always my favorite.”
“What is Arms?”
“You know. It’s that game where you bring up two volunteers from the audience to be the arms for two performers. So, like, I would put my arms behind my back…” He gets himself up from the couch to demonstrate. “And you—just stand up real quick—you come behind me.” He gestures with his head.
“We’re doing this right now?”
“Come on, it’s nothing weird, let me just show you.” As always, I go with my dad’s flow. I take a few steps and get behind him. “Okay, now slide your arms into these holes.” He flaps his elbows, highlighting the gaps between arms and body.
“Can’t you just explain it in words?”
“Winifred. Please. I promise this will be fun and not creepy.”
“All right, all right.” I put my arms through his, my nose buried in his gray polo shirt, just below the collar. Smells like the forest. Like fresh air. Like home.
“Okay, now you move your arms around however you want, and I have to justify what you’re doing.”
My eyes have started to produce tears. Maybe because soon his arms might actually not be under his control. Or maybe because I’m worried this closeness won’t always be available to me. “That’s kind of cheesy, Dad,” I say, somehow making
my voice sound normal.
“So what? Cheesy is good sometimes!”
I half-heartedly move my arms back and forth.
“Okay, that’s a start,” Dad says. “So while you’re doing that, I say something to justify it. Like ‘I call this lazy-man piano playing!’ ”
What we’re doing is even cheesier than I thought it was fifteen seconds ago, but I decide to throw him a bone anyway, interlocking my fingers and shaking my hands in the air like an old-timey athlete celebrating victory.
“Now we’re talkin’!” Dad says. “I am a champion! I am a winner! Hooray for me!”
I pull my hands apart and start pointing in random directions. I obviously can’t see anything, as my face is still buried in Dad’s back. I wish there were a way to wipe my wet face on his shirt without him feeling it.
“You lost!” Dad says. “And you lost too! You suck! You suck! You all suck!” I point a finger into my dad’s chest. “I don’t suck!” I point it forward again. “But you do!”
I laugh in spite of myself.
“Wait a sec, is somebody back there laughing at this very cheesy improv game?”
I raise my right hand and give Dad’s face a gentle smack. His stubble is prickly. “Hey,” he says. “Don’t make me be violent to myself.” I lightly smack the other cheek. “Hey!”
“Why are you hitting yourself?” I ask.
“Oh, don’t even go there, Win.” It’s well known within our family that as a kid, Dad hated nothing more than when his older brother, Noah, would say that while grabbing Dad’s hands and propelling them into him.
I smack both cheeks at the same time. “You don’t like yourself or something?”
Dad turns around and lifts me up as he growls like a grizzly, then hurls me onto the couch. I’m laughing, happy and genuinely surprised; it’s been at least three years since he’s done that to me.
“If you poke the bear, you’re gonna get hurt,” he says, growling but maybe also wincing and more out of breath than I would have expected.
“You okay?” I say, my own smile fading.
“Yeah,” Dad says, trying to laugh it off. “That just…” He flexes his right arm at the elbow a few times. “I’m good.”
“Okay. I can slap you again if that’s helpful.”
He continues to look at his arm for what feels like a full minute before responding. “What? Oh. Ha. No, thanks.”
He takes his phone out of his pocket and glances at the screen. “I should probably get dinner started,” he says. “Wanna help?”
“Not really.”
“That’s fine, I’ll just get the robot to do it.”
“Okay, great.”
Dad walks over to the fridge to gather ingredients, and I join him, trying to ignore the way he reaches out to the counter to make sure he doesn’t fall.
* * *
—
“Winnie joined the school’s improv troupe today,” Dad says, a few minutes after we sit down to eat dinner.
“Wow,” Mom says, her face lighting up. “That’s great. The ban on performing has lifted?”
“For now,” I say. “I think. Maybe.”
“Amazing. I didn’t even know your school had an improv troupe.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve told you about it before. Leili’s in it.”
“Oh, that’s right, that’s right,” Mom says, slurping a single spaghetti noodle into her mouth. “How’d she convince you to get back in the game?”
“She paid me.”
“What?” Mom looks concerned.
“That was a joke.”
“Oh. Okay.” Mom makes that face like I don’t understand what passes for humor these days in this house, but all right. “So why did you actually decide to join?”
I stare down at specks of Parmesan cheese that missed my plate and landed on the table. Can’t we just celebrate this personal milestone and talk details later? “I don’t know, I just did.”
“Come on, Win,” Dad says. “You can give Mom a better explanation than that. You said Leili wore you down, right?”
“Right,” I say. It sounds better than the actual reason, which suddenly seems pathetic. I joined because a boy I barely know told me to. Ugh.
“Go Leili,” Mom says.
“We owe her a drink,” Dad says, repeating his not-that-funny joke from earlier.
I love our family, but sometimes I wish I had someone to roll my eyes with other than Dad. A little jokester brother named Johnny. Or a scrappy little sister named Madge. When I was eight or nine years old, I bugged my parents constantly about not wanting to be an only child until finally Mom looked at Dad and then at me and said, “You know, we didn’t want that for you either.” They had tried to have a second child, she explained, but she’d had two miscarriages. Neither she nor Dad wanted to go through that again, so they stopped trying. So. A little TMI for age nine, but I stopped asking.
“And how was your day?” Mom asks Dad.
“Oh, me? Good. Fine. Classes this morning went well.”
“Did you call to make that appointment?”
“Oh shoot, no, I didn’t.”
“Russ,” Mom says.
“I will. I’ll leave a voice mail later. I totally forgot.”
“This isn’t a joke. I can do it if you—”
“No, I got it, I got it,” Dad says. “I just…I got it.” This is a long-standing dynamic between my parents. Mom is more on top of things. Dad is less so.
“Okay,” Mom says, lifting a forkful of salad into her mouth. “Just actually do it.”
“I said I got it, Dana.” Dad doesn’t get snappy regularly, so it’s always notable when he does. This time I think he even surprised himself. He’s suddenly very focused on the last meatball left on his plate.
I want to ask what appointment they’re talking about, but now the subject seems off-limits. We eat in silence for five minutes before I get up the courage to ask to be excused.
* * *
—
As I’m walking to my room, I see that I have nine new texts: one from Leili, and eight from Evan. It catches me so off guard I trip up the steps.
“You all right?” Dad says, from the kitchen.
“Totes McGotes,” I say, using the banister to pull myself back up.
Once firmly planted on my bed, door to my room closed, I look at my phone.
Leili’s text is simple and to the point: Azadeh = SUPER annoying.
Hah why? I text back before looking, with a combination of excitement and dread, at the eight separate thoughts Evan felt he needed to transmit to me.
Did you like the pic? he texted at 6:17 p.m.
You were seriously so funny today
I can’t look at my dog wo thinking about it
And wondering if he hates me
Haha
He texted again at 7:04 p.m.:
I’m starting to think you gave me a made-up number
And I’m texting these things to a stranger
Sorry, Stranger
That was twelve minutes ago.
I drop the phone on my bed because I’m nervous I’m going to accidentally respond before I’m ready. He’s definitely flirting with me. You don’t send eight texts to someone if you’re not flirting.
Right?
But does that mean he’s pretending he thinks I’m funny so that I’ll go out with him?
Or does he have a crush on me because I’m funny?
I hope it’s that.
It better be that.
Dad is often a helpful resource on questions such as these. I’ve always felt more comfortable talking with him than Mom. Mainly because Mom gets so invested in every real-time detail and then I feel all this pressure to keep reporting back, whereas Dad can give good advice—mainly ab
out the moronic male perspective—and then forget the conversation happened by the next day.
Not that I’ve even had so much experience. The closest thing I’ve had to a relationship was with this elfin boy named Asher Fisk who I met at Camp Valley Island Mountain the summer before high school started. He was my first kiss, and he made charcoal sketches of me, and he had gorgeous dimples, and he referred to many things as “wicked,” and he always wore a hemp shell necklace, and when camp ended, we decided to make the long-distance thing work (he’s from Maine), which it did up until February, when he stopped responding to my texts and calls for a full week and then sent me this long, annoying email about how he’d started dating some girl at his school “which, really, when you think about it, makes a lot more sense, right?”
Dad explained that many boys are stupid dipsticks in high school and that it was completely acceptable for me to entertain fantasies of pushing Asher Fisk into a cement mixer. It was very helpful. I want to go downstairs and ask him about Evan’s texts, but I don’t want to accidentally stumble back into Tenseville. And also he’s got way more important things to worry about.
A bigger question is: How do I feel about Evan? (I mean, assuming he actually does like me and think I’m funny and I’m not reading way too far into all of this.) I guess he’s cute. Goofy-cute. Thinking back on it, I didn’t have a crush on Asher until he started talking to me all the time in the dining hall and leaving cryptic drawings of birds and pinecones on the steps of my cabin (which seemed charming then but now just seems weird), so maybe this is kind of like that. Maybe my destiny is to never end up with boyfriends who I have crushes on first.
Not that I actually have a crush on anyone right now. I spent much of the past summer pointlessly pining after Dev Ahmad (along with every other girl at camp). He was handsome and good at magic tricks, but what really got me was that his magic act was hilarious, and not even in a dorky way. But he was making out with Michelle Jorgenson all summer, which I was actually okay with, since she’s super-shy, so it felt like a nice message to send to the younger campers. Like, you can be a quiet person and still get the hottest guy in camp.
