Hope and Other Punch Lines(12)

“What’s the tattoo?”

“Let’s just say it’s a fish….”

“Like a Jesus fish?”

“No, a normal fish…but with mammary glands.”

“A mermaid?” I ask.

“A sexy mermaid. I can’t talk about it. Anyhow, he’s a really good person. Sometimes when people use EBT cards to pay, he’ll put stuff in their bags without charging them. He thinks no one notices, but I’ve seen it a bunch of times. He’s a superhot grocery store Robin Hood. He keeps a book in his back pocket, which is the cutest thing ever. Careful! Top left. Use the power combo.” I ignore Jack and get shot again. Of course.

“Crap,” I say.

“You never listen. Anyhow, I know you think most of my crushes are unrealistic, but this one feels different. I really like him,” Jack says, and because I am not a douche, I don’t say what we are both thinking, which is that he says this every single time.

“That’s great,” I say. As much as I like to make fun of Jack—it’s my favorite hobby—I try not to tease him about his wholly theoretical love life. It’s not easy being one of only a handful of out kids in Oakdale, and any guy would be lucky to have him. I mean it. I may have sucker punched Jack in the face once in the third grade and he annoys the living shit out of me, but I love him. We’re brothers, and I don’t mean that in a bro-y way, like we’re bonded because some asshole made us drink fifty beers together one night and now we think we’re friends for life. We actually will be.

“Nah, I think he might be straight. Ugh. Why are we both so bad at this?” Jack asks.

“At what?” I ask, because the truth is there’s a pretty long list of stuff we are bad at.

“Pretty much everything except hanging out together and coming up with terrible jokes.”

“At least we know we’re not peaking in high school,” I say. I shoot a power rocket at nothing in particular. The sky explodes like the Fourth of July. It feels awesome, which perversely ends up making me feel even more pathetic.

“Thank God,” Jack says. “Because peaking in high school would have been a real tragedy.”

“The worst,” I agree just as an alien dinosaur opens his giant jaws and swallows me whole.





“Your mom is worried about you,” my dad declares over dinner at his house. Well, technically, it is my house too, since I live at both 11 and 15 Lexington Road, my time divided exactly fifty-fifty, as mandated by the divorce decree. Not that it really matters where I sleep, since the houses are so close we tend to treat them like they’re interchangeable. Sometimes, on Monday or Thursday mornings, when we’re out of milk, my dad and I walk over and eat breakfast at my mom’s. On Tuesdays and Fridays, Mom and I like to stop at Dad’s to fill up our travel mugs because he splurges on the good coffee.

I don’t answer my father right away. Take a bite of pizza to buy some time and gauge where this conversation might be heading.

Grandma again? I thought I took it like a champ when we went for ice cream.

College applications? I signed up online for a bunch of catalogs.

New friends? I’m working on it.

Since Cat and I had our own little divorce and she got custody of the rest of our crew, I’ve been decidedly less social. The thing is, I used to be part of a happy foursome—Me, Cat, Ramona, and Kylie. They all had hair colors not naturally found in nature and lots of piercings and an enviable fluency with pop culture. As a fern, I have standard-issue brown hair, unpunctured ears, and basic tastes, so we were never a perfect fit. When I hung out with my friends (now ex-friends), it was an irony not lost on me that my natural inclination to blend actually made me stand out.

Cat and I had done the best friends necklaces, the blood-sisters thing, the sleeping over at each other’s houses every weekend for as long as I could remember. We had been so entwined in each other’s lives that it seemed a foregone conclusion that we would always continue that way. I wish I could explain what happened, why we unraveled junior year, with a few dismissive words about me stealing her boyfriend or her stealing mine—I’ve never had a boyfriend, and Cat would rather die than commit to a guy she was hooking up with—or how one of us turned mean or some other girl-feuding cliché. Instead, when I look back, I think we outgrew each other. It’s as simple and as sad as that.

Which was fine—these things happen—but the hard part is I still haven’t quite found a new group to fill the void.

“Nothing to be worried about,” I tell my dad. “I’m fine.”

There is no part of me that thinks this could be about the cough. If it were, we’d already be in a waiting room at the pulmonologist. I used to go so often for my asthma that my entire family was invited to Dr. Cohn’s son’s bar mitzvah. I danced my very first slow dance under a cardboard Ferris wheel that said Cohny Island, and last year, we went to his daughter’s sweet sixteen, where I ate delightful pigs in a blanket.

I have no intention of outright lying about the cough. I’m just not going to bring it up first. If my parents sat me down and said, Hey, Abbi, have you been coughing up blood and wheezing and do you think maybe you have 9/11 syndrome? I would say, Yes, as a matter of fact I have and I do. Sorry about that.

“Mom says you seem preoccupied,” he says, all faux casual, like my parents did not plan this pizza-plus-fishing expedition. My mother has always liked to outsource our difficult conversations. It was my dad, not her, who sat me down last spring and asked if I’d be interested in going on the pill. I appreciate your liberal open-mindedness, but do you see any guys around here? I asked. I’m pretty sure I can’t get pregnant watching movies with Cat.