Hope and Other Punch Lines(26)

“It’s just a cookie.”

“Technically, it’s two cookies with cream between them.”

“So you think these things actually matter? How you like to eat an Oreo? You sure this isn’t small talk?” I ask. I let my mind settle on Noah, who I know is trying to distract me, or maybe us, from the scene we have fled. Sometimes it feels like those towers are still falling and will never stop.

“This is not small talk! Details totally matter. Take your car, for example. She’s still, as yet, unnamed. She’s also immaculate, or was until I got here, and look at this little basket you have in the front: Tissues. ChapStick. Even a flashlight. What is this? Holy crap, do you keep Mace? That’s genius.”

“Are you making fun of me?” I ask.

“No! Not at all. I think people don’t pay enough attention to the small things about each other. But that’s the really interesting stuff.” Noah takes his Oreo, manages to split it so that the cream is evenly distributed, and hands me half.

“I always eat the middle first, and then I regret it because then I’m left with the crappy cookies,” I say. “For the record, I’ve never eaten an Oreo in my underwear.”

“Interesting, and not just because you mentioned your underwear, though feel free to do that more often.”

“Come on,” I say, though the corners of my mouth rise and my face grows warm.

“My point is, your delicate undergarments notwithstanding, if you bother to add up all the details of a person, if you pay close enough attention, that’s how you get to a whole,” he says. His knees are back on my dash, and his hands make a hammock for his head. “And you’re interesting to me because, believe it or not, I’d like to be your friend.”

“Friend? Or blackmailer?” I ask. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say something like that out loud, like it’s an easy thing to admit, like there are no consequences to opening yourself up to rejection: I’d like to be your friend.

“I’m a blackmailing friend.”

“Or friendly blackmailer.”

“You know what I think?” Noah asks, and turns in his seat to look at me. His big glasses can’t hide the look in his eyes, which, like this day, somehow holds too much: curiosity and playfulness and also pain.

“About how I eat my Oreos fully dressed or about the fact that I’m joking along with my blackmailer may mean I have Stockholm syndrome?”

“I think people sometimes get you confused with Baby Hope.”

“But I am Baby Hope.”

“No, you aren’t. You’re Abbi Goldstein, a girl who, I’m learning, has a weird affinity for Wonder Woman T-shirts and flip-flops and keeps Mace and also an alarming number of asthma inhalers in her car and feels regret every single time she eats an Oreo. What’s Stockholm syndrome?”

“It’s when people who are kidnapped start to sympathize with their captors,” I say.

“I did not kidnap you. For the record.”

“It was me on the front page of the freakin’ New York Times almost sixteen years ago,” I say. “I am Baby Hope.”

“No. It was a picture of you. Big difference.”

“Is there, though? You said yourself that our stories are what make us who we are.”

“You didn’t write the Baby Hope story. I’m not saying you don’t bear the burden of it, you obviously do, but you didn’t write it. So it’s not yours. Not really,” he says, and I swat away the single tear that makes a slow, unexpected line down my left cheek.

That might be the most insightful thing anyone has ever said to me.





When I get home, my mom and Phil are sitting on the couch watching the news. Phil is typing on his laptop, immersed in work, as usual. I notice that my mom is crying next to him.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

“The world is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad place sometimes, and it doesn’t need to be,” she says, and then looks back to the screen, which shows the aftermath of another mass shooting, this time at a middle school in the Midwest. Forty-five kids dead in the span of a six-minute spree. I turn away. I’ve seen enough tragic shit for the day.

“You sure?”

“Come give me a hug. That will help,” she says, and so I lean down and let her throw her arms around my neck. She inhales deeply—and I realize she’s actually sniffing me, like I still have the comforting smell of the top of a baby’s head—and I stifle my sigh at her overwhelming mom-ness.

“Your mother is too sensitive,” Phil says, in a patronizing voice, like my mom is both charming and idiotic. Once I’m freed from her embrace, I resist the sudden urge to clock him in the face.

Forty-five kids dead.

I don’t do anything, though, because I am me, and Phil is Phil, and also I’ve never hit anyone in my life, other than Jack in the third grade. If I actually did it, put my fist to Phil’s nose, I think his number one concern would be whether he got blood on the couch.

I kiss my mom four times on the top of her head, which has always been our thing, and run upstairs to my room before I break something.

I don’t let myself spend too much time thinking about how my mother married a bowl of oatmeal. How she is crying not just about those dead kids, but probably about my dad too. How in fifteen years there might be a me in that Midwestern town who selfishly decides his own personal questions are important enough to awaken half-sleeping wounds.