Hope and Other Punch Lines(30)

“What is?” I ask.

“Everything.”

“Grandma?”

“All of it. When you pulled up in the car, you looked like a woman, not a girl. And to be honest, before now, I never really let myself imagine it. I dunno, after everything, I’ve been weirdly superstitious. Like if I let myself see you as an adult, something would snatch you away. And now the world is going to.”

“Mom.”

“No. It’s a good thing! That’s what’s supposed to happen. I keep thinking about that horrible shooting. The forty-five parents at that middle school getting calls that their kids were never coming home. I’m so, so tired of always worrying about our world splitting into a before and an after again.”

I ignore the icy feeling climbing up my back, the image of a shard of glass embedded in Chuck’s leg, my cough that erupts just because I’m thinking about it. When I heard the news on the radio driving home earlier in the week, I shut it off.

An idea comes: Tell her.

My mother scoots me closer to her on the bench for her own comfort, not mine. I assumed that my plan this summer—my eight weeks of ignorant bliss—was a selfish one, me indulging my need for a little more joy in the before, but I realize with a start that it might also be the right thing, the brave thing, to let the truth stay buried for a little while longer.

My mother has finally allowed herself the fantasy of my growing up. So much guilt finally giving way to optimism. I will not be responsible for destroying her dreams. Not while my mom’s already in the process of losing someone else.

“I’m not grown. I’m not even five feet.” I kick up to show her my tiny size-four-and-a-half flip-flops. My toenails are painted with silver glitter. I’m wearing a string ankle bracelet a camper made for me. No one could mistake me for a woman.

“I didn’t say you looked tall. Pretty soon you’ll be on your own, though. Far away at college.”

“We have a whole year,” I say, careful to use a tone of not quite promising.

She pours more wine. Looks up at the sky, now more gray, finding its way to black.

“Mom, are you okay? For real?”

“This is what we experts call a midlife crisis. Nothing to worry about.” She smiles and looks like herself. As bright and shiny as my sparkling toenails. Once again the person who used to give my boo-boos magic kisses whenever I fell. Who would sometimes sweep me up so fast, I wouldn’t even notice that I’d touched the ground in the first place. Always with the same refrain: You’re okay, sweetheart. You’re okay. “By the way, your dad is coming over for dinner.”

“Really?” My dad is never home this early.

“Well. Lasagna,” she says, like that explains it, when what she really means is he’s checking up on Grandma. I thought one of the reasons people got divorced was so they don’t have to have dinner with each other’s parents.

My mom pumps her legs back and forth, as if this is a playground swing, as if she thinks we can get somewhere if we push hard enough. I decide to lift my feet and join her. Who cares that we have nowhere to reach for? That our swing may become untethered and collapse? I’m looking for joy in this moment.

We push back and forth till the sky goes fully dark. Till it turns the color of goodbye.





There’s this great episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee in which Jerry Seinfeld and John Oliver fall in comedy love and talk about how they both have such a compulsive need to make other people laugh that it borders on sociopathy. No matter the circumstances, they’re always looking for the funniest angle. In Trevor Noah’s episode, he tells Seinfeld how stand-up in South Africa was illegal until about twenty years ago because telling jokes was considered a dangerous and powerful expression of free speech.

I’m pretty sure Jerry and John and Trevor would all agree with me that a really good joke could save the world.





“Don’t look now,” Noah says, and I reflexively start to move my head, which happens whenever someone says the words don’t look now. “But Cat is here.”

I catch myself just in time. We are at Moss’s party, loitering in the foyer because he apparently lives in a house on steroids and it’s overwhelming. Two huge columns flank the entrance, each with a giant white marble lion at its side, both of which are currently wearing fluorescent pink Troll wigs. Naked statues spit water into the air at random, a chandelier the size of a horse dangles threateningly over our heads, and there’s gold embroidered into the wallpaper. According to Jack, who it turns out might be one of those people who secretly knows all the good gossip, Moss’s dad was the sixth investor in Snapchat and is now on the Forbes 400 list.

I shouldn’t be surprised to see Cat. It seems like every teenager in New Jersey is here. Probably even some rich kids from Manhattan who tunneled their way over. Still, I bought into the fiction that my summer life with camp people would be like visiting Vegas—what happens there stays there.

“Can she see me?” I ask, holding myself perfectly still, like I’m doing the mannequin challenge.

“Why are you frozen? Move,” Jack says. “Look natural. Be normal.”

“I forgot how to do that.” Again I have the arm problem. Where do they go? Up? Down? Do I cross them?

“She’s here with that guy we saw her with the other night at the store,” Noah says, looking over my shoulder.