Hope and Other Punch Lines(4)

Baby. Freaking. Hope.

This might actually work.

As soon as Uncle Maurice, which is what we are supposed to call the camp director—this silver-haired dude with a killer seventies stache—and Zach, my new senior counselor, aren’t looking, I pull out my phone to text Jack. He’s not just my best friend, he’s also the only person in the world who will understand what this means to me.


Me: BABY HOPE IS AT CAMP. WE ARE HAVING COFFEE TOMORROW. IT’S A SIGN

Jack: What’s up with the all caps? Who are you?

Me: You are right. Caps were uncalled for Jack: Glad we cleared that up. Also, NOT A SIGN

Me: I really think she might be able to help Jack: She was a baby at the time Me: I have a plan Jack: You really need to let this go. You sound insane Me: You’ve seen the pictures Jack: People have doppelg?ngers. It’s a documented phenomenon



“Hey, put that away,” Zach says to me, and swats at my phone. “That’s how a kid drowns.”

My new senior counselor epically sucks. So far today, and I’ve only know him approximately six hours, he has whispered “dibs” in my ear three times when we were introduced to a new girl, and he keeps talking about his “boys back at school,” always in reference to some dumb prank they pulled, like replacing someone’s shampoo with Nair. Apparently It was sick, dude, so sick.

Just as I was wondering how it’s possible to bro that hard without a keg nearby, he started talking about his meditation practice and his deeply held commitment to veganism. Which is to say: his existence is confusing.

“Last time I checked, you can’t drown in grass,” I say. Jack would hate Zach, because Jack hates anyone who is easily classifiable, and though this guy falls into two contradictory categories—Zen stoner and frat boy—I have no doubt the hating would still apply. “Uncle Maurice gave us a ten-minute break.”

“Don’t talk back to your elders,” Zach says, and then laughs his bro laugh, a hard heh, and walks away.

I give him the finger in my mind.


Me: My senior counselor is the worst, so don’t crap all over the one thing that has made this day bearable Jack: This Baby Hope thing is…unhealthy, and when I say unhealthy I don’t mean calorific Me: What are you talking about?

Jack: I realized today calorific is a word we don’t use nearly enough. Calorific. It’s funny, no? I feel like there may be a bit there Me: Not really. Anyhow, Abbi seems cool Jack: She’s a little short for my taste Me: She’s a little too much of an actual girl for your taste Jack: True. Now are you ready?

Me: For what?

Jack: I’m going to be serious with you for a minute and it might get awkward because we’re never serious with each other, but then we can get right back to our regularly scheduled shit talking Me: Ok Jack: You need to let this 9/11 stuff go. For real. Enough is enough. Consider this an intervention Me: I’m not crazy. It’s him Jack: Break’s up. Must go do God’s work ringing up tampons and eggplant. Good talk, man





The first time I realized that I’m going to die, that we are all going to die eventually, I was in the third grade. Of course, by then I had already learned that no one gets to live forever, and that doesn’t mean just the old, just the sick, but babies and mothers and teenagers and real estate agents. Also pilots. And orthodontists. I understood that death was cruel and didn’t play fair. I was, had been for as long as I could remember, the girl who survived, and so for whatever reason—I’m sure Dr. Schwartz, our family therapist, has a working theory—I didn’t think the normal rules of mortality applied to me.

I was fashionably late to the existential panic party.

Then one day in third grade, I found myself peeing on my goldfish, Orange, who somehow simultaneously had flat-lined in the toilet bowl and was swimming happily in her small aquarium on the kitchen counter.

“Mom!” I screamed, thinking at first that I had relieved myself on some other poor fish that had swum its way up our pipes. When my mother realized what had happened—she’d forgotten the crucial step of flushing when secretly replacing my dead fish—she smiled right into my horrified face.

“Well, now you know.”

She said this like it was good news, in the same tone she’d used to show me the house she had bought two doors down from my father after the divorce, and then again the first time I got my period. Matter-of-fact optimism in the face of something grim. “That was Orange number nine, may he rest in peace. Number ten seems to be adjusting well to his new bowl.”

Once I caught up, my previous innocence astounded and embarrassed me. Of course there was no magic tooth fairy who traded cash for slimy canines. And of course I was going to die. It was hard to remember ever being so stupid as to believe anything else.

I guess it’s easier to give up all our myths at once.

When the cough came a month ago, tight and jagged and without warning, it wasn’t a total surprise. I’ve known my whole life that there had to be consequences to being The Girl Who Survived. I have been lying in wait.

I had read about the “World Trade Center cough,” common enough among survivors to have a name. I’d seen the obituaries in the newspaper from 9/11 syndrome, which seemed to increase exponentially in number around the fifteenth anniversary. And I knew what had happened to Connie.