Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(57)

“Thanks, I’m f—”

“Are you okay though, really? You seem not okay,” he asks, stepping on my words.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Come in.”

He steps inside past me, and I gesture for him to sit down on the sofa, where the episode’s been paused.

“This is a sad one,” he says. I guess he can recognize it from the still.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be watching this?” he suggests tentatively.

“Maybe. Hey, wait here, I’m gonna put some clothes on real quick. I’ll be right back.”

“Okay.”

I run to my room and throw on the first clean clothes I can grab—a tank top and pink running shorts—and then I come back and sit on the sofa again.

“So your, like . . . story thing,” Gideon says. I squirm with humiliation. “It was weird for me. I’m not gonna lie. But I know it’s what you like to do. Or how you deal with things or whatever.”

“I think I’m done with it.” I sigh.

“With what? With writing?” he asks, surprised.

I nod and snag two beers from the six-pack. I snatch up the rest and head for the kitchen to toss them in the fridge.

“But you’re so good at it!” he shouts from the living room.

“I don’t know,” I yell back, because I don’t know. The wanting to write has to come before the writing itself, and I just haven’t wanted to, which makes me think I will never want to again.

“So, I thought you might like a stand-up routine I downloaded a while ago,” he yells. “It’s this comedian named Tig Notaro.”

Mildly surprised and secretly pleased, I yell back, “You still listen to stand-up?”

I return to the sofa with the bottle-opener magnet from our fridge and pop open both beers.

“Of course,” he says, sounding surprised that I’d ask.

I hand him one.

“I don’t know. I guess I thought you’d moved on to wittier influencers like Jason Tous.”

He stares straight ahead, looking contrite. But he just has nothing to say for himself. I admit, I’m partly sticking it to him because at some point, it was two roads diverged in a wood: He’s (rightly) upset that I wrote creepy Internet fiction about him, and I am (rightly) upset that he has transformed into a proper popular *. But ultimately, I don’t care about any of that right now. Everything that seemed like a big deal last week is in my emotional rearview mirror.

“Well, it’s nice of you to try. But I don’t think I’m into any ‘what’s the deal with’ stuff right now.” I hand him a beer.

He shakes his head. “It’s not that, like, not at all. I have it here on my phone. Why don’t you just give it a chance? I bet you’ve watched this enough times you’ve memorized the dialogue by now.” He gestures to the TV.

Fair point. I shrug.

“Sure, whatever. But I have veto power. If I’m not into it in five minutes, it’s done.”

“Deal.”

He scrolls quickly through his iTunes library—which I quickly note consists almost entirely of Kanye and stand-up specials—at least his taste is still good—and hits play on one.

The emcee introduces the woman, Tig Notaro. I am already rolling my eyes at Gideon’s tone-deaf attempt to make me feel better.

“Just wait,” Gideon murmurs. My heart does a weird sputter because he looks exactly the way he used to when he was about to play me a comedian’s boundary-breaking set—his eyes are shining with adrenaline, and he’s leaning forward with his hands on his knees like he’s about to begin a race.

As the opening applause calms down, Tig Notaro begins her set with, “Hello. I have cancer. Hello. How are you guys?” She is met with some confused giggles but mostly silence. Like the audience, I am officially listening.

For the next thirty minutes, everything fades away as she talks. She’d been diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer only three days earlier, she says, and as a professional comedian, she can’t make it into neat jokes yet.

Instead, she does something amazing: She’s bracingly honest. She talks about how friends felt bad, now, when they complained about petty problems in their own lives, but she genuinely wishes they would just talk to her normally. She makes fun of platitudes like “God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.” She doesn’t hide her fear of the future. She faces down an L.A. audience who came to hear some hip, ironic observational comedy and tells them—without packaging it into a joke-punchline format—that she just found out she might die soon. Every laugh she gets throughout the whole set is the result of her being totally, completely, un-comedian-esquely straightforward and honest.

The applause is long and thunderous and gives me enough time to realize that I’m crying. This is how Ruth must have felt when she found out, why she didn’t tell anybody, how hard it is to negotiate with yourself, let alone other people. How you decide to just let go. I’m not mad at her anymore. This crying is a different kind of crying than I’ve been doing for the past few weeks. The ice finally broke, and now I’m underwater.

Gideon leans to the side on the sofa and wraps me in a big hug, my tears soaking into his Maclaine-house-smelling MHS hoodie, leaving a blotchy wet spot behind. This goes on for a while, but I can’t tell how long. This kind of crying is a little bit like falling into a black hole: Maybe it lasts two minutes, maybe two hours, maybe you get torn apart, maybe you time travel back to 1887—you can speculate, but you can never really know.