Hope and Other Punch Lines

by Julie Buxbaum

  I’m pretty sure that’s not what we mean by Never forget.

  There’s this whole special area reserved for VIPs, where you stand in the Reflection Room and view the remains repository. Those are literally the words they use, Reflection Room and remains repository, as if its patrons are kindergarteners or Kardashians and take comfort in alliteration. This is an underground lookout point—a window onto a cavernous room filled with mood-lit drawers. A gold star to anyone who can guess what’s in those nifty cabinets. Yup, those lucky people who were so incinerated there aren’t even DNA traces left.

  That’s what you’re supposed to reflect on. In your free time. By choice. They provide complimentary tissues.

  Unidentified remains.

  Here’s the strangest part of all: the museum has its own Twitter feed. A fucking Twitter feed. Of course it’s about the most depressing shit imaginable. They don’t even try to be funny.

  Which is a long way of saying the 9/11 museum turned out to be a dead end. No pun intended.

  I’m really hoping Abbi isn’t.

  The girls swim with two instructors while a lifeguard named Charles—who is hot in exactly the way lifeguards are supposed to be, all tanned abs and disinterested glare—watches from his perch on the side of the plake with a flotation ring in his lap.

  “You look sort of familiar to me,” Julia says, and these are the first words she’s said to me all day that haven’t been some sort of command. “Where do I know you from?”

  “I get that a lot. I have resting I know you from somewhere face,” I say. I cup my hands over my eyes and pretend to be fascinated by the girls’ swimming progress. I’ve come too far to be outed now. “So how are things with you and Zach?”

  “I used to think he was cool—did you know he meditates every day?—but last night we went out and he seemed over me already. It’s only been a couple of days, which I realize is like a month in camp time. Still…” She trails off, and we both turn our attention to Charles the Lifeguard, because he has his whistle between his lips, and that’s all he has to do, bring a whistle to his mouth, to get girls to look at him.

  What’s camp time? Is it like dog years? Perhaps there was some sixth sense at play when I picked this job—perhaps I somehow knew this summer would feel longer and bigger when it was all over.

  “Maybe you should upgrade, then,” I say, and subtly point at Charles, who has now dropped the ring and therefore provided us with a better view of his perfect torso.

  “Nah, he’s as dumb as he looks.”

  “Those abs, though,” I say. Julia looks him up and down, slowly and without embarrassment or shame. Like it’s her God-given right to look at whomever she wants.

  I want to be her.

  I want to be her looking at Lifeguard Charles.

  I want to be her looking at Lifeguard Charles and understand what it feels like to have him look right back. To feel like you own even just a tiny corner of the world.

  I’ve never had a boyfriend, barely even kissed anyone, unless you count a rowdy game of spin the bottle in ninth grade. I own no part of anything.

  “You’re totally right. I could forgive the stupid for a night.”

  “Be careful. That’s like ten days in camp time,” I say, and Julia laughs.

  I mentally give myself a high five.

  * * *

  —

  When I next see Noah, before pickup at afternoon meeting, I do that thing where you stare straight ahead at something intently so you can plausibly pretend you don’t see the person you are avoiding. It doesn’t work. Noah, who is apparently as shameless as Julia, gets right into my face.

  “Hey,” he says, planting himself in front of me. “Nice try ignoring me.”

  “I wasn’t ignoring you,” I say, and look at the stage, where Uncle Maurice is leading the kids in a round of rah-rah songs. This is my favorite time of the day. When all the campers sit tired and cross-legged on the floor and sing out the rest of their energy. I love the feeling of camaraderie, the pure light in their voices, like we are all part of some magical club full of wonder and delight. “I was lost in thought.”

  “What were you thinking about?” he asks, and for a second I think he actually wants to know. I could tell him how afternoon meeting makes me nostalgic for my own childhood, reminds me of dancing to the Beatles in my grandmother’s farmhouse kitchen, reminds me of all my happiest befores. And then I remember yesterday, and his ulterior Baby Hope motive, and I want to kick him in the shins.

  “So listen. About yesterday,” he starts.

  “Answer is still no. I’m sorry.” Again with the reflexive apology. I should start an I’m sorry jar. Put in a buck every time the words slip out.

  “But—”

  “Seriously. I can’t.”

  “There must be some way I can convince you. Or bribe you, even? I’m not above selling my body.”

  I smile, and then, when I realize I’m smiling, I attempt to rearrange my face.

  “I really, really need your help on this,” he says. “No one will talk to me without you. Believe me, I’ve tried.” Noah looks earnest now, almost sweet. He ruffles his hair in a charming way, a back-and-forth swoop, which leaves it standing straight up like uneven grass. In the background, I hear my girls’ quavering, off-key kid voices singing “Knights Forever, One and All!” which will now be stuck on a loop in my head for the rest of the day. I won’t mind.

  “Find someone else.”

  “There is no one else. You are Baby Hope.” He says it too loudly just as the music comes to a stop.

  “I told you. Just Abbi. Please,” I say under my breath, and look around to make sure no one over the age of four has heard.

  “Exactly how badly do you want to keep this whole Baby Hope thing a secret?” Noah leans in to whisper, and I feel the tickle of his breath on my ear. I shiver.

  Does he think I’m playing here? I am not playing. He has no idea what it’s like having people assume they know you. Being treated like a symbol, not a person. People look at that photo and see patriotism, resiliency, sometimes, perversely, even a happily-ever-after. None of which has anything to do with me. There was a “think piece” in the New York Times that went viral after they ran it last year, blaming Baby Hope for the Iraq War. That writer looked at the photo and felt that I was a false idol, a bait and switch, but how ridiculous to accuse me of selling a war. Yet I’m not so sure he was totally wrong. Maybe the photograph did play its small part.

  “What do you mean? I told you…” I hate how long it takes me to figure out his subtext. I take a step back. “Wait. Are you blackmailing me?”

  “Define blackmail.”

  “Come on.”

  “If you won’t help me on this article, I guess I won’t be as motivated to keep your secret. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”

  “I’m not touching your back. Even figuratively,” I say.

  “How about with one of those long backscratchers with the creepy plastic hands?”

  “This is not funny.”

  “Or one with an equally terrifying shark mouth?”

  “No.”

  “Other counselors are bound to ask me about you since we’re the only ones here from Oakdale. I can’t make any promises about what I’ll tell them.” He throws me an exaggerated shrug and looks around pointedly, like he may not be able to stop himself. Like he’s going to scream it out: Hey, you guys, guess what? Abbi is Baby Hope!

  “No one’s going to ask about me,” I say, reassuring myself that I’ve already covered my tracks as best I can. I left my middle name off the camp forms to make it harder to find me online. Uncle Maurice doesn’t even know who I am.

  “The lifeguard already did.”

  “Charles?” A hungry eagerness creeps into my voice. Which is silly for a variety of reasons, not least of which is t
hat I have no real interest in Charles. I’m sort of interested in his superhuman abs, but even then only clinically. I’m curious how that happens. How many crunches does he do a day? How long can he hold a plank? Does that leave time for any other hobbies?

  “I knew Captain America would get your attention.”

  “Stop it. He didn’t ask about me.”

  “Maybe he did. And I’m sure Julia would find it interesting.” The song has switched to “This Land Is Your Land” and Uncle Maurice has busted out a battered old acoustic guitar and all I want is to be sitting on the floor, indistinguishable from my girls, singing along. My voice, me, lost in the crowd. I want to sit there and feel pre-nostalgia, which probably isn’t a real thing, but I want to feel it anyway: that potent mix of optimism and yearning and the tiniest bit of sadness that comes with the certainty that something will one day be over even if it’s barely yet begun.

  “Please, I really need your help,” he says. His tone has switched from playful to serious, like this all really matters. I want to tell him it’s futile. That the photograph is just a picture of a bunch of lucky people at a single moment in time.

  I look over at Julia, who signals that she needs my help. Her hand motions seem friendlier than they did this morning. More Come on over, less Do this NOW. Livi, already my favorite camper because she’s always lost in some imaginary world, squeezes her eyes shut when she belts out to the New York Island. I feel a swell of tenderness as I watch her wipe away a string of mucus with the back of her little hand.

  My heart grows along with the music. Next Friday, I need to come to camp dressed in superhero gear. Our lunch was chicken nuggets in the shape of dinosaurs and Tater Tots. This afternoon, we created dream catchers out of paper plates and dyed feathers. I’ve given myself eight weeks. I won’t let Noah take them away from me.

  “Fine,” I tell him. “I’ll do it.”

  “Awesome,” he says, and throws his arm around my shoulder. I shake it off. “I knew you’d come around.”

  I am on an intergalactic space mission to save my fellow Mars colonizers from alien predators. My character in this game looks nothing like me. He has a goatee, neon-green hair in an Elvis swoop, a badass tat on his cheek, and a scar that slices from lip to eye. Jack, currently busy consuming a taco, usually plays as a blue-haired girl with an anarchy sign on her forehead. She kicks my butt every single time.

  “Duck!” Jack screams as a space dino roars in my face. I shoot instead, and the animal explodes, drenching me with its guts.

  “I can’t believe you resorted to blackmailing Baby Hope,” Jack says, apropos of nothing, which is typically how conversations go for us. “Terrible idea.”

  “Thanks for your support, man. Means the world,” I say as I drop and roll across a giant boulder and toss a grenade into the swarm of alien invaders. I suck at video games, but we’ve exhausted the Netflix comedy options and all the new stuff online, and I’m not feeling vintage YouTube today.

  I want to blow some shit up.

  “Just telling it like it is. Remember ‘Clean-Up on Aisle 5’ guy? Brendan?” he asks. His voice goes a little high. Nervous. I know what this means. New crush.

  “The one with the tattoos?” I ask, trying to remember any other details he may have given me but coming up empty. Jack is a better talker than I am a listener.

  “Yeah. He’s not an actual high school dropout, but he has that look. I think of it as delinquent-sexy.”

  “That would make a great band name. The Delinquent Sexies. Or for my Netflix comedy special. Picture it: Me totally nerding out on the billboard. Big glasses, socks pulled up, maybe even suspenders, and then it would say Noah Stern: Sexy Delinquent.” As I drop the controller to write the billboard with my hands, I take a bullet to my chest. Serves me right.

  “Would also work for a porno title,” Jack says.

  “I’m pretty sure Abbi has a thing for the lifeguard at camp,” I say. “He’s super cut. Totally the type who should consider an alternative career in porn.”

  “You’re the only straight boy I’ve ever met who doesn’t care if you sometimes sound super gay,” Jack says. “I think it might be one of my top three favorite things about you.” I take this for the compliment it is. Worrying whether I seem gay—which, for what it’s worth, I’m not—seems like a colossal waste of time, and I say this as someone who is in hour three of wasting my life pretending to kill alien dinosaurs. “And must everything come back to Abbi now?”

  “Sorry. Tell me more.” Jack’s bursting to talk about the random guy he has cast as his love interest this summer, and as his best friend, I must do my duty and pretend to listen. I reload, pick up a booster, and settle into a hiding spot behind a metal door on the space station.

  “Well, I’m thinking something more plotted than your typical Internet porn. It would star this kid who’s a delinquent, and spoiler alert: he’s also been a very naughty boy.”

  “Stop. I meant about Brendan.”

  “Okay. So he’s seventeen. Takes college classes part-time at NJCC. Has a tat on his left bicep that was ill-advised.” Jack starts pacing behind the television, which he does whenever he’s (a) practicing a bit or (b) discussing a guy. One time, when he used a stand-up routine at our school talent show to ask out Alfonso Simeon, it was (c) both.

  “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 Thursd
ay 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.”