This Will Be Funny Someday

by Katie Henry

  “Isabel, what the fuck,” Charlotte says, “You sound like you’re on drugs.”

  “Do you consider weed a drug?”

  She’s silent for a beat. “Yes!”

  “But what about Fred, that public defender friend of Mom’s? He says it isn’t a drug, it’s just an herb, but I ate it, so maybe it doesn’t still count as an herb.”

  “Hi, focus, please,” Charlotte says. “What do you want me to do here?”

  “Call Dad about . . . something, I don’t know, anything, but then tell him it’s too loud, you can’t hear him, so then he goes outside.”

  She sighs, loudly and long-suffering. “You owe me.”

  “I’ll get you a pony.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I’ll get you Will’s sister’s pony.”

  “What?”

  “Just call thank you love you!” I hang up the phone, then pop my head back over the table. “My sister’s going to call him and get him to go outside. You have to tell me what’s happening, though.”

  I lower myself down just an inch below the tabletop so I won’t be seen but can still mostly hear them.

  “Okay,” Mo narrates. “I think it’s ringing. He’s reaching in his pocket . . . looking at the caller ID . . .”

  “He’s letting it ring,” Jonah says, sounding appalled. “Is he screening a call from his own kid?”

  “You screen calls from your parents daily,” Will says.

  “That’s not the same.”

  “Has he picked up yet?” I ask.

  “Hold on,” Will says.

  “There he goes,” Mo whispers to me. “He’s talking . . . talking . . . Okay, now he’s getting up.”

  I shoot back under the booth. I can’t see my dad, but he must be walking out, because all three of their necks turn in unison from his table to the door.

  “Come on.” Mo beckons me out from under the booth. “We’ve got to go. Now.”

  I hesitate. “What if he’s right outside the door?”

  “Doesn’t matter, we’re going out the back.”

  “Is there a back door?” Will asks.

  “There’s always a back door,” Jonah says.

  “Because of Prohibition, right?” I ask as Mo hauls me up by the arm. “It was in my AP US History textbook.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, dragging me past the bar, and the stage, and the crowds of people so quickly everything blurs.

  “The drinks were illegal so they built lots of secret doors and rooms and buildings and things.”

  “Yep.”

  “And they made the gin in bathtubs but I don’t think the bathtubs were secret.”

  “Cool.” She cranes her neck around the corner, but there’s only a bathroom there. No back door.

  “I read it a long time ago, though,” I say, suddenly aware of how much I’ve been talking about an AP class for someone who’s supposed to be in college. “The textbook. Not recently. Because it was in high school and I’m not in high school anymore, so—”

  “Shit,” Mo says, and for a second, I think she’s figured it out. But then she says: “We have to go through the kitchen.”

  “No way,” Jonah says.

  “That’s got to be a health code violation,” Will says.

  Mo rolls her eyes. “Fine, go out the front, then. I’ll take her myself.”

  The kitchen staff death-stares at us from their stations as Mo drags me through the kitchen by one arm.

  “Sorry,” Mo says to each person we pass, “very sorry, just passing through, emergency.”

  “We don’t have hairnets but we’re still very clean!” Mo’s still dragging me, but I call back over my shoulder: “Also the food smells so good. I wish you could eat it!”

  Chapter 20

  IN 1895, A man named John Medley Wood was wandering through the Ngoya Forest in South Africa. He found a cluster of cycad trees, tall and topped with a crown of green leaves. Almost like a palm tree, but with a sturdier trunk. He’d never seen anything quite like them before, and neither had anyone else, outside this forest.

  He could have left this living thing the way he found it, untouched and wild. But he didn’t. He cut off a main stem, replanted it in a box, and shipped it halfway across the world. That’s where it sat, alone in a box, for decade after decade. Cut off from anything familiar, isolated from all its kind. They named it after him, which seems like a mean joke. Wood’s cycad. The loneliest plant in the world.

  That’s how I feel at school. Like a cycad in a box.

  It’s not so bad during class, because I never talked to anyone in my classes, even when I had a boyfriend. During lunch, I avoid the cafeteria entirely. Ms. Waldman doesn’t mind if I eat my sandwich and fruit in her room. She grades papers and makes lesson plans; I read and text Mo, if she’s not in class.

  But I can’t stay in her room forever. At some point, I’m going to have to brave the cafeteria again. I can sit with strangers; what does it matter? This isn’t my real life anyway. So after Shakespeare class, I hang back for a moment, so I can return Ms. Waldman her book. Jack hangs back, too, but only to complain to her—again—about his grade on our last test.

  “This one should have gotten half credit, at least,” he says. “We both know it.”

  If he wants an argument, Ms. Waldman refuses to give him one. “As I said yesterday and the day before, the grade is final.” She motions to me. “Isabel?”

  Jack, looking annoyed at being denied a fight, stalks past me and positions himself in the doorway. I wait for a moment, but it becomes clear he has no intention of leaving, so I walk to Ms. Waldman and hand her back the copy of As You Like It.

  “I finished it,” I tell her. “If you wanted it back.”

  She waves me off with a smile. “Keep it. I’ve got another copy at home. Or three.”

  I stick it back in my bag. “Thanks.”

  “So, did you enjoy it?”

  “Yeah, a lot,” I say. “It was great. Way better than all the sad, gory ones.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  “You were right, when you said it’s about transformation. I liked seeing it happen. Rosalind starts out as this scared girl. But then you watch her, and she . . . changes. She gets all this confidence; she talks to people—especially men—in a totally different way. She’s bold and brave and so, so funny.” I pause then, because there’s something I’ve been wondering. “Do you think that can really happen?”

  “A girl dressing up as a boy named Ganymede to flee her evil uncle and live in the forest with her exiled father, who doesn’t recognize her, and then tutor her crush, who also doesn’t recognize her?” She shrugs. “I would say it’s a stretch.”

  Not that part. “I mean do you think people can change like that?” I ask. “Become a totally different person than the one they’ve always been?”

  “I think we’re always changing. It’s just bit by bit, and we might not see it.” She turns it back to me. “What do you think?”

  I open my mouth to answer that I don’t know. But I hope so. Then I think—maybe we’re both looking at this wrong. “What if she didn’t change?”

  “What do you mean?” Ms. Waldman asks.

  “What if—” I take a breath. “What if she was always that person? Deep down, that’s who she was all along. She just finally got a chance to show it.”

  Ms. Waldman nods, but before she can say anything back, Jack interrupts. “Hey, should I leave?” he calls to us. “Don’t want to get in the way of anything intimate.”

  “Would you fuck off already?” I snap at him. Ms. Waldman makes a small, surprised noise, and I can almost hear Jack’s jaw hit the floor. But nobody’s more shocked than me. I hadn’t thought about it; I’d just . . . responded. Like I would have onstage.

  Jack, suddenly aggrieved, looks to Ms. Waldman and gestures to me. “Aren’t you going to give her a referral?”

  “No,” Ms. Waldman replies. “Would you like one?”

  He scoffs at that, bu
t finally leaves.

  I talk for another minute with Ms. Waldman, wanting for Jack to be long gone before I make my escape, but one step into the hallway and I’m face-to-face with him.

  And not just him. Alex, too.

  When they see me, Alex keeps his expression neutral. Natural. Like this is any other day, like nothing’s changed. Jack, on the other hand, grins.

  “Watch out, man,” Jack says to Alex. “Your girl’s feisty today.”

  He punches Alex in the shoulder and then swaggers down the hall, leaving us alone.

  “You should probably tell him,” I say to Alex. “Because I’m not going to.”

  Alex tilts his head like a confused cocker spaniel. “Tell him what?”

  “That I’m not ‘your girl.’”

  “Oh.” He slips an arm around my waist. “Don’t get all offended. He doesn’t mean it like that.”

  “Wait.” I try to take a step back but can’t, because of the hand looping me in. “I don’t—”

  “What took you so long, anyway? Did Ms. Waldman try to have another heart-to-heart with you?”

  “Alex—”

  “She needs to get a life, seriously. Or maybe a cat.”

  “Alex,” I say, louder. “What are you doing?”

  “Standing in this hallway talking to you instead of eating lunch, apparently.”

  “Why are you being nice to me?”

  “Uh.” He stares at me like I’ve lost my mind, and I’m starting to feel like I have. “You are my girlfriend.”

  That catches me so off guard I recoil. “Since when?”

  He thinks about it for a moment. “October.”

  Early September, but that’s not really the point. “You broke up with me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Does he—does he really not remember? He has to remember. How could he not remember? It was awful, it was very recent, it was in his house.

  “But—” I flounder. “In your room. We were talking about . . .” I don’t want to say Mo; I don’t want to remind him. Wait, why do I care if I make him upset? We’re not even dating anymore. I thought we weren’t dating anymore—

  “Shakespeare,” I throw out. “We were talking about Shakespeare when you took my phone and you got so mad and then you broke up w—”

  “What, that?” He sounds a second away from laughing. “That’s what this is about? Isabel. So we had a fight. It happens.”

  “You told me to get out. You told me it was over—”

  “I never said that.”

  “Yeah, you did,” I say, bristling. “I was there, you know.”

  “So was I.”

  “You told me over and over to leave—”

  “The house, not the relationship.”

  “And then the next day at lunch—this whole week at lunch—”

  “You could have sat down. No one stopped you,” he points out. “I figured you wanted some space.”

  “But the way you looked at me—you told me you were done! You told me!”

  “Can you hear yourself right now?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Can you?”

  He pulls me over to one of the locker banks. When he speaks again, it’s softer. Deliberately gentle, the way my mom would talk to my grandma at the end, when she was confused all the time and seeing dead relatives by her bedside.

  “Look.” He leans down so our eyes can meet. “I know, okay? I get it. You were really upset.”

  I was upset? He was the one yelling, throwing books and backpacks around, backing me into a corner.

  “When people are really upset, they don’t remember everything the right way, you know? I think that’s what’s happening.”

  Is he talking about me, or him? We can’t both be right. I remember what happened. Not every second of it, now that I try to—but it doesn’t mean Alex didn’t say those things. I still know what happened. Don’t I?

  “This same thing happened with my mom one time when we were in Venice. She swore we both promised her we’d go to this one island in the canals where they make, like, lace, and my dad and I were looking at each other like, ‘What the hell?’ Because that never happened.” He sighs. “It’s probably good we don’t do family trips anymore.”

  I guess I can believe the part about his mom, because that’s just kind of her deal. Maybe all the keratin from her weekly Brazilian blowouts seeped into her brain and damaged the memory center.

  “I love you, Isabel, but you always do this.”

  “When have I—”

  “It’s just like after that thing on the train platform,” he says, with a world-weary sigh. “We have a fight, you get upset, and then you come up with the wildest idea of what happened.”

  The train platform—God, it is just like the—I shake my head. I’m not doing this. I’m not remembering that.

  “What train?” I ask Alex, trying to match the way he tilts his head. The breeze in his voice.

  He opens his mouth, then closes it. “When—never mind. I guess.”

  “So I’m still your . . .” I trail off. “I didn’t think I was still . . .”

  “Of course you’re still my girlfriend,” he says. I’m not sure that was even the word I was planning on saying next. I’m not sure of anything. “One little fight isn’t going to change that.”

  I could change it. I could. I should. I know I should.

  “Don’t you want to be my girlfriend again?” he asks.

  I think: Yes. No. I don’t know.

  I think: Again. You said “again,” why would you say “again” if you’d never broken up with me?

  I say: Nothing.

  It’s not as simple as Alex thinks it is, and it’s not as obvious as Naomi thought it was, either. There are parts I want and parts I don’t. I want him to hold me tight against his chest while we watch movies again. I want him to brush the hair out of my eyes and tell me I’m the prettiest girl in the room again. But I don’t want to be called names, I don’t want to be backed up against a wall, I don’t want to replay conversations in my mind and wonder if I truly made them up.

  This is the part of the movie where the girl leaves. Where she walks away strong and tall, and never once looks back. There’s never a movie about a girl who goes back, and back, knowing she shouldn’t but not knowing what else to do. It’s no mystery why those movies don’t exist. No one wants to root for someone weak.

  If I stay, I’m only proving how weak I am.

  But if I leave, everyone will find out why.

  If I leave, everyone will know just how weak I’ve been.

  I stare up at Alex, scrape out my doubt, and mold it into a smile.

  “I was always your girlfriend,” I say. “Wasn’t I?”

  When I hold out my hand, he takes it and squeezes tight.

  It’s horrible, what people do to flowers, when you think about it. They plant them by design, grow them in rigid rows. If one stalk dares to bend a little, people bind them to stakes. Be straighter, be taller, be prettier and easier to manage, we tell them.

  And when they finally bloom, we cut them off at the legs. The moment they’re beautiful is the moment they finally have worth, and that’s the moment we kill them. We snip them at the root and prune away the thorns so they can’t even fight back. Pretty and harmless and fucking dying. That’s how we like them best.

  I haven’t been taking the best care of my orchid lately. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s just that I’ve found other things to grow. Instead of watering and checking soil, I’m spending my afternoon with an open notebook, writing and editing and rewriting my set for the All-College Showcase.

  The Showcase has a three-minute limit, shorter than my regular tight five, so I’ve got every draft I’ve ever written spread out on my bed, trying to choose the best bits. The changes never seem so big from draft to draft—a line added here, a failed callback cut there—but when I compare the first version to the last, they’re worlds apart. But there’s something good in all of them, and together
, they might even be great.

  When I finally get up on the Showcase stage, that’s what I want the judges to see. The very best version I can give them.

  There’s a knock on my door. Before I can say “Come in,” Mom does anyway. I’m not sure what the point of knocking is if you don’t give your kid enough time to hide their weed, or their porn, or, in my case, a handwritten guide to stand-up comedy. But I doubt she’ll even notice it.

  “Hi there,” she says, one hand on the door, other hand carrying a laundry basket. “I’m doing a load of whites. Do you have anything?”

  Doesn’t she know I’ve been doing my own laundry for years? I’m too lazy to separate by colors, so I just wash everything on cold. “I did mine a couple days ago.”

  “Oh, okay.” She sets the basket down, and I can see it’s empty. Was she just looking for a way into my room? She didn’t need one. I’d have let her in.

  I’ve been waiting weeks for her to come in, give me some signal I could talk to her.

  “I can do them,” I offer. “The whites. If you want.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Mom says. “I might take you up on it. I’ve got this brief due by midnight and you wouldn’t believe the nonsense John Tomlinson is pulling. . . .”

  I want to talk to her. But how can I, when she’s already talking? How can I, when she’s got so much on her plate already? I don’t want to make her life harder. She’s got a million problems to deal with, but she doesn’t think I’m one of them. And—if I’m being honest—I like not being a problem for her. I used to be one, before I could help it. I don’t want to be one again.

  “That’s a new one,” Mom says, inspecting the orchid.

  It’s not. “Yeah.”

  “When’s it supposed to bloom?”

  Weeks ago. “Soon.”

  “You know, you haven’t been home for dinner a lot lately.”

  Neither has she. “I guess.”

  “Poor Dad,” Mom says. “He says he’s eaten alone this whole week. What have you been up to?”

  “Just . . . hanging with Alex,” I say.

  “Not Naomi?” Mom asks. “I haven’t seen her at the house in so long.” I hesitate for a second too long, and Mom zeroes in on it, like a beagle with a rabbit. “Is she doing all right?”