Crying Laughing

by Lance Rubin

  I can’t believe that just happened. I want to jump up and down. I want to scream. I want to wrap my arms around Evan and squeeze. “Thanks,” I say.

  “I knew I made the right decision bringing you here,” Evan says.

  He did make the right decision. He knew I was funny, and he picked me, and he laughs at my jokes, and he is wonderful, and I don’t know why it took me this long to see that.

  “I mean, I knew you’d be funny,” he continues, “but I didn’t know you’d be that funny. I’m so proud. Ms. DiMicelli, Ms. Moore, wasn’t that hilarious?”

  “Quite,” Ms. DiMicelli says, adjusting the position of the visitor sign-in clipboard. “Reminds me of my own dog, actually. Kermit. He’s completely ungracious.”

  Wow.

  “It was very…interesting,” Ms. Moore says without glancing up.

  Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

  “And sorry I had to keep it a surprise,” Evan says, giving me a sheepish smile, “but I was worried otherwise you might have chickened out. And I knew you could handle it.”

  When he puts it that way, I actually understand. Because I might not have had the guts to do that. No, I definitely wouldn’t have. But he was right: I could handle it. I did handle it. “Oh yeah, no,” I say, “don’t worry about it.”

  “Ms. DiMicelli,” Evan says, “could you give Winnie a late pass for homeroom?”

  I get to do bits and skip homeroom with no consequences?

  I could get used to this.

  “Of course.” Ms. DiMicelli writes one out and hands it to me over the desk. “I’m not going to be able to look at Kermit with a straight face tonight.” She winks, which I normally hate coming from grown-ups, but this one seems different. Pure.

  I’m not sure how to respond, so I just say, “Oh. Yeah. Tell him Spot says hi.”

  But this is one comedic leap too many for Ms. DiMicelli, who stares at me for a few seconds, puzzled, before she says, “Well, okay,” and returns to her computer.

  12

  I walk into Mr. Novack’s English class as nonchalantly as possible, thirty or so seconds after the homeroom-is-over tone has sounded, stopping at his desk to hand him my late pass.

  “Oh. So you are here,” Mr. Novack says. He’s only been my teacher since last week, but so far, he’s lived up to his reputation of being a pompous dick.

  “I am,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

  He sighs, as if my tardiness is the pulled Jenga piece that knocks down the whole tower, and starts scribbling in his attendance book.

  After a few seconds, I realize my presence is no longer needed, so I take my seat and place Tess of the d’Urbervilles on my desk. I’m still coming down from the high of five minutes ago.

  “Hey,” I hear from behind me to the left. “That was you, right?”

  I turn to see Fletcher Handy, the guy who was so convincingly blowing in the wind at improv.

  “Oh, hey,” I say, feigning ignorance on the off chance he’s talking about something else. “What was me?”

  “The dog. On the announcements.”

  “Oh yeah. Evan just, like, pulled me into doing that. I—”

  “It was really funny,” Fletcher says, though if it weren’t for the nod and closemouthed smile that followed it, he could just as easily have said, “The capital of South Dakota is Pierre.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Wanda Pechofsky taps me from my right. “Did you just say that was you?” We’ve been going to school together since sixth grade, but this might be the first time she’s ever spoken directly to me. “On the announcements? The angry dog?”

  “Um,” I say, feeling my face flush as I turn toward her. “Yeah.”

  “That was freaking hilarious,” she says. Wanda leans to the purple-haired girl on her other side, Danielle something, and points at me. “The dog was her. It was…uh…”

  “Winnie,” I say.

  “Winnie, yeah,” Wanda says. “Winnie was the dog on the announcements.”

  “Oh,” Danielle says, blinking, confused. “Really?”

  “Yo!” Matthew Lee says from the back row. “I want something that squeaks, man! We were all laughing our asses off.”

  A surge of energy moves through and around me like a force field. Like I’ve crossed over into some alternate reality.

  “Yeah, we actually paid attention for once,” eternal asshole Mike Muscone says. “Nice job, Pooh.”

  What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On.

  “All right,” Mr. Novack says, closing his attendance book, having finally completed the thousand-word essay about my late arrival, “let’s open to page eight in our copies of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.”

  As I flip to the right page, I’m nearly floating. The past minute was so much like a fantasy I’ve had on repeat in my brain for years, it gives me joy chills. And also kind of makes me want to throw up.

  Yes.

  I’m so happy I could vomit.

  * * *

  —

  The joy continues through the rest of the morning. I’m never gonna do Ecstasy, because it puts holes in your brain, but I imagine this might be what it’s like. Every time I’m convinced I dreamt the whole thing up, someone goes out of their way to tell me how great I was and that they never knew I was so funny (even Mr. Barker, one of the gym teachers, who had previously given zero indication he knew of my existence). It’s a touch unsettling; if I were going to program my own personal matrix, this is what would happen in it. Which leads me to wonder: Have I entered my own personal matrix?

  I keep hoping I’ll run into Leili and/or Azadeh before lunch, because they would be helpful proof that this is reality, but it doesn’t happen. They each text me excitedly, though—Leili with an OMG and Azadeh with a what the what???—saying it was awesome and wondering why I hadn’t mentioned I’d be doing it.

  By the time I walk into the cafeteria, I’m desperate to talk with them, so I’m thrilled to remember Dad packed a lunch for me and I won’t have to waste time going to buy one. But as I sit down across from Leili, Azadeh and Roxanne are cracking up about something and don’t even acknowledge my arrival.

  “Hey, Winner,” Leili says, this fake sort of smile glued to her face.

  “Hi, Lay,” I say. “What’re they laughing about?”

  “Hard to say. Some inside joke, I think.”

  I completely forgot about the way the day started, with Leili and Azadeh bickering as we walked into school.

  “No, no,” Azadeh says, gasping for air, a hand on Roxanne’s arm. “It’s not— I can explain, it’s just about something this girl Siobhan on our team always does.” Are Azadeh and Roxanne…flirting with each other? I thought Roxanne was straight. At least, she was dating this guy Rodrigo for a bunch of months. Still, maybe they’re flirting. Azadeh came out last year. She told me while we binge-watched Jane the Virgin at my house (“I think I love Gina Rodriguez,” she said. “She’s so great,” I said. “No, but…really,” she said), but I’ve definitely never seen her flirt with anyone before. Suddenly their inside joke goes from annoying to adorable.

  “Yeah,” Roxanne says, snorting, “we’re making a joke about how Siobhan and I fought in Vietnam together.”

  Right. Back to annoying. Leili and I look at each other. “So how was your morning?” I ask over the guffaws.

  “Fine,” Leili says. “It was— Oh!” Her irritation dissipates, as if she just remembered she won the lottery. “You were so funny on the announcements!”

  “Yes!” Azadeh says, pulling herself together and reaching across the table to grab my hand. “Ohmigod, Winner, you’re my hero!”

  “So funny,” Roxanne agrees.

  My irritation dissipates too.

  “We weren’t even paying attention to the announcements,” Azadeh says, “and then Leili heard your v
oice and nudged me, which at first I thought she was just doing because we were fighting—”

  “We weren’t fighting,” Leili says, “we were having a disagreement.”

  “We were pretty much fighting.” Azadeh holds out her arms and nods her head like Come on, we can all agree on that, right? “But then I realized it was your voice on the announcements, and we got nervous for you, but then you were saying the funniest things, and we weren’t even the only ones laughing!”

  Her shock that other people found me funny would be offensive if I didn’t feel exactly the same way.

  “Lots of people were cracking up in Mrs. Kalanithi’s class, too,” Roxanne says. “Like Hahahahahaha.” She tries to act out how they were laughing, and it’s flattering but uncomfortable.

  “The curse is broken!” Leili says, raising a baby carrot in the air like a magic wand. “You performed for so many people! And it went great!”

  “Well, I mean, I couldn’t even see the audience,” I say.

  “Don’t try to belittle it! It was really cool, Win. You should have told us you were gonna be doing that.”

  “Seriously,” Azadeh says. “We might have missed it if it weren’t for Leili’s bat-radar hearing.”

  “I didn’t know I was gonna be doing it,” I say. “Until, like, literally, moments before.”

  “What do you mean?” Leili is tripped up by the logic of that.

  “I mean Evan pulled me away in the hall but wouldn’t tell me why and it was, you know…to do that. To do that part of the announcements.”

  “Aww,” Azadeh says. “That’s pretty sweet.”

  “He didn’t even tell you he was about to have you perform?” Leili asks. “You had to come up with that on the spot?”

  “But,” Azadeh says, confused, “that is what improv is, isn’t it?”

  “Right,” I say. I’m embarrassed that didn’t even occur to me.

  “Well, normally you know when you’re going on,” Leili says. “But I’m so proud you were able to get through it.”

  “If someone did that to me,” Roxanne says, “I would have no idea what to say. I’d be all, ‘Uh, can I just say the Pledge again?’ ”

  Azadeh laughs, and we fall into a brief, awkward silence. Leili looks like she’s about to bring up something new when—

  “Spot! There you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” It’s Evan. He and Tim Stabisch grab two empty seats next to Roxanne. “Cool if we join you?”

  “Uh, sure,” Leili says, though they’ve already lowered themselves to the table, so it doesn’t seem like her answer really mattered one way or the other.

  “Whaddup,” Tim says. He’s wearing a T-shirt that’s covered with tattoos, as if to make the wearer seem like a shirtless tattooed person.

  “Y’alls hear Winnie on the announcements this morning?” Evan asks, pulling a wrap out of his lunch bag. “She killed it!”

  “Yeah, she was great,” Azadeh says. “We were just talking about that.”

  “Sweet,” Evan says. “Nice job last week, by the way.”

  “Oh,” Azadeh says, confused as to why she’s being complimented. “Were you…Were you at field hockey practice?”

  “You do field hockey, too? Wow, that’s impressive.”

  Evan thinks Azadeh is Leili. Even though this happens all the time, I feel particularly mortified. Leili gets what’s happening, but Azadeh is for some reason taking longer to catch on.

  “Oh. Well, yeah,” Azadeh says, “it’s the main thing I do, but—”

  “I think you’re thinking she’s me,” Leili says, leaning her head forward so that Evan, who’s a couple of seats down, can see her. “Hey, Evan.”

  “Oh!” Azadeh laughs, her impressively good nature a skill she’s developed over time to combat the world’s twin idiocy. “That’s why I had no idea what you were talking about.”

  “Whoa!” Evan looks back and forth between the two of them. “Twinsies! I didn’t know you had a sister. You should join Improv Troupe too,” he tells Azadeh. “We could do so many cool twin bits. Or, like, scenes about clones and stuff.”

  “Nah, not really my thing,” Azadeh says.

  “Well,” Evan says, taking a huge bite of his wrap, “just think about it.”

  Does he encourage literally everyone he meets to join Improv Troupe?

  “Twins are hot,” Tim Stabisch says, messily spooning soup into his mouth.

  I look across the table to Leili, trying to mind-meld so I can transmit an image of Tim’s head and torso being snapped off by a T. rex, but she’s looking down at her pita chips and hummus.

  “Almost as hot as fabric tattoos,” Roxanne says.

  Tim is unsure whether or not to say thank you.

  “Yo, Winnie,” Evan says, skillfully changing the subject, “everyone keeps asking me who was the voice of Spot this morning.”

  “Oh really?” I say, trying to seem humble and surprised.

  “Yeah. I tell them it was Ms. DiMicelli.” Evan cracks up at his own joke. “I’m totally kidding! Of course I tell them it was you. We gotta do something to celebrate.”

  “Smoke a huge bowl,” Tim says, taking the straw from his milk and using it to blow bubbles in his soup.

  “Shut up, dude.” Evan elbows him and soup splashes onto Tim’s shirt.

  “Hey!” he says. “This is a new shirt, jerkwad.”

  “It’s fine. The soup looks like another stupid tattoo.”

  “Up yours,” Tim says.

  Leili, Azadeh, Roxanne, and I are silently looking at each other. Our table has been commandeered by a couple of morons, and it’s my fault.

  “Sorry about him,” Evan says to all of us but mainly to me. “Brought up by wolves, this guy.”

  “Ow-ooooooo,” Tim howls.

  I try to think up a witty response, but nothing comes.

  I am very good at improv.

  13

  “Okay, okay,” Mr. Martinez says, hushing everybody. “I have an announcement to make.”

  All of us sitting onstage go silent, drawn in by the promise and possibility of the word announcement. “I knew that’d quiet you guys down.” Mr. Martinez smirks, twinkle in his eyes that I know Leili, who’s sitting next to me, is loving (because she’s specifically referenced it many times).

  We’ve already gone through our warm-up games, all of which felt slightly less mortifying than they did last week. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m used to them or because I feel more confident or what, but let’s just say during Nameball, I changed a tennis ball into a human-sized orb of light, so. Yeah. Progress.

  It’s been three days since I woofed my way into my classmates’ hearts, and I’ve been eager for another comedy fix. I thought maybe Evan would ask me to do the announcements again, but he hasn’t. He has, however, continued texting me and sitting at our lunch table (which I apologized to Leili, Azadeh, and Roxanne for; they’ve all been way more understanding than I would have been) and generally giving every indication that he really, really likes me. Which I think I’m into.

  “So,” Mr. Martinez says. “I was really happy with the work everybody did last week, and it confirmed to me that we’re ready to challenge ourselves a bit more, stretch our wings a little further. I went to a fantastic conference this summer and learned some new tricks, which I want to impart to all of you.” He puts a finger in the air and takes a dramatic pause. “We’re going to do some long-form improv.”

  There’s a murmuring among the group, both excited and confused. I am one hundred percent psyched. Long-form improv is what they do at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, which Amy Poehler cofounded.

  “For those not in the know,” Mr. Martinez says in my direction, which I sort of resent, “long-form improv is far less structured than short-form. You usually get one suggestion from the au
dience, and that’s the seed of inspiration for all the scenes that happen during that performance. We’re going to focus on a specific improv form known as a Harold, which consists of—”

  “Wait, what’d you say it’s called?” Rashanda asks.

  “It’s called a Harold,” Mr. Martinez says.

  “Like the name?” Mahesh asks.

  “Yeah. Funny improv people came up with it, so they decided to name the art form with an actual name.”

  “That’s weird,” Jess says.

  “Ha, well, it doesn’t matter, it’s just what it’s called.” Mr. Martinez seems both amused and defensive. “Anyway, when you do a Harold—and if you’ve started reading Truth in Comedy, you’ll learn more about this—you have a series of scenes, which at first may seem like they’re all about different things, but as the Harold progresses, it’s the players’ job to make connections between those scenes, until by the end, it all feels like it’s related. Does that make sense?”

  Not really!

  I must not be the only one thinking that because he says, “Well, it will soon. And look, if we can get the hang of this, our first performance in October…will be all long-form.”

  A buzz percolates through the group as Leili looks at me like I guess we’re supposed to think this is cool? Some people nod enthusiastically, and Evan and Dan Blern are high-fiving like a couple of nerds.

  “I know, I know,” Mr. Martinez says. “It’s very exciting, but our show is soon, so if we want to do this, it’s going to require a lot of focus and a lot of concentration. But don’t stress out about it. The performance will be more like a low-stakes experiment. A chance to show your friends and family what we’ve been up to. But we will have to work hard to get there.”

  These mixed messages are gonna give me a panic attack.

  “All right, enough talking! I figure the best way to start learning is to just dive in. Today we’ll do scenes inspired by a single word. No relationships provided like last week—that’s for you and your scene partner to figure out in the moment. Don’t forget to Yes, and! Let’s start with…Molly and Leili.”