11

THE CAR RIDE IS QUIETER THAN I'D EXPECTED. I DRUM MY FINGERS INmy lap and inelegantly perspire. Every possible bad outcome flashes through my mind, no thanks to my copious consumption of true-crime podcasts and my friendship with Zee, who believes that she is destined to die in a dramatic (but not vehicle-related, strangely enough) fashion. It occurs to me that aside from the fact he is a comic and we used to go to the same school, I know next to nothing about him.

"I know nothing about you. You could be a serial killer."

"So could you," he quips dryly. "Those pincerlike legs, inner rage—classic early serial-killer energy."

I chuckle and settle back in my seat. We crawl to a stop at a red light.

"You really don't remember me, huh?" he says, contemplating me.

"Nope," I say. I am allowed a white lie after the long night I've had. I don't feel like talking, don't feel like rehashing the past.

"You find out more about your dad already?" he asks.

Zero segue. "What?" I say, startled. Vern had remembered what we talked about four years ago. He was paying attention.

The light changes and we inch forward into a wall of traffic. A traffic jam at 9:45 p.m. in the three-lane expressway means there's been an accident. Motorists are slowing down to rubberneck, some to take down the number plates so they can buy the lottery numbers for 4D the next day. We're going to be stuck in traffic for a while.

"I guess you forgot about our chat in the cafeteria back then, before you disappeared from school?"

I shrug, feigning nonchalance. "Oh, that. My mom told me the full story about my bio dad, yeah. A couple of months after I transferred."

He nods. "How was it?"

I let out a shaky laugh. "Inspiring."

When I turned thirteen, I asked my mom for an unusual present: I asked for the entire story of my bio dad—no names, just the facts—and she complied, reluctantly. Told me how she'd had a one-night stand with an acquaintance in her sophomore year at Georgetown University and got pregnant. He came from a powerful, conservative Asian American family who would have wanted them to get married, if he had acknowledged my existence—after all, her parents had wanted that, too, on top of other things. So she kept me a secret for the longest time, even after I was born.

She did tell him about me when I was about two, she said. He was engaged to be married by then and he told her never to contact him again. He offered to pay her a large sum of money to disappear, but of course my mother couldn't bring herself to take it, although she admitted to regretting that decision in the years to come when things got tough.

She showed me a photo of him she found online. I have his large dark eyes, his expressive brows, the same quirk in his lips when he finds something privately amusing. He had been a star athlete, too, when he was young. A baseballer. That's how he'd gotten to Georgetown on scholarship. That's how he met my mom, an academic scholarship kid from Malaysia.

That's how my mother's life got derailed.

I force down the lump that always appears when I think about this and change the subject abruptly. "So, uh, how long have you been in stand-up?"

He drums his fingers against the chipped steering wheel. "I don't know. Two, maybe three years? I started after I saw Ali Wong's first Netflix special. You remember that?"

I nod reverentially. "Absolutely. My mom and I both sat down to watch it, and she doesn't even like stand-up."

"It was just…revelatory, you know? Like, damn, I can do that. I don't have to work at a desk job."

"I take it you were not a star student."

He snorts. "You wish. I got by just fine. I mean, I wasn't a star student per se, but I was a very good student. A's and B's, never struggled, just never had the extra mental sauce that made me exceptional, academic scholarship material. I could have taken the traditional path, I guess, but one day I just woke up and thought: why. Why am I doing any of it? I don't want to go to university, I don't want to have a desk job. I'm a performer. I just want to do what I want, earn enough money to live how I want."

"Oh, so you're one of those, huh," I say.

"What?"

"Family has money yet for some reason the kids go to public school?"

He is quiet for such a long time I worry I said something wrong. "Nope. Poor as a wharf rat" is all he says. "So why are you in comedy?"

"By accident?" I say, instead of for company. "Like, I, uh, literally, figuratively fell into this." I summarize the accident.

"Well, when athletics lost a star, we gained one," he says. "Lucky us."

"Thanks." My face is burning. I'd never been complimented so frankly before. "I—I don't know if I'm a star…Beginner's luck, I guess."

"Nope," he says with a pointed shake of his head. "You have It. It's a rare thing for a newcomer, to be able to hit the ground running like that. I didn't have that ease. You and Gina are naturals." He throws me a half smile. "You don't need to be a natural to be good, but talent sure as hell helps."

I'm sure my face is melting off. "I've always liked stand-up comedy. I've been listening to specials since I was twelve. There were some days"—the days I didn't like thinking about, the days I think my mother wishes she could erase from my memory—"I listened to YouTube specials for hours…I guess I absorbed some of it by osmosis."

"Comedy—the cheapest therapy you can get," he quips darkly.

"Not sure it's therapy so much as distraction."

We stay silent, each lost in our memories. Then he hiccups, we laugh, and the spell breaks. He fiddles with some dials on the dashboard. A catchy pop song I don't recognize plays. "What is this?"

"‘Wannabe' by the Spice Girls. It's a pop song from the nineties. If you want to listen to something current, just you know, scroll though my phone and pull up Spotify." He passes me his phone, which I take without thinking. "It's unlocked."

I nod, trying to play it cool—it's not every day you get access to an older guy's entire life in one place.

He glances over and sees me staring at the phone like it's a pager, which is something Stanley once showed me, and I lost my mind over its quaintness. "Everything okay?"

"Mmfffm, yes."

He grins at me. "You haven't changed a jot. You're something else, Agnes. I like you."

His reply was so uncomplicated and easy. Very much not like the person I was not thinking about.

"Okay," I say, ever eloquent. I force myself to speak in my normal fashion and practically shout the following: "Why are you listening to nineties pop?"

"Oh, I'm getting inspiration for a bit I'm doing about old-school pop versus our pop. You know, the lyrics back then and now. I like contrasting the past with the present in my sets. It's so silly that we're always harping about learning from the past, but we're mostly just as intolerant and murderous and horrible as we were a thousand years ago." He laughs humorlessly at some private memory.

"My mom is a millennial, and she would totally laugh her butt off if she heard you refer to nineties pop as old-school. I mean, she probably grew up listening to even older music, like from the seventies and eighties. And then there's, like, sixties pop…" I was babbling.

The light turns green, and he pops the gear into drive. "So true."

We drive in companiable silence for the rest of the trip, listening to music from my mother's youth, until he breaks it with a statement. "So, I noticed the tension between you and Ray."

I nod. "A little."

"Well, you really threw Golden Ray off his game, so I'll say there's more to it than that." He chuckles at some private amusement. "You're not friends with Ray, right?"

After a slight hesitation I say, "No, but we're friendly."

A red light. We roll to a stop. Vern turns to me and says, "Well, even if he's your friend, I'll still say this: He's such a phony."

I start. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Look, I'm not stupid. Those scuffed, limited-edition sneakers? His ‘brandless' designer jeans? His posh accent that he tries so hard to water down? Please. It's why his jokes about his average-Joe life never hit as hard as they should." Vern scoffs. "Especially when you're Royce Taslim."

So he knew. "When did you figure it out?"

He laughs. "Today, actually. When Zee accidentally called him Roy. I figured since she was your friend and she knew Ray—Royce, you guys had to all go to the same school. She's such a public person that it made my sleuthing easy. From there it was just a matter of a few careful search words, since you mentioned you were cocaptains of the track-and-field team before."

A cold feeling slid down my back. "You're keeping his secret, right?" I say this matter-of-factly, so that Vern doesn't catch the worry in my voice.

Vern shrugs. "For now. But now that I know who he is, it pisses me off even more, seeing him tell those jokes of his. His whole ‘struggling everyman' persona is my reality."

Vern was right, of course. Ray—Royce was a phony. I knew that. It just sounded so much starker, visceral, when it was put that way.

Phony. Phony. Phony.

"He's a good guy. He's kind."

"He can afford to be kind," Vern says. "Most people, especially the rich, are, under the right conditions. The trick is to catch them when things are inconvenient for them. Then you see their true colors."

The air-conditioning shudders and belches out hot air. He jiggles a tab and sighs when nothing happens. "Sorry."

"It's fine, let's roll down the windows."

He looks at me approvingly. He asks for my address, and we drive to mine in companionable silence.

"Here we are," he says. He checks out the modest three-bedder, double-story terrace house and says, "Nice place."

"Thanks," I say. "Also for the ride."

"You're welcome," he says. "Anytime. And, Agnes?"

I pause with my hand on the door. "Yeah?"

"I'm glad we reconnected."

I wave goodbye and bolt into the house, almost knocking into someone waiting in the living room with the TV playing: Mom. "Ten forty," she says, looking at her watch. "Not too bad."

"You should be in bed," I tell her.

"I should," she says. "But I wanted to make sure you're safe."

"I am," I say.

She nods. "I'm going to bed now."

"Mom, please don't wait up for me next time. You know I can take care of myself."

"I know." A sadness reaches her eyes. "You grew up so early."

She kisses me and heads upstairs. I wait till she's gone and head to my room. If I'm going to enter this comedy competition, there's no time to lose. I have to start practicing.

Bryan recorded the entire set on his phone—among this group of open mikers they have a tradition of having a rotating roster of comics who do this for the group, so the comics can study their and others' performances—and he'd sent out the link to the uploaded master file half an hour ago. I fast-forward to my set, noting that Royce's set was not on the recording. He must have opted out. I had seen him recording his own sets on his own phone set up on a tripod.

For whatever reason, it was important to Royce to keep his Ray persona on the down low, to hide in plain sight, to live a lie, and while I don't think his double life is sustainable in the long run—as soon as you start gaining traction as a performer, sooner or later, someone will record you and post it online, and it'll only be a matter of time before his identity is exposed—I feel compelled to respect it. It's unsporting to do otherwise, and I'm still, at the core of it, a sporting person.

I watch the video of my performance again and again, taking notes and working on my set, writing new material as I go, until I fall asleep sometime after midnight.