46
I STAND ON THE STAGE AND SAY NOTHING FOR TWO MINUTES BEFOREwalking offstage to a shocked audience. Royce tries to talk to me but I shake my head, whisper that I'm fine, I just need to clear my head; Jit calls out to Royce to wait for him, which distracts him, and I take the opportunity to run out of a side entrance and melt into the throngs of people out on a Saturday night in Chelsea.
Twenty-five percent of my total score, gone.
Gone before I even tried.
I'd put all my hopes, all my energy into this. All my dreams. And now it's over. I don't know what I have left to offer. I'm going to disappoint everyone who ever believed in me, who sacrificed so much to let me come to this stupid pipe dream. At least with sports there's a scientific approach to it. You train and you calibrate and you take the data and work toward a goal. You know exactly where you are, where you're going, what you're capable of. Stand-up, and by extension, my wild ideas about having a career in writing…these are all shots at the moving target. I'm reaching for a pie in the sky.
I'd exposed myself to the world and pretended to be worthy. Now I'm just another loser. A fake. How am I supposed to do this tomorrow, in front of an even larger crowd, with a camera recording my performance? The mere thought of it makes me sick. I run into an alley and heave acrid liquid onto the street behind a dumpster. I'm lucky the alley is empty, but I don't take any chances and quickly rejoin the people on the street.
I walk for hours. Well, forty minutes. Finally, the hunger and fatigue get me, and I stop for a hot dog (a better-looking and better-tasting one, thank God) and start heading back to the hotel, dispirited.
A vague idea is forming in my head: I don't have to show up tomorrow. What would be the point, anyway? I have no shot realistically to win.
I get to the lobby, and Royce is there with Jit, chatting softly. When he sees me, he walks over without another word and folds me into his arms. "I was worried, you didn't respond to my texts."
"I'm sorry," I say thickly. "I think my phone died. I had to use my gaming-honed orientation skills to get back."
"I got a surprise for you."
"I hate surprises."
"Well, I think this one is going to be quite nice. Come with me."
We walk down a couple of blocks and stop in front of a striking, Gothic-looking hotel with those intricate wrought-iron balconies on its red-bricked facade. The people swanning in and out of the premises look fancy. I swallow. "Look, Royce, I don't know if I'm dressed—"
"You're fine," he says. He leads me through the doors, Jit trailing a few lengths behind us, and we come to the elevator banks. My heart is pounding so hard it is threatening to explode. Did he think—Was this surprise…attached to his body? In which case, it would be extremely bad timing. Right?
I walk down the hallway with him, warily.
He sighs. "Agnes, whatever you're thinking, I guarantee you're wrong."
He knocks at a door and then it swings open. "Voilà," Royce says, practically dragging me into the room.
It's my mom.
"Surprise!" Royce says happily.
"Hi, hon!" my mom says, grinning at my gaping face. "Imagine running into you here!"
I laugh and hug my mom, then turn to Royce. "You—you did this?" I say, my voice quavering.
"Yes," he says, beaming. "I brought your whole family here. I thought you'd appreciate some support for the main event tomorrow."
Great, now my family is going to see me fail—in person.
It's not his fault, I know he meant well, but my anxiety levels shoot through the roof.
"Er, well, I'll leave now. Bye, Mrs. Morrissette!"
My mother thanks him, and he gives an embarrassed little wave before ducking out.
"Mom, are you supposed to be flying in your condition? Is it safe?"
She grins. "I'm just seven months pregnant, my dear, plus I was cleared by my ob-gyn and the airlines for travel, so I think I'm good. This is my babymoon."
"Stanley, Rosie where now?" I blurt eloquently.
"Went for a walk down the block to get some snacks, we landed, like, five hours ago."
She pats the space on the bed next to her and I sit down cautiously.
"So, let's talk," she says, and my throat tenses and I see my back hunching in the mirror beside me. I realize I haven't actually spoken to my mom one-on-one for the longest time about anything serious or even personal, not even the everyday disappointments of life like losing money to a faulty vending machine or forgetting my completed homework at home and getting reprimanded for it, not because I don't trust her with the information, but rather, in my desire to protect her, not telling her about the minor and major disappointments I face has become second nature.
"How were prelims? Did you record yourself as we asked?"
All the stress of that moment boils to the surface. "Yes, but…" I swallow, my voice drops to a whisper. "I froze onstage; I didn't say a thing."
I recount what happened and she hugs me in sympathy. "Oh, Agnes, what a pity. But you're still going to go up tomorrow, right?"
"No." My eyes prick with tears. "Let's go home."
"But you worked so hard on your set. You should at least try, you never know."
"There's no point in doing something if it has no chance of success."
She squints at me, confused. "But you like stand-up comedy. That should be enough."
I draw away from her. "I should be spending my time better instead of frittering it on things that won't bear fruit."
Mom says, "You're only seventeen! You have so much time!"
"You were twenty when you had me, and everything was ruined."
It slips out. I didn't meant to say it that way, but my mother's face blanches, a hand goes around her throat and circles it, and she just stares at me. My mother's a naturally chatty, sociable person, someone who instinctively knows what to say in every situation, but now she's at a loss for words.
I swallow and continue. "I've made everything difficult for you at a time when you should have been…thinking about, I don't know, your first internship, your first impulsive trip with a bunch of people you met in a dive bar…okay, fine not a dive bar, but at this internship, and these people become your lifelong friends, and you make bad decisions together, maybe accidentally kill someone on a road trip, and then you cover it up together, and then you get your first—I don't know, whatever adults think are important milestones in your twenties. But I took that away from you."
She makes a pained noise. "Why—why would you even think that?"
"I don't know.…" Some words someone said on TV about a person in the similar situation, words that had lodged in my young, impressionable brain and rooted darkly.
She drags a palm across her face. "Look, the year that I fell into depression…when you were ten—that had nothing to you or our life together. Things happened. It was just a bad year, Agnes. I sought help, and I got better because of therapy and my meds. And I'm good now because I'm still on therapy and meds, Agnes."
I take a deep breath and turn to my mom. "That was just one part of it. I think I just…felt like, if I lived out the life you wanted for yourself, you'd be happy. I just wanted you to be happy. You sacrificed everything for me….I just…I just wanted you to feel like you had made the right choice, back then. That if I had everything sorted out, and never worried you, an-and that if I were successful and had a great stable job, then one day I—I can take care of you, the way you did, the way you always do. I just want to deserve your love."
"Oh, Agnes," my mother says, tearing up. I'm so sorry you thought…" She is weeping softly, and my heart shatters. She gathers me in her arms. "I'm sorry you felt that you had to be a certain way to be loved. That's absolutely ridiculous, because I would love you no matter how you turned out."
"Even if I become the leader of a cult?" I whisper, unable to help myself.
"Honey, please. I'm trying to tell you something."
"Sorry."
"Look, I only want you to be happy, and I'm sorry I never made that clear enough." She tightens her arms around me. "You are not a mistake. You were a choice. My choice, and I knew, even back then, that you would be the best decision I ever made. You are more than enough, Agnes—you are my perfection. Do you understand?"
"Okay," I say, muffled against her shoulder and trying not to cry but failing. "When you put it that way."
She lets out a bark of laughter and we pull apart and grin, embarrassed, stuffing tissues at various leaking face organs. She bops my nose. "I don't need you to take care of me. I just need you to be happy, and to love me. Chat with me like we used to, y'know? Tell me what's going on in that big, wonderful head of yours that actually writes jokes? What?" She shakes her head, awed. "I'm going to need you to send me clips of all your stand-up sets, okay? Even the ones you bomb. And all the wonderful things you will dream of and write in Rhode Island, or any other college you want to go to, and I'm stuck with a screaming, pooping kid—and baby Yina, okay? You promise?"
I chuckle. "Promise."
She kisses me on the top of my head. "My baby," she says. "My first baby."
The door beeps.
"Oh my God, I leave for one minute and you guys start crying?" Rosie says, running over to throw her arms around us, while Stanley, struggling with a bag of groceries, says tiredly, "Surprise!"
"Zee says to break all the legs," Rosie chimes in, holding the phone up. "I don't think she means it metaphorically, since she clarifies in another text, ‘Not yours, Agnes. You've done enough to yourself.'"
She isn't wrong. I have done a lot to myself, and I'm going to stop holding myself back. "You tell Zee that I will," I say, laughing and wiping my eyes, "break a leg. Metaphorically speaking."