Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

About fifteen minutes before her first bringer show at LOL Comedy, Maddy, Simone, and Max are sitting in a U around a small round table in the back row, facing the stage. Zoe, Bobby V., and a couple of the other open mic regulars are up front. There are five other comics in the bringer show lineup tonight, so there are at least sixty people in the audience, five times the size of Maddy’s largest audience to date.

Maddy bounces the right heel of her sneakered foot up and down, over and over. Simone places her hand on Maddy’s knee, stilling her.

“Girl, breathe.”

“I’m good.”

“You want me to get you a vodka soda, take the edge off?” asks Simone.

“No, I don’t like to drink before going up.”

Max’s phone rings. He looks at the screen.

“It’s my manager,” he says, answering the call on speaker. “Hi, Artie.”

“Max, I have good news for you. I’ve got a twenty-college tour, and you, my friend, are the headliner.”

“Holy shit, for real?”

“No fake news here. You’re going to need an opener, someone who can do a solid twenty minutes, preferably a female comic. These liberal college coeds are all about equal rights for women. I can line up a girl for you if you want, but if you know someone you’d like to use, you’re going to be traveling together for seven weeks.”

“Yeah, I know someone,” says Max, answering without hesitation.

Maddy’s heart launches out of a cannon and doesn’t land. Her eyes are pinned to Max’s eyelids, waiting for him to look up and into hers, to join in jubilant celebration, but he continues to stare down at his phone, focused amid the noise of the club and understandably engrossed in what his manager has to say.

“Great. Get me the details on her ASAP. You’ll leave in three weeks, starting in Maine.”

“Okay, yeah, I’ll get that info to you right away.”

“Perfect. Congratulations, my friend. This is a good break for you. Talk soon.”

“Thanks, Artie,” says Max, before ending the call.

Max looks up now, drums his hands on the table, and howls.

“Oh my God, Max, this is huge!” says Maddy.

“Yeah, congratulations!” says Simone.

“Fuck yeah! I’m getting us a round of shots.”

Max shoots out of his seat and heads to the bar. Bug-eyed and about to burst, Maddy looks at Simone.

“Oh my God!” says Maddy.

“I know, it’s so exciting.”

Maddy can hardly believe it. She’s going to go on the road, on a comedy tour, with her boyfriend. Granted, they haven’t established themselves as that, haven’t used the words boyfriend and girlfriend , but they’ve been together pretty much every afternoon and most evenings for a month. Her heart continues to soar high along the currents of her inner stratosphere as she imagines the adventure.

Twenty minutes. That’s more than twice what she has now, and they leave in three weeks. That’s a lot more material in not a lot of time. And what will she tell her mother and Emily? How will she ever sell this? It’s too much. The air inside her grows turbulent, and her excited heart, unsafe up so high in such dangerous winds, begins to nose-dive.

But Max believes in her. She replays his response to his manager. He didn’t even flinch. She can do this. She’ll write every night after Emily goes to sleep. Her mind flips through the pages of her underdeveloped bits, words highlighted in blue marker instead of yellow. The difference between a funny joke and a not-funny joke can be a single word. She’s got the raw material for twelve more minutes. It’s there; she just needs to mold it into shape. Nothing like the pressure of a deadline.

And she’ll explain everything to her mother and Emily. This isn’t crazy. Crazy would be turning this opportunity down.

“You ready, Maddy?” asks Larry, the club manager, standing over her.

“Yeah.”

“Bobby V.’s gonna warm up the room, and then you’re up first.”

“Got it.”

Maddy watches Larry as he winds his way around the tables, searching for the next comedian on his list. Her heart rate accelerates, and she starts bouncing her right heel again, faster this time. She doesn’t want to go first. What if Bobby V. bombs, and the audience is still cold? But she supposes that going first is better than going last, waiting around for almost an hour, her anxieties having too much time to fester and multiply.

Max returns to the table with three tequila shots and sets one in front of each of them. He raises his glass, and Maddy and Simone follow suit.

“To my first comedy tour!” says Max, grinning, before downing his shot.

“Cheers!” says Simone and tips hers back.

Maddy hesitates, her outstretched arm suspended, first because she never drinks before her set, but then because she’s also unexpectedly pinched by his choice of pronouns, my instead of our . He’s probably just so amped up and overwhelmed with excitement that he forgot to include her in the moment. And to be fair, it is his tour, his headline, his spotlight. It’s not her tour. She needs to get a grip. He just got the best news of his life, and she’s dissecting grammar.

“Cheers!” says Maddy.

She swallows her shot, and it burns all the way down.

Bobby V.’s set was solid and broke the ice nicely for her. Maddy made it through the first three minutes with ease, skating on the smooth confidence of her established material. Max and Simone laughed at all her punches, leading the way, breaking the dam for the crowd.

But now she’s in the creamy white middle of the Oreo. She’s memorized the material, said it aloud at least a dozen times to herself in front of Emily’s bathroom mirror and even naked in front of Max. But the only true way to know whether this new bit works or not is if it fails or flies in front of a live audience of people who don’t know her.

“Guys, especially older guys, love to date younger girls. There’s actually a rule for how young the girl can be for the guy to not be a total creep. Or criminal.”

The faces on the women look amused, but no one laughs. That’s okay; she’s just warming this one up.

“You take the guy’s age, divide it by two, and add seven. Now this rule does assume that the guy can do math, so it’s not going to be for everyone. Like this guy.”

Maddy points to one of the dudes she brought in off the street. He smiles, agreeing to be the butt of her joke, and his girlfriend laughs.

“So if the guy is forty, you divide by two, and add seven. He can date a twenty-seven-year-old. If he’s thirty, half plus seven is twenty-two. Seems reasonable. But it got me thinking, we girls could use a dating rule for age, too. But ours would calculate the guy’s emotional age.”

Maddy pauses, holding an exaggerated smile while raising her eyebrows, hamming up the moment, squeezing out some laughter from the women in the audience in anticipation of the direction they suspect she’s going.

“You take the guy’s chronological age, divide by two, and then you subtract ten. So if the guy is fifty, half minus ten is fifteen. Which is useful because it tells you you’re basically dealing with a horny teenager who likes sports cars and can only think about himself.”

She’s greeted with a burst of laughter, from both the dudes and the women. She waits as the laughter continues, and the restraint gives her the space to laugh, too, enjoying this beautiful moment of connection. For the first time on the comedy stage, she feels as if she’s in a real conversation with her audience.

“If the guy is twenty-four, half minus ten? You’re dating a toddler, ladies. He’s probably not financially independent, likes his iced coffee in a sippy cup, and throws tantrums if he doesn’t get his way. The math totally checks out.”

Already in on it, the women in the audience roar, nodding and clapping. Maddy smiles, riding the glittery high of the joy she created. She looks out to the back row to connect with Max, but his head is down, his face aglow with the light thrown by his phone screen, and his inattention is a dart bursting her party balloon.

Jostled, she takes a breath and replays the joke she just told in her head to reorient herself, to stay present in her material and prompt herself for what comes next. She’s recited this emotional-age bit dozens of times before tonight without registering anything special about the ages she chose, until just now. Twenty-four, the emotional equivalent of a toddler. Same age as Max.

“That’s it for tonight,” says Bobby V. “Thanks for coming!”

Maddy, Max, and Simone are knocking back their fourth round of tequila shots as people start leaving the club. Bubbling over like a popped bottle of champagne, Maddy cannot stop smiling. She did her first bringer show, and she killed it. And in three weeks, she and her absurdly tall, talented, and hilarious boyfriend are going on tour. A freakin’ comedy tour!

Maddy makes eye contact with two girls, probably in their late twenties, as they walk together toward the exit.

“You were so good!” calls out the first one.

“Yeah, you were my favorite,” says the second.

“Thank you so much,” says Maddy, her face flushing hot from the tequila and the compliment.

“What should we do now?” asks Simone. “Want to get dinner somewhere and celebrate?”

It’s 8:05. Maddy’s too jazzed up and drunk to go straight home. No problem. On the weekends, when she wants to see Max perform and take in a real comedy show, she tells Emily that she’s going to dinner or a movie with Simone. Emily’s always okay with it. She’s probably relieved to have some time alone with Tim in the apartment without their third wheel, a break from being her kid sister’s keeper for a night. Plus Emily’s so preoccupied with wedding plans and her upcoming bachelorette party, she’s not worried about her sister’s whereabouts.

“Yeah, let me just text my sister.”

She retrieves her phone from her coat pocket, and to her wholly unexpected horror, it’s lit up with texts from Emily.

EB

EMILY BANKS

7:21 PM

Hey I haven’t eaten yet and Tim’s working late wanna get sushi somewhere

I’ll just come by now get a latte and wait for you to be done

7:32 PM

Ur not here??

7:34 PM

Barista says you got off at 2:00

Says you don’t work evenings

???

WHERE R U??

7:37 PM

OMG ur at a COMEDY CLUB?!!

Dear God, no. Frantic, Maddy swipes out of Messages and taps on the Find My app. In the busy and anxious anticipation of her first bringer show, she forgot to stop sharing her location. Fuck . She has to get out of here right now.

“Let’s go!” Maddy says.

She doesn’t have a plan past leaving the club. She’s a shaken cocktail of lithium, quetiapine, tequila, the happiest night of her life, and now the threat of losing it all, and her brain is the saturated maraschino cherry drowning at the bottom of the glass. She can’t think. Her heart racing, she rises to her feet and turns around.

And there, standing in the doorway, looking directly at her, is Emily.