Chapter 26

CHAPTER 26

As she walks down Fifth Avenue, Maddy plays the sound of her sister’s laugh in her head on repeat like a catchy verse from a favorite pop song. She wishes she could set it as her ringtone. She did her eight-minute set in the living room, Emily seated on the couch as if she were watching a basketball game on TV with Tim, uninterested but pretending to care, only intending to humor Maddy long enough to prove that she was right and Maddy is nuts. Despite her pursed-lipped skepticism and her cross-armed conviction, she laughed.

She laughed!

And because of that beautiful, renegade laugh, Maddy’s life has changed. For one, knowing that Emily sees her comedy as a real endeavor and not a sign of mental illness is validation gold. Any niggling doubts Maddy housed before Emily’s reluctant laughter have vacated the building.

Also, Emily agreed not to tell their mother, so Maddy’s not in imminent danger of being deported to Connecticut, a huge weight lifted. Maddy no longer stashes her notebooks out of sight under the couch cushions. She leaves them in proud, plain sight on the side table. And she can go to any comedy club she wants without having to create a cover story for Emily.

Of course, she still hides her location when she goes to the clubs so her mother doesn’t know where she is. Her mother asked about her whereabouts the other day, saying she checked the Find My app to see if Maddy had arrived at work yet, but it read No location found under Maddy’s name. Ready with a well-rehearsed excuse, Maddy covered by saying that too many baristas were checking their phones during their shifts, and so their boss now makes them power down their phones while they’re at work. This brilliant lie made perfect sense to her mother, and Maddy wasn’t questioned any further. She’s also careful to promptly answer every one of the million texts her mother sends each day.

So her comedy life is still a secret from their mother, Dr. Weaver, and the rest of her family, but there is a stretch-her-legs freedom in no longer having to hide this part of herself from her sister. She walks with bouncy swagger, four inches taller in flip-flops.

The weather jumped from when-will-winter-ever-end to blazing-hot-summer-even-though-it’s-still-spring overnight. People are bitching about the heat and humidity, about the abrupt switch from heat to air-conditioning in April without a fresh-aired spring in between. Maddy thinks these people just like to complain, that there’s a perverse joy in the familiar habit of misery.

Maddy loves it. While waiting on the corner for a WALK signal and as other people shelter themselves in the shade, Maddy tilts her face up to the bright sky, eyes closed, absorbing the penetrating warmth of the sun into her skin. It blows her mind that she can stand on this street corner and feel heat thrown from a burning ball of plasma ninety-three million miles away. Scientists estimate that the sun is 4.5 billion years old and has about as many years left before it becomes unstable and collapses in on itself, thereby destroying Earth (if it hasn’t already been destroyed by then), and she pinches herself lucky to exist here and now, smack in the middle of her planet’s existence.

The WALK signal is taking forever. She turns to consider crossing in the other direction and notices the magazine kiosk she didn’t see before. And there, front and center, is Taylor Swift on the cover of POP magazine. Her closed pink lips and bemused almond eyes peeking out from behind a curtain of bangs hint at a delicious secret she’d love to share. Maddy feels a tingle, a special pull, and smiles, knowing the pedestrian signal stopped her here and at length for a reason.

Taylor is on her epic Eras Tour, but Maddy isn’t allowed to talk about it, and she’s definitely not allowed to go even if she could get her hands on a ticket that didn’t cost at least $1,000. She’s also not supposed to watch any video clips from the concerts, but that’s hard to avoid as they regularly pop up on her social media feeds. Even though she’s no longer following Taylor, everyone else is. Taylor Swift is everywhere right now.

She touches her favorite musician’s face on the cover, smiles, and then pulls the magazine from the display. Her mother would tell her not to, but she can relax. For God’s sake, it’s just a magazine. She purchases a copy and slides it into her backpack.

As she continues walking, she’s struck by the exquisite timing of all things, that everything is exactly as it should be, that the Universe is operating in ways that can’t be random, governed by laws that must be mathematical, balanced, predictable. Trustworthy. If she hadn’t been forced to take this semester off from NYU, then she never would’ve given stand-up a shot. She wouldn’t know Simone. If Adam hadn’t broken up with her in December, she wouldn’t be with Max.

If she hadn’t been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she wouldn’t be going on a comedy tour in two weeks. None of the amazing things that have unfolded in her life would’ve happened without that fork in the road. Yes, that fork was scary and disruptive, but who wants to drive down a perfectly straight road for an entire lifetime?

Not her.

Something is taken away so that something else can take its place. Lose a boyfriend. Find a new one. No longer a student at NYU. Become a comedian. A person dies. A baby is born. Nature fills the void.

She’s on her way to Comic Strip Live. She’s doing a five-minute open mic tonight, all new material. Most of it will probably bomb, and that’s not going to feel good. It never does. But that’s the only way to get to the twenty minutes she needs in two weeks. She’s scheduled to do an open mic almost every night between now and then. She loses the weekend because of Emily’s bachelorette party, but then she’ll be back at it every night until she and Max leave town.

She’s been writing a lot at night, well after Emily has gone to bed. She tries to go to sleep at ten, but as soon as her lids close, it’s as if someone hangs a W E ’ RE O PEN sign in her mind’s front window. The doors swing open, and a mob of ideas that had been pressed together, waiting in a crowded, roped-off line all day, flood into her consciousness. She can’t ignore them. Words fly out of her pen, filling her notebook pages.

And then she’s up early, without an alarm, before Emily and Tim and the low growling of garbage trucks, editing whatever she wrote before she fell asleep. Like most new comics, she tends to overexplain, and her first-draft jokes are all too wordy. She spends the first part of the day drinking coffee while she strips her overdressed bits down to their bare-naked essentials.

She hasn’t seen Max since her bringer show. He’s been really focused, preparing his forty minutes for the tour. So she’s been giving him some space. And now that Emily knows what’s up, Maddy can write at her apartment instead of hiding out at Max’s in the afternoons. So she and Max have been out of touch all week. She’s meeting him at the club now, and they’ll hang out in the bar before her open mic. She can’t wait to hear the details about their tour itinerary.

Thinking about Max makes her realize how much she misses him, how much she likes him, and how excited and lucky she is to be going on tour with him. Stopped at an intersection a block away from the club, she has to keep herself from hugging the sweaty stranger standing next to her. She checks the time. She’s not late, but her heart skips, suddenly anxious, swept up in an overwhelming hot hurry to get to the club, to see Max as soon as possible. The second the light changes, she charges into the street and walks just shy of jogging the rest of the way there.

Inside, she spots the back of Max’s head in the center of the booth below Jerry Seinfeld’s picture, the exact spot where they met back in November. She slides in opposite him, breathless and grinning. He’s reading notes from a page in a pocket notebook, pen in hand, and doesn’t look up. His face is clenched, closed off.

“You okay?” she asks.

“I’ve got a tight thirty but nothing else,” he says, raking his face with his fingers.

“You’ll find it.”

“I better. I need ten more minutes and I only have two more weeks to figure it out.”

“Same.”

She’s got a solid ten, but stretching to twenty in such a short amount of time feels almost impossible, as if she’s just run a marathon but someone has moved the finish-line ribbon another twenty-six miles down the road.

“What do you mean, ‘same’?”

“I’ve got ten, I need ten more, just like you.”

“Why are you trying to get to twenty?”

She laughs, a nervous giggle. His face remains deadpan.

“Are you trying to be funny?” she asks.

His face doesn’t budge.

“You know,” she says.

“No, I don’t.”

“For the tour. To open for you.”

His eyes retreat. He lays his pen down and leans back.

“Shit, Banks. I’m taking Zoe.”

She’s stunned, barely able to comprehend what just happened, as if he’d thrown a bucket of ice water in her face.

“What the fuck, why?”

“Don’t be mad. You’re good, but you’re still really new at this. Zoe’s been busting her ass for three years. And she’s got twenty minutes already in her pocket. She deserves it.”

“Fuck that. I deserve it. I’ve probably put in more hours in three weeks than she’s done in three years. Plus, there’s talent and working smarter. Plus fuck Zoe. Take me.”

“I can’t. I already asked her.”

“Unask her. Say you changed your mind. You don’t owe her anything.”

“I’m sorry. It’s her turn.”

“Her ‘turn’? What the fuck does that even mean? We’re not waiting in line in fuckin’ Starbucks,” she says, her voice growing louder. “I’m good, and I’m your girlfriend. You should be taking me.”

Max turns his head and does a quick but serious scan of the bar, as if he’s worried about who might be listening.

“Banks, look, we’ve just been messing around. Come on, don’t give me that look. We never defined anything. You’ve never even spent the night.”

For the first time, Maddy wonders who has been.

“Are you fucking Zoe?”

“No. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I picked her. I don’t want any drama.”

Maddy rolls her eyes.

“I guess we should talk about this,” he continues. “I don’t want to be attached to anyone while I’m on this tour. I’d like to see you again when I’m back, but for the seven weeks, I need to be on my own.”

Oh, there it is. This isn’t about whether she’s ready or whose turn it is. Being a stand-up comedian is the closest thing to Harry Styles that a mere mortal dude can be. It doesn’t matter how geeky, gawky, bald, fat, or homely the guy is. If he’s a comedian and can make the ladies in the audience laugh, he’s sexy. Look at Pete Davidson.

Max isn’t going to waste this moment, this rite of passage even, on staying true to a girlfriend back in New York, and he certainly doesn’t want her sharing his hotel room, cockblocking him at every venue. He’s going to fuck as many college groupies as his new rock-star status entitles him to. He’s a headliner now. That makes him a player, and he’s going to play.

“I just want to be crystal clear about everything so there’s no confusion.”

“Yeah, you’re a fucking chandelier.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“Don’t be a dick.”

So that’s it. She’s not going on tour with him, and he’s not her boyfriend anymore, if he ever was at all. She’d been so careful not to disclose anything about her bipolar diagnosis for fear that he’d ghost her if he knew. It never occurred to her that she could be a normal twenty-year-old and still be discarded.

A guy in a Knicks jersey with Oscar the Grouch eyebrows materializes at the head of their booth, Maddy assumes to scold her for being too loud.

“Maddy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Leo. I saw you the other night at LOL and really liked your set. I’m running a new comedy festival here for emerging female comics in three weeks, and I have a ten-minute spot still open if you want it. Interested?”

“Hell yes.”

“Great, here’s my card. Give me a shout, and I’ll send you the details.”

He leaves as abruptly as he appeared. Maddy looks down at the card in her hand and grins. She waggles it in front of Max’s face as if it were a winning lottery ticket.

“Thanks so much for clearing my calendar. See ya!”

She slides out of the booth and walks away, heading to the greenroom backstage without looking back. She rereads the card. New York Women in Comedy Festival . She smiles.

There it is again. Something is taken away so that something else can take its place. If Max weren’t such a douchebag shit stain and had picked her instead of Zoe, then Maddy wouldn’t be available to do the festival. She’d be on the tour, up late watching HGTV alone in some sketchy Holiday Inn off the highway while Max was fucking some nineteen-year-old chick in a dorm room. She kisses the card. Trust the Universe.

Without knowing a thing about the festival, she’s 100 percent certain that it’s better and where she’s meant to be. Someone influential could be in the audience. Lorne Michaels, Amy Schumer, Jimmy Kimmel, her next boyfriend. A real one this time. It could be anyone and anything could happen.