Gideon smirked, winked, and became someone other than himself. “Thanks, man. Appreciate that. Nice to hear I can still pass for thirty.” He paused for the giggling from various parts of the room.
He unhooked the mic from its stand and walked haltingly across the black stage, seeming to be in deep thought. My heart was pounding. I felt like it was me up there, squinting beyond the lights.
“Uh, so my parents are still together. . . . Um, thanks?” he said to the smattering of applause. “I’m just gonna point out that you have no idea what kind of marriage you just applauded, by the way.”
Self-effacing laughs. Gideon was totally different up there. Relaxed, calm, self-assured. He even looked a little taller.
“But no, it’s a good marriage. Of course they do fight sometimes,” he continued. “Probably no more than normal. They grew up pretty different. That’s part of it, probably. He grew up Irish-Italian, pretty strict family. He’s been in therapy for a long time and gotten past a lot of that stuff. My mom grew up as a piece of wood and some fabric, and now she’s an ottoman.”
He had said it so casually that you’d almost miss it if it wasn’t so odd. There was dead silence, but he continued deadpan, like he hadn’t said it. Confused laughter from a few parts of the room. I remember literally holding my breath.
“It’s a really romantic story. So my dad fixes old furniture for a living. They locked eyes across the secondhand store one day, and that was it. He had her reupholstered, her legs polished—the kind of ottoman he could see himself marrying. I mean, of course he says that she was already that ottoman on the inside. He just wanted her to have the upholstery to match because she deserved it.”
Then suddenly, I got it. He was being personal; he just wasn’t being literal.
“Isn’t that a romantic story? It’s just like The Notebook, if you swapped out Rachel McAdams for an extraneous piece of living room decor that’s an afterthought to most people.”
Big burst of laughter, sweeping Gideon along with it—but he allowed himself only a chuckle. (“I hate when comedians have that fake little laugh right before a bit, like they’re being swept away by how awesomely funny this memory was. It’s so obvious,” he once mumbled with a mouthful of popcorn as we tore through the miserable collected works of Dane Cook “for research.”)
Gideon stopped, abruptly breaking the rhythm, and stared at a point behind me. His face said: Oh, shit. I twisted around fast.
And there was Mrs. Maclaine, sticking out like a sore thumb in an Hermès scarf (I once called it “a HER-mees,” like herpes, and she corrected me: “an er-MEZ”), standing next to the bar with her arms crossed and looking very, very angry.
Five minutes later, Gideon and I sat on the damp curb, still so adrenaline-jazzed that we barely even cared we were in trouble. Meanwhile, Mrs. Maclaine stood by her BMW and called what seemed like every parent in Melville to let them know that we weren’t going halfsies on a crack pipe. Her hand shook a tiny bit. The only reason she hadn’t peeled off with Gideon was to wait for Dawn to come pick me up.
“I just knew when I came on they were all looking at me like ‘Oh, no, here we go, it’s a kid who’s gonna joke about why high school sucks,’ and I just . . . I wanted to prove them wrong.”
“You were so, so funny. I was really nervous on your behalf, so I only laughed a few times, but . . .”
“I wanted to surprise the hell out of everybody in the room, you know?”
I shook my head. “You didn’t.”
He looked hurt. “Really?”
“Almost everybody. But I wasn’t surprised at all.”
We both looked out at the gleaming puddles spotting the parking lot in front of us, then beyond, to the freeway. The mutual high was fading, and we were back in our own lives again.
“I hate it here,” he mumbled.
I just stared at the pavement. There was so much I could say. But I just whispered, “Me too.”
He turned toward me, a familiar face but in a really unfamiliar way, his green eyes locked on me. He moved his head closer to mine, and it felt so right that I’d already closed my eyes.
“Gideon Andrew Maclaine, you get in this car right now.”
Headlights beamed onto us as a second car swished through the puddles to a crawl. A really shitty car. Dawn’s car.
As I headed toward it, Mrs. Maclaine tapped on Dawn’s window, her car keys entwined in her perfectly manicured hands—claws, I thought meanly—and Dawn cranked the squeaky handle until the window rolled down.
“Ms. Epstein, I know you’ve got a lot going on,” Mrs. Maclaine said to my mother, her words dripping with disapproval, “but your daughter is out of control, and I certainly can’t parent for you. Please find somewhere else to send Scarlett after school. I’m done.”
With that, she slid into the driver’s seat of her BMW, where Gideon was already waiting. Behind the tinted black glass, I saw he was looking straight ahead, blank. They glided out of the parking lot and onto the highway.