the essential-oil display while Becca took over with customers. I remembered what Ruby had said about Becca’s arms and noticed that today, as always, they were sheathed in long sleeves despite the fair weather. I wondered if she, too, had a secret. If so, it seemed like a stupid and destructive secret to keep.
But wasn’t I being just as stubborn?
Telling Amanda had brought instant relief. But Amanda didn’t matter—even she knew that. Once she’d faded into the background, the relief had faded with her, and I was left alone to anticipate another confrontation with Neely. What if I just needed to tell someone else? Not my mom, who would freak out, or Ruby, who would gossip about it, but someone closer to my world, who would understand?
Kim, for instance. After prelims, Kim had checked in with me to ask after my imaginary illness. She’d even offered to bring me soup and Gatorade. It wasn’t the first time she’d made friendly advances, and I wasn’t quite sure why I’d never responded to them before. Okay, it annoyed me that she played up the sexy-baby thing onstage, and maybe she really would laugh at the idea of Aaron Neely, the Aaron Neely, masturbating furiously at me in the back of an SUV. Maybe I needed someone to laugh, to break the spell of it, at least for long enough to get me through the semifinals. Anyway, hanging out with Kim would give me something to do other than dread Neely and wonder about Amanda.
I finished up the oil display and got back to my phone, which was tucked under the counter in my purse. I had just enough time to send a text to Kim—Ran out of puke, all better now. Hang out before shows?—before the next wave of customers. I heard the buzz of a text, but I didn’t get a chance to look until the shift was nearly over. Kim had replied, Meet me at the lake @6?
I’d been thinking more along the lines of happy hour than exercise, but since I was supposedly recovering from food poisoning, it wouldn’t hurt me to play along. See you there, I texted back, trying to remember if I owned a single pair of walking shoes.
“The lake” was Ladybird Lake, which I still thought of as Town Lake, the homelier name it had worn when I first moved to Austin. By either name, it wasn’t a lake at all but a fat stretch of the Colorado River running through the heart of the city just south of downtown, flanked on both shores by hike-and-bike trails and kayak-rental places. Since coming back to Austin, I’d spent more time sitting in my car in traffic on the bridges over the river than down among the annoyingly healthy trail runners and dog walkers. But no matter how backed up the bridges were, the broad, rippling surface of the water, glinting at rush hour in the slanting sun and dotted with paddleboarders like gondoliers, made for a pleasant view.
That said, parking by the river was a bitch. Already late from having stopped by my apartment to change into a more walkable outfit, I maneuvered the car up and down the clogged one-way streets and cursed the no-left-turn signs until I found a spot a quarter of a mile away. I texted Kim I was on my way and hustled toward the trail under the powerful six o’clock sun, marshaling the last vestiges of bounce in a pair of ancient tennis shoes I’d found buried in the piles of heels in my closet. I was already pouring sweat when I got to our agreed-upon meeting place, where Kim, clad in a threadbare Eagles T-shirt over a lime-green sports bra, was executing an isosceles downward-dog in a sunlit patch of grass. She sprang up when she spotted me, her cheeks perfectly flushed, like an actress in a movie about working out. Panting, I waved in lieu of saying hello.
“Hey, late-ass bitch,” she said.
“Namaste, slut,” I said, still catching my breath. “You’re looking very white-lady today.” The snarky greetings among comics used to throw me before I accepted them as just part of the job. Remembering that I was supposed to be convalescing, I added, “You’re lucky I came at all. If I die out here, I’m suing you.”
“You want to walk or run?”
“Did I stutter?”
“What, you mean at prelims?” she said with a nasty grin, and I bowed sarcastically. “No, seriously. Congrats, though.” She steered us toward the path, at this hour a slow-moving river of people and bicycles and dogs swathed in a low cloud of reddish dust.
“You too,” I said. Kim had placed in her preliminary round the week before mine. “But the prelims are old hat to you, right?”
“Yeah, this is my third year,” she said with a quick sidelong glance at me, like I’d touched a nerve. She’d never placed at finals.
“Third time’s the charm, they say,” I said, to make nice.
“It’s so fucking exhausting.”
“Skip it,” I suggested. “Go sailing.”
“Are we even allowed to do that?” I knew what she meant. Since Funniest Person had gotten so big, standups in Austin referred to it as the “comedy tax.” It ate up months every year. “Let’s just bitch about it and pretend we don’t care who wins instead.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“I mean, it’s going to be the same dudes who place every year.”
“And the Funniest Person in Austin goes to . . . a guy with a handlebar mustache!” I said in my announcer voice.
“Second place . . . a guy with a slightly smaller handlebar mustache—and a neck tattoo!”
“Third . . . some woman, so nobody can accuse us of sexism!”
“I’ll take it,” Kim said. “I’m your token, right here.” I wondered if I should make the next joke but Kim took the words out of my mouth, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Maybe they’ll double their money and put a Latina comic in third.”
“I fully endorse that idea, since I’m the only one in town.”
“May the best token win . . . third, that is. If they even throw us a bone this year. I mean, last year it was three white dudes.” She smirked. “Speaking of that, I want to buy a drink for whoever gave Fash firsties last week. He nearly pissed his pants when he saw the order.”
“May the first slot always go to a white man.” I cast my eyes heavenward.
“Amen.”
We walked for a little while in silence. I watched the dogs trotting along the path and imagined what they were thinking. A golden-haired collie: I’m trying to spend less time on Instagram and more time really living. A pit bull running next to a septuagenarian in butterfly shorts: I love this man, and when he dies, I am going to love eating him. A chow chow: Sometimes I pretend I’m a cat. What, you don’t have any kinks?
“Someone told me if you don’t get to L.A. by twenty-six, you’re never going,” Kim said suddenly.
“I heard it was twenty-three,” I said, not asking Kim’s age. I didn’t feel like reminding her I was two years past the expiration date. “But then, I also hear you have to spend six years out there to make it. So if you do the math, it’s really seventeen.”
We had reached a shaded part of the path bent around a stagnant outcropping of the river. The overgrowth blocked out the sun, but it also shut out the breeze so completely that it felt like an airless room. We weren’t walking fast, but I was drenched, and Kim’s forehead was beading up at the hairline. She pulled a strand of sweat-darkened gold off her temple and fanned her cheeks with her hand. “Sometimes I think I’d rather off myself than keep slogging through it year after year.”
