She must have seen the raw look on my face. “Why did you come back here in the first place?”
There had been lots of reasons for leaving L.A.—our rent was climbing, and my job at the diner was wearing me out—but the final straw had been my disastrous solo meeting with Aaron Neely. Neely was a one-time comic’s comic with a self-destructive streak who had, after the usual stint in rehab, made the unusual move of putting aside his own career at its height to produce up-and-comers. In four years, Jason and I had come close to breaking through a handful of times, but when Jason snagged the pitch meeting with Neely through some minor miracle of networking, we thought this was really it, the big one. We had each vowed never to take a meeting without the other person—we were not those L.A. people—but when Jason was a no-show at the smoothie bar where Neely was waiting, I couldn’t bring myself to pass up the opportunity. After checking my phone one last time for a text from Jason, I went in, fearless in my fake Prada heels and fake Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress and fake Marc Jacobs bag, to pitch our pilot alone.
What followed was almost comically surreal. The smoothie Aaron had waiting for me at his private table, a maroon swirl of kale and beet pulp with a chalky aftertaste that I forced myself to exclaim over enthusiastically as I choked it down. The way the tall stool had seemed to tip under me halfway through the meeting, the walls around me sliding downward. The loud whispering noise that seemed to come from the ferns shielding us from the rest of the smoothie bar, gradually drowning out every sound but his voice saying, “You look terrible, please, let me take you home.”
And then, of course, there was Neely himself, a comedy hero of mine with a ruddy, pitted nose and the hands of a giant. Larger than life. Later, in the black-upholstered back seat of his SUV under black-tinted windows, merely larger than me.
When he finally dropped me off at home, unsteady on my feet but relieved to be walking at all, I found Jason sick too, hunched over the toilet in misery. The look he gave me was so awful, so full of betrayed confidence and disgust, that I knew we would never talk about what happened. And some part of me didn’t want to, feared being pulled down into the quicksand of memory in the back of Neely’s car. It was enough to know that we never got a follow-up call on the show. I had evidently flubbed the pitch.
Amanda was still waiting for a response.
“Sometimes dreams just don’t work out,” I said after a moment’s pause. “But you can’t dwell on it. You have to go back to square one. Try again.”
Amanda fixed me again with her long stare, which seemed to flip from naiveté to knowingness and back effortlessly, as if they were two sides of the same thing. “Admirable,” she said, finally.
I’d never been good at being friends with women. I couldn’t get the hang of the transactional nature of female friendship—you give me this secret, in return I share my deepest insecurity. Rinse and repeat. Even as a child, I was never interested. In fifth grade, it became clear that some girls were going to get tall and pretty, and others were going to make straight As, and others were going to act boy-crazy, and still others were going to do all these things in Spanish, which I don’t speak, even though I look like I should, and understand only when it’s my mom talking. Being funny didn’t get you into any of the cliques. When Jason appeared a few years later with his fart jokes and SNL recaps, I was grateful to be rescued from the elaborate pas de deux of girl talk forever.
But feeling Amanda withdraw slightly now, I knew enough to offer up an ersatz confession. I took a stab. “Actually, I’m kind of blocked for material right now,” I said, looking for something that wasn’t true and realizing, even as I said it, that it was. “Everything in my set feels kind of dead. Sometimes I feel like I’m dead.” Damn those whiskey sodas.
Amanda leaned forward, suddenly fierce, and wrapped her skinny fingers around my wrist. “Listen, Dana,” she said. “I know what it’s like to be driven out of town, lose your livelihood, your self-respect, everything. I let my ex lock me up and tell me I was worthless. He wasn’t even good-looking.” She chuckled, but it was a grim, unpleasant sound. “I would never have given him the time of day if I hadn’t felt dead inside. But I’m not dead. I’m still here. And so are you.” Her eyes burned drunkenly, and her knuckles pressed into my wrist bone. “Whatever happened to you in L.A., you’re not dead. The person who did it to you is the one who should feel that way, not you.”
“Nothing happened to me in L.A.,” I said, and gently pried her fingers loose.
She released me and drew back a little, seeming to come to herself. Then she looked at my wrist, which I was rubbing with my other hand, and laughed, that short bark I’d heard during my set, like a fox. She settled back into her chair.
“Right,” she said, grinning. “I’d just like to know who Nothing is, so I could find him and break his knees for you.”
Score one for the literal-minded. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The tension suddenly drained out of me, and I felt tired of pretending. “I’ve got a better idea. How about if while you’re off breaking Nothing’s knees, I go find your ex-boyfriend and kick his ass?”
“That’d be a start,” she said. “But I warn you, if you’re looking for asses that need kicking, I’ve got a long list.”
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“Deal.”
I raised my glass. We clinked and swallowed in tandem. In the other room, I could hear Fash wrapping up his set, and the comics who had stuck around to watch were gearing up to head somewhere together—probably Bat City for the late-night open-mic. Any minute, one of them would be poking his head around the corner and asking me to come along. If I wanted to avoid introducing Amanda, now was the time to go.
“Hey, it was really nice meeting you,” I said. “That set was rough. And now I feel . . .” I put my hand over my heart. “Much more wasted.” She laughed. “But really, thanks.” Remembering something I was always supposed to be doing to help my comedy career, I said, “If you want to know when I’m performing around town, follow me on Facebook.”
“I stay off social media,” Amanda said. “Call me paranoid, but after working at Runnr, I know what they use that information for. Could I get your number instead?” She pushed a napkin over and handed me a pen.
I hesitated only an instant, then said, “Sure.” I jotted down my number and stood to go. As I handed the pen back, I thought of another pilot idea: Failed comic creates Instagram for fake lifestyle guru. Account goes viral. Comic must pretend to be sincere for rest of life. I started walking toward the door.
“Good luck in that contest next week,” she called after me.
“You mean break a leg,” I said reflexively.
“Only if it’s someone else’s.”
I recognized her second attempt at a lame joke and chuckled in return. It seemed possible at that moment that she might become, if not a fan, something I needed even more: a friend.
Waking up late with a hangover the next morning, I hustled to Laurel’s Paper and Gifts for my opening shift and nearly smacked myself on the forehead when I saw all the cars in the parking lot. I’d forgotten about the early staff meeting. I used my key to get in and hurried past the display shelves full of stationery and gilt-edged notebooks.
When I first came back from L.A., I’d dropped into Laurel’s as a customer, hoping one of those fancy notebooks might inspire me to start writing again, though in the end I wound up buying the same old pocket-size Moleskine I’ve used since they first appeared by the cash register in Amarillo’s sole Barnes and Noble. But