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“I don’t think that’s what blackmail means.”

Seth flashed me a brilliant smile. “Well, I give you permission to blackmail me with it, if you really want to.”

“That takes all the fun out of blackmail.”

“Sorry,” Seth said, not sounding sorry at all. “Anyway. I may have lied to you before.”

“Please tell me you lied about what’s under your beard,” I said. “I knew you were a face tattoo kind of guy.”

“I actually have a second beard tattooed under the first beard,” he said. “Just in case.”

“Just in case what? Just in case your face catches fire, but only in the beard region?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Seth said. “Any fire in the beard region would also burn my skin, rendering any tattoos pointless.”

“I see.”

“Anyway,” said Seth. “I may have lied about doing stand-up. In that I actually may have tried stand-up before.”

Somehow, it didn’t strike me as a wild idea. I could see it in my mind, Seth doing his absolute best to make people laugh. “I just can’t believe you lied to me. Didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Honestly, I forgot about it until just now,” Seth admitted. He popped the last half of rainbow cookie into his mouth without asking if I wanted it. “It was right after college, when I thought I was the coolest guy ever. Which has never been true, by the way.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Rude. Anyway, Dan was trying to make it as a stand-up comic, and he asked me if I would go on with him one night as moral support, so I signed up to go on right after him. Which worked out well, actually, because he totally bombed, so I figured I couldn’t do worse than that.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It was a huge success and you left the crowd in hysterics.”

“If only,” Seth said somberly. “No, I tanked, too. It just wasn’t as bad because Dan laid the groundwork beforehand.”

I snorted. “If I could go back in time, I would attend that comedy night just so I could cringe at how bad you were.”

“Again, rude,” Seth said. “And also, if you could travel back in time, wouldn’t you want to do something like, I don’t know, kill Hitler?”

I snorted again. “Someone else would just have taken his place.”

“That was a joke.”

“Was it? Maybe that’s why you bombed your stand-up.”

He stood abruptly. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, and walked off. I was left watching him, blinking at how suddenly he’d left. Had I genuinely insulted him? I thought we’d been joking around.

Ugh. This meant I’d have to apologize if I wanted to keep things the way they were. Which I did. Because things were really nice right now.

Ugh, again.

Watching a terrible comic alone is way less fun when you don’t have someone next to you to snicker with or roll your eyes at (one-sidedly, since Seth was way too nice to do such things when the comic could potentially see him do it if they squinted really hard). So I pulled out my phone and scrolled mindlessly through photos of old friends taking hikes and hugging babies and posing wistfully in front of flower walls and that’s why I didn’t realize what was happening until I heard Seth say into the microphone, “Shalom, everybody.”

My head popped up so fast I heard something in my neck crack. Okay, that would have to be looked at later. But for now, my eyes zeroed in on Seth, who was standing on the stage, his smile so bright it eclipsed the lights above. The mic only reached his chest, like it had been adjusted for the shorter person before him and he couldn’t figure out how to raise it. “How’s everybody doing tonight?” he said, scanning the room.

Nobody responded. He took it in stride. “So, gefilte fish, huh? What’s up with that stuff?”

What the hell was he doing?

Again, nobody answered him, but the wattage of his smile didn’t dim even the slightest bit. “I mean, how do we even know it’s fish? It could be anything in there. Like they say with hot dogs. Pig snouts. Well, that wouldn’t exactly be kosher. In more ways than one.”

I hadn’t realized somebody could cringe with their entire body. It was really not helping whatever had cracked in my neck.