Why I Think They Laugh At Me (But They Laugh With Me)
Four people laughed at the same time, and one of them looked at me.
I was sitting at the end of the cafeteria table with a sandwich, an apple and a thermos of tea. Across the room, a group of kids from my class were bent over their table, shaking with laughter. Then a girl glanced up. Her eyes landed on me for maybe half a second.
That was all it took. My mind slammed the door shut and started a private screening.
They are laughing at my sweater. They are laughing at the way I chewed. They saw me read the same line of my book four times. They have been waiting all year for someone like me to sit alone.
I held my sandwich with both hands and stared at it as if it might protect me. The laughter kept rolling across the room, warm and loud, and every wave of it felt like a tiny slap.
Are they laughing at me?
What did I do?
Why do I always feel like the joke?
The ear that only hears one thing
Zoe slid onto the bench beside me with a pencil stuck in her curls and a cookie in each hand. She took one look at my face and put one cookie down in front of me, like an offering.
“Let me guess,” she said. “They’re laughing, and your brain translated it into they’re laughing at you.”
“How do you always know?”
“Because it’s the only translation your brain knows.” She said it very gently. “When you feel afraid of being judged, your brain gets a little too good at one language. Every laugh, every glance, every whisper goes into the same machine, and out comes the same sentence.”
I looked at the group again. I still had that tight feeling around my chest, like a scarf wound too many times.
· · ·
What I can actually see
“Try this,” said Zoe. “Pretend you’re a scientist. You’re not allowed to guess. You may only report what you can see and hear. Ready?”
I nodded, a little reluctantly, and took a breath.
“Four people at the table. One of them is holding something up.”
“Good. What is it?”
I squinted. A boy in a blue hoodie was holding out a phone, and on its screen was a very surprised orange cat wearing what looked like a tiny hat.
“It’s a cat,” I said slowly. “It’s a video of a cat in a hat.”
“Is anyone looking at you?”
“…No. They’re all looking at the phone. Except the girl who glanced up.”
“And what was she doing when she glanced up?”
I thought back. She had looked up, and then she had looked right back down again, still laughing, still holding her sides.
“She was just breathing,” I said. “She needed to come up for air.”
“So,” said Zoe, with a very serious scientist face, “the evidence says the group is laughing at a cat in a hat.”
Something shook loose in my chest. I laughed first with my nose, then with my whole face, and I could not stop. A cat in a hat. I had spent ten minutes at war with a cat in a hat.
Laughing with, not at
“Now here’s the fun part,” said Zoe, finishing her cookie. “Next time you hear laughter, ask one question first: Is there a joke I haven’t seen yet?”
I wrote it on a napkin. Is there a joke I haven’t seen yet? It is a surprisingly good question. It turns a sentence about me into a sentence about the room, and the room is nearly always bigger than I am.
The girl who had glanced at me walked past our table a moment later, still smiling, and said, “Have you seen the cat video? You have to see it!”
So I did. I watched a small orange cat wearing a hat try to stand up with great dignity and fall off a couch. Zoe and I laughed so hard that the apple slices jumped in their bowl. Even the boy in the blue hoodie turned and grinned at us.
Nobody was laughing at me. They had been laughing the whole time, and I had been standing outside, sure that every sound was a door closing.
I still have days when a burst of laughter makes my shoulders go up. That is okay. It is just my old translator, working a little too hard.
And on the rare day when a laugh really is about something I did, I can survive that too. A small embarrassment is only a small embarrassment, and it passes faster than the worry about it.
But now I ask my question. Is there a joke I haven’t seen yet? And then I look for the cat in the hat. Most of the time, there is one.
With love,
Lina
