St. Mary's Church Grounds — July 2010, Wake Day 2, Late Afternoon
The grill had cooled to embers and I was scraping carbon off the grates with a wire brush when the footsteps came up behind me — deliberate, unhurried, the cadence of someone who'd been waiting for the crowd to thin before making their approach.
"Holden, right?"
Nora Ferdinando-Buzzer stood three feet away with her arms crossed and the dish towel draped over one shoulder like a sergeant's insignia. The clipboard was back. The polite-blank expression from the handshake line was gone, replaced by something harder and more specific — the look of a woman who'd spent her grandfather's entire funeral managing logistics and had finally found time to manage the one thing that didn't add up.
Me.
"That's me."
"Nora Buzzer. We shook hands yesterday but I don't think we actually talked."
"We didn't. You were busy."
"I'm still busy." She didn't sit. Didn't lean against the picnic table. Stood at full height — which wasn't tall, but she occupied space with a density that made inches irrelevant. "I wanted to ask you a few things. About how you knew my grandfather."
The wire brush scraped across the grate. I kept scraping because stopping would look like panic.
"Sure."
"Which years did he coach you?"
"Early eighties. Youth summer league."
"Which league? He ran three. Wildcats, Rockets, and the weekend drop-in at the Y."
Meta-knowledge: the movies mentioned Buzzer coaching but never specified league names. I was guessing, and Nora Buzzer was a woman who had grown up testing her grandfather's stories for accuracy the way other kids tested the limits of bedtime.
"The weekend drop-in," I said, because it sounded the most casual, the most forgettable, the kind of program a kid might attend for one summer and never think about again.
"The Y program. Okay." She uncrossed her arms. Crossed them again. "How old were you?"
"Six, maybe seven. I didn't play much. Mostly sat on the bench and listened to Coach talk."
"He was good at talking."
"The best."
A pause. The scraping filled it. Across the yard, the lawn chair circle had dissolved — Eric was helping Sally carry dishes inside, Kurt was chasing Charlotte around the playground, and Lenny was on his phone by the parking lot, pacing the way Hollywood agents pace when the call is about money.
"Did Grandpa ever take you to Marchetti's for pizza after a game?"
The question landed casual. Too casual. The kind of casual that took practice.
"Yeah," I said, because Coach Buzzer taking kids for pizza after games was exactly the kind of thing a coach in a heartwarming comedy would do. "Once or twice. Great pizza."
Nora's eyes went flat. The warmth — whatever thin layer had been there — vanished like smoke off the grill.
"Marchetti's burned down in 1975."
The wire brush stopped.
"Three years before Grandpa started coaching anything," she said. "He never took anyone there. He talked about it sometimes — the pizza from when he was young. But the building was a parking lot by the time he had a team."
My mouth opened. Nothing useful came out.
"So." Nora's voice had dropped to the frequency of a woman who'd caught something and was deciding what to do with it. "Either you're misremembering, which is fine — people conflate childhood memories all the time. Or you're making up a connection to my grandfather at his funeral, which is significantly less fine."
The grill grate sat between us, still warm. I set the wire brush down because my grip had gone white-knuckled and the brush was starting to shake.
"I'm misremembering," I said. "It's been a long time."
"It has."
She didn't press further. She didn't need to. The trap had sprung, the data had been collected, and Nora Buzzer had filed me in whatever mental cabinet she kept for people who didn't pass inspection. She picked up the dish towel from her shoulder, folded it once, and walked back toward the kitchen without another word.
Marchetti's. A pizza place that burned down five years before Coach Buzzer ever picked up a whistle. And I walked right into it because I assumed the movies told me everything and the movies told me nothing about a restaurant that closed before anyone in the cast was born.
I leaned against the picnic table. The evening air was cooling and the charcoal smell still clung to my suit — two days in the same clothes, two days at a wake, and the one person whose opinion mattered most had just watched me lie about pizza.
Nora tests claims with trap questions. She doesn't guess, she doesn't assume, she sets the table and waits for you to sit in the wrong chair. And I sat right down.
The phone buzzed. Not the passive cooldown notification — something new, something with weight. I pulled it out and the screen displayed a mission alert framed in amber, diagnostic complete.
[NEW MISSION AVAILABLE]
[Target: Marcus Higgins]
[Timeline Bug: Comedy Defense Mechanism]
[Origin Point: 1992 — Jefferson Middle School Talent Show]
[Severity: Deep Root — foundational personality architecture affected]
[Difficulty: D]
[Accept? Y/N]
Below the alert, the diagnostic overlay loaded — a behavioral scan of Marcus, compiled from the system's observation through the kitchen window. The data was clinical and devastating. Marcus's comedy output: consistent, high-volume, precision-timed. Marcus's vulnerability index: near-zero. A red bar labeled VULNERABILITY sat flatlined at the bottom of the display, not draining like Rob's Belonging bar had been, but absent. The bar wasn't low. It was cauterized.
[Analysis: Subject uses comedy as primary defensive mechanism. Humor output correlates inversely with emotional exposure. Pattern origin: single traumatic public performance event, age 14. Comedy armor has prevented emotional growth for 18 years while maintaining social functionality. Subject is popular, liked, and fundamentally unknown by every person in his life.]
I looked through the kitchen window. Marcus was inside, cross-legged on the floor at the kids' table, constructing something elaborate from napkins while Greg Feder, Keithie Feder, Donna Lamonsoff, Andre McKenzie, and Charlotte McKenzie watched with the rapt attention children give to adults who take silliness seriously. Marcus's hands moved with the economy of a performer — fold, twist, puppet — and his mouth was running a narration at whisper-volume, close enough for the kids to hear, private enough to be conspiratorial. Becky Feder had climbed into his lap at some point and Marcus hadn't moved her, which said more about the man behind the comedy than any diagnostic overlay could.
He learned to be funny because the alternative was unbearable. Fourteen years old, a stage, a crowd, and something broke so clean he rebuilt the whole personality around the scar.
The napkin puppet did something that made Andre snort-laugh and Charlotte cover her mouth. Marcus's face didn't change. Dry, thin-lipped, committed to the bit. The comedian who never laughed at his own material because the material wasn't the point — the armor was.
I pressed Y.
[MISSION ACCEPTED: THE BOY WHO LAUGHED ALONE]
[Deployment window: 2 hours]
[Temporal coordinates: April 1992, Jefferson Middle School, evening]
[Preparing insertion parameters...]
Two hours. Two hours before the system dropped me into a middle school in 1992 to fix something that happened to a fourteen-year-old kid who grew up to be the driest, funniest, most defended man in a room full of defended men.
I pocketed the phone. Picked up the wire brush. Started scraping the grate again because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't panic.
Across the hall, through the kitchen window, Nora was watching me. Not the evaluating squint from earlier — something colder. The steady regard of a woman who'd caught a lie and was deciding whether the liar was dangerous or just pathetic.
Two fronts. Nora, who I need to convince I'm not a con artist. And Marcus, whose entire personality I'm about to try to rewire from the roots.
The grill brush scraped carbon into ash. Two hours. The 1992 deployment window opened at dusk, and somewhere in the past, a kid named Marcus Higgins was backstage at a talent show, holding index cards, vibrating with the specific energy of a teenager about to do the bravest thing he'd ever do.
I had two hours to figure out how to make sure it went right.
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