It's Okay to Laugh Read Online Free

who pierced his ears multiple times. Grown-up Aaron hugs me close to his skinny chest until the fire alarm lets us know we’ve burned our dinner to the pan.
    When our relationship started Aaron and I had traded these little pieces of ourselves so freely and so immediately that we both started to fear we might run out sooner than we’d anticipated, that our respective wells would run dry and we’d end up just like the couples we pitied, passing the saltshaker withouteven looking up from our crossword puzzles or even worse, a game of Candy Crush.
    But love is funny, and there’s something about the thrill of discovering another person that makes even a story you’ve heard before a story you want to hear again and again, like the childhood books whose spines wore out from so many bedtime readings.
    I HAD A HIGH SCHOOL teacher who was obsessed with the Vietnam War. We called this teacher Bilbo Baggins, in part because he was small and beardy, and in part because all high school kids are terrible people who should be caged until they are at least twenty-one. Really, though, the joke was on us because Bilbo Baggins is a damn hero and that guy, like most high school teachers, was a saint.
    â€œYou know what I would love?” he said one day, pacing the room in his worn, wide-wale corduroys and loafers. “I’d love for a real Vietnam vet—a guy who was your age when he fought a war —to walk through this door and tell us his story.” He was just talking to himself, but my good friend and fourth-grade boyfriend Guy raised his hand and announced, “Nora’s dad is a Vietnam vet!”
    â€œIs that true?” Bilbo asked, and I nodded. What I didn’t say was that my father had never talked about it, not to me, not to my siblings. What I didn’t say was that his time as a marine, when he really was just a kid, was a point of quiet pride for him. That it imbued him with the fastidiousness he still carries today: A place for everything, and everything in its place. Take all you want, but eat all you take. Take the message to Garcia. Semper Fi. Stand up straight, goddammit.
    â€œSo,” my dad says over dinner that evening, reaching across me to take seconds, “I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” I ask, suddenly racking my brain for any rules I may have broken that would necessitate a meetingwith my parents at school. How many times did I get a uniform violation for having my shirt untucked? Is that an offense punishable by a secret parent-teacher conference?
    â€œYour history teacher called!” he says, almost giddily. “I’m coming in to talk to your class.”
    I’m shocked not because my father isn’t a generous man, but because he is such a private one. I’ve never seen the man naked—though, who wants to see their parents naked?—he wears a bathrobe over his pajamas, always, the ultimate in modesty. He called the past Christmas “total bullshit” because my mother gave me a water bra from Santa. Why Santa cared enough about my flat chest to give me a bra that simply included a set of water balloons stitched inside the cups was beyond me, but I was grateful to suddenly have a B cup underneath my school polo. Most of what I knew about my father and the life he lived before I was born, if you can call that a life, even, had come to me slowly, usually as we drove around the city that raised him.
    â€œSee that?” he’d say, pointing vaguely out the driver’s-side window. “That’s the tree my sister used to have me climb as a kid to steal her green apples. She’d give me a paper bag and tell me to jump the fence and fill it up.”
    I loved those moments, when he would give me a piece of himself without my asking, a little treasure just for me.
    My dad is already in the classroom when I arrive. History is the third period of the day, right before lunch,