Character Types Lesson

Anders lived for the half second before a prank landed, that breath of time when the trap was set and no one knew it yet. A rubber snake coiled in Theo's backpack. A plastic spider dangling over a bus seat. A whoopee cushion tucked under the substitute's chair. If there was a way to make a person jump, Anders knew it well, had run the experiment in the past, and could report the results from memory.

Theo had long since stopped reacting. When the snake tumbled out of his bag, he only exhaled and set it on the desk. "Nice one, Anders," he said, exactly as he always said it. Theo did not get angry. He figured that was just Anders and pranks were just something that happened around Anders and always would.

Everyone had filed him under the same heading. Weeks earlier he had informed the entire bus that Mr. Delgado's house at the end of the block was haunted, and for days afterward a handful of younger kids took the long way around it. His older sister Greta had quietly retired every ounce of trust she had once extended him. When he burst into the kitchen swearing a spider was crawling up her shoe, she did not lift her eyes from her phone. "Sure it is," she said, in the flat voice of someone who had been fooled one too many times and had made a policy of disregarding Anders entirely.

That was the trouble with Anders, though he would not have called it trouble yet: he joked so constantly that the signal had worn out. There was no register left for sincerity. There was only Anders, grinning, waiting for the world to take the bait.

One evening his father was cooking, caramelizing onions in a pan working on the stove, when the phone rang and he stepped into the next room. Anders drifted into the kitchen, hunting for a snack, and saw it before he understood it. A dish towel had sagged against the live burner and a slim tongue of flame was working its way up the cloth toward the cabinets.

"Fire," he said with a bit of reservation, and then louder, "there is a fire, an actual fire, in the kitchen, right now."

Greta did not so much as turn her head. "Nice try, Anders."

"I am not messing around. Dad. Dad, get in here!"

"You are never messing around," Greta said, unbothered, as this moment of tension and disbelief haunted Anders worse than any specter sighted near Mr. Delgado's house.

The flame climbed. Anders felt a cold, dropping weight in his gut, the precise opposite of the thrill he chased when setting up a prank. He crossed the room in three steps, seized his father's arm, and pulled. "It is real. I am begging you, Dad. Come now!"

Perhaps it was his face or perhaps some older instinct read what his reputation had buried, but his father moved toward the kitchen, and when he got there, Dad took the burning towel, and acted without wasted motion. He killed the burner, dropped a lid over the flame, and smothered it in seconds, a puff of black smoke rolled across the ceiling. A dark streak of soot marked the wall above the stove. The air was heavy with smoke but no one was hurt.

Greta reached the doorway and stopped, the color gone out of her face. She had come within a few careless seconds of suffering through a burning kitchen.

His father breathed out slowly. "Good thing you came and got me, Anders," he said.

Anders nodded, but his mind had snagged on something worse than the fire. It was not the flame that frightened him. It was the silence before anyone moved, the seconds in which the word "fire" left his mouth and simply died there, weightless, because it came from the boy who joked. The pranks had been funny and he did not regret the laughter. What unsettled him was the discovery that he had bought that laughter by selling the trust that others had placed in him. These pranks had come at a great cost and now nobody who knew Anders could afford to believe him.

He did not resolve to stop being funny. Being funny was part of who he was and he had no intention of amputating that part from himself. What he resolved was subtler. There had to be a line, audible to the people around him, between Anders at play and Anders in earnest, so that the next time the stakes were real, no one would lose a second deciding whether to believe him. Comedy was cheap. Credibility, he now saw, was the thing you spent it on, and he had nearly gone bankrupt.

A few days later he told Greta there was a llama loose in the backyard. She did not glance up. "Fake."

"That one is fake," he agreed, grinning. Then the grin fell away and his voice went level and plain. "The stove is still on, though. For real this time."

She looked at him a long moment, reading him, and found something in his tone she had not bothered to look for in years. She got up, checked, switched it off, and jabbed a finger at him on her way back. "Do not make me regret this."

She was the same Greta she had always been, still built to call his bluff on reflex. The difference was on Anders' side of it. This time, when it counted, he had made certain she could tell.