Epically Earnest

Molly Horan

• Publisher: Clarion Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9780358566236
• Print ISBN:
  9780358566137

In this delightfully romantic LGBTQ+ comedy-of-errors inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a high school senior works up the courage to ask her long-time crush to prom all while deciding if she should look for her bio family.

Juggling a top-secret promposal, a surprise DNA test, and the girl of her dreams, what could possibly go wrong?

• A Sweet F/F Romance: Janey has been crushing on the impossibly cool Gwen for years. Now she’s finally making her move—by planning a flash-mob promposal in Central Park.
• Found Family vs. Bio Family: As the adopted “Bag Baby” of a viral video, Janey’s always been happy with the family that chose her. But when a DNA test reveals a secret cousin, she has to decide if she’s ready to find out where she came from.
• Witty Banter: With rapid-fire dialogue, hilarious schemes from a chaotic best friend, and Oscar Wilde-inspired shenanigans, this retelling is both clever and charming.
• A Coming-of-Age Story: A heartfelt and funny journey about figuring out who you are, who you love, and what family really means.

Chapter One

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

—OSCAR WILDE, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

So, don’t kill me, but I stole your spit.

This was the text I got in the lobby of Algie’s apartment complex, from Algie himself, who I knew had just been informed of my arrival by Mark, the night doorman. Algie likes to send texts right before actually greeting people, “to set the tone.” But I suspected this particular text was his half-hearted attempt to mitigate my anger by dropping the bomb while we were still separated by thirty-six floors. Normally he’s good at making me forget whatever genuinely enraging thing he’s done now. It’s possible the little effort he needs to put into getting my near instant forgiveness makes me kind of a doormat. Taking my spit against my express wishes, however, crossed a line and I felt a little vindicated by the fact Algie knew that.

When I reached the penthouse, Algie was leaning against the doorframe wearing a top hat with the brim tipped over his eyes, an already-open can of Diet Sunkist in his hand, a totally inadequate peace offering. He didn’t look up when the elevator dinged, but instead said, in his best English accent, “Beverage, madam?”

“You’re going to try to be cute? That’s your plan—ply me with orange soda and Algernon charm I’ve built up a tolerance to for the last decade? I could call the cops, you know,” I said, stomping past him into his apartment, past the floor-to-ceiling Impressionist paintings, past a life-size replica of the Venus de Milo, and into his room, where I sat on the very edge of his four-poster bed (an honest-to-god set piece from an off-Broadway production of Scrooge), making sure to telepathize that I could leave at any second.

“And what, Janey, would you charge me with? If spit theft was a crime, I would have been in juvie since the first grade.”

“Shut up, there was no spit theft either way between you and Brett A.”

“Maybe not Brett A., but Mitch H.—”

“How have you never had mono?”

“Strength of character.”

“You stole my spit.”

“For your own good—”

“Transporting samples of bodily autonomy across state lines is probably a crime.”

“When you make up crimes, at least make them grammatically correct.”

“Algie! You know I don’t want to know, I’ve told you I don’t. This is a complete violation of—”

I faltered—tired of talking, tired of arguing—suddenly hit by a wave of bone-deep exhaustion I hadn’t felt since I ran the mile with a 102-degree fever (in my defense, I always feel like I’m going to die when I run the mile, so I didn’t really notice a difference). I flopped onto the refrigerator-size teddy bear Algie got from whatever guy was following him around in a lovesick haze last Valentine’s Day.

I felt Algie’s head rest gently on my back, a sign of just how much trouble he knew he was in with me—normally he flung his body onto mine with absolutely no consideration of the damage his elbows could do to my kidneys.

“Don’t you want to know what I found?” he asked in a whisper, a register I was pretty sure I’d only heard from him on the stage when he was playing someone capable of being quiet.

“That I’m mostly Western European, slightly Eastern European, with probably one percent something that seems totally random because genetic testing you got a Groupon for probably isn’t as scientific as you’d like it to be?” I asked.

“Janey, I found a familial match.”

I was going to throw up. Hopefully on Algie. No, I was going to pass out. Or possibly become the Incredible Hulk. None of the emotions or sensations flowing through me were matching up with anything I’d ever felt before.

Somehow, I got out, in a death rasp, “Well, Mr. St. Vincent High School Register editor in chief, way to bury the fucking lede.”

My legal name is Jane Worthing, but that’s not the name on my original birth certificate, wherever that is. You might know me as the Bag Baby, which various sites on the internet have described as “one of the first viral videos of the twenty-first century.” I’d like to say I’m honored to be a part of such an important milestone in web culture. But instead, I tend to get hung up on the fact that one or more of my birth parents left me, in an oversize Gucci handbag in the back of the Poughkeepsie train station. What separates me from other unfortunate infants who have been abandoned in far-less infant-friendly locales and haven’t reached a fraction of my view count is my dad. Of course, in that moment he hadn’t quite claimed the dad mantle, but he did have his unique way with words. My soon-to-be aunt was the one who captured the moment on her flip phone as Dad cautiously approached the bag (instead of calling security like you’re supposed to do when something in a train station looks suspicious).

“Careful, Mickey, you don’t know what’s in there. Could be one of those coppah heads, like that lady from Dahchester found in her toilet” you can hear my aunt say in her thick-as-hot-fudge-in-the-fridge Boston accent.

If all of life’s a stage, this is the opening line of the play that is Jane Worthing. Dad keeps slowly electric sliding up to the bag until, out of nowhere, up pops my one-year-old head, little blonde pigtails flopping everywhere, big cheeked, blue eyed, with an expression that clearly says, “Whoever woke me up from my nap is about to get fucked up,” but, you know, cuter. And then Dad says it, the line immortalized in late-night monologues, an SNL sketch, and a hand-drawn caricature sent to us by the guy who draws the Zits cartoon. “Jesus, Anne, people are leavin’ their babies everywhere these days.” Which, if you think about it (and I have, a lot), is pretty flippant for someone who was about to fight so intensely to become my legal guardian.

“Once I picked you out of that god-awful ugly thing, that was that,” Dad always said when I would ask what lead a single, twentysomething, self-professed dude-bro (once I explained what that was) to adopt an unclaimed toddler. “I swear, Janey, it didn’t even occur to me you were going to be such a chick magnet!”

So, after a search for anyone who was missing a toddler and a lot of vetting and paperwork, Dad officially adopted me. I don’t really remember Dad’s days as a single parent (though they did yield some pretty amusing photos of what he thought a toddler should wear) because my magical woman-attracting powers worked—he married Mom before my fourth birthday. So really, I’ve had a pretty average, normal childhood, if you just ignore the first four years. And I did, most of the time. Did I sometimes in the middle of the night wonder who abandoned me, and why, and if there was anyone out there who could explain how I got the vaguely bird-shaped scar on my ankle or if kiwi allergies run in my birth family? Sure. But it doesn’t help anything to wonder about mysteries that might never be answered. Have you ever noticed that the historians who are still looking for Amelia Earhart always seem kind of on edge? I think it’s because if a mystery is big enough and old enough, you have to worry that the answer might not be big enough to fill the hole the question has carved in you.

This is only one reason why I’d avoided all the ways I could go full twenty-first-century Nancy Drew and 23andMe my way into some kind of teary family reunion on a morning show. Because that’s what would happen if I put out any kind of message onto any corner of the internet. Some bored blogger would pick it up, then it’s a HuffPo headline, then I have sixty-seven cousins who have all been offered round-trip airfare to the Today show to explain that they always wondered what became of that cute toddler their forgetful aunt used to keep in an oversize tote.

There is no way I could have a private moment with any recovered family members if I asked the internet for help. All the internet people would demand their nationally televised Hallmark moment, and I’d never know if this collection of strangers with my eyes really wanted to get to know me or just wanted to visit LA. It was a decision my parents respected. It was a decision Algie mostly respected. But then DNA kit companies started advertising on every true crime podcast Algie constantly listened to. Once he understood family secrets were just a drop of drool away, he became obsessed with me getting one. Even though I’d told him no, texted him no, and spelled it out in carrot sticks during a particularly boring Netflix binge, he hadn’t listened. And now, because Algie never listens, I had a familial match. I didn’t want a familial match. My family is my dad and my mom and all the aunts and uncles and cousins who have populated my Christmases and summer vacations. But it’s basically impossible to ignore a question once the answer seems just within reach—it’s out there. Attention has been called to it. I still think Eve might have never eaten the apple if God was just like, “And here’s a bunch of basic trees, now moving on to everything else in this literal paradise.”

“It’s a first cousin,” Algie said as I sat up. A first cousin. Their parent is the sibling of my bio parent. My head started swimming again. That seemed too close, like too much information right away. Spit-service stories I had read during long nights of procrastination all found second cousins or third stepcousins twice removed to be starting points that could be investigated further, or not. A first cousin is practically the end of the story. Family tree fully formed.

“Have you . . . ?” I asked, too nervous to complete the question.

“I didn’t click into the tree. I didn’t want to see it before you.”

I smiled a little, despite my still-simmering anger. There was nothing Algie would love more than to discover the answer to a seventeen-year-old mystery before me, or anyone else, but knowing he didn’t proceed without me made me feel a little more open to forgiving him before graduation. Algie had been trying to convince me to track down my birth parents for as long as I could remember. Whenever he pushed it, I tried to remind myself that his curiosity came from equal parts excitement about living in close proximity to an honest-to-god mystery and his love for me. I knew that whenever he sensed some kind of emotional defense, which was usually just me not wanting to make a fool of myself (or not wanting to fool around in a public place), he thought it was because there was some kind of gaping hole in my heart carved by whoever gifted me a few chromosomes then left me behind.

“It doesn’t matter. Someone, or some people, didn’t want me, but my parents did. I actually think a bigger chunk of the population would have healthy family relationships if we were more willing to reorganize when the ones we were born into, or you know, produced, don’t quite seem to fit.”

“I really can’t wait for you to run for office someday on the baby abandonment platform.”

“Give me your laptop.”

And there it was: a brown acorn, artfully perched on the name of my blood relative, Sandra Snoot. Oh god, I hoped that wasn’t my last name. My first last name. I put the curser over it, wishing the act of clicking it would make more noise to allow this very momentous moment to seem more, well, cinematically momentous.

“You don’t have to do anything with it, you know. I can even take you to this amazing hypnotist downtown who can probably remove this entire afternoon from your memory,” Algie said, taking my non–track pad hand and squeezing it.

“I am Jane Worthing, and who I was my first year can’t change that,” I said, like it was a mantra I’d had all my life instead of something I had just come up with. I clicked.

Family trees are pretty straight forward, but my eyes seemed to take in nothing as I manically scanned the cartoon oak suddenly taking up the screen. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, trying to steady myself, or remember how to read, or both.

I found Sandra’s branch: parents Steven Snoot and Emily Tennen. I let my eyes slide to the left of Steven. One brother, b. 1979, d. 1988. Not my birth father. I looked at Emily’s branch. Only child. My brain felt like it was full of rusty gears, moving and turning, but not quite latching on to what it needed to make sense of what I was seeing.

“Her mom’s name, Emily. It’s in gray. That means she was adopted,” Algie said, pointing at the screen.

“Oh. Well. That’s that, then,” I said. I knew it didn’t have to be, of course. It was possible Emily had done some detective work of her own, that she’d found birth parents and biological siblings, that she had once met a bio sister or brother who had a new baby girl, who she hadn’t been in touch with since. I could message Sandra. I could track down Emily’s contact info. I could take a trip to New Jersey; it wasn’t like I had any big spring break plans anyway. But Emily’s gray name felt like a sign. The universe had given me an amazing family, and I worried I might offend it if I tried to work out what happened before. And I actually had a lot of respect for the universe. I didn’t want to find out what happens when you offend it.

“Are you sure?” Algie asked.

The last thing I remembered being one hundred percent sure of was my decision to get the purple big-kid bike with the pink streamers instead of the lime-green one with the yellow basket when I was seven. But I nodded anyway. I really wanted to be sure.

I assumed it was lingering shame that made Algie wait three episodes and two boxes of Pop-Tarts to bring up Cecil, my cousin who had moved to Brooklyn from Boston earlier this month, suddenly placing him in Algie’s orbit. After a very, very brief introduction at my house, Algie had DMed him, Cecil messaged back, they chatted, and now my little baby cousin was destined to become just another notch on Algie’s bedpost—which, let me remind you, he had four of.

“So, Janey, what do you think I should get Cecil for his birthday? I was thinking a book of poetry, but that is a little overdone. Do you think he’d appreciate a book of my poetry, or is that a little too DIY?”

I was pretty sure that if Algie wrote him a haiku on a Post-it Note, Cecil would start writing their wedding vows. I wasn’t going to tell Algie that.

“Seriously, Algie, he’s so little—”

“He’s almost six...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Books by Molly Horan
• Back Ad
• Copyright
• About the Publisher