As Harry sat there in the office, he watched a smile spread across his coach’s face. Then there was a chuckle that turned to laughter as time went on. After about 20 seconds, Harry reached out his hand and took the phone back.

“Dan come here!” Harry’s coach yelled to the office next door. Dan, the jumps coach, walked in. “You gotta hear this. Harry, play him the voicemail.”

Harry pressed some buttons and handed the phone to Dan. Dan held it up to his ear and guffawed immediately.

“This is your outgoing voicemail?!” he asked in the middle of it. Harry shrugged and chuckled. “Yah.”

“What are you some kind of Big Daddy superfan?” he asked, handing the phone back.

“Nah it’s a funny movie and I like that scene.”

“Look it’s hilarious and a spot-on impression, but if you’re gonna start interviewing soon you’ve gotta change it.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “I guess you’re right,” he said, and he shut the phone and put it back in his pocket.

It had been three years since he’d made that his outgoing voicemail message. As he walked out of the office, he remembered all the attempts it had taken to get it right.

Sitting in front of the family computer in their father’s office, he’d probably spent at least an hour or two recording, deleting, practicing over and over until he got it right. When it sounded good, he told Jeff to call him. Jeff did, and Harry didn’t answer. When he called a second time, Harry picked up, and it was just the sound of Jeff’s deep voice gone high in a fit of laughter.

It made Harry feel good. His favorite thing was making people laugh, and he enjoyed making no one laugh more than Jeff because Jeff was a tough-guy hockey player on the varsity team as a sophomore, a guy who became a guy while the rest of them were boys, and he always looked ready to knock somebody’s teeth out whether he was skating in warmups or on his way to Spanish class.

But as tough as he was you never really saw him angry. He never yelled, he only talked in a low voice and sometimes you had to read his lips to know what he was saying. The only problem was his lips never moved that much either. Everybody listened close when Jeff talked, and on the rare occasion Jeff laughed really hard, it was a special thing you had to marvel at, like Mike Tyson himself was standing in front of you, clutching his belly and laughing through squinted eyes.

Harry walked across campus and went up to his room. He could remember Jeff’s laugh like they were right back in gym class and he was doing that impression of a Russian barber character he had made up during the unit on badminton: “My name is Olga Kasparatchaikovskywicz—I drink beer and cut hair, which makes for good time but bad haircut.”

When it was Harry’s turn to serve, all he had to do was start speaking in that voice to get Jeff to start laughing and whiff. It was a special talent that Harry felt he had. He could make other people laugh sometimes, but he could always make Jeff laugh. And nobody could do that. All it took was an impression, a character he had made up off the top of his head, a silly voice, and Jeff would collapse in humor-induced paralysis. After he made the voicemail, Jeff would call sometimes just to hear it. Harry would pick up and Jeff would go, “What’re you doing?! I’m trying to show Matt the voicemail!” Harry would laugh and hang up and watch Jeff’s name appear and disappear on the caller ID a minute later.

Harry pressed some buttons and raised the phone to his ear again. The characters went back and forth—both Harry doing different voices—and he could see Jeff’s face wrinkling and folding over in laughter: eyes closed, mouth stretched in a smile, a bottom row of teeth few people had ever seen surrounded by a goatee that would later disappear as the treatment went on.

Afterward, all his friends got tattoos but Harry didn’t get a tattoo because his parents convinced him it was unnecessary. They were right. You didn’t need a tattoo to remember somebody. But it helped to have something. As the beep at the end of the voicemail sounded, Harry hung up and played that something again.

It was better than a tattoo. Jeff never saw the tattoos, but he did hear the outgoing voicemail Harry was listening to right now. Sometimes he would call just to hear it when he needed a laugh. Harry thought of what Dan had said about how he should delete it before he started interviewing. He was right. The beep came again. Harry hung up and pressed some buttons and raised the phone to his ear. Sitting in front of his computer, he must’ve spent at least an hour or two that day with the voicemail message, listening, practicing, performing it in his empty room, reciting it over and over until he got it perfect, laughing, listening, crying.