He saw Frankie steel her jaw, and her nostrils flared just a touch, and beyond that, he thought he saw something like recognition. April and Connor had set the dinner in a private room at Burton Library—but there was too much about Burton to unpack right now.
“We will not discuss Burton until we need to. God, do we have to make everything aboutthat afternoon? It was a decade ago!” Frankie said.
“Fine,” Ezra said. “Just fine.”
A concession. And then he realized: yes, he really could always outsmart anyone. Unless, of course, it was Frankie Harriman.
NINE
Frankie
Ezra insisted on checking his answering machine before they headed to Lemonhead, which Joni noted probably wouldn’t even be open yet. Frankie admired her street smarts and wondered what she’d do after graduating. She was half-inclined to offer her a job like someone had done for her: an olive branch, a lifeline, out in LA.
“Maybe Mimi left me a message this morning,” Ezra said, partially to himself, as he punched in his number, then his code. “She’d know that I could fix it.”
Frankie rolled her eyes and thought about how paternal he sounded, and she knew that sounding paternal shouldn’t annoy her but it did all the same. Her own dad was somewhere in the Caribbean with his new girlfriend and certainly unconcerned with Frankie’s holiday itinerary, though he had sent her five hundred dollars for Christmas. Her mom had called and pleaded to meet up in Los Angeles after she and her newhusband wrapped up in Cabo, but Frankie had told her she was leaving for Middleton early and concocted dates so her mother wouldn’t push it. Her family was exhausting, and besides, her mom would only needle her about why she was managing half-talented, nubile, partially dressed twenty-three-year-olds rather than pursuing her own musical talents.
And anyway, she was thirty-two now, too old to embark on a new career when being young and having round breasts and flat abs was as important as any sort of talent. And yet, about a year ago, she found herself at home for a whole weekend—no travel, no concerts, no evening plans—and grew wistful about her neglected musicality, like it was a sunflower plant she’d left out to die. Without even thinking about it, she’d driven down Western Avenue to an out-of-the-way haunt where one of her artists picked up collectable guitars, and she bought an upright piano. It wasn’t the grand piano she’d grown up with, but then, a grand was out of the question in her apartment. She paid an extra three hundred dollars for delivery, and then she just sat and stared at it from across the room for the rest of the weekend. She didn’t know what she was thinking. She called to return it but was told it was final sale.
Today, she watched Ezra behind the espresso bar counter, the phone pressed to his ear, his eyes floating toward the ceiling, and she saw him mutter under his breath. Then he handed the phone back to Joni and returned to the table, swinging his coat over his shoulders and around his torso in one fluid motion. Somehow, Frankie had adjusted to his mangled face. It was odd, she thought, how something so shocking not even an hour ago felt digestible now. His cheeks still looked like roadkill, but now this was just an accepted fact of their morning.
Her own head was still throbbing, but she didn’t want to make a big deal of it. She knew Ezra would become paternal with her too, and the last thing Frankie wanted was a father figure. Her parents had been trust fund kids who got pregnant too young and decided to valiantly keep it—keep her—but neither of them had been ready to be the type of parents who raised a well-rounded kid. So however Frankie turned out, she figured it wasn’t her fault. They’d been twenty years old and had too much money and not enough interest or life experience. And like Ezra’s face, it seemed completely fucked-up for a period in her childhood, but years later, it was what it was. For a while there, the three of them had united behind her musical genius: they had something to focus on collectively rather than recognize that they were simultaneously wholly dysfunctional. When she abandoned her music, they abandoned one another. She used to blame herself, but that got tiring quickly, so she settled into a new mantra: Who ever said family had to be forever?
She was a city kid seeking an escape when she’d arrived at Middleton at eighteen. Her parents and her school counselors at LaGuardia (everyone knew it as theFameschool by then) and her music teacher, Fred, were pushing her toward a conservatory, toward Juilliard. Middleton, a smaller liberal arts school in the middle of the Berkshires, had only a budding music department. So she said yes as soon as the oversize envelope arrived in the mail.
She’d shown up for college admittedly unformed. She’d spent the bulk of high school in music labs, collaborating with teachers or semiprofessionals or performing in competitions where sometimes, afterward, the kids would sneak away fromtheir parents and try to act like normals, but they, all of them, were one-degree abnormal, which her mom always told her was necessary for great talent, for prodigies. But mostly that meant that her high school social experience, at least until her senior year, was spent in deserted classrooms post-concert sipping off-brand soda and eating powdered donuts left over from the reception. By seventeen, however, she was done with all of that. But still, it was no surprise that she landed at Middleton a bit of a mess.
“Well,” Ezra said today, heaving his shoulders like he bore the weight of the world on them. “It’s true: her flight got canceled. I guess she called my machine last night too. So”—he flapped his arms in the air—“that’s that.”
“You know you can propose literally any day of the year,” Frankie offered.
Ezra leveled her with a look the best he could. One of his eyes spasmed under its own weight. “Do you ever just not have an opinion?”
Frankie considered this. No, she rarely didnothave an opinion. Her opinions were what literally defined her, what made her career. As far as she was concerned, this was part of her charm. She thought this was something he used to love about her: that whenever he was waffling, he would tell her the two options and ask her to choose. Advanced art history or abnormal psych? Chinese chicken salad or beef with broccoli? Absolut or Amstel? Frankie would make an unequivocal choice for him and always chose, she thought, correctly. If she didn’t or hadn’t, he never said otherwise. Who chose for him now? she wondered. She suspected it might be Mimi. But even as they chipped away at each other, she hoped, for his sake, this wasn’t the case.
“We need to get moving,” she said, standing quickly. The room spun, and she flattened her hand against the table. Ezra was by her side immediately, grasping her elbow, keeping her steady.
“You ok?”
Frankie nodded. Of course, this was a preposterous question because she wasn’t ok. But she found herself in the unusual position of merely wanting to be compliant. Things were messy enough already.
“You both could probably use a doctor,” Joni offered from the cash register. “Is there a reason you’re here and not there?”
Frankie looked at her for a beat and didn’t reply. How to answer a question that felt loaded, too complicated to explain to this nice stranger. Neither of them wanted to admit weakness, neither of them wanted to be the first to say mercy, neither of them wanted to simply say:help.
Beside her, she heard Ezra sigh.
“Do you have anyone you could call from last night?” he asked. “Maybe to help us sort this out?”
Frankie shook her head. She knew that her voicemail would be only work emergencies or her mother. She didn’t know how to reach Laila without her cell—she hadn’t committed her number to memory. Who else was there? No one. Her artists were used to her rescuingthem, not vice versa. Frankie had set up what she deemed a perfect hierarchy in her life: she was at the top, everyone else clung to rungs below her, and until this very moment, she’d never considered the ways that this might not serve her.
“What about Gregory?” Frankie said. For reasons she didn’t yet remember, she felt sure that he’d been part of thedebacle last night. Perhaps he was with them at the scavenger hunt? She jostled with the idea. Something about it felt familiar. “I think he was with us?”
Ezra scowled. “Like I didn’t think of that. I tried his room too. He’s not picking up.”
They thanked Joni, who told them she’d be at the café until three p.m. if they needed anything but no later because she had a second gig tonight, and Ezra held the door for Frankie, and then they were padding through the snow, headed west through the main artery of the grounds. Middleton was a sprawling, sleepy campus: rolling hills, Gothic architecture, lawns of bright green grass when they weren’t blanketed with leaves in the fall and snow in the winter. Statues of founding fathers sprung up in front of fountains, footpaths with raised wooden bridges crossing small bubbling brooks. It was all so postcard beautiful, as if you could become more serene just by looking at it.
Frankie flipped the hood of her jacket over her head and tugged the cord to seal in the warmth. Ezra squinted as the flakes landed on his eyelashes and then melted. His ears were a salmony pink from the cold, and he pressed his chin into the zipper of his coat to conserve body heat. They marched silently toward the bar, his Sambas and her Doc Martens crunching the ground beneath them.
