Frankie wondered what he was thinking. In the ten years since she’d left Middleton, she’d convinced herself that her time here hadn’t been transformative. That she’d been looking for an escape from her parents and the pressure of their musical aspirations and that Middleton had been a temporary fix. But as she tilted her head left, then right, she found herself pregnant with nostalgia. For the night when they, along withtheir friends, decided to camp out on the North Lawn because Gregory had said there was going to be a meteor shower (there was not); for the spring fair fundraiser where the campus turned into a literal circus, and fire-eaters and jugglers and men on stilts wobbled by, and Ezra taught her how to play Skee-Ball at the makeshift arcade. She was exceptional at it from the get-go and delighted at beating him each time, and he, ever the good sport, laughed until he ran out of tickets, and she, flush with them, went to the prize booth and bought him a stuffed zebra with a sad look on its face because it reminded her of him when he pretended to pout at losing.
They stomped by Steinway Auditorium, an imposing stone building that was one of the newer builds on campus. The Steinway family, of the piano fame, had donated several million dollars to attract top talent shortly before Frankie matriculated. It was one of the reasons her parents conceded and made peace with her decision to skip Juilliard and the like: though Frankie was done withall of thatby then, they held out hope that she’d return to her roots, to “her gift” as her mother liked to say while Frankie often made vomit sounds.
As if reminding himself of the building’s significance, Ezra did a double take and stopped.
“No,” Frankie said, still so in tune with him. “We wouldn’t have gone in there.”
Ezra fished the keys from his pocket, ignoring her.
“Ezra!” she cried. “I wouldn’t have gone in there!”
Her head throbbed when she raised her voice, and she tried to still herself to make the pain dissolve.
He turned to face her. “So you still don’t play?”
“What business is it of yours if I do or do not?”
“Nothing about you is my business anymore, Frankie. And yet here we are.”
“No,” she said. “I’m still not playing. Ok? Can we go to Lemonhead, like we agreed?”
Ezra gave her a long stare, and even with his jelly donut–sized eyes, Frankie knew that he had her number. She wasn’t about to tell him that a few months ago—nearly nine months after she bought the upright piano on Western Avenue and then let it collect dust for the better part of a year—she woke up pressed against her purple wall and felt the tug again: like an addict in search of another hit. And for the first time in years, she scooted out the piano bench and felt her fingers curve, then fly over the keys. She didn’t know why: nostalgia, comfort, pain, maybe all three wrapped up together. Not unlike her decision to come back for the weekend: nostalgia, comfort, pain. Maybe they were all related.
“Don’t look at me as if you have the right to my secrets anymore,” she said finally. “I don’t owe that to you.” She fumbled for her jacket zipper and tugged it up an inch, as if this were any sort of protection from his permeating stare.
Ezra blew out his breath, the whirl of air pillowing around him.
“Listen,” Frankie continued. “I’ve set foot in Steinway Auditorium exactly twice in my entire life. And just because one of them was with you doesn’t mean that I relived those days last night.”
“Both of them were with me, by the way,” he countered. “So who’s to say that last night—”
“Jesus Christ!” Frankie yelped into the empty campus, thebarren trees. “Are we relitigating our senior year or are we trying to find out if we are married?!”
“Fine, just fine. Perfect,” he said, and started walking again, not waiting for her to catch him.
Frankie slunk along beside him until they reached the corner just across from a strip of dilapidated storefronts. The Soup Café, a Chinese restaurant, a campus clothing shop, a rinky-dink drugstore, and Lemonhead. The lights on the marquis were illuminated, but the L had burned out, so it read EMONHEAD, which struck Frankie as more depressing than it probably was.
Both of them stopped and stared across the street. It felt like a resurrection of sorts, of her old life, of their lives. Frankie felt an unwelcome swell of emotions—nostalgia, comfort, pain—rise through her: she didn’t even know for what, specifically, but she thought that maybe it was just for lost time. How can you unexpectedly split from your boyfriend after a no-holds-barred fight in front of Burton Library and then wake up in a bed with him ten years later and grieve for those years, even if you wouldn’t do any of it differently? Frankie hadn’t allowed herself to mourn all that she lost after graduation. It was easier to move on, to force her way through. Now, she wondered if never mourning at all had been its own form of sorrow. It’s not like pain just evaporated, she considered. It needed to go somewhere, and maybe shards of it were still lying dormant inside of her, waiting for a resurrection.
There was a Toyota Corolla in the tiny parking lot, and an open dumpster filled to the brim with black garbage bags,which gave Frankie hope that at least a janitor might be working at the bar this morning. But it was New Year’s Eve, and she knew that would just be dumb luck. Of the many things that Frankie Harriman believed in, dumb luck wasn’t one of them.
“Ready?” Ezra asked.
No, she wanted to say.
But in reply, she stepped ahead of him. She wasn’t going to let Ezra Jones see her wilt. She never had. She wouldn’t now.
TEN
Ezra
ELEVEN A.M.
Ezra knew he had struck a nerve outside Steinway Auditorium, but he decided that Frankie had a point: Why did he care if she was playing piano again or not? Why did he care what her skeletons were? He knew why he did, actually: because when he watched her at the piano from the back row of the auditorium, he had seen a sort of release, an awakening, and it stirred something in him that he wasn’t even aware he could feel. Unbridled joy. Total liberation. He could close his eyes and listen to her genius and tap into something that felt like freedom from everything else—his mom, his anxiety, her prognosis. Ezra hadn’t expected that, from music, much lesshermusic, which he hadn’t even known about. Later, he’d discover this same hypnotic calm behind a hand of cards, but at Middleton, standing in the shadows of Steinway, listening to her brilliance, well, that was the closest he’d come to out-of-bodyserenity in a long time. But still, he reminded himself now, her decision to abandon her musicality wasn’t his problem. He wasn’t her therapist. He wasn’t her boyfriend. They weren’t even friends. They were friends once, even before they fell in love, but that’s not the kind of thing you can return to after you’ve so deeply drawn blood.
He fiddled with the gold band on the ring finger of his left hand, which was jammed into the pocket of his North Face jacket, and he assured himself there must be a reasonable explanation for why they appeared to be married. Maybe it had been a fun game that April and Connor had set up last night. Maybe it had been some sort of joke. Could Alec Barstow really have married them? Ezra didn’t even remember seeing Alec last night, though this was not particularly soothing because he remembered nothing at all.
By now, they’d crossed the street and wrestled with the door, which was padlocked shut. He’d tried the keys, but that would have been just too easy, and predictably, none of them worked. He pressed his forehead to the glass window and tried to peer in, but there was nothing to see, so then he stepped back and tipped his head back toward the sky and screamed, “FUUUUUUCK!” He knew it was a mistake to come here first. Why would this bar be open at eleven o’clock in the morning? Why didn’t he push back harder against her stupid plan when he was the problem solver among the two of them?
