“There’s a back entrance,” Frankie said.
He brushed snow off his hair and stared at her. “Frankie, can we—”
“Just come on,” she said, and flagged him around the sideof the building. Ezra started to argue, but she’d already vanished around the corner.
Obviously, the back door was locked as well. Frankie tugged the handle and grunted for about ten seconds, but surely even she knew she was no match for the dead bolt. Ezra watched her glance around, wondering if she’d concede defeat.
But instead she said, “Well, I didn’t want it to come to this, but alas.”
Before he could stop her, she reached down for the brick by the door that appeared to serve as a doorjamb, and casually, as if she were a Little League pitcher, tossed it through a pane of glass just to her left. The shattering was high-pitched, startling, and Ezra nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Holy shit!” he yelled. “What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?”
She brushed shards of glass off the surrounding pane and then hoisted herself over the threshold and disappeared.
“Frankie!—” Ezra said, but found himself striding toward the broken window and peering in. “This is officially a crime!”
Silence. He glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, if he’d hear sirens cutting through the still campus air. But there was just the soft hush of falling snow, of branches shifting under the snow’s weight.
The back door swung open, and Frankie looked triumphant.
“You’re welcome!” she said.
“You’re welcome?” Ezra held his ground, which he quickly realized was futile because they both knew he was going to follow her in.
Frankie rolled her eyes as he scrunched his hands into fists and literally shook them at the sky, then she raised her eyebrows, and he said, “Fine!” and she held the door as if she were being chivalrous.
Once inside, Ezra patted the wall until he found a light switch.
The lights flickered and then eked on, as if they needed coaxing. Ezra looked around. The bar hadn’t changed much in a decade: same stench of spilled beer, same faux-wood bar top, same mismatched counter stools. The back wall had signed photographs of celebrities who had passed through the area, probably for a summer concert series or a stay at the exclusive spa twenty minutes down the road. None of the faces had been updated or changed in ten years, which made Ezra feel old. Older, anyway. Above them, someone had haphazardly taped up a HAPPY NEW YEAR banner, along with purple and gold streamers, Middleton colors, which floated toward the floor. Ezra had never spent the holidays on campus: he’d always been happy, even eager, to get home. Not because he was homesick. Rather, as if by being there, he ensured that his mom was okay. New Year’s Eve meant they could throw out the shit from the calendar the year prior, and too often, that shit was chemo, radiation, and abject terror. A fresh start was the most he could ask for. Once Frankie began joining him, he sometimes wondered if he could just stop time, stay in his boyhood room forever, with his mom down the hall and his girlfriend under his comforter, and his Eagles and Phillies posters pinned on the walls, so that nothing could ever shatter the stability of those moments.
“No, no, turn the lights off,” Frankie called from over hershoulder. She was already behind the bar searching for something, which Ezra could only assume was extremely high-proof tequila. “No need to draw unnecessary attention. I know what I’m looking for.”
“Unnecessary attention?” Ezra barked. “You just threw a brick through a window!”
“Yeah, but that was in the back alley,” she replied. “No one notices that sort of thing for at least an hour.”
Ezra did not want to know how she knew this. In fact, it seemed perfectly normal that Frankie Harriman would know how to pull off a low-level heist. Nevertheless, he turned off the lights.
He stepped further inside and ran his hands over the paneled wood of the bar. He and Frankie had met here, a memory he hadn’t revisited in years. It came to him quickly: how it felt like luck that night, when she sat down next to him and he inexplicably spilled his guts about his girlfriend, Bethany, who started off as alluringly mysterious but soon left him emotionally itchy; that she was always coming and going, that he always felt like an afterthought. Still, Ezra was loyal and preferred monogamy even if it made him miserable. Part of this may have been, he could see now, that he so often walked on a knife’s edge because of his mother’s diagnosis; he simply didn’t know how to live differently. The anxiety, the occasional self-loathing were baked in, not because he’d been born anxious but because he was constantly worried about another phone call, about a worsening prognosis, about losing her. Still, though, he couldn’t blame his mother’s chemo schedule on his inability to cut himself loose of Bethany; he’d just never been great at extricating himself from situations thatdidn’t serve him. Years later, when he was offered six figures and an expense account and a fancy ergonomic chair at the white-shoe law firm where he’d worked for both summers in law school, he remembered that night with Frankie at the bar, how she’d plopped down next to him, a stranger, and he’d poured his miseries out to her, and she’d said in reply: “What are you even doing with her, with your life? Don’t you know that you’re in control of your own destiny?”
He and Frankie had done two rounds of shots that night, and then Gregory had joined them for two more, all of which surely made her advice and aura more legendary than they may have been in the sober light of morning. But once he recognized Frankie’s face, he started seeing her everywhere, and she seemed to soothe him, calm him in ways he felt palpably, almost like she was a drug. Prozac. Frankie was like his Prozac. He ran into her at the cafeteria a day later during lunch, and she greeted him with no artifice, as if they were long-lost friends. He found her poring over the card catalog at Burton Library later in the week, and she said, “Oh rad, it’s you. Go put your bag down with mine by the back stacks, then let’s go get bagels.” It was midafternoon, but Ezra adored eating breakfast foods at all hours of the day, and he soon discovered so did Frankie. It didn’t take long for them to be inseparable. And then, it took even less time for them to fall in love.
This morning, Ezra squeezed his eyes closed and inhaled the dank scent of malty yeast and wondered if he needed to give Frankie more credit.No.His consciousness pushed back. He’d offered her everything he could: loyalty, love, commitment.
“I found it!” Frankie popped up from the bar area with abox stuffed with electronic equipment. She glanced around the room, then headed to the back wall by the framed headshots where there was an abandoned TV sitting on a Formica table.
Frankie fiddled with various cords and muttered to herself while plugging one thing into another, and then she wedged herself around the back of the TV and pressed a button and piped: “Is it on yet?” And Ezra watched the screen come to life and said: “Yeah, but can you clue me in here?”
She righted herself and pressed a palm against the lump on her head.
“Ouch, shit.” She wobbled for a few seconds but then turned to Ezra. “Don’t you remember? They keep a record of who comes in and out, to cover their asses against underage drinking.”
Ezra did remember now. Henry had given him his expired driver’s license when he headed off to Middleton so Ezra could use it at bars, and he got nervous every time, which became a running joke among his friends, especially Frankie, who gave him a pretend pep talk every night when they headed out. “Ok, Ez, you can do this. Your name is Henry Jones, you are twenty-six but still a junior in college for reasons no one can explain.” Then she’d fake roar and pound her chest, which he thought was meant to pump him up but mostly made all of them giggle, and that was enough; that was, in fact, just what he needed.
Today, Frankie turned on the VCR that she’d connected to the TV and dug out a remote control from the box.
“How do you know how to do all of this?” Ezra asked.
