“Also,” he said, “it’s eleven thirty in the morning, and I realize this wouldn’t be the first time you’ve been drunk before noon, but don’t you think we should try to show up to April and Connor’s wedding still standing? Aren’t you a bridesmaid?”
Frankie opened her mouth to reply, then closed it. She remembered all the things she didn’t like about Ezra Jones just then: his condescension, his rigidness, his total lack offun. How could she have married him? How, it must be asked, could she have loved him? She squeezed the contented-looking images from the VCR and the Polaroid out of the corners of her mind.
“Fine, fine!” she said, waving her own hand in the air. The engagement ring caught the light from the ceiling, and they both let their eyes linger, then fall to the floor. “What were you doing back there? Let me guess: trying to reach your future wife?”
Frankie regretted it as soon as it was out of her mouth. She knew she should at least be trying to be a little bit less of a bitch, but then she was often at her sharpest, some might even say at her best, when she felt cornered. She couldn’t help it. She wasn’t going to apologize for it.
“No.” He shook his head. “Still going to voicemail.”
“Well, where to next? I suggested Lemonhead, and Iconfirmed that I was here. So, that’s something. More than you.” She should probably suggest the athletic complex, tell him about the pool. Disclose the rest about the scavenger hunt. But she didn’t.
“And you confirmed I wasn’t with you?” Ezra pulled out a stool and sat, as if he were too weary to remain on his feet for another second. “Before the rehearsal dinner? You’d think I could remember that at least. I didn’t think I wasthatwasted when I left the hotel.”
Frankie hesitated. Ezra’s initial premise was correct: hehadn’tbeen at Lemonhead before the rehearsal dinner. It was only hours later that he’d dropped by, that she spotted them together on the VCR tape, and until she understood why, Frankie wasn’t yet ready to tell Ezra that yes, at around 10 p.m. last night, they were arm in arm in the lobby of Lemonhead; that twelve hours ago, they appeared happy.
“No,” she said. “Just Laila and me.”
“So let’s find Laila,” he said.
“Like I haven’t thought of that.”
He rubbed his temples. “Well, I guess we could go back to the Inn?”
Frankie considered this. It wasn’t a bad suggestion. They could knock on doors until they found someone who was with them. She glanced down. She was still wearing the same clothes as she left in though, and she assumed as much about Ezra.
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t go back there,” she said. “Also, it’s a long way to walk in a blizzard.”
Ezra nodded because she wasn’t wrong: without the snow, they could probably get back in forty-five minutes. Today, undoable. Frankie supposed they could call a taxi, but then what?They’d be stuck off-campus when seemingly everything they needed to solve for was here.
He looked down at his own attire and exhaled. “Let me try Gregory again.”
“Maybe he was our best man,” Frankie said, and she meant it to be funny, to lighten the gloom of the moment because it was all just soridiculous.
“Don’t even joke.” Ezra slapped his hand on the bar. “Do not even joke.”
He rose as if he had the weight of their shared history on his shoulders and returned to the back room. “I’ll try to reach him. You come up with plan B.”
“We are already on plan C,” she said.
“Wonderful,” he replied before she heard the office door close.
Frankie didn’t know what to do now. Ezra was right: she probably shouldn’t be drinking this early, and besides, her concussion felt like it was progressing from bad to worse. Could concussions do that? She didn’t know. Maybe it was a brain bleed; maybe she was actually dying. She shuddered. Now she was spiraling like Ezra would. She tilted over and tried to see the lump on the shiny gold railing that decorated the side of the bar. Her back spasmed, and she righted herself. She headed to the bathroom for a better view.
As she pushed open the red-painted door that read GRRRLS, she felt bile rise up in her throat. Not because she was ill, rather because she remembered. She tripped her way toward the sink and gripped the porcelain edges and told herself not to vomit.
The memory from twelve years ago was fuzzy, then camemore clearly into focus. She and Ezra had been friends for months by then, spinning closer to each other once he ended things with Bethany. She herself had left a series of paramours by the wayside her first two years at college: she’d graduated from LaGuardia a virgin, though there had been some pretty decent grinding on the dance floor of Studio 54 her senior year once she’d quit music and was attempting to make herself over into someone new. By the time she got to Middleton, Frankie was reborn and had resolved to make up for a lack of sexual experience by having a lot of it. She didn’t have many male friends—men weren’t of particular interest to her unless solely for her pleasure—and yet she and Ezra, after their serendipitous meeting, built a quixotic, consuming friendship.
They’d spent that summer between their sophomore and junior years apart. She was back in Manhattan at her parents’ apartment for the break; her dad was at their Hamptons’ house, and her mom had been so happy to be relieved of him that she agreed to stay put in the city. Ezra had returned to Lower Merion for an internship at a friend’s dad’s law firm. Frankie remembered this now: how he’d always known what he wanted, how it was just a straight shot for him, from A to B, and maybe that’s part of what tugged her toward him. How what she was innately brilliant at and what she thought she wanted for herself were two wildly opposing things. Instead, that summer, she found herself working at Tower Records in the Village on 4th and Broadway, which drove her mom through the beamed ceiling of their Park Avenue apartment. But she didn’t want a stuffy internship at some corporate gig, and she had no other idea what to do with her life, and sheknew the manager at Tower because she’d been in there so often in high school.
“I think it’s absurd that you’re working for minimum wage selling other people’s music,” her mom had said one morning in her bright blue leotard and neon-pink headband after her ritual of a doubleheader of two Jane Fonda workouts. Her mother had just turned forty, and the unspoken agreement between them was that they would not discuss her basically confirmed affair with Fred, Frankie’s old music teacher. Her mom was in the best shape of her life.
Frankie had recounted this to Ezra on the phone one summer night. How her mom was standing there in her ritzy apartment in her royal-blue spandex and her scrunchy socks and her too-white Reeboks and pretending that she wasn’t cheating on Frankie’s dad with her childhood piano teacher, with no career to speak of herself, and somehow judging her for being directionless.
“Like, shouldn’t she look in the mirror? A little self-reflection before she starts talking to me about my choices?” Frankie was out on the balcony of her bedroom smoking a cigarette.
Ezra started laughing, which hadn’t been Frankie’s intent, but she dragged on her Marlboro and joined him. Soon, she was curled up in a ball on a lounger barely able to catch her breath. Her mom. Spandex. Jane Fonda. Fred. She hadn’t realized how absurd it was.
“It sounds like a plotline fromDynasty,” Ezra said, and Frankie could feel his grin through the line. “Aerobics instructor seduces her child’s tennis instructor.”
