Frankie inhaled and looked upward toward the flickering halogen lights. Then her mouth pointed downward in her trademark frown, and a look of disgust washed over her face.
“Ew. Am I on the bathroom floor?” she said. “I got a little dizzy, I guess.”
Ezra pushed himself upright and extended his hand, which she accepted with surprisingly little reluctance. When they were both on their feet, Frankie wobbled a bit and her hands landed against his chest.
“Whoa, ok, come on, I got you. Let’s get you some water,” he said.
Ezra felt her hesitate, and he wasn’t sure if it was because she was going to spurn his help or because they were close enough to feel intimate. He supposed that both things were akin to the same feeling: even Frankie would tell you that she too often panicked at the first sign of emotional surrender. He gazed down at her while she steadied herself. No, that wasn’t fair. Not the first sign. But at the firstrealsign of emotional surrender, at the most honest sign.
Of course he remembered what had happened here in this dank, dingy bathroom, how he’d been going crazy all summer, delicately trying to get to know everything there was to know in the Frankie Harriman oeuvre without terrifying her and scaring her off. It was obvious to him even back then that he had to proceed carefully, that he had to tiptoe right up to the line that she had drawn for whatever romantic criteria she concocted for herself. Though it didn’t occur to him until much later that he was risking his own heart as much as he risked hers.
That summer, they spent every night on the phone—she always called him to incur the long-distance charges, and what started out as late-night check-ins in their childhood bedrooms when their mothers were asleep soon became conversations over dinner or time spent watching sitcom reruns with the phone held to their ears, neither one of them saying much, just laughing at the same jokes, groaning at the clunkers. Frankie had never seenCheersorNight Courtbecause she didn’t watch much TV as a kid, she’d told him, so Ezra made sure that Thursday nights were appointment TV.
When he got back on campus—he took the train up by himself because his mother had an oncology appointment inCenter City—he’d dropped his bags, and before even unpacking, he went to find her. As if he literally couldn’t wait another beat, another minute, without touching her, without inhaling her. For Ezra, Frankie Harriman was like a full-body infection: once he felt it, there was no way to ignore the way it pulsed through his veins. She wasn’t in her room and she wasn’t in the library, so he’d walked to the bookstore in case she was loading up on supplies, but she wasn’t there either. He checked Laila’s room and then April’s, and he poked his head in to see Gregory, who was sharing a double with a transfer kid from Michigan State named Connor. Gregory, who’d spent the summer at an internship in Houston, bear-hugged him and said, “I’d try Lemonhead, but give me a sec, and I’ll head there with you. It’s five o’clock somewhere.” Gregory was always full of those little idioms, like he carried a quote book around with him.
It wasn’t even dinnertime, so it hadn’t occurred to him that they’d already be drinking. The bar was crowded when they got there. Laila sucked on a cigarette and waved to him from the dance floor, then threw her arms around him when he made his way through.
“Frankie?” he asked.
And her face cracked open with a Cheshire cat grin, like she was in on his mission, and she nudged her head to the back.
“Bathroom,” she said, then gave him a little push. “I heard about this all summer. So go and make it stick.”
And he felt something swell in him, a confirmation, an affirmation, and he pressed through the rest of the afternoon revelers and swung open the door to the ladies’ room, and there she was, the voice on the other end of the line. Hecouldn’t remember now if he kissed her or if she kissed him, but it didn’t matter either way. Time stood still, and something electric raced through him from his toes to his heart and clear up to the top of his skull until he pulled back to catch his breath, and she’d said with no small amount of surprise, “You found me.” And then he took off her clothes and explored her body right there in the Lemonhead bathroom, doing everything to her that he’d been imagining doing all summer. Not sex, because that, after so long, he wanted to make special, but there were so many other things to do besides sex.
Now, a decade later, with plenty of scars to show for it, Frankie moaned and said: “Look, I don’t want to alarm you, but I guess I need to tell you that I’m ninety-nine percent sure that I have a concussion. This happened once before in...” She stopped and searched for the word. “Oh right, this happened in Bangkok.” Then, as if remembering the whole shitstorm of a situation they were in, she added: “Did you reach Gregory? Does he know if you’re my legally wed husband?” She pushed past him and out the bathroom door, weaving her way toward a barstool.
In fact, this time Ezrahadreached Gregory, who was no help at all. He picked up the hotel phone after three rings and mumbled, “Yeah?” And when Ezra asked him if they’d been together last night, Gregory said, “One second dude,” and seemed to rest the phone down on the nightstand. Ezra heard thumping footsteps and water running and some low-level groaning, and then Gregory returned and said, “Fucking booze-filled scavenger hunt, never again,never again,” and Ezra said: “So there really was a scavenger hunt?” and Gregory said, “Come on, dude, it’s too early for this bullshit,” and then hung up on him.
“So I think there... possibly... could have been a scavenger hunt?” Ezra said to Frankie now. “And that sounds... insane? Because I honestly have no recollection of it. At all.” He shook his head, trying to free a memory.
Surprisingly, this was not the only scavenger hunt that Ezra had participated in as of late. About six months ago, just at the start of summer, Mimi’s company had been trial-running an in-person dating option. The site was still in beta testing, and they’d had another influx of Silicon Valley funding (though Mimi was still mostly paid in stock options and thus constantly tight on money), and their cash on hand meant they could throw additional parties and events and test-drive user satisfaction and algorithms. (Ezra never really got the sense that anyone in charge knew exactly what they were doing.) The event was in San Francisco, so Ezra had tagged along: he was in talks to join a new search engine start-up, the unfortunately named “Google,” and Mimi always preferred to have a plus-one (ergo the aborted trip to Prague with Gregory six weeks later). The scavenger hunt was mostly a bar crawl through downtown on a Saturday afternoon; Ezra had a dinner with the Google executives that night, so he sipped his beers and deflected when Mimi kept pushing shots on the gathered figurative guinea pigs. Mimi herself was not much of a drinker. She enjoyed white wine and an occasional spritzer, but she, like him, preferred to remain in control. Also, Mimi didn’t need booze: she got drunk off social situations—she literally grew more animated in a crowd, as if she were a rechargeable battery, and what jazzed her up, what turned her on, was people. It made her perfectly suited for the job—sober but still riotous; clearheaded but an absolute ball of a good time. Admittedly, Ezra found this side of her draining.But it was such a small thing, her manic energy, her overzealous cacophony at a party, that in the scheme of their perfect match, he ignored it. She tried to egg him on, to sweep him up in her tornado, but all of it mainly left him exhausted. Despite his reluctance, she liked it when he joined her because she would often stand in front of the crowd, arm linked into his, and say something like:You might be skeptical about Datify. I get it! I was too! But then I met my literal perfect match.Ezra would see people in the back of the room stand on their tippy-toes to catch sight of him, and he’d do something like take a small bow or kiss her on the cheek, and then everyone else would glance around to see if their match was among them too. Being in front of a crowd made Ezra grind his teeth, set off small flares of anxiety. Sometimes he would chew the inside of his lip to quell the nerves, and sometimes he’d have to stuff his hands into his pockets so they didn’t outwardly tremble, but he did it for Mimi because he loved her. And she never seemed to notice his anxiety, which was probably for the best, since he’d never explained it all.
The night of the scavenger hunt in San Francisco they were at their twelfth bar somewhere in the Mission District, traveling in a horde of fifty or so singles, when Ezra tried to leave for his Google dinner. As it was, he doubted he’d make dinner on time, and naturally, punctuality (and first impressions) mattered to Ezra. He’d tried to peel off, and Mimi said, “No! Ez! You can’t go! Why would you leave me for some silly dinner?” She was at her most gregarious by now, her not-technically-drunk-but-still-exhausting extroverted self.
“Meems, it’s not silly. I have to go. It’s for work.”
“Work?” Her face folded in confusion. “But you came out here with me.” She looked around. “And we’re the example.We’re Project Zero. These people need to know that the questionnaires are the real deal!”
Ezra sighed. He’d told her about the dinner but hadn’t stressed its importance. He hadn’t told her about the job offer because he didn’t know if she, who had come to think of herself as a New Yorker, would want to move, and maybe more honestly, he didn’t know if he’d break something fragile between them. But also, at these events, he was starting to feel like an animal in a zoo: always on display.
“No,” he said. “I mean, yes. I’m here as your plus-one. But I do have some work.”
“But this is mything!” He knew that it mattered to her; he knew that she wanted to impress her bosses. She’d recently been told that she’d get a bonus for every person who signed up for the site from her events. “I wanted you here to domy thingwithme.”
Ezra nodded. He really, really did not want to fight. He really, really did not want to skip this dinner, if only because it was in thirty minutes and canceling now would be rude. But Mimi’s arms were crossed and she was staring at him with a quiet fury.
“Mimi,” he started, but she cut him off, which was just as well because he didn’t know what, or how, he was going to decide.
“I’m sorry, Ezra,” she said, though she didn’t sound sorry at all. “By all means, go to dinner. You know, this doesn’t exactly come easy to me. But, fine, whatever, ok. Go.”
Ezra didn’t even know what this meant, because the last thing he’d done was come to any of this easily either. He, like Mimi, had grown up without any of the perks of his new worldorder—having not much more than just what they needed, living mostly month to month with maybe a little savings if the sky fell down—and walked away from the law job to live off ramen and pizza slices for a year while he waited for one of his gaming ideas to break and pay him a salary. He’d buried his mom. He’d lost touch with most of his old friends. He’d managed to forge a bigger life than he’d planned, but it hadn’t in any way come easily, and besides, he no longer knew if he wanted it now that it was his. He’d fallen into the work in tech, which was filled with bros who talked about expensive tire rims and twenty-thousand-dollar Rolexes, so far from his Philadelphia roots and values. He hadn’t said any of that out loud, of course.
Mimi approached tears, so he conceded and rescheduled his dinner to brunch the next day, which was just as well because the Google guys were stuck at the office and running late, so no one really minded. Well, Ezra had minded being made to feel as if he were an unsupportive boyfriend. He needed Mimi as much as she needed him. He resolved that maybe they just needed to get married so she knew, reallyknew, that she was as necessary to him as air.
Ezra eyed Frankie for a long beat this morning, with Mimi inexplicably absent and a gold band even more inexplicably on his left ring finger. That night in San Francisco, they had finally trudged back to their hotel, and Mimi passed out, and Ezra watched her for a few minutes and eventually turned out the light on his side of the bed and slept fitfully. They woke up the next morning and apologized like grown-ups, and she took his credit card at his insistence because money didn’t matter to him now, even though he knew how awful that sounded, andshe went shopping while Ezra met the Google guys and they told him all about how they were going to revolutionize the internet.
He stared again at Frankie today. He didn’t even know why he was thinking about all of that. “Hey,” he said, sliding onto the stool next to her at the bar. “I know there’s a lot of shit to sort through, but I really think we need to get you some medical attention. The rest of it can wait.”
