“Actually, you still have my grandmother’s ring—” Ezra’s voice rose several decibels. “I don’t exactly trust you with a family heirloom.”
“Fine! Don’t let me hold you up!” She tried to yank it off her finger again. The ring still didn’t budge.
A window opened a few stories up and a head popped out.
“Can you guys please shut the fuck up? Some of us are trying to sleep!” The window slammed shut.
Ezra peered skyward and connected the dots. They were behind the upperclassman dorms; he knew it looked familiar. He’d only been back here once before, and the snowfall today made it look more romantic than it had been back then, with its three dumpsters and faded brick facade in need of a pressure wash. It was the fall of their senior year, and they were still happy. Mostly, anyway. Frankie had spent the summer with her mom in the Hamptons. By now, her parents had split for good—Frankie had known it was coming after a phone call in late spring—and her mom got the house in Sagaponack. Ezra shared a dorm room with Gregory at Fordham where they both took summer classes at night and worked at low-paying internships during the day. He took the Jitney out to see Frankie in early July for the long holiday weekend, his only visit that summer. Not because he didn’t want to be with herall day, every day; rather because that one weekend visit had gone so poorly. It was clear upon his arrival that she was fighting with her mom. She didn’t want to elaborate about the details, and every time Ezra asked, she snapped things like, “Ezra, you can’t fix this, so please stop,” or “This goes way back, ok? Like ages back. You don’t seem to get it.” He suspected it had to do with her music, but he’d promised never to ask her about it again, since their fight a few months earlier in Steinway when he’d first seen her playing, just after her parents had told her about their separation. And a promise to Ezra was a promise, even if he committed to it before he understood how breaking it may have saved them.
He wasn’t emotionally mature enough that weekend in the Hamptons to suggest to her that her problems were his problems and that he would have just been fine hearing her out, listening to her vent. Because hedidwant to fix it; hedidwant to fix her. So they spent the weekend in a tense, noiseless bubble, with her mother pretending everything was perfectly fine whenever he was in the room, and with the two of them whispering out their rage when he wasn’t. He was blessedly relieved when he finally kissed her goodbye and stepped on the Jitney to return to the city.
A decade ago, he’d ended up in this same alleyway behind the dorms shortly after they got back to campus from the summer. It was Frankie’s twenty-first birthday, and the rule among their friends was they couldn’t just drink themselves to oblivion for their twenty-first; they had to come up with a fitting celebration each time. For Gregory’s birthday, they had gone to a Chuck E. Cheese in Pittsfield, followed by a depressing strip bar (he came out a few weeks later, and Ezrawondered if he finally just had enough boob to realize that it wasn’t working for him); April had rented out a room for hers at one of the few haute cuisine restaurants in town (there were only two, and it was understood that these were exclusively reserved for professors or parents who came for a visit) for a very-adult sit-down dinner with a printed menu and wine pairings. All of them had felt a little foolish swirling their glasses and pretending they had any idea what they were doing—who knew a pinot from a Syrah back then?—but they were tipsy soon enough, and it proved hilarious to act like full-blown grown-ups for the evening. Connor, who had a black eye from hockey practice, wore an ascot; April had spoken in a British accent; Gregory had insisted everyone call him James Bond. Ezra had even worn his suit, which his mom had splurged on for his summer internship. Frankie had actually understood all the various ingredients on the menu—squab and ramps and some sort of rare sea urchin that she’d tried once in the city with her father—and had explained each course to them as they were served, like she was the adult in the room. So they were all pretending more than just a little bit.
But he wanted Frankie’s twenty-first to be personal, to be unique in a different way. He wanted it to be just the two of them. She hadn’t quite stabilized from her summer with her mother, but instead of talking about it, she was simply moodier than normal. He knew she was fighting to free an albatross from around her neck, so he tried to let it go. But he didn’t know how to help her, and her refusal to want his help bruised him. Wasn’t that his job? To try? Whenever he suggested that, much like over the summer, she snapped, and then later acted like nothing had ever happened. She never apologized, thoughthat was something Ezra only realized once they’d cratered for good.
Anyway, it was Frankie’s birthday. She’d called him from the Hamptons over the summer and repeatedly lamented that she regretted her choice to spend the summer with her mom.
“I should have gone to Paris,” she said at least twice during every phone call.
Her dad, having lost the beach house in the separation, was in Paris with his new girlfriend, and although Frankie rarely spoke of her relationship with him, Ezra assumed it was less rocky than the one with her mom. Though he also didn’t understand why her relationship with her mom was so tenuous. He’d asked. He’d asked often. Frankie often just tutted and said, “It’s complicated.”
“The music teacher?” Ezra pressed once.
Frankie went silent for so long that Ezra wondered if they’d been disconnected. Then finally, she said: “No, not Fred.” Then, “Just so you know, I’m the one who made the choice to stop playing.” Ezra didn’t know and, further, didn’t understand why that specific fact mattered.
But on Frankie’s birthday, he knew how he could at least make her smile. He borrowed a ladder from the janitor’s closet in their dorm, and Connor and Gregory held the legs while he strung fairy lights back and forth in the alley behind her second-floor room. He used some of his summer earnings to pay an art student for sketches of both the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, which he hung on the brick wall that was ten feet from her window. He ran to the grocery store and bought baguettes and Brie and red grapes. He splurged on a wine he didn’t understand and couldn’t afford.
Frankie had a late-afternoon lecture—he remembered now that it was Econ 101, which she hated but took because she was preparing for postcollege life and thought maybe she wanted to be music adjacent: a producer, an agent; she didn’t know but it seemed like econ might come in handy. As long as she wasn’t an artist, she’d say.I’ll be anything but the talent.They’d talk about this late at night in bed together, and he always assumed he was part of those plans. He’d never questioned it; she’d never given him reason to. So for her birthday and while she was at Econ 101, he snuck into her room and donned a beret and turned out the lights so when dusk settled in, the alley glowed behind him. She swung open the door, and her weary face morphed into a delighted one, and he swept her into his arms and said, “Happy birthday, mademoiselle” (the most French he knew—he had studied Latin), and uncharacteristically, Frankie burst into tears. And Frankie never cried.
“Happy tears,” she said. And Ezra believed her.
And from then on, at least until early spring, six or so months later, the two of them were better, they were fixed. Ezra had fixed them. Ezra, he’d liked to think, had fixedher. It only took Paris. And the alley that they’d find themselves in again eleven years later.
FIFTEEN
Frankie
Frankie knew that Ezra was thinking about that birthday, the one where he’d brought Paris to her, but she didn’t want to get into all of that. It was easier to keep this clean: the past was what it was; the present was also what it was. Ezra had always been a hopeless romantic. She had enough road between the two of them now to understand that this was at least part of why they were incompatible.
He was staring at her now, and she didn’t want to squirm, but it was admittedly difficult not to.
“So were you going to propose to her here? Like, in Paris?” she blurted out.
She hated that she said that. She hated more that it bothered her to think he would re-create that moment, that magnificent moment when time had stood still for her twenty-first birthday, for anyone other than her. She’d had a shit-awful summer. Her mom was all over her about returning to the concert stage because in late May, she’d received a prestigious invitation to playat a rising stars event in Aspen. Her mother wouldn’t stop nagging, couldn’t leave it be. She threatened to stop paying for Middleton; she questioned, cruelly, what other skills Frankie had. Which was Frankie’s entire point. She still kept in touch with a few of her peers from back then, and nearly all of them excelled at one thing and one thing only. They were geniuses at the violin or the cello or even the harp, but Frankie’s mother wasn’t that far off: they were in many ways stunted young adults who didn’t have a significant list of actionable other merits. They didn’t seek adventure; they didn’t envision any sort of big, wild life beyond their talent. Frankie had never wanted to be the kid who was brilliant at music but sucked at living. She didn’t want to be the girl who was known simply because she was born with some kind of genius. Because that was actually just luck. Frankie wanted to earn her way through life: that’s what the discipline of long practice days and relentless competitions had taught her. It felt important to her that her future be of her own making. Which was ultimately why she quit at seventeen. Why she woke up one morning and stared at the ceiling and knew she was going to disappoint every adult in her orbit. But she simply didn’t want it anymore. She wasn’t even sure if she ever had or if they were the ones who had wanted it for her.
So when the invitation came to perform in Aspen, all sorts of ugly things were rearing their heads between her and her mom during Ezra’s Fourth of July visit. Explosions of arguments about her talent, about herwastedtalent, about what Fred thought (her mom was screwing Fred, so Frankie gave less than zero shits about his opinion), about how she was squandering her life at a liberal arts college when she could be playing at Carnegie Hall. And finally, when her mom reallycut to the truth of her accusation, about why she was so wrapped up in aboywho surely was nothing but a distraction from what she should be doing. Was Frankie staying at Middleton for him? Was Frankie throwing away her future for him? Frankie had thought that was pretty fucking rich, coming from her mom who’d gotten knocked up at twenty, and she said as much. Frankie already knew, even though she loved Ezra desperately, even though he was her one real thing in the world by then, that he’d never trump her desire to live a grand life, to grab it wholly and jump in.
This, of all the wreckage of that summer, proved in the end to be the truest thing she learned about herself, though she forgot about it all when she returned to Middleton in August and Ezra threw her a birthday party in Paris.
Today, Ezra, looking noticeably winded, made his way toward her.
“I was not going to propose to her here. I was—” He stopped, and she grinned because she knew she was under his skin. Triumph. Then he took a beat and moved past it. “Don’t shit on that night because you feel like picking a fight with me. That night was perfect. And you can rewrite history all you want, but you can’t rewrite that.” He sighed. “Look, I should have told you this, but Alec Barstow got ordained to be April and Connor’s officiant. It’s not... I mean... is it totally beyond possibility that we got married?” His voice cracked, and Frankie willed him to hold it together.
Frankie leveled her eyes at him and thought about how cozy they’d looked on the VCR, her memory of the mistletoe, that picture by the pool. Something struck her: a flash, a crystal clear recollection, and she felt her heart accelerate. Thestart of the scavenger hunt: how they had been at Burton Library, how they had toasted the happy couple, and then April and Connor clinked their glasses and announced that they were going to scatter all over campus to track down clues and win prizes. She and Laila had glanced at each other and rolled their eyes, and then April shouted: “I see you, Frankie Harriman! You are not too good for this! You’re the most competitive bitch I know, so I expect you to bring your A game!” And indeed, Alec Barstow had been there too.Shit.
“Look,” she said to Ezra now, deflecting. “Evenifwe got married last night, can’t we just annul it? Is that really a reason to panic?”
Ezra laughed, his pitch too high and decibel too loud. He removed his hands from his parka pockets, where they’d been warming, and ran his fingers through his hair, so it stood at attention, then tucked them back away.
