He would go to Waverly’s, and find his phone, and call Mimi and arrange a new flight, and take some Tylenol, and attend the wedding (ignoring Frankie the whole time), and propose at midnight when the world crossed over to a new century.Yes.He told himselfyesas he turned around and headed in the opposite direction toward the north side of campus. That didn’t sound so hard. That felt extremely doable. What Ezra Jones always needed was a plan. What Frankie Harriman always needed was a foil. They never could have worked. They were always a thunderstorm of impending doom.
SEVENTEEN
Frankie
In the back alley behind the dorm where Ezra had brought her Paris, Frankie flexed her jaw and chewed on her lip and stewed for a good three minutes—about the fact that he left her, about the fact that she had the impulse to kiss him, about, well, all of it—before her ears got too cold and her fingertips went numb. Also, she needed the world to stop spinning. Eventually, when she was no longer dizzy, she started forming plan D. To the best of her calculation, she had about three hours before she had to make herself presentable and get to the chapel for photos, where she’d paste on a smile, just like she used to in her piano competitions, and pretend that everything was ok. Even all these years later, Frankie could endure any sort of version of pretend as long as she knew it was temporary.
It was better that she hadn’t told him—about the mistletoe, about looking cozy at Lemonhead, about a scavenger hunt in which... She squeezed her eyes closed and tried to remember how they had possibly ended up as partners. Noneof this meant—she hoped—that they’d somehow gotten so wasted that they indeed wed themselves to each other. Not just because Frankie didn’t believe in marriage, didn’t believe in a stupid piece of paper that made you promise the rest of your life to someone. In fact, Frankie could think of almost no one she knew who was happily married. Maybe April and Connor would give it a real go. Maybe monogamy wouldn’t bore them. Maybe exchanging emails with grocery lists was their type of kink. Maybe renting movies at Blockbuster and driving to Vermont for a week of maple syrup tasting for summer vacation was their idea of fun. She didn’t know. It wasn’t her life.
Fine. She blew out her breath. Fine! She would solve this herself, just as he’d suggested. Frankie was always a better solo operator than team player anyway, if she were being honest. School orchestra was theworstbecause she wanted only to do her own thing, and obviously, sports were out because, well, she was a fairly low-tone, highly protected bubble kid who spent her weekends at music competitions. She couldn’t risk any injuries to her fingers or her hands or really her arms or elbows, so anything remotely fun was out. Also, she was an only child and, therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, had never been a fan of collaboration. You would think this would be critical for a music manager, but in fact, what worked for her and her clients was simply that Frankie knew best, and they all understood this and so they listened. When they didn’t listen, well, that’s when the trouble started, and Frankie would be called in to clean it up. For someone who appeared remarkably undisciplined, Frankie was actually quite rigid. You don’t practice piano for four hours a day throughout yourchildhood and transform into a different person as an adult. If she could have, she would have—she gave it her best go at Middleton, for God’s sake. She’d triple-pierced her ear, worn acid-washed jeans with rubber bracelets and fringy tank tops, watched hours of MTV rather than rewrite her term papers, but none of that changed anything about her DNA, about the bones of who she was inherently. So now here she was, fully formed. Quite volatile, which could be misconstrued as wildly spontaneous, but those were not the same things. Not even close to being the same things.
So plan D it was.
Frankie emerged from the alley behind their old dorm where Ezra had once brought Paris to her. There was no sign of him when she looked to either side, though she could see the tracks from his Sambas—the little circles from the soles still clearly defined—heading back toward the north part of campus. She was certain he was going to try Waverly’s, so she assessed she should go anywhere but.
A heavy gust of wind caught her off guard, whipping the snow against her cheeks, seizing her hood and sending it aloft, nearly propelling her backward and onto the ground. The world tilted for a good five seconds, and Frankie held her hands in front of her as if she were going to topple again. Her legs felt wobbly, her energy totally zapped.
She made her way to a bench along the walkway just a few buildings down from Steinway Auditorium, then tucked her hand inside the arm of her parka sleeve and dusted the snow from the seat. She’d been so annoyed with Ezra back there that she hadn’t even had a moment to consider that he wasn’t the buttoned-up lawyer he’d always promised to be.
“Why law?” Frankie would say every few weeks while he was studying for the LSAT, and then later, while he was doing his applications, mostly because she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life, but also because she didn’t understand what made it so appealing. Every lawyer she knew, mostly men through her father, was dull and waxy.
“The rules,” Ezra would say, every time, as if Frankie thought he might have come up with a different reason. “There’s always a firm set of rules. And you either follow them or there’s a consequence. That makes sense to me.”
Frankie still loved him enough not to point out that the law was open to all sorts of interpretation and not exactly equitable to all. Also, she loved him too much to note that his need for things to be black and white, to be so clear-cut and controlled, was about much more than the law and mostly about the uncertainty and destabilization of having a mother who was in and out of chemo. And there was nothing Ezra could do to change that. So Frankie would just sit on his bed with him while he typed into his gray PC with the interminable hum of his dot matrix printer in the background, and offer encouraging edits to his essays, and then, when she got really bored with it all, she’d take off her shirt and lay there topless, counting the seconds in her head until he noticed. The highest she ever got to was eighty-seven, and that was only because Ezra was extremely focused that night.
When Ezra was accepted to NYU in February of their senior year, he assumed she would move to New York with him. Frankie didn’t know what she was doing with her postcollege life, but she was certain she didn’t want to repeat herpast and move to the same city with the same streets and the same haunts and the same people she’d already experienced. She didn’t want to stomp out his joy though, so she held her breath and hoped he got in elsewhere. She would have considered moving anywhere else with him. She really would have.
Thus, after all that steady certainty, after how much he loved the law and after he chose NYU because they gave him a full scholarship and a research job that paid well enough for him to start saving (she understood why he couldn’t turn it down, and she didn’t ask him to) and was also close to his mother who he still worried about, Frankie was genuinely shocked that he was some big-time tech guy now. She’d met plenty of these new “internet” dudes at swanky LA parties, and Ezra, at leastherEzra, didn’t strike her as that type at all: flashy cars with subwoofers, girlfriends with enormous fake breasts, expense accounts to cover a multitude of sins. They talked about stock options and second homes and remote Caribbean islands that they jetted to for the weekend.
She shook her head and corrected herself.HerEzra was not a thing. It was odd though, she had to admit. How the span of a decade had opened between them, and as much as they no longer knew each other, to Frankie—and she wondered if it were the same for Ezra—she couldn’t shake the notion that she still knew him as intimately as ever.
Suddenly, she had a memory.HerEzra. No wonder that sounded familiar: those very words resounded in the private room at Burton last night. There had been about forty of them there. The ceilings were high and the walls stacked with books, and portraits of the college’s founders in gold frameshung over the fireplace mantels. Fancy canapés that were meant to mimic their college fare—oversize spoonfuls of ramen, delicate wedge sandwiches of PB&J—were carted around by waitstaff, students who lingered behind for the holiday to earn catering tips. There was an open bar, but still, Frankie managed to sip Diet Coke, and then, just so no one asked, a Sprite, which she told everyone was a vodka soda. She’d seen Ezra across the expanse of the room. She’d tried to look everywhere but at him, but of course, that was physically humanly impossible, because when your brain tells you not to stare, the only thing you do is stare. Laila was already tipsy. Frankie remembered this now too. She’d done two shots at Lemonhead, just as a warm-up, and also because she had her eye on Alec Barstow, who she’d heard had recently moved to Asheville, which she noted was close enough to Charlotte that maybe they could become something more than friends.
“He’s officiating,” Laila had said. “Like off the internet.” She flopped her shoulders as if to say she didn’t really understand how such things worked—Frankie didn’t either—and then Laila wiggled her eyebrows like she thought it would be amazing to land the centerpiece of tomorrow night’s ceremony.
At some point, April and Connor gathered them around, and April had raised her champagne glass triumphantly and said, “Don’t think we were letting you get out of here without a trip down memory lane!” And someone—Frankie couldn’t see who through the crowd, and also she was tryingveryhard not to look in that direction because Ezra was in the vicinity—called out, “This whole thing is a trip down memory lane, and not necessarily a good one!” And someone else called out, “Look, Scotty, just because you got put on academic probationjunior year doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t have some fun!” And everyone laughed, and Frankie realized they were talking about Scotty Quinnlan, who she literally hadn’t given a single thought to since leaving campus. Like, she had completely forgotten that he existed. That he lived somewhere on planet Earth.
April and Connor were laughing at all of this, then Connor reached for the microphone and said: “We’re doing a scavenger hunt! All of your names are in the basket back there—we’ll break off into pairs—and there will be a grand prize for the winner!” And someone, Frankie thought it was Alec Barstow, yelled, “Let’s make it threesomes! I’m always up for a threesome!” And then they moved en masse to the back of the room to draw names. Frankie did the math and thought how unlucky she could be: she had a one in twenty or so chance to be with Ezra, and though those weren’t great odds—not something she would, say, bet her life on—she also had nineteen other chances not to be with him.
The rules were that whoever picked your name was on your team. You then picked another name to kick off the next pairing. Gregory, who Frankie hadn’t seen since graduation and who, she thought, looked exactly the same as when she last did see him, barring a sad wispy mustache, selected her after being partnered with Alec Barstow.Frankie Harriman, he said dryly, his eyebrows raised. But then he found her in the crowd and steered her out to face the basket and slung his arm around her like this whole thing was ridiculously wild and did a little bow as if he were her butler.M’lady, he added for a flourish.
Frankie stuck her hand into the basket—she could feelherself shaking and honestly couldn’t believe that she was going along with this preposterous situation, but Laila was shooting her the stink eye, as if to say:April was a generous friend to you when you showed up freshman year as a moody loner, so you will shut up and enjoy yourself.Remarkably, whether it was because she didn’t have time to recalculate or because she was becoming an actual adult, Frankie understood this. This was not the moment to turn something that could be nothing—a one-in-twenty shot—into a full-on calamity. So she reached her hand into the basket and prayed silently,Not Ezra not Ezra not Ezra.And she pulled out a piece of paper, and she felt her cheeks flush with blood and she said:
“Oh. Ezra Jones.”
And to her right, April squealed, “Your Ezra!”Her Ezra.And Frankie wanted to throttle her because April really did know the weight of their history, but April was also a hopeless romantic who adored things like Valentine’s Day and red roses and believed in the tradition of not letting her husband see her in her wedding dress before the ceremony and also in second chances. If memory served, she and Connor had split for a few months in their midtwenties. No wonder April didn’t give the pairing a second thought. And anyway, Frankie was too shell-shocked to do anything other than shuffle to the side for Ezra to make his way to the front.
Now, on the bench at midday, with the snow beginning to slow, Frankie connected the puzzle pieces to how she ended up with Ezra last night. They had been partners. She tilted over and thought she might be sick. The nausea passed, and she pushed her palms into her knees and righted herself.
Campus was starting to wake now. There was a smattering of students making their way past, a few who looked hungover, a few who looked like they were rushing because they had somewhere to be. Frankie remembered that about college: how even though there was so little that was actually important, everythingfeltimportant. Maybe it was because it was the first time she’d truly been in control of her choices, or maybe things like her friendships and simply the experience of being on her own, of being wholly independent, actually were the most foundationally important part of her growth. Since the age of five, Frankie had always been told who she was going to be, and at Middleton, where no one knew what she was capable of at a piano bench—at least until Ezra caught her playing their junior year—she had the chance to be whatever it was she chose.
Awash in memories of her younger life, Frankie tried to envision what she would have done last night if she wanted to pretend that she was twenty-one again and inhabit that ghost. Well, she would have gone to Lemonhead; she already knew that. Her fingers reached for the set of keys in her pocket. She stood wearily and supposed she needed to at least check Steinway Auditorium. It was such a cliché. Good God! Did she get wasted and end up screwing Ezra in a music room? Honestly, she thought she was better than that, but the truth of it was that she knew that this wouldn’t have been unheard of. The question was not really if they ended up sleeping together, because for Frankie, the sex was beside the point. That was just a physical thing that bodies were designed to do. No, it was the vulnerability. The moments or hours leading up to it.To the intimacy, to the tenderness, to the space between how much she thought she hated Ezra Jones and somehow kissing him beneath the mistletoe.
She trudged up the steps to Steinway and pulled out the keys. But surprisingly, there was no padlock on the door, and instead, she reached for the gold handle and simply swung it open.No.This was not it. Not what she was looking for. She let the door close and stood and stared at her reflection in the glass. God, if her mother could see her now, she’d have an absolute fit. Disheveled hair, wrinkled clothes, wan face, slouched shoulders. Standing outside of the auditorium where Frankie should have come into her greatness.
She turned and walked away before she allowed herself another thought about that. She didn’t miss performing. This wasn’t a do-over story about a child prodigy who second-guessed casting aside her talent. Her talent had been an anchor that dragged her down so deeply she had to make the choice to either drown in it or cut herself free. She didn’t regret any of that.
A mountain bike passed in front of her, then came to an abrupt stop and skidded across the brick walkway. The biker hopped off, and the bike rattled to the ground. Then the rider turned and pointed herself toward Frankie.
