“You!” she said.
It took Frankie a second to place her. She was still swaddled in wool but now had on earmuffs and a scarf tightly bundled around her neck. Her parka threatened to eat her whole.
“I’m sorry?” Frankie said, and then the glimmer ofrecognition formed a complete picture.Shit.The girl from Homer with the pepper spray. “Oh,” she said. “Yeah, it’s me.”
“I called the police!” the girl said.
“Well, that wasn’t necessary. We left as soon as you got there.”
Also, Frankie thought, if she were to get arrested at some point in her life, she hoped it was at least for something exotic, like setting tigers free from a zoo or inventing a new strain of weed. Not breaking into her lame freshman-year dorm.
“You slept in my bed!” she said.
“If it helps, I don’t remember any of it,” Frankie said.
“Do you have any idea how disgusting it is to know that someone else”—she lowered her voice now, and Frankie tilted herself forward—“to know that someone elsehad sexin your bed? Like, do you understand how gross that is?”
“Oh.” Calm coasted over her. If that’s what this was about, she could clear the air and be on her way. “We didn’t have sex. We really just fell asleep.”
She tugged the keys from her pocket, thinking she could ask this girl if they belonged to her. Maybe they simply belonged to her! Wouldn’t that be incredible, Frankie thought. If there were just a reasonable explanation, and Ezra had inadvertently picked up this girl’s keys? She already felt relief washing over her.
“I think these are yours?” Frankie said, offering them to her.
“What? No.” The girl scrunched up her face, then pulled out her own set of keys from her pocket. “But like, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re wrong.”
“About what?” Frankie felt her hope deflating and dropped the keys back into her own jacket pocket.
“About the sex,” the girl said flatly. “About your trespassing sex.”
“No.” Frankie shook her head. “That’s not the type of thing I’m wrong about.”
“Look, I don’t know you and I don’t know what kind of person breaks into a dorm room to have sex, but I found a three-pack of condoms under my bed.”
Frankie felt what she thought was a mild heart attack, a jolt of pain coursing through her. Her heart literally paused for a moment. She didn’t think she could blame this on the concussion.
“No... I don’t—” Frankie started then stopped.
A very, very hazy memory came to the front of her brain. Her asking Ezra if he had a something—protection. But that could have been from years ago. She had no idea if it was actually fromlast night. When they first hooked up in college, they used condoms because there were posters plastered everywhere on campus about herpes and genital warts and the terrifying notion of AIDS. Eventually, once they were together for a few months in college, they both got tested, and then she’d gone to student health and gotten a prescription for the pill. She’d never been in a steady enough relationship to go on the pill before that. She’d theoretically never been in a relationship at all.
“I... I don’t think you’re right,” Frankie said, but each protest was getting weaker.
The girl gave her a pitying look. “You don’t even remember having sex with him?”
“It’s almost the twenty-first century,” Frankie bleated. “I’m allowed to sleep with whomever I want!”
A barely postpubescent boy nearby turned and stared.
“It’s true!” Frankie shouted at him and at anyone else. “My body, my choice!” She didn’t know why she had to turn this into a bigger thing, a public spectacle, and she wished that she would just shut up. She was always doing this—stepping further into the shit instead of backing away. She considered briefly now that it was not the best way to manage a healthy personal life.
“You can do whatever you want with your body,” the girl said. “But just not in my bed.” She grimaced and gave Frankie a long look from head to toe. Then she reached into her pocket and said, “I’m calling the cops again. You can’t just, like, get away with this. Someone has to be held accountable.”
EIGHTEEN
Ezra
ONE P.M.
Ezra knew before he got there that Waverly’s would be closed. But he wasn’t someone who left things to chance and wanted to be sure. Then there it was. Shuttered and dark. He wasn’t about to be as reckless as Frankie and vandalize a window to solve his problem. He pressed his forehead against the glass and tried to peer in, hoping to, he didn’t know, jog a memory or stumble upon a clue. But the windows were tinted, and the glare from the gray skies meant that he was only staring back at his own reflection. His face looked a bit better now, cooled from the snowball and given some time. Ezra had quite obviously never been pepper-sprayed before—he was theoppositeof the type of guy who would have been pepper-sprayed before—so he wasn’t certain how long it would take to normalize. (How had it been only four hours since he’d woken up with Frankie? This day felt like a lifetime.) He did the mental math though and thought that surely, by the time he figured out how to get Mimi to Middleton, all would be well; his face would be the face of the man she loved.
