NINETEEN
Frankie
Frankie could not believe that after all the land mines she’d averted in the past few hours, this tiny girl swaddled in puffy layers and wearing bright green earmuffs was going to be the narc who ruined everything. The girl cradled her phone in a mittened hand and held it between them like it was a grenade.
“If you’re gonna call the cops, call the cops,” Frankie said. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”
The girl hesitated, and Frankie was certain that she’d called her bluff. Police meant statements and back-and-forths and this and that, and honestly, it would kill this girl’s whole afternoon, possibly her New Year’s Eve plans.
But then the girl tugged off her other mitten with her teeth, flipped the phone open, and punched the buttons.
“Wait!” Frankie bleated. “Wait!”
Frankie had never been the type to beg. She couldn’t think of a time she’d had to beg! Sometimes, yes, well, she wore different hats with different clients, and of course there werelech erous producers and managers, but that was just how it all went as one of the few female powerhouses in the industry. So she danced the dance for her clients because that was part of the gig: she protected them from the sleazebags who wanted to ply them with coke and then screw; she shielded them from dickheads who promised the moon but paid them a penny on the dollar. Women were constantly undervalued and underestimated in her business, so she had to work with all of the cards in her deck. This made her think of Ezra, and for a moment, she was distracted by just how much she could not wrap her head around how significantly he had changed.
The girl snapped her out of it.
“Why should I not? Give me one reason why I shouldn’t call the cops.”
And then Frankie remembered to use all the cards in her deck. She couldn’t outrun a bike; she could barely run at all with the blood pooling in the lump on her head. But she remembered the posters over the bed.
“Night Vixen,” she said.
The girl’s brow furrowed. “Night Vixen?I shouldn’t call the cops because of Night Vixen?”
“I’m their manager. I discovered them. I saw the poster in your room.”
The girl wrinkled her nose like she couldn’t decide if Frankie were lying or if it even mattered. “Please.”
“It’s true. I swear,” Frankie said. “Do you want a signed CD? Tickets to their next tour?”
“Do I look like someone who can be bought off with a bribe?” But the hand holding the phone dropped into her parkapocket, and she took a beat, considering. “Oh, actually, I didn’t just find condoms. I found this.”
She reached into her crossbody bag and pulled out Frankie’s CD Walkman. Frankie had forgotten about it in the mess of everything else. The Walkman itself wasn’t important. The Night Vixen rough cut CD was. A leak could get her fired. Night Vixen would never dream of letting her go, but everyone answered to someone, and Frankie still had a boss at the management company, even if she pretended that she alone played God.
“Oh, wow!” Frankie said, trying to keep her cool. “Yes, thank you, I lost that last night.”
She took a step closer to retrieve it, and the girl inched her arm away.
“What do I have to give you to take it off you?” Frankie asked.
“The dignity of not having screwed in my bed last night?”
Frankie sighed, low, long, exhausted. “I really don’t think—” She stopped herself. She was already pressed for time and arguing with a freshman about her sex life was doing no one any good. Still, she was begrudgingly impressed that this girl was holding her own, that she hadn’t already bent to Frankie’s plan. Few things wowed Frankie Harriman more than independent thinking. In the end, that might have been the reason she and Ezra never would have worked. He wanted what she wanted; he was fine with what she was fine with. At least initially.
They had had their first fight just before the end of their junior year, after they’d been together for a full nine months. Who goes nine months in a relationship without ever expressing a dissatisfaction, without ever diverging on opinions? She couldsee how, in hindsight, the tipping point that led to that fight—that she hadn’t told Ezra she was a prodigy, that she’d spent most of her childhood awing grown-ups in concert halls, and that he only learned of it by stumbling upon her playing at Steinway—may have felt like its own sort of betrayal. But Frankie had gotten so used to her college persona, the free spirit who was responsible to no one, that she hadn’t wanted to let her old persona show; she hadn’t wanted to do anything other than pretend she’d buried it at seventeen.
Frankie hadn’t known she had an audience that day in April of her junior year. She’d just gotten off the phone with her mother, who had announced that she and Frankie’s dad were splitting, and though Frankie had always assumed that this news, this official split, would come as a relief, she instead was consumed with grief. She couldn’t explain it: she knew her parents didn’t love each other; she knew that her talent and potential was what glued their trio together. But there it was all the same: anguish, and when the grief rolled over her, she surprised herself and raced through the rolling hills of campus to Steinway. Someone at the dorm must have told Ezra she’d left in a fit or that they saw her fly into Steinway, but he didn’t hear it from her. This was Frankie’s thing, her private thing, and as much as she loved him, she still wanted some things just for herself. She didn’t think this made her selfish.
When she pulled her hands back from the keys, she was startled to hear applause from the back of the auditorium. She stood quickly, pushing the piano bench back with such force that it toppled over, and then there he was, her Ezra, leaping onto the stage, sweeping her up and into his arms like he’d just witnessed something magnificent, something just in itsnascency, when what Frankie was there for was to honor the end of something else. He wouldn’t stop talking. He wouldn’t stop marveling. Frankie had fled her dorm and retreated to the one place she knew she could find security—behind the black and white keys of the grand piano center stage in an auditorium—and he invaded that space and shattered it. If she had explained this to him, maybe he would have understood. Instead, he kept saying things like, “Is this what you meant when you said you played piano? Because this is definitely not, like, ‘Chopsticks,’ ” and “Holy shit, why would you not tell me that you are basically Beethoven or...?” He searched around for another great composer, another master performer, but Ezra wasn’t fluent in her old language, which was part of what she loved about him. She thought he was looking at her differently, inhaling her differently. And then he said, “I don’t understand—if you are this brilliant, why would you ever stop? Don’t you owe it to yourself to keep going?”
And that was it. That was all it took for Frankie to believe that her instinct not to trust him with who she had been before had been correct. That of course she shouldn’t have told him about her secret, inexplicable gift, which she hadn’t asked for, didn’t want, which made her feel like a bird inside a gilded cage for the entirety of her childhood. Ezra didn’t understand that to be the greatest at something, you could never relent—and even if he understood this, he wouldn’t have found relentlessness a deterrent. Just look at his passion, at his direction toward law. But at least that washisdecision, Frankie had thought back then. At least Ezra got to throw himself toward his own choice of relentlessness. Frankie had never had a say in hers, had never been behind the decision-making. So whenshe was finally old enough to choose for herself, the only thing she cared about was freedom, about independence, about having the right to make whatever fucking choices she wantedfor herselfin the first place. Her parents would never understand it. LaGuardia never understood it. Fred didn’t, conservatories didn’t, her nerd friends from the competition circuit didn’t even try to. But Frankie did. Frankiedid.
And of all people to choose everyone else’s side: Ezra.
She went from zero to a thousand in an instant, and looking back, she could have, would have, done it very differently. But she exploded about how little he knew about her, how right she was not to trust him with her secrets, how the only person she could count on in this whole fucking world had let her down. She left him in the aisle of Steinway, pushing past him and running to her dorm room, indignant, furious, burned. Eventually, he knocked and looked like he’d been crying, and he said he was sorry and he’d never bring it up again. He hadn’t realized that he was pressing into a bruise that was already purple. In his defense, he said, how could he have? She’d never let him take a look.
Finally, she said: “Ask me anything you want to, and then we’ll never talk about this again.”
