By now, they’d reached the private room.
“Here ya go,” Zoe said. “And you’re welcome.”
They both glanced around the room. The cleaning service hadn’t yet swept up. There were disposable wineglasses littered on cocktail tables, crumpled-up napkins scattered around too. The flower arrangements had started to wilt, and the tablecloths were askew. It was astonishing, Ezra thought, that he was here last night and had absolutely no recollection of it.
“You’re leaving?” Ezra asked, moving from table to table, checking for his phone, lifting the linens to search the floor, scooting out the chairs.
“I’m on work-study, dude. I have actual hours to clock in.” She gave him another pitying look. “I’m not running a charity.” Then: “Also, it’s New Year’s Eve. I have better things to do than spend it in a library with some old guy.”
“Wait,” Ezra said, deflating, seeing no sign of a phone. “Just... can you look around, see if anything jumps out at you?”
“Like an explanation about why you’re cheating on your girlfriend with your ex-girlfriend?” Zoe made a face.
“I’m not... I don’t... I’ve never been a cheater.” Ezra felt a rush of shame. Though what he said was true. But then he remembered how Frankie was right: hehadbeen caught in Vegas and yanked out by the elbows and told he was never welcome back at the Bellagio, and then two days later, the MGM. What if he’d been a cheater this whole time? What if the story he told himself was just that? A convenient narrative because it blurred out the messy parts.
Zoe ran her fingers over a shelf of books, tracking them all the way toward the back of the room, where a giant blackboard was adorned with Polaroids. She stopped and stared, and Ezra took ten steps forward—just like he had this morning, pacing back and forth in Homer, he would unconsciously count his steps in his mind—to stand beside her. In front of them were at least a hundred photos, taped up in lines. Seemingly, Ezra thought, by teams or at least by pairs. He squinted and searched the faces, looking for his own.
Zoe spotted him first.
“There.” She jabbed her finger. “You’re right there. With theex-girlfriend.”
Indeed. There he was. In chalk beside the photo, someone had written:TEAM FREZRA.
That’s what April used to call them whenever they played all’s fair football or foosball in their dorm rec room or just because she thought it was endearingly hilarious. Ezra hadn’t thought of that in years. At the top of the board, in the same handwriting, someone had scrawled:APRIL AND CONNOR’S MILLENIUM REUNION WEDDING EPIC SCAVENGER HUNT. He and Frankie were standing rigidly side by side, each of them looking uncomfortable, though Frankie admittedly looking more so. Ezra could tell by the way that his eyes were half-open, the looseness in his jaw, that he must have already been on his way to drunk by then. He couldn’t blame Frankie for this, he knew. He could blame Gregory, who he just remembered was probably waiting for him out front. And he could blame himself. He should have known better than to mix a Xanax with booze. He did know better. It had just been so long since he’d had to.
“Shit,” he said. “My friend is outside. I totally forgot. I asked him to meet me here.”
And Zoe said, “Dude, I think you have a codependence problem.”
And Ezra said, “What? No.” Then he scanned the photos until he found Gregory with Alec Barstow, hockey star and internet-ordained officiant.
“Look, I have to go to my post,” Zoe said.
Ezra took stock of the blackboard. Each team had evidently taken a series of photos around campus. But his and Frankie’spetered out after only two. There was the one of them at the start, the uncomfortable one. Then there was one that he must have taken of the two of them. Inexplicably, Frankie kissing him. Or him kissing her.Kissing her!His eyes were closed, the angle suggesting that his arm was extended, and the whole thing was a little blurry, but even still, he could see her staring at the camera—at the lens—as if to say,Just because I’m doing this doesn’t mean anything. Then Ezra remembered the mistletoe, which not even a few minutes ago he was certain he wouldn’t have gone along with. He peered more closely at the photo: What if Zoe were right? What if he was a cheater? What if all it took was some Portland booze, a miscalculation with an antianxiety pill, and the unfortunate luck to be paired with Frankie for him to forget Mimi altogether?
Ezra felt his breath leave his body for the third time today.
The other teams had seemingly returned to Burton with a stack of photos—evidence, he assumed, that they’d completed the hunt, that they were still in it to win it.
Beside him, he saw Zoe, still not having yet ditched him, inch her nose toward the incriminating photo, then peer toward the doorframe. Then she pointed: “Ah. I was wondering who hung that all over the building. Because it sure as shit wasn’t me.” She shook her head. “This notion of romance on New Year’s Eve, that we can’t be alone for the holiday or for, like, the turn of the century, is so outdated. Kissing at midnight. Preposterous.” She flopped her shoulders and headed toward the exit. “Anyway, my dude, best of luck with this triangle you have going on, for which you have no responsibility.”
Ezra tried to refute her, but only a strangled sort of moan left his mouth.
“Listen,” she added, “it’s New Year’s Eve. Cliché as this may be, it might be time for a reckoning.”
He started to protest; he held up a flaccid hand then let it drop. Zoe met his eyes, and something passed between them, a challenge. He dropped his gaze to the floor, and she clucked as if to say,Exactly what I thought, and then disappeared around the corner. Gone.
TWENTY-THREE
Frankie
Frankie had sat with the stillness of the pool for as long as she could stand it, and then a little longer because she knew that the quiet was important, was necessary, and too often, she was running from that serenity. She pulled her toes out, wrinkled and pruned by now, and discovered that within the solitude, she had been able to piece together more about the evening than she’d known when she started.
Maybe there was something to simply being still. To working through the discomfort that she so often fled from. For the whole of her life, or at least since she’d first pulled out the piano bench in her parents’ apartment when she was five and her parents stumbled into realizing that she had perfect pitch, Frankie had been surrounded by noise. Her dad had inherited a grand piano from his own parents—an antique Steinway that he had tuned twice a year but otherwise went unused in their expansive living room. Her mom had been playing Simon & Garfunkel on the record player, and the storygoes, Frankie just sat down at the piano and instinctively began playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” When she finished, she looked up, and her mom was standing in the precipice between their kitchen and the living room with pink oven mitts on and her mouth agape.
“How did you do that?” her mom said, and Frankie worried that she was mad at her. The truth was that Frankie didn’t know how she had done it. It was like she could see the notes the way she saw colors. They were there. Her brain knew that red was red. Her brain knew that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was set in E-flat minor, even if her brain couldn’t tell her that exactly. She started to cry, and her mom rushed over and wrapped her in her arms, the oven mitts still on, and whispered not to cry, that everything was going to be all right. Looking back, Frankie understood that her mom was barely twenty-six. She was playing dress-up as a wife and a mother, numbing herself to the dreary reality of waking up in a life she hadn’t planned on. Sometimes, she would stare wistfully at the wall for so long that Frankie, still little, thought maybe she’d mastered the art of falling asleep with her eyes open.
But when Frankie sat down at the piano that day, everything shifted. For the three of them. Now, they were surrounded by noise, and not just noise, they were surrounded by music.Music!What a joy that should have been, what a gift. It was only now, by the silence of the pool, with the filter occasionally bubbling and a sporadic hum of a motor, that Frankie felt something untangle in her, just by sitting in peace. Even the lump on her head seemed calmer, like she was beginning to heal from the inside out. She reached up, pressed it, found that it was still sore but less aggressively so.
