She dragged her feet, ankle-deep, from the pool, tugged on her socks, and tied her Doc Martens. She unrolled the hems of her jeans and recounted exactly what she knew. These were the facts as Frankie understood them at the moment.
She had met Laila in the lobby of the Inn. They had gone to Lemonhead. Just as she had maintained.
They proceeded to Burton Library for the rehearsal dinner where—though this part was still a little hazy—she was unceremoniously and unluckily paired with Ezra for a scavenger hunt.
At some point, she willingly kissed Ezra Jones under the mistletoe. She thought, perhaps, this was a memory from a long-ago time, but even Frankie wasn’t so LA as to believe that déjà vu could be this strong. She’d kissed him. She just needed to accept the facts as they were.
She had a photograph of the two of them right here, at the Olympic-sized pool where they once skinny-dipped because his mother’s oncologist had discovered lesions on her liver and this felt like the only place to wash Ezra clean.
From there, there were gaps. But she knew that at approximately ten o’clock, she and Ezra had linked up with Gregory at Lemonhead, because she had video proof of her leaning into his chest, his arm around her waist (!!!!). How they had gone from sworn enemies (or at the very least, vitriolic exes) to walking arm in arm had yet to be determined.
After that, Ezra turned into a card shark and ripped off Joni, the wonderful barista, and as a tour de force to end the evening, they broke into Homer.
Oh, Frankie reminded herself, at an undetermined time, Ezra’s beloved girlfriend, Mimi, got stranded in... she couldn’t remember which state, but it was somewhere in the middle of the country, and the two of them—Frankie and Ezra—may have gotten married.
Frankie pushed open the doors to the athletic complex, the cold assaulting her, the wind biting her cheeks. Out of habit, she reached into her bag to grab her Walkman but remembered that Zoe had stolen it. Maybe she could just live in the quiet; maybe she didn’t always need to have a melody humming through her brain. What would happen then? If she just kept her head up and her ears open?
Frankie remembered now that Gregory had been partnered with Alec Barstow. Which is precisely how they could have gotten married last night.Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.
She had been whispering to Laila, leaning in close so she didn’t cause a scene because she did understand that the rehearsal dinner was not about her (really, she did), and begging Laila to swap partners with her. Laila had heard her out but cocked her head and said something annoyingly maternal like, “Frankie, I kind of think this will be good for you? Just... It’s been ten years... Maybe this can be healing?”
And then Gregory had stepped between them and said to Frankie, “You’re a competitive bitch. Let’s team up and form analliance.” And Frankie had figured that at least a foursome would provide some breathing room, so she noddedfine, and then Gregory clapped and said, “I’m winning this motherfucker,” and Alec said, “Excuse me,we’rewinning this motherfucker—you know in college, I set the record for hat tricks,” and Frankie recalled then that Alec only ever wanted to talk about hockey back then too. Frankie remembered that Gregory was toting his Portland moonshine, which he held up as if an initiation to their alliance, and that she deflected by making a joke about only drinking top-shelf, which Ezra rolled his eyes at just before he did a shot of his own. Ezra hadn’t been much of a drinker in college—that had always fallen to Frankie—and she was surprised to see the alcohol disappear down his throat, how loose he was getting, how messy.
“We’re adults here, Frankie,” Ezra said. “It’s like two hours of your life. I don’t want to do this any more than you do.” Then he grabbed Gregory’s bottle and took a swig directly. Then added, “This is truly disgusting, Greg. It’s basically straight kerosene.”
Frankie remembered now, as she exited the athletic complex, that their first clue was within the library itself. “Meet Me Under and you know what to do then,” it read. Well, none of the four of them had any idea what that meant, but Ezra said: “Meet me under the stars?” And Frankie was annoyed because the clue specifically told them to search within the library,and so she said: “Burton does not have a planetarium, you know.” So Gregory added, “Maybe in, like, the astrology section?” And Alec said, “I’m a Gemini. We’re known to crush it at everything.” And Frankie had wanted to scream.
They wandered through the halls, their eyes pointing up, until finally they reached the lobby, and Frankie saw it with dread.
“No,” she said, and then the rest of them followed her gaze.
