“Jesus,” Ezra muttered.
Alec pumped a fist and said, “All right, clue number one accomplished,” then he grabbed the Polaroid from Gregory and pulled their faces together and the flash went off. He flopped the picture back and forth in the air until there they were, the two of them,kissing, and Gregory squealed a little at the hilarity of it because Alec was as hetero as they came, and said, “I can’t lie: I’m a little turned on,” and then they sprinted back to the room to deliver the photo for the board and receive their next clue.
Frankie crossed her arms, so Ezra did too. She wanted to win. She really wanted to win because what was the point of this exercise if not?
“Let’s just get this over with,” she said.
Ezra shook his headno.He was definitely drunk by now, his eyes on their way toward half-closed, his posture a little ragged. “I exorcised you, Frankie Harriman. I did.”
“Ezra, can we just agree that we are adults and pressing our lips together can just be a ridiculous act of physicality so we can move on from this charade and possibly be crowned champions?” She glanced behind her. Gregory and Alec had at least a minute on them. She didn’t know where the other teams were, but so far, it appeared they were in second place. “Like, trust me, I do not want to kiss you any more than you want to kiss me. If there is anything less on this planet I want to do, Ican not think of it. But I want to win more than I do not want to kiss you, ok?”
Ezra’s eyes flitted toward the exit, and he seemed to lose himself for a beat. They’d never discussed what had happened outside when they split. She was too heated, even a week later when they spoke briefly on the phone, and Ezra seemed to just want to compartmentalize like he always did.
Frankie reached over, grabbed his arm, and swung him toward her.
“Fine.” He sighed. “Fine.”
She stood on her tiptoes, and he lowered his chin while holding the camera aloft, and then suddenly, before she could give it any more thought, she leaned in and kissed him. And now, with the wind kicking up but the snow coming to a halt and the sun beginning to make an appearance on the quiet Middleton campus, Frankie remembered that she hadn’t hated it. That it had felt familiar, comforting almost. That something about Ezra Jones sent a charge through her, through her veins, through her blood, through her guts, and when she kissed him, that electrical pulse raced inside her just as it always had.
She’d grabbed the photo and run it back to the blackboard where April had squealed and said, “Oooooh yeah,” and she’d flipped April off because really, come on. April had thrown her head back and laughed, and said, “The resurrection of Team Frezra!” and handed her the next clue. Which had led them to the pool. Which Frankie had already figured out.
At least that answered the question of the mistletoe, she thought as she shoved her hands into the pockets of her parka. She wondered where Ezra was, if he’d found his phone, if he’dtracked down Mimi. The church bells clanged twice in the distance, echoing over the campus, cutting through the quiet. It must have been the turn of the hour, ticking down to the start of the ceremony. She didn’t want to drag her problems from last night to the wedding. She could, at the very least, be dignified for April. She had about an hour left before she’d have to abandon hope of solving this mess.
Frankie knew where she was headed next. But she stood there for another minute, the sun on her face, with the church bells as beautiful as any music she’d ever heard. Her eyes blinked back tears. She just didn’t know yet what for.
TWENTY-FOUR
Ezra
TWO P.M.
By the time Ezra had collected himself and woven through the maze of hallways in the depths of Burton and walked past Bruno, the security guard, who wished him a Happy New Year unironically, and under the mistletoe in the front lobby and onto the steps outside, Gregory was nowhere to be found. Ezra blew out his breath, brushed the snow off the steps, and sat down. From across the campus, the church bells clanged twice, a reminder that not only was he losing daylight before the start of the wedding but that time was ticking down on his millennium proposal. In fact—he did the math now, despair taking root in his stomach: there really was no way that Mimi could get here from Kansas City in time: a connecting flight through Chicago, a car ride... Ezra could make magic from a bad hand, but there were some deal-ins that one simply needed to fold. The sun broke through the flat gray sky, illuminating the white landscape in front of him, and Ezra was momentarily blinded. He held his hand in front of his eyes and saw the gold wedding band. Maybe it was for the best that she wasn’t here. This notion punctured him, redefined, even if temporarily, the type of partner he considered himself to be.
What a debacle this was. The wedding band and the condoms and the blackout hangover and the sleepover in Homer.
He pushed himself to his feet. He wished Gregory were here, but he wasn’t. But Ezra didn’t want to do this alone. He never wanted to do most things alone. He knew this was a squishy area for him; he did know, theoretically, that there was room for improvement. But still, with the sun brightening the campus and with Burton at his back, he thought that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he found Frankie.
This startled him—admittedly. He’d spent ten years convincing himself that Frankie Harriman was the worst possible scenario. But now, he allowed for the notion that maybe things could have been different with them, for them, if he hadn’t been so needy, if he hadn’t pushed her outside her comfort zone.
Ezra had always assumed that Frankie would follow him to New York. They hadn’t exactly discussed it, but they hadn’t not discussed it either. She seemed thrilled for him, at the NYU acceptance, at the scholarship package. It was true that she kept urging him to wait to hear from Stanford and to take UCLA or USC more seriously, and Ezra didn’t tell her this, but he’d pulled the rest of his applications once this acceptance came in. He wanted to be near Henry; he wanted to stay within driving distance of his mother, who wasn’t even close to out of the woods the winter of his senior year. Though he knew Frankiehad all sorts of issues with her own parents, they didn’t seem like anything that would make her flee from Manhattan. For a long time, he blamed her for not opening up about the baggage from her childhood: the pressure and the prodigious gift and how much all of that took from her. How eventually, she just wanted to be normal. But maybe he didn’t ask the right questions. Or maybe he didn’t ask enough questions, if he were really honest with himself. Maybe he didn’t want to make any waves after that initial argument in Steinway Auditorium when he’d caught her playing after her parents had called to say they were making their separation a permanent one.
It takes two to tussle, his own mother had used to say, whenever Ezra would complain about his dad and how he’d dropped out of their lives. She got the idiom wrong, but Ezra loved her all the more for it, and it’s not as if he didn’t get her meaning. Back then, he had always thought that this was simply her being overly kind toward his father, protecting Ezra from the shit-all truth. But maybe what she meant, it truly just dawned on him now, as he abandoned any hope of Gregory’s arrival and descended the steps of Burton, was that everyone shared responsibility in both their triumphs and their failures.Everyone—his dad, his mom, him, Frankie, the whole lot of them—always has ownership, for better and worse.
Which meant that the unpleasant truth of whatever happened in the past twenty-four hours, a kiss, a wedding, possibly sex in a twin bed at Homer, couldn’t be simply pinned on Frankie.A reckoning, Zoe had said. Ezra did not like the sound of that at all. And he didn’t think Mimi would either.
But Ezra was a fantastic compartmentalizer—it was certainly part of what also made him an excellent card player. Hestarted down Middie Walk and tried to squelch any sort of hysteria that sprung up when he thought of the consequences of last night. Though there were only two Polaroids of the two of them on the board, he’d noticed what he thought was Abel ice rink in the background of several of the pairings’ photos. If they’d been there, maybe he had been too.
Of course, the rink wasn’t just another stop in the scavenger hunt; it was another memory piled on top of all the rest. It had been shortly after they’d gone to his place for Christmas break of their junior year. She’d come to stay with him and his mom in Lower Merion, and just by adding her to their table—Henry came too, along with his mother’s younger brother whose ex-wife had the kids for the holiday—they’d expanded their family. An extra place setting that plugged a hole Ezra hadn’t even been aware of. He remembered that he’d tried to take her to the pond to skate but that Frankie didn’t know how, so they sawMoonstruckinstead, and he was just as happy to do that. Because being anywhere with Frankie was better than being anywhere without her: the movie theater at the Willow Grove mall, the frozen-over pond, the front seat of his Jeep listening to “We Are the World,” he didn’t really care. When they were packing up to leave and return to campus, his mom pulled him aside and hugged him for a long time, longer than Ezra was used to, and he knew it was because she was so happy that he had found someone to move through life with, whether just in the present or perhaps for longer. They both now knew that there were no guarantees for the longer.
Ezra hadn’t thought about any of this in a very long time. How falling in love with Frankie his junior year couldn’t be separated from the joy that his mother had during her firststint of hope, of renewed health. She’d been in remission that Christmas, and maybe—it occurred to Ezra now—part of the intensity of his feelings for Frankie had simply been about relief. He shook his head and turned off Middie Walk to the footpath that led downhill to Abel. Not relief. About salvation. Maybe he was so desperate for his mother to be saved that he got things a little mixed-up and thought that Frankie needed to be rescued as well. Or maybe he was trying to save himself. It was hard to remember exactly what was running through his mind, his heart, twelve years ago, but he’d had enough space between then and now to somewhat recognize that it may not have been black and white.
He stopped short once Abel loomed in front of him, and he wondered momentarily if in addition to his blackout, he was now hallucinating. He blinked several times, but it was still there: a Zamboni parked half on the sidewalk, half in the street. One of the side doors of the building was hanging off its hinges, diagonally tilted toward the ground as if waiting for gravity to do its worst.
Ah shit, he thought. But at least he knew he’d been here last night.Destruction. How fitting.
TWENTY-FIVE
Frankie
