She screamed this loudly, right when Steve Perry was taking a breath afterJust a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world.
Gregory, who happened to be clustered nearby, spun toward them and said, “Wait, that’s true?! You tracked down Alec?”
But Frankie said, “Shit!Shit!No, forget you heard that.” Then she noticed Ezra disappearing behind the stage, and she didn’t want to make him wait, even though she really did want to make him wait, but she was trying to be mature. Besides, now Mimi was heading toward them, and she absolutely did not want to have a girl fight in the middle of April and Connor’s wedding because that would be straight out of a terrible ’80s movie, and Frankie was repelled by clichés.
Gregory forced a grin and waved to Mimi, then through gritted teeth said, “Make sure your purses are zipped,” and Frankie would have laughed but her stomach had dropped, and it was all she could do to say, “I’ll be back,” and push herself forward to find Ezra backstage.
This wasn’t the first time they’d tripped their way back there, and Frankie very much did not like the memories this whole shebang stirred up. This evening, the backstage area had been transformed into the catering hot zone: waiters came and went with trays of hors d’oeuvres, and the chef barked things like,We’re firing the skewers!as Frankie dodged a youngman who looked exasperated with the job and it was only an hour in.
Ten years ago, when she’d last set foot backstage—the only time she’d set foot backstage at Steinway—she’d found only cluttered darkness. Lights resting, ready to be hoisted, scattered parts of sets that had been broken down from whatever musical the theater nerds had put up that spring. She’d scampered back here when she heard the clatter of the doors to the auditorium open; she was hiding, of course. Hiding from Ezra, because ten years ago, that’s all she knew how to do.
By then, they were just two weeks away from graduation. It was early May. Ezra had long since made his choice to attend NYU Law, and Frankie made small but empty comments about possibly joining him even though her heart wasn’t in it and she knew she never would. In hindsight, she should have told him. She should have just said:We had something really beautiful for two years, and you’re my best friend, but I can’t. I can’t go back there, I can’t relive the life I’ve already had, even for you.And maybe they would have figured out a way to do things long-distance or maybe they could have had a clean break, said all sorts of platitudes that they actually meant when you’ve had your first significant revelatory love, and they could have split from each other with grace. Theoretically, Frankie knew that people could do this. But she didn’t know how to; she wasn’t one of those people.
So instead she made vague promises about how she could crash at her mom’s place until she found a studio in Alphabet City, and she lied and told Ezra that she’d mailed her résumé in to Atlantic Records, where she had some old contacts. Shedid, indeed, mail her résumé in to Atlantic Records, but to their LA office, along with Universal and Sony. In fact, the very day she later found herself in the bowels of Steinway, hiding from Ezra, she’d just gotten a call in her dorm room from a friend of a friend of her dad’s at Sony requesting an interview, which was the only reason she untacked her wall calendar (cute kitties wearing bow ties—she’d hung it ironically) and realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten her period. Frankie had been on the pill for a solid year now, which meant that she really didn’t give her period too much thought: it showed up when she took her week’s worth of pink sugar pills and disappeared when she took the green ones that prevented her from growing a human in her uterus.
She flipped the months—April and May—back and forth. Maybe she was just being ridiculous. If she couldn’t remember getting her period last month, it was likely because it was so ordinary, so normal that she just hadn’t tracked it. But part of her knew this wasn’t true. She’d gotten up from her desk and retrieved her current month’s pills, then counted backward with her finger alongside the calendar. In fact, she’d gone home the week of the sugar pills. Her mother had called because her grandfather had a heart attack playing golf in Sagaponack, and her mom, who had said only loathsome, terrible things about her grandfather when Frankie was growing up, pleaded for her to come say goodbye. Frankie took the train down to the city and bought some flowers at a deli outside Grand Central Station but discovered, once she was buzzed up to her grandparents’ apartment three blocks south of her mother’s, that her grandfather was going to live after all. She thought this was good news, though after she handed hergrandmother the bouquet and kissed her grandfather’s waxy cheek, she found her mother in the library nursing a whiskey, where she said, “I swear to God, that man will outlive us all.”
So Frankie thought she’d remember having her period that weekend. She’d have run to Duane Reade for tampons, have rooted around her mother’s medicine cabinet for something strong to ward off cramps. (Also just to root around her mother’s medicine cabinet because every turn was a surprise.)
She didn’t trust student health with her privacy, so she left the calendar abandoned on her desk and ran, shaky with the anticipation of a truth she already knew was coming, to the dinky drugstore by Lemonhead. She paid in cash, and because Burton Library was closer than her dorm, she scuttled into the restroom, locked the door behind her, and waited the three minutes until the stupid stick told her that she was destined to repeat the mistakes of her parents. Pregnant at twenty-two. She was such a fucking cliché that she would have laughed if she hadn’t been weeping, there by herself, in the back stall of the school library, where squares of toilet paper littered the floor and floral air freshener made a pitiful attempt to mask the wayward scent of too many students who had too many cups of coffee.
She’d run to Steinway straightaway. She didn’t know why, didn’t ask herself to consider why. It didn’t matter. Looking back, she doubted it was because music brought her peace or comfort or any of those trite little statements that therapists would say. Because it didn’t. But she’d been trained to retreat into it, and it was a long time, maybe until tonight at the wedding, that Frankie understood retreating was not at all the same thing as seeking. Frankie retreated to Steinway because she used music, her music, as a crutch. Not as a balm. Andthose were two different things entirely. For all of her formative years, up until Middleton, music had filled every emotion for her: pain, stress, loneliness, and yes, even joy. Frankie had loved piano for a while; she knew that to be true too. But it was so all-consuming for her, at least until she walked away, that she couldn’t differentiate between any of those feelings: she was like a newborn who screamed at everything because she couldn’t tell when she was hungry, when she was scared, when she just wanted someone to hold her.
So she’d found herself onstage alone at the piano bench. As she too often found herself as a child. Only now she was pregnant. She hadn’t wanted any of it, and she was determined not to be a passenger in her life any longer. Wasn’t that the whole point of rejecting Juilliard or a conservatory or the path of a professional musician? Of telling Fred and her mother to go fuck themselves when they begged her to attend Aspen? Of hanging up on her father when he’d called her to ask what it would take—as if she were waiting on a bribe—for her to rejoin the competition circuit just before she left for her freshman year? All she wanted her life through was to be left to her own choices. She’d decided that at seventeen, and she’d never regretted it. She’d defied expectations; she’d pointed herself toward the unknown, even when it terrified her. This was why she’d abandoned her music, and unlike her mom, she wasn’t going to put all of that aside for a baby, for a man, not even for a good man.
Tonight, at April and Connor’s reception, all of this rushed back in one unwelcome memory. She was upset all over again at Ezra, for forcing her to dredge this up when she’d spent thebetter part of a decade forgetting it, pretending none of this had happened.
Out front, the DJ dropped “Y.M.C.A.,” and Frankie heard the guests let out a cheer.
She didn’t see Ezra at first, so she wound further into the hallways, where the bustle from the catering staff had slowed, peering in one dressing room door, then another.
“Frankie.” His voice rose up behind her, and she jumped. She’d missed him in the sea of waiters, but there he was, just like he’d been ten years ago. He looked handsome, flawless in his tuxedo, like nothing from his life had stuck to him. His face had fully recovered from the pepper spray, and she couldn’t help but think that Ezra looked a little bit like a movie star.
“I’m here,” she said.
Ezra took two quick steps toward her, then turned to glance behind him.
“You’re not being followed if that’s what you’re wondering,” Frankie said because she just couldn’t help herself.
“What were you thinking?” he said, his flawless face going red, his ears turning a bright shade of pink. “You can’t just... you can’t just do that to a person!”
“Kiss you? Marry you? What? I need to know which calamity you’re referencing.”
“Don’t turn this into a joke, Frankie!” He really was furious now, and Frankie had so rarely seen Ezra genuinely rageful that she didn’t know what to do or how to respond. “This is exactly like you: you can’t leave well enough alone. You just come in, stir up shit, and press the escape button and boom, you’re gone.” He inhaled, then blew the air out of hisnose. “I won’t do it. I won’t have it. So seriously, I just wanted to tell you to leave me alone. Now. Forever.”
Frankie started to protest. She felt like she should at least be able to launch a defense. The kiss had been mutual, even if she’d been the one to start it.So excuse her if he now wanted to pretend otherwise.
Ezra saw her sorting through an explanation. She could read it on his face.
“Don’t.” He held up his hands as if she were approaching him again. “Just don’t.”
“Fine!” she said. “Let’s call this what it was: a mistake. A massive, miscalculated, decade-old mistake.”
Ezra shook his head as if he pitied her, which she really didn’t think was fair, and then said: “Goodbye forever, Frankie Harriman.” And then he turned to go. He had rounded the corner when Frankie remembered the ring.
“Hey!” she called after him. “Hey!” She scurried to keep up, turning the corner back to the main artery of the backstage. “Ezra!” She had to raise her voice now, above the blare of “Y.M.C.A.” and the waiters and the clinking of plates and glasses. “Ezra!”
He stopped but didn’t turn, which Frankie found enraging, bordering on insulting. Despite what she had just said—which she hadn’t really meant and was just saying to be provocative; my God, surely, Ezra knew that!—they had a whole history between them, a vast, wide-open love for each other that crumbled into wreckage, and yes, she bore half of the responsibility. But he could turn to face her. He could look her in the eye.
