“Stop staring at me,” she said.
She ran her palms over her now-blond hair, flattening the overnight flyaways. She wondered if she looked different to him or if he were thinking she was the same, just older. She had never gone blond in college, and she liked to think that she’d grown more comfortable in her skin since then. But her eyeliner was surely smudged, and she wore much more of it anyway, and she was certain she had dark circles under her eyes—she always had them these days because she was never in the same time zone long enough for her circadian rhythm to settle.
“I’m not staring.” Ezra sighed. “I’m just surprised that you still have that sweater. I figured you dumped everything that had to do with back then.”
“Not everything,” Frankie said. “Just the dead weight.”
Ezra rolled his eyes at her overt pettiness, and Frankie wanted to regret it, to be less petty, but she found that she could not. And since she had come to accept herself for exactly who she was, nothing more, nothing less, she jutted her chin and said not another word.
Ezra spun around and in two steps, he was at the window, which had steamed up along the bottom corner from the radiator heat below. These dorm room heaters were shit, Frankie remembered. Always too scalding or not working at all. A relic from the 1950s. Middleton prided itself on its traditions, on its two-hundred-year history, and on campus, everything old was new again: radiators, stodgy library books, ancient professors, and evidently, previous lovers too.
At the window, Ezra raised the drawn shade.
“It’s snowing.”
Frankie pressed her palms into the mattress and straightened up to catch a glimpse out the window, as if he were lying to her. Ezra saw this too.
“We can agree on the basic facts of the weather, ok? It’s snowing.” Then he cocked his head and really assessed the situation. He loped ten paces to the door, opened it, twisted his head right and left out the front, then walked the ten paces back to the window.
“Holy shit,” he said. “That’s what I thought. This is my freshman-year dorm room.”
“I didn’t know you then,” Frankie replied, as if this were a way to prove him wrong. She felt so desperate to prove him wrong about something. Snow, the sweater, that they’d slept together. It didn’t matter. Anything!
“Well, it is. I used to count my paces back and forth whenever I needed to calm down.” He paused, then quieted. “It was my mom’s idea.”
Frankie softened for a moment. She’d heard his mom had died a few years ago. Ovarian cancer, which she’d fought off and on since Ezra was a teen. Ezra was unusually close to her: hisdad had left when he was a toddler, and his brother, Henry, older by six years, was busy being a grown-up by then. So it was just the two of them. Frankie used to be jealous of their bond. Even with a deadbeat dad and a mom who was chronically exhausted trying to pay their mortgage while going through treatments, he never doubted his mother’s commitment to him. Her unconditional love for him. When she died, Laila had called and left a message on Frankie’s machine, but she had been in Tokyo with Ashlee Cooper, a young up-and-comer who they thought they could launch in Asia before the States. (Alas, Ashlee developed a raging coke habit before her first single blew up, and she never really made much happen beyond that. Last Frankie had heard, Ashlee was auditioning for the first season of a show that marooned twenty contestants on an island.) By the time Frankie returned from Japan and heard Laila’s message, she told herself that too much time had passed to reach out, and besides, who was she to call him and say how sorry she was? They weren’t friends. They weren’t anything. His mom had always been kind to her, though: pretended not to notice that she snuck into Ezra’s bedroom the times she stayed with them over Thanksgiving or Christmas, went out of her way to send Frankie care packages whenever she sent ones to Ezra, and they always had homemade cookies.I should have called, Frankie thought now, a tickle forming at the back of her nose, a pinch of tears building too. She started to say something—condolences, perhaps—but Ezra cut her off before she could compose herself.
“Holy shit,” Ezra said again. “This is definitely Homer, and this is definitely my old room. And I have absolutely no idea how we got here. Or why.” He looked toward her for an answer, but Frankie happened to glance down at that exact momentand was in a bit of shock herself. In, well, actually a compete spiral, albeit for a totally different reason.
“Holy shit,” Frankie said in reply. She’d just noticed a weight on her left hand, on her ring finger, in fact. A solitaire diamond in a platinum setting.
“HOLY SHIT, EZRA!” she said louder. “Why am I wearing an engagement ring?”
FOUR
Ezra
Ezra could feel his panic rising, and it had just about reached his boiling point. He didn’t know if Frankie remembered this: flushed skin, shallow breathing, tremors in his fingers, all the signs of an oncoming anxiety attack. He was clutching her hand, staring at the ring on her finger—his grandmother’s ring, the one meant for Mimi. And she was clutching his: staring at a band around his own left ring finger, which, until this very moment, he had never seen, much less owned or worn, before in his life.
Frankie yanked the ring on her finger, but it wouldn’t budge: either her knuckle had swollen overnight or she’d shoved it on with such force last night that it was just stuck there. He pulled the gold band off his own hand, but she yelped, “If I have to wear this, so do you, so don’t you dare!” which really didn’t make all that much sense rationally, but they had bigger fish to fry, so he slid his back on.
“What the hell, Ezra?” Frankie started again and threw her arms into the air, then was on her feet, the sheets (whose sheets?) in his old dorm room tossed on the floor. One of the sleeves of her sweater caught a prong from the ring, and she spent a good five seconds waving her left arm spasmodically trying to release herself. When she did, she circled around in search of her jeans, finding them under the wood-laminate desk, and jumped into them like an old-timey cartoon character.
Ezra watched all of this and was struck by how little she had changed; how much she reminded him as she so often had done in college of a tornado: always in motion, occasionally a thing of beauty, too often destructive. Her hair was blond now—he’d never pictured her as a blonde, always a broody brunette, but he gazed at her and thought that it suited her. Maybe because it gave the veneer of sunshine but then you noticed the darker roots and wondered if there weren’t something more menacing below. That’s who Frankie was. A blonde with dark roots, all the way down. She was leaner than a decade ago, reflected not just in her taut shoulders and arms (which he couldn’t help but notice in her tank top before she covered herself), but in her austere cheekbones too. He knew she was a big deal in the music world and jetted from city to glittery city, but Ezra thought that she looked like she could use a home-cooked meal. Not for the nutrition but for the nourishment. Even with the blond hair and the lithe body, she seemed nearly unchanged. Ten years had come and gone, and here they were, exactly as they had been.
Frankie caught her breath and then rubbed her temples. Then she was at it again.
“What the actual fuck, Ezra?! Please tell me that we didnot get...” She paused here, and Ezra thought she might actually gag. “Please tell me that we did notget marriedlast night?!”
“I thought you remembered last night clearly,” he said. “If memory serves, not even five minutes ago, you reassured me that you remembered everything.” He felt himself slide into unemotional work mode, which calmed him, slowed his racing heart.
“Stop being such a goddamned lawyer,” she scoffed. “I’m not on the witness stand here.”
Ezra did not bother correcting her, but it stung a bit, that she thought of him as a lawyer, that she hadn’t kept up on his life enough to know that he’d never given it much of a go. It’s not like hewantedher to be plugged in to his life, but standing there in front of her, he realized it’s not like he hadn’t wanted that either. He’d heard things over the years, didn’t mind perking up his ears whenever her name came up in conversation. Usually, it only served to remind him that they were better off apart, that they’d always been combustible. Still. It would have been nice to know her ears were perking up too.
They’d been best friends since the early winter of their sophomore year—even then, he was a serial monogamist who had split with his high school girlfriend the summer before Middleton (well, she’d split from him) and then committed to a flighty girl named Bethany. Frankie had plopped down next to him one night at the bar at Lemonhead, every student’s favorite drinking joint, and said: “I’m not a therapist, but you look like you need some life advice,” and he surprised himself and told her everything: about Bethany’s odd disappearances for days at a time, about his mother’s newly returned cancer.And Frankie said, “Well, if this is like where we spill our darkest secrets, I guess I can tell you, stranger, that my mom is 99 percent having an affair with my old piano teacher?” Ezra remembered that she said it like a question but then recalibrated and said, “No, she definitely is. She 100 percent is fucking him.” And he really didn’t know what to say, because what he wanted most in his world was to veer away from any messiness, and here was this girl who simply purged her messiness onto the bar. When he didn’t reply, she clicked her tongue and said, “Yeah, but anyway, I don’t understand why you’re with a girl who seems to have very few redeeming qualities? Just, like, to be with someone? That doesn’t seem healthy.” She was blunt, even back then.
Gregory had been hovering nearby, and he poked his chin between them and said, “Oh, hey, I’m Gregory, not Greg, just Gregory, and for the record, you—you’re Frankie, right?—you are totally right, and Ez, really, you’ll be ok if you dump her because it’s not the end of the world if you’re single, ok?”
