“I have a blistering headache. Not a hangover headache, just that it feels like—” She reached up to touch the top of her head and assess.
But before she could say another word, the lock on the door clicked and the door swung open. A young woman, no taller than five feet and bundled in wool from tip to toes, appeared in front of them. Her eyes widened, and she froze.
Ezra had the bad luck of being the one standing within striking distance, so when she unfroze and screamed and reached for something that was buckled to her backpack, he was the one who was unfortunately blinded by her Mace.
FIVE
Frankie
TEN A.M.
Frankie did feel badly to see Ezra in such a state, even if she preferred not to see him at all. She rubbed her temples and tried to pray her headache away, but it felt selfish to worry about the pounding in her own head when he could barely crack open his eyes. She thought of that poor student, returning home from her walk of shame (Frankie didn’t know if she was still allowed to say that?) to find two strangers in her dorm room. She could hardly blame her for dousing Ezra, then fleeing the scene. Frankie had scrambled around and grabbed what she could: her Doc Martens, their jackets, her purse, before tugging Ezra, who was alternating between whimpers and hysteria, out into the dorm hallway, then down the steps to the frigid outside air. It occurred to her now that she was missing her Walkman. And Night Vixen’s early cuts.
Holy hell, this was turning into a ten-alarm fire.
She refocused. One problem at a time.
“We need to take you to a hospital,” she said.
Ezra was sitting on a concrete step outside Homer, its brick facade glimmering in the snow, and muttering, “My eyes, my eyes, my eyes,” his breath puffing out into clouds in front of him. Ezra had always been a bit of a hypochondriac, which in hindsight might have just been a cry for someone to take care of him. That had never been her strong suit, back then, maybe not now either. But today, Frankie, in a moment of genuine pity, wrapped Ezra’s coat over his shoulders and sat beside him to rub his back.
It was odd, she thought, touching him again. With no memory of the night before, this was essentially the first time she’d made contact with Ezra Jones in a decade. A third of her life, really. A significant enough swath of time that he felt like both a stranger and also a familiar puzzle piece that clicked so easily into place. They’d fallen in love organically, simply, like learning a song stanza by stanza.
The night she sidled up to him at the bar at Lemonhead, he’d told her that she was the easiest person to talk to he’d ever met, that she made him want to tell her his secrets. Frankie remembered being flattered: she had been called many things, but amiable and approachable had never been among them. And he was easy to talk to too: like someone she needed to know, like someone who made her like herself more than she realized she could. And so she decided that they were going to be great friends, and they had been. They spent the remainder of their sophomore year swapping stories at the library or splitting buttered bagels while they crammed for their art history exams (they discovered they were in the same lecture), and once Bethany dumped him that spring,they metaphorically leaned closer and closer into each other like magnets until there was no space between them. And they stayed that way until they didn’t, the day of graduation.
Now, Frankie’s hand worked in concentric circles over his shoulder blades, and she reminded herself that this was a temporary balm, a short-lasting kindness. She did not want to be entwined with Ezra again. She had new people with whom to swap her stories, to share her secrets. She couldn’t think of any at the moment, but she was sure that she did all the same.
Then she remembered the ring. Rings. Plural. She pressed her eyes closed and tried,triedto recollect what had happened. She met Laila in the lobby, and they’d taxied over to Lemonhead—the hotel, set back from campus and newly built for high-end donors and guest lecturers, was too far a walk even in Doc Martens. They ordered drinks, and Frankie was proud of herself for starting with a club soda. They toasted to seeing each other again. She had a vague image of the bar: not much had changed in the ensuing decade, but then students hadn’t flocked there for the dingy decor. Rather, they were liberal with their ID policy, and pitchers of beer were five bucks. The floor was still sticky from spilled drinks; the pleather on the backs of the booth seats still crackled beneath their weight; the light was still dim enough to conceal all sorts of misdeeds. It was oddly crowded for winter break, but then plenty of students opted to stick around over the holidays—either by choice or by circumstance. Frankie had been one of them until she started going home with Ezra instead. Middleton forged new families—she wasn’t so many years out that she didn’t remember that.
The first time Ezra had invited her home, it had beenChristmas break, they’d been together for four months, they were seamless in the way that early love is. After they first slept together in the B and B that Ezra had splurged on—a memory that Frankie revisited now for the first time in years, flooding her cheeks with heat—they wanted always to be naked, and when they weren’t naked, they wanted always to be together. At lectures, in the library, at the dining hall. It didn’t matter. The span of a two-week break felt interminably long to the both of them, and Frankie’s parents were splintering by then: she couldn’t bear to decamp to West Palm Beach, where they spent most Christmases, and be the glue that held her parents together.
Frankie was surprised to remember this now—how easy it had been to say yes to spending break with him, how easy the two weeks had been in a home that wasn’t hers. She was a near-professional at performing for strangers, even several years after quitting performing entirely, but she found that his mom asked for no artifice, and Ezra demanded even less of it.
“Just you,” he would say. “Just you.”
That holiday break, he’d suggested ice skating. There was a pond over in Bryn Mawr that was shallow enough to freeze by mid-December, and all the local kids made an event out of it: the first skate out. Frankie could borrow his mom’s skates, Ezra had said. Someone always set up speakers and a boom box and blasted whatever was charting on the radio. And someone else always inevitably sold hot chocolate for a quarter, fifty cents if you wanted marshmallows.
But Frankie had never learned to skate. She didn’t explain the why of it because she wasn’t yet ready to trust anyone with her history—it had been because she’d had one singular focusin childhood, and anything beyond that,any childhood things, were simply not on the docket. She’d barely even told him that she played piano by that point, by that magical Christmas. When he suggested that they head to the pond for the evening, she shook her head and burst into tears. It had to be the first time he’d seen her cry. It was one of the last times too, in fact.
He told her that he didn’t care if she were the world’s worst ice skater; he didn’t care if she dug her fingers into his elbow or spent the bulk of the evening on her butt. He thought it would be amazingly endearing if either of those proved true. But Frankie simply would not budge. She didn’t want to learn something new; she didn’t want to be the only one at the pond who looked like a fool. Later, Ezra realized that what she really meant was: I only like to do something when I am the best at it.
They agreed to go to the movies instead. They sawMoonstruck, and Frankie had laughed until she got a cramp in her side. But he made her promise that she would take lessons at Abel Rink, Middleton’s hockey arena, when they got back. She didn’t know why he cared, why that was so important to him.
“It’s not like ice skating is, like, a critical life skill,” she said while they were waiting in the concession line for a large popcorn and Red Vines.
“No.” He shook his head and smiled. “But what if I want to take you skating some time? Just because I want to? Wouldn’t it be nice if you said yes?”
Now, a decade later, the cold from the step outside Homer was seeping through her Levi’s, just like it had all those years ago on the ice, and Frankie pushed the memory away. She wasn’t here for nostalgia; she wasn’t interested in a trip down memory lane. Getting swept up in emotion today wasn’t goingto help anything. She nodded to herself, an exclamation mark on her proclamation. Beside her, Ezra shoved his arms through the sleeves of his North Face puffer, and Frankie hopped to her feet, happy for a respite from the chilly concrete, a respite from her thoughts.
“Can you walk? We really need to get you somewhere.” She paused. “Isn’t student health...” She glanced to her left and right, tried to get her bearings. In contrast to the pulse at Lemonhead the night before, the campus was quiet, the snow falling in wet, fat flakes and starting to stick. The gray Gothic buildings seemed to shiver, so Frankie did too. She thought again of the ring on her finger and wondered, if she managed to wrestle it off and dropped it in the snow and let it sink to the ground below, if that would mean that whatever happened simply hadn’t. Could you erase a moment or an act just by burying it? Frankie knew well enough the answer, but that didn’t mean she didn’t consider it all the same.
Ezra was still whimpering on the chilly steps beside her. His eyes were swelling at an alarmingly rapid rate, his lids and surrounding skin a bright angry pink. Frankie didn’t want to play nursemaid, but she also didn’t know what other choice she had, and she’d done it often enough for work: a harried trip to the ER for a pumped stomach in Milan, a backstage IV of fluids if it meant getting the artist onstage in London.
“Goddamned Mace!” Ezra squawked, and Frankie wasn’t sure if he was genuinely crying or just unable to stop his tears from the spray. Ezra had always been an easy crier. In college, she first found this lovable, but by the end, she thought it was all a little melodramatic. “I mean,” he continued, “who maces a perfectly nice guy standing there trying to explain himself?”
Frankie didn’t think this was the time to get into the dynamics of a young woman returning home to find a strange man in her room or point out that she also kept Mace not only in her purse but in her glove compartment too.
“Come on,” she said. “You need help.”
