Frannie and Tru Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Kevin, who always believed

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  The summer sky was dark outside my window when the phone rang. Not a tinny version of a pop song from somebody’s cell—the hard jangle of the landline. Almost no one called that number. Mostly telemarketers, sometimes ladies from church looking for volunteers, donations to the bake sale. But they never called this late.

  Opening my bedroom door a crack, I listened as Mom picked up the receiver in the kitchen and gave a little “Oh” of surprise. Seconds later she was rushing up the steps and into her room. She didn’t look in my direction, just closed her door with a click. Before she did I heard two soft words. “Oh, Deb.”

  Deborah. Her sister. The two of them were just a year apart, but hardly ever spoke. My room shared a wall with my parents’ room, so I leaned against it and tried to hear, thinking about everything on the other end of the line. Aunt Deborah with the perfect hair. Uncle Richard who worked at some sort of firm, the kind of place with three names. Somebody, somebody, and somebody else.

  And then there was my cousin Truman. Tru for short.

  Minutes passed, and Mom kept talking. Dad came up the stairs and disappeared into the room with her, staying silent as her voice murmured on. If it had been a year ago, I might have barely noticed, barely cared about some strange phone call from Aunt Deb, but right now I needed a distraction. Summer was here, but for me it promised to be a long and terrible slog. School had let out three weeks earlier, and I’d hardly left the house or spoken to anyone. Wrapped in gloom, I was practicing a kind of stillness—like a tightrope walker who looked straight ahead and thought only of keeping her balance.

  But now . . . now something about this secret conversation stirred me. Leaning closer to the wall, I felt a twinge of excitement. I had a sense that things were happening. I made myself flat, pressed my ear to the fading purple paint. Most of my mother’s words were indistinguishable, but one soft note sounded over and over, until finally I knew what it was.

  Tru.

  I woke just after midnight, tangled up in sweaty sheets, a dream slipping away before I could catch it. Minutes ticked by, and I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop wondering about the phone call. About Truman.

  He was two years older than me, the same age as my brothers, twins Jimmy and Kieran, which meant he was now seventeen. We almost never saw him, just a couple of Christmases or Easters here and there, and that was years and years ago. There in the dark, an old memory came to me. His family was with mine at our dinner table. Tru, hair nicely combed, fork and knife delicately in hand, was asking for something to be passed. Mom complimented his manners, but there was something off about it all, something in his practiced, smooth politeness. . . . Later I overheard Dad tell Mom, “That kid’s got a shit-eating grin.”

  His words had jolted through me. I was little, maybe eight, and swearing was a serious offense in our house. But then Dad chuckled, and I realized that he wasn’t mad. Not exactly. I thought about what he’d said, and even though I’d never heard that phrase before, I was pretty sure I knew what he meant.

  Tru was bad, but people liked him.

  Years passed when I didn’t see him at all. I knew practically nothing about him except that he lived in Connecticut and went to prep school, which I understood was fancier and more expensive than the Catholic schools we went to in Baltimore. He had slipped from my life so completely that I might barely have remembered him at all—but then there’d been that one amazing day. When I was eleven and he was thirteen, Tru made it to the big spelling bee, the one they show on ESPN. We’d had a family party, my brothers, my parents, and me crowding in front of the television with Coke and microwave popcorn. The camera panned over the kids onstage, and there was Tru. I could hardly believe it. We all cheered and clapped, and Dad called him “the great white hope, treading water in a sea of Indians and Asians.” Mom said that was inappropriate, while Jimmy and Kieran laughed so hard they fell off the couch.

  My heart fluttered like a little bird every time he approached the microphone, his name appearing in bold letters on the screen: Truman Teller. Lots of kids used their fingers to trace the words out on their palms, but Tru never did. Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and stared at some point off in the distance. He seemed to spell without effort, like he was pulling letters down from the sky.

  I was sure he was invincible, but in the end he fell. It was the end of round five. About half the kids were left.

  “The word is corpuscle.” “Repeat it, please?” “Corpuscle.” “Language of origin?” “Latin.” “Definition?” “An unattached cell, especially the kind that floats freely, a blood or lymph cell.” “Use it in a sentence?” “Red corpuscles have a biconcave shape, allowing for the rapid absorption of oxygen.”

  Tru missed the second c.

  When the bell dinged to signal his mistake, my parents and brothers groaned and shouted in disappointment, while I sank off the couch, landing in a heap on the floor. A sympathetic burn of embarrassment and disappointment filled my chest. I was someone who felt all my failures—bad grades, dropped balls—as little scorches of shame, and I couldn’t imagine what it was to fail so publicly, so enormously. As he came down from the stage, the camera caught his face for the briefest moment. His head was ducked, but I could see the hint of a hooked little smile.

  We turned off the TV after that, but I kept picturing Tru, that look on his face. I remembered my father’s words, “a shit-eating grin,” and a strange tingle came over me. A flash of understanding.

  Tru didn’t care about the spelling bee. He didn’t care at all.

  Somehow I knew that I was right. I’d seen it in the flare of his right lip when he thought the cameras weren’t looking. The idea amazed me, almost scared me. How could someone not care about something this grand, this important? I tried to imagine how that would feel, but it was impossible. I’d always been a good girl who followed rules and wanted to please. Still was today.

  When I was eleven I couldn’t have explained why that smirk mattered so much, why it affected me. But now, as I lay in in bed, staring out into the darkness, I found the words for what had struck me so.

  Tru was a person not afraid of the world.

  I woke up groggy, sunlight cracking through the crooked blinds. The morning was hot and sticky. Mom was banging around in the kitchen, so the boys had woken up, too, even though it was early for them. We settled around the dining room table for breakfast, because that’s what my parents liked us to do. We ate meals together, at a table, as a family. It was one of their big rules, like no back talk and no cell phones after eight p.m. Most of our friends thought we were freaks, and we didn’t blame them. But this morning something was wrong. I could tell right away. Our bowls were filled with dry cereal, and we were waiting for the milk, but Mom was holding it and wouldn’t let go. Dad put a hand to his mouth and co
ughed awkwardly.

  “Your cousin Truman is coming to stay with us. For the rest of the summer.”

  At first, we all just stared at him. He might have said the president was coming for all the sense it made. But then Mom told Jimmy that he would have to move out of the basement bedroom and back in with Kieran upstairs, like when they were little. That snapped everyone awake. Kieran gave a heavy sigh and leaned back in his chair, while Jimmy went red in the face.

  “Are you kidding me?” Jimmy asked. “Seriously. You’re kidding me, right?”

  Dad told him to deal with it. Jimmy opened his mouth again, but Dad gave him one of his looks that stop a person dead, then crossed his arms over his chest, swelling up like a gorilla. Jimmy shut up. I knew Dad was pissed, really pissed, because his cheeks were all mottled. He told us he was picking Tru up that night from the train station and would like for someone to come with him. To welcome our cousin. He glared at my brothers, who looked away and stayed silent.

  Seconds went by. Tick.Tick.Tick. Then I opened my mouth. Shut it. Opened it again and took a breath.

  “I’ll go,” I told him. “I want to go.”

  TWO

  An hour later, Mom and Dad had disappeared on errands unknown, while the twins were busy moving Jimmy’s stuff back upstairs and squeezing it into the too-small room. I was cleaning the kitchen, but as soon as I was alone, I started sifting through the junk drawer, pushing aside old rubber bands and stray birthday candles until I found what I was looking for: an old school portrait of Tru.

  He was just twelve or thirteen in it, still a little baby-faced, not smiling exactly, but cocking an eyebrow. This was the same Truman I remembered from the spelling bee, except here he was wearing his school uniform: navy blazer with an embroidered crest; crisp, white shirt; red tie. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, nothing like my brothers and me. Like my dad, we were red-haired, fair, freckled, and tall. Impossibly tall. They were both six three. I was five ten and still going.

  I searched the photo like it could tell me why he was coming. Kieran had eventually asked Mom, once things had calmed down a little, but all she would say was that we hadn’t see him in forever and were overdue to spend some time together. There was no way that was all there was to it, but the picture, of course, told me nothing. All it did was remind me that I had no idea what he looked like now. The more I stared at his face, the more he seemed like some kind of ghost boy, frozen in time and full of secrets.

  Before I knew what was happening, Jimmy snatched the picture from my hand.

  “Oh god—he’s worse than I remember.”

  Kieran came loping up the stairs and into the kitchen as Jimmy held up the little wallet print. I glared at both of them, but they didn’t seem to notice.

  “Can you believe we have to put up with The Blazer here all summer?” Jimmy asked.

  Kieran grinned. “But don’t forget he has to put up with us.”

  “Good point,” Jimmy said as the two of them headed back down the stairs. “I mean, look around. Does he know we’re living in the dark ages here?”

  This summer was the Dark Ages because we had just given up our internet and cable and would only be running the air conditioners when we were absolutely dying. These were just the latest blows in a series, all of which had begun in the fall when Dad started running low on work. He was a marine welder, which meant he went underwater and worked on things like submarines and bridges. Sometimes he had to travel, leaving for weeks at a time, and while it could be dangerous, it paid pretty well. But then his long-steady contracts had started to slow, and since December, they’d gone dry almost completely. Now he made almost nothing but spare cash through random jobs he picked up here and there—light plumbing and handyman chores, fixing the cars of friends and neighbors. When things first got bad, we’d pretended everything could stay the same, but as winter wound down, we kept cutting back, spending less and less. Finally, Mom had decided to double her shifts at the hospital. She worked there as a medical transcriptionist, listening to recordings that doctors made and typing out what they said. Whenever she talked about work over dinner, Jimmy would pretend to fall asleep.

  And now we had a hot, cramped house with no internet, no cable. I was sweating as I scrubbed a cluster of old, angry coffee cup rings that had set near the sink. For the first time I wondered what Tru would think of where we lived, our situation. I leaned into the sponge and scrubbed harder. The twins had left the photo of him on the counter, slightly crumpled now, and my eyes kept flitting toward it.

  Jimmy reemerged from the basement into the kitchen carrying an armload of T-shirts.

  “Frannie,” he asked, “do you think The Blazer knows that Baltimore is a cesspool of drugs and STDs? I don’t think the kids around here are going to be his type.”

  Kieran shuffled in behind him lugging two big dumbbells in his hands, two smaller ones tucked under his armpits. “Dude,” he said, “chill with the Blazer talk.” He tried to sound serious but was grinning. Jimmy acted like he hadn’t heard.

  “Do you think The Blazer really understands the concept of a row house?” Jimmy asked, looking pointedly at me. “I mean, does he even remember that all we have is a skinny little house that is connected to other houses? I don’t think he’s going to like the accommodations here at all.”

  “Well, shit,” Kieran said, now giving up and laughing, “you might be right about that.”

  “I mean, think about it,” said Jimmy, plucking the photo from the counter and waving it around. “This kid wants us to feed him?”

  Kieran rolled his eyes. “Uncle Richard must be giving them some cash. You know he must be.”

  “Shit,” Jimmy said. “Sometimes you’re not an idiot. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  I hadn’t thought of it either, but now the idea made me blush, embarrassed for Dad. Embarrassed for all of us.

  The twins turned in unison to look at me. Jimmy had shaved his head down to the faintest fuzz on the last day of school, and Kieran had been letting his grow for months into a great mass of clown curls. They were actually fraternal, though everyone found that hard to believe—they were practically mirror images. And right now I was sick and tired of both of them. I didn’t want to hear their jokes about Tru, because all the reasons that they couldn’t stand our cousin were the same reasons that I thought he was interesting. I kind of liked his school uniform, which was better than the stupid, shapeless sweaters we had to wear. I liked that he seemed too smart for his own good.

  And to be honest, what I really liked was that he was so different from my family.

  Jimmy sighed. “Frannie doesn’t seem concerned about how we’re going to make The Blazer comfortable. She doesn’t seem concerned at all.”

  Kieran shook his head at me, tsk-tsking, and then the two of them headed back downstairs to carry up another load, voices trailing behind.

  “Do you think he prefers squash or tennis?”

  “I’m guessing polo. Or fox hunting. You know—anything with a horse.”

  I looked up at the ceiling and sighed. In that moment I was glad that I was the only one going to the train station with my dad. It might be my only chance to make some kind of impression on Tru before he met the twins and decided we were all a bunch of loudmouthed idiots. I needed that chance; I knew I did. Because while I couldn’t say why exactly—maybe just because I had so little else to hope for—I thought that Tru might be able to lead me out of this sad and lonely summer.

  He was different from my family, so he might notice that I was kind of different from them, too.

  On the twins’ next pass by the kitchen, I turned my back, ready to ignore them, but then Kieran came over and put a sweaty arm around me, wrestling my neck into a gentle sort of sleeper hold. Some of my anger dissolved. It had been ages since he’d done something like that and, instead of yelping or fighting, I just went limp. I let myself be held. Kieran told me that my wrestling skills sucked as he gave me an extra squeeze that was almost a hug. He let me
go with a pat on the head and a final thought.

  “I was going to suggest that the kid bring a sleeping bag and ride out the summer on the floor in your room, but I just couldn’t do that to you, Frannie. ’Cause as far as I remember, Truman is kind of a dick.”

  As I put the cleaning supplies back under the sink, I got a little rush of nerves. There was something hiding here—a secret treasure, tipped on its side, wedged far back in the dark and dirty cabinet. I pushed past the trash bags and mousetraps and some old jars of oil. I moved aside the avalanche of cleaning supplies. And there it was.

  A small but almost full bottle of vodka.

  I’d been cleaning the kitchen for months now, ever since Mom had started working more, but still, I’d only noticed the bottle a few weeks ago. That’s how far it was shoved into the sticky recesses. And whoever left it here, Mom or Dad, had clearly completely forgotten—I was sure about that, because its disappearance had been the source of a major blowup just last week.

  Dad had been looking for it the other night, had ransacked the kitchen, in fact. When he couldn’t find it, he totally freaked out on the twins. A truly epic screaming match, apparently. I missed the whole thing, and when I finally heard about it, I knew I should tell everyone, but . . . I didn’t want to. If I told them where it was, it would be like admitting that I’d never need it. That I really was that profoundly uncool.

  Now, alone here in front of the cabinet, I liked the idea of having the bottle when Tru got here. I had no friends, no life, but I could offer this up, like it was no big deal. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  I knew Dad might go looking for it again, might eventually find it—so if I really wanted it, I should hide it away. Hide it somewhere extra safe.

  The boys were loud and busy upstairs. No one else was around, but that wouldn’t last long. If I was going to move it, I had to move it now.

  Grabbing the bottle, I leaped to my feet and ran through the vertical stretch of our house, the three rooms lined up in a neat column—kitchen, dining room, living room. I burst out of the front door with a squeak and a slam, flying across the street into the dog park. Rushing down the steep hill, I dodged rocks and trees until I reached the big, grassy basin at the bottom.