Frannie and Tru Read online

  Tru had his own bathroom and shower down there, and I started to think he’d stay there indefinitely. Not just tonight but all summer. He would never come out; he would just lurk underneath us, doing whatever he did.

  As I was thinking this, Mom came down from upstairs, and I ducked my head toward the unread pages. She walked right over and dropped a pile of towels on my lap, accidentally knocking the book to the floor.

  “Take them down, please.”

  I knew it should have been the most normal thing in the world, but the idea of taking those towels to him sent my heart racing. This was it. This was my chance. A chance at what exactly I wasn’t really sure, I just knew I wanted to talk to Tru, to get him to smile at me like he had outside the station.

  Yes, Frannie. Very subtle indeed.

  Arms full, I walked carefully down into the basement. The bedroom was straight ahead at the bottom of the stairs. The lock had been broken for as long as I could remember, but the door was shut tight.

  I knocked lightly, then waited. One second. Two seconds. Three.

  “Come in.”

  Tru was in Jimmy’s bed, sitting up against the headboard, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. His things were invisible, either still in the suitcase or tucked completely away in drawers. There was a book next to him on the bed. The Great Gatsby. In his right hand there was . . . something. Something that he was flipping around and around in his fingers, deftly as a magician, making the object appear and disappear from sight. I wondered if it was a little pencil, a golf pencil, when suddenly it was gone, tucked into his T-shirt pocket with a single motion.

  He sat up and turned toward me, sitting cross-legged, hands folded neatly in front of him.

  “Towels,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I placed them on a desk chair just to my right, realizing that once again I had nothing to say. Seconds passed in silence, each moment humiliating, but I felt madly compelled to stay. I had to. Just yesterday, I’d been sure the summer would be long, miserable, pointless. Now Tru was here, with all his charm and his jokes and his shit-eating grin, and there was a chance that he could give some life to the coming weeks.

  So I stood and stood and stood but did not leave.

  Tru broke the silence.

  “So your dad was saying something in the car right before we pulled up to the house. Something about a new school for you? A magnet school?”

  “It’s . . . yes. It’s because . . . Do you know that my dad’s been out of work?”

  Tru nodded like he knew, but still, I felt like this was some kind of betrayal. I got defensive.

  “Jimmy and Kieran are seniors, so it makes sense for them to finish at St. Sebastian’s, but I have three more years, and we can’t . . . ah . . . well. You know. It makes sense for me to go to public school. So I applied and got in. To the public magnet school.”

  “In the city?” he asked.

  “In the city,” I answered.

  Jimmy had been the one to pull me aside, months ago, and ask if I knew what that meant. That most of the kids would be black. “So what?” I’d snapped. “They’re just a bunch of dorks like me.” But the week before Mom and Dad pulled the plug on our internet, I’d hunched over the computer to look up the student breakdown and seen that he was right. I felt ashamed for looking it up, and yet I knew without the slightest doubt what Jimmy had been trying to convey: that I’d be some freakish redheaded refugee from Catholic school. That I wouldn’t make any friends.

  But . . . that wasn’t how the world worked anymore. Was it?

  The pathetic thing was, I didn’t actually know.

  For the first time ever, I tried to imagine what it was like for black students at St. Sebastian’s, and realized I had no clue. There were about eight hundred kids altogether, and there were, what, maybe a hundred who were black? I wasn’t really friends with any of them, even though they hung out with plenty of white kids—sat with them in class and joked with them in the locker rooms and dated them sometimes. But at lunch, most of the black guys and girls sat together, and I had no idea why, if they wanted to or felt pressured to or some combination. All these questions had gotten tangled in my mind with my worries about next year at my new school, the whole mess of it consuming me when I was trying to sleep. Eventually I’d started calming myself down with an elaborate fantasy.

  It went like this: I would arrive at the magnet school and immediately start dating a boy on the JV basketball team. We would take the world’s most beautiful homecoming photo, the dark skin of his arms circling my snow-white shoulders. He would have an older sister, who would hover over me with great affection, and the two of them would come to my house, and my parents and my brothers wouldn’t know what to do. They would look in awe at the new person I had become, and they would feel proud but also distant from me, because of how much I had changed. Can you believe, they would ask each other, that we ever worried about sending her to that school? This would be my new, beautiful life, and my boyfriend would never know I was the kind of person who had done secret racist searches on the internet.

  I had constructed this drama months ago, reliving it again and again until it grew warm and familiar. Now, as I talked to Tru, the whole of the fantasy flashed through my mind like a movie on fast-forward. He seemed on the verge of asking me more about school, but didn’t, and I sensed something in that hesitation. There was understanding in the look he gave me, as if he knew how serious this change was, what it meant. We met each other’s eyes, and then he cracked his knuckles, tilted his head, and let out a sharp sigh.

  “Frannie, do you know a place called Siren?”

  Siren was less than a mile from our house, a dark little restaurant and bar where local bands played at night. I nodded, and my heart began a trill. I told him it was close, and he said that he knew that. He had looked it up.

  “I have a friend, Frannie. She just started as a waitress there. She was a year ahead of me in school, and she’s down here for the summer, before she goes off to college, taking some special class at MICA. Do you know MICA?”

  MICA was the art college off Route 83. Or as Dad called it, “the planet’s single greatest concentration of white kids with dreadlocks.”

  I told Tru that I knew MICA.

  “Well, then you’re probably imagining that she’s some kind of artsy nightmare. She’s not really that bad, but I make sure to tease her about it mercilessly, just to keep her in line. Anyway, she’s just finished up her shift, but she’s sticking around to watch a show tonight.” He paused and waved his phone in my direction, a text lighting the screen. “Now, you and I are too young for after hours, but here’s the thing. My friend can get us in, and from there we should be fine. I, for one, am agonizingly close to eighteen, and while you are not so close to eighteen, you are very, very tall, and I think that will work to our advantage.”

  He paused and looked at me. “That would be fun, yes?”

  All the blood in my body seemed to be surging up, up, up, as if I were standing on my head, rerouting my insides, looking at the world upside down. I wanted to go to Siren with Tru. I couldn’t remember wanting anything more than this in my entire life.

  I nodded, and Tru looked pleased.

  “All right,” he said. “Now here’s the thing, Frances Little. I don’t imagine your parents will be very thrilled with this plan. So this is the all-important question. Is there anywhere acceptable we could possibly pretend to be walking to at nine thirty at night?”

  Happiness swelled inside me like a physical force. For once I knew exactly what to say.

  “Yes,” I said. “We can tell them that we’re going to Stix for Chix.”

  He blinked at me several times, as if I were blurry and he was trying to make me come clear. He put his head down and did a quick cough, looked back.

  “Well, I can’t say we have that in Connecticut. By all means, please tell me more.”

  FIVE

  For ages, I’d dreamed about
the Sophomore Summer Retreat. SSR, to all of us at St. Sebastian’s. I dreamed about it the same way I dreamed about kissing and prom dresses and being a grown-up with my own place. Yes, on some level I knew that unless I became some sort of freakish hermit cat lady, those things would happen to me eventually. They had to. It’s just that right now they seemed as distant as the moon. The stars. Magic glowing monuments that I would never ever reach.

  And when it came to SSR, I suppose I’d been right to be worried. That dream was never coming true.

  For kids at St. Sebastian’s, the retreat was huge, epic, this one special weekend before sophomore year when the boys and girls were carted off to neighboring cabins, where everybody did spiritual exercises and talked about feelings. For years, I’d heard older girls whispering about things that had been said during those weekends in the woods, about the intense talks and tears as everyone sat in a circle. Who knows what went on with the boys—Jimmy and Kieran still gave each other these stupid, knowing looks whenever somebody mentioned it. But the circle part was only kind of important, anyway. What really mattered was that kids always snuck in beer and met each other in the woods late at night. I’d been sure that I was going to have my first drink. My first kiss. I just had to make it to that cabin, into those trees, and my real high school life would finally begin.

  Except now, of course, that dream was over. There was no St. Sebastian’s for me. No summer retreat full of spilled feelings, secret booze.

  I’d planned to bunk with my three best friends: Mary Beth, Dawn, and Marissa. They must have picked another roommate by now, but I had no idea who. I hadn’t spoken to any of them since school let out, had actually been pulling away from them for months, ever since they found out about my dad, about my new school. When I first told them, their eyes had gone all big, and afterward they’d begun to tiptoe around me as if I were dying. First I resented them and then I began to think of them as silly. Pathetic, even. Pathetic little girls who lived sheltered little lives.

  And then had come that morning in the hallway.

  It was the end of winter, an icy March day. I was running late. My hair was knotted, and I was wearing last year’s uniform sweater, the only one I could find in the mess of my closet, the polyester stretched and worn, the sleeves too short. Rushing to my locker, I turned a corner and was surprised to see the three of them clustered around Kat Deveraux. She towered over them, slender, polished, and cold, not one of us. Their voices were hushed but thrilled, and I heard my name, a breathy whisper about my father and my new school.

  I couldn’t figure out why they would be telling her this, why she would care, but there was something in their voices that was a little nasty, and I started to suspect that I was being used. That my life was a hard flint of gossip, a way to strike a flame that would impress this witchy blonde.

  I tried to brush the thought away—I didn’t want it to be true—but then I caught a final hiss from Mary Beth.

  “She’ll be, like, one of the only white girls.”

  Just then the bell rang, sending everyone in different directions. At the same moment they spotted me and mumbled embarrassed hellos before rushing to class. I’d wanted to run away before they saw me, but I was frozen there, struck dumb not only by Mary Beth’s words, but the way she’d said them. With just a little too much eagerness, that desire to shock.

  Her voice, that closing thought, had echoed in my mind all morning. I’d never really thought of myself in those terms before, as a white girl. At least, I’d never felt that being a white girl actually meant something or mattered. But in that hallway that morning it suddenly did, and I got a flash of complicated feelings, a fleeting sense of what it would be like to be labeled like that. The words were a cold burn, harsh as snow on skin.

  When I saw the girls again at lunch, I was too big a coward to confront them, pretending, as they did, that nothing had happened. But things changed after that. I started ignoring their calls. I made excuses not to go places with them.

  Which was exactly why I’d had no plans to go tonight to Stix for Chix, this silly charity field hockey tournament that benefited a local women’s shelter. Girls came from all over the city to play little scrimmages in goofy costumes, while pop music blasted in the background. It went all night, like Relay for Life, so parents hated it, and kids loved it. Mary Beth, Dawn, and Marissa all played field hockey, so they’d be there, wearing ugly old prom dresses they’d bought at a thrift store about a month ago, one of the last times I’d really hung out with them.

  That day, I met them at the thrift store counter ready to buy some clothes of my own. Not joke clothes. Real clothes. Clothes I could actually afford with my babysitting money. Dawn noticed first, then poked Mary Beth who gave a little whoa of surprise and stifled a noise that might have been a laugh. Marissa sort of turned away, like she was trying not to see.

  The most painful part about it was that, in a way, they were just pretending. Acting. They weren’t that snobby, not really. Pushing me away had become a game, a power play, the kind of thing we’d done to other girls in middle school for no real reason except that we could. And we could, of course, because those girls were weak and scared. They didn’t speak up. And now that was me.

  As I counted out my cash and grabbed my bag of secondhand shirts and jeans, I decided that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with them. Not ever, ever again. They could have their stupid dresses and stupid all-night fun fest and stupid mean-girl games, all the more stupid because they weren’t even that cool. They didn’t party, didn’t have boyfriends. And who knows? Maybe that’s why they needed to push somebody around.

  I’d tried hard to forget that day, but now I was all tangled up in the memory as I told Tru what Stix for Chix was in a confused rush. I started to explain that my friends were there, only they weren’t really my friends anymore, but all I could do was trip in and out of an unfinished sentence. I finally just shut my mouth. Tru’s face grew supremely amused. He paused, considering me, and I could see he was fighting a smile.

  “Did you . . . want to go to this thing?” he asked.

  There was a level of politeness to this question. He seemed genuinely interested in what I would say. To be honest, before things had changed with the girls, I absolutely would have gone. It was the perfect excuse to be out late, and I would have loved any chance to run into boys from school, or better yet, new boys from different schools. But after everything that had happened, I didn’t want to go. Not at all. So I was happy, then, to answer with a roll of my eyes, giving the kind of opinion that I was pretty sure he’d appreciate.

  “I would rather die.”

  When I told my mother we were going to watch Stix for Chix, and that I wanted to say hi to Mary Beth, Dawn, and Marissa, she became a happy wreck. She knew I hadn’t really been speaking to them, and now there were tears in the corners of her eyes.

  Hot guilt coursed through my body but didn’t stop me.

  She offered to drive us three separate times, until finally I yelled, “My god, it’s a ten-minute walk! Ten minutes! Tru likes to walk. It’s one of his favorite things!”

  And with that we were finally out the door. I told him that we’d have to make an awkward loop so that it would seem like we were moving in the right direction, in case Mom was watching. We moved temporarily toward the shining stadium lights.

  “So that’s where your little friends are, with their little sticks? What college is that?”

  “Johns Hopkins,” I said. “It’s a smart kids’ school. Science and premed and stuff.”

  Just a few weeks ago, I’d heard my Dad call it “loserville, land of the unlaid” when he was talking to my mom, not realizing the twins and I could hear him from the other room. “Yeah,” Jimmy had yelled with a snort, “I bet Frannie will go there.”

  Dad sort of huffed around, face red, caught between being embarrassed and pissed. Not Mom. She’d come over and slapped Jimmy on the back of the head. She had a way of doing that where it was light but still shock
ing, not so much a physical thing but the surest, fastest way to make you feel like crap.

  After a couple of blocks, I turned left and Tru followed, as we moved toward our real destination. The two of us arranged ourselves side by side on the sidewalk. I watched him watching the houses. We lived in what people called a working-class neighborhood, which I was pretty sure meant kind of poor, but not really poor. Still, our street was on the outer edge, the part closest to the university, where things were nicer. People on our block sent their kids to some of the cheapest private schools, just like my parents did. And our neighbors cared for their lawns and planted flowers.

  Things changed quickly, though, on the way to Siren. Soon Tru and I were passing yards that had rusty chain-link fences and tacky plastic flamingos perched in the ground. The cars were dented or duct-taped and the dogs, staring at us from side yards and front windows, were uglier. Meaner. We were quiet for a while, and when Tru finally spoke, I thought for sure it would be a joke about where we lived.

  “You know what’s funny?” he said. “I actually do like walking. It really is one of my favorite things.”

  The mysterious item was back in his fingers, flitting between them and hiding from view. I tried to look without making it obvious. For a second, he paused the elliptical motion and simply held the item in his fingers—a cigarette, I finally saw.

  No, not a cigarette. Something hand-rolled, tapered at the end.

  He resumed his magic trick and chuckled.

  “We’re almost there,” I told Tru as we turned down a busy little street, its sidewalks crowded and storefronts lit up.

  Two boys in short-sleeved hoodies whizzed by us on their skateboards, almost knocking over an older couple dressed nicely for a date. Tru took in the scene and asked where exactly we were, what kind of neighborhood. I explained that lots of people thought the houses around here were dumps and the residents were trashy, but they also thought the stores and restaurants were cool. Rich folks came here for shopping and dinner.