Frannie and Tru (24 page)

“Tru really likes you, Mom.”

A smile did break across her face then, but it was the saddest smile I could imagine. A smile that thought it wasn't worth a thing.

I hugged her, and she held me tight, almost too tight. I stayed there for a minute, and then asked if I could go to bed. She released me.

I crept up the stairs and into my room. The twins were murmuring behind their door, and I quickly shut mine. I crawled into bed, where I tried to stop picturing the sculpture, its twin figures rising defiantly against the sky, shining and glowing, Tru and me run aground at their feet. Instead, I thought back to the night he arrived, when we'd stared up at the heart, and I'd made him smile. With a joke that he still remembered.

And that's when I had a brilliant thought, much too late. When we sat on the curb and I couldn't find any words, I knew now what I should have said.

Very subtle way to say good-bye.

He would have loved that, absolutely loved it, I was sure. It would have broken the tension, started a mend to our rift. But of course it didn't help me now, alone here in my room.

At the beginning of the summer, I felt like I was always ten steps behind. Now I was only two.

When I woke in the morning it was early. I crept downstairs but no one was around. I poured myself a glass of water, stared out the kitchen window as I slowly drank. I knew Tru might still be sleeping, but I couldn't wait. I needed to see him.

The steps to the basement creaked like crazy as I descended. His door was open a crack, and I knocked quietly, then waited. Nothing. I knocked again, then peeked inside.

No Tru. The air seemed unusually still. The bed was neatly made.

I rushed back upstairs, just as the front door opened. It was Mom, alone.

I started to get a bad feeling. My face buckled in confusion.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Debbie wanted him home right away. I had to put him on an early train.”

At first I could only stare at her, not willing to believe it.

He had left without telling me good-bye.

At noon, I heard Dad come through the front door. He ducked into the kitchen and found me, Mom, and the twins in the kitchen, leaning against the fridge and the counters, eating a lunch of thrown-together sandwiches. His face, neck, and arms had deepened to a rich brown red—not quite a tan, not quite a sunburn. I cringed, waiting for him to explode, but I kept forgetting that, according to Tru's version of events, we'd barely done anything wrong.

He didn't even look at the boys or me, only at Mom.

“I should have been here,” he said, without even a hello. His duffel bag slumped to the floor.

My mother's smile was tight, but her eyes shone with something like love. Or maybe just relief.

“We're fine,” she said. “The van is fine. Poor Tru . . . I think he'll be fine, too.”

Jimmy threw his arms up into the air. “Seriously? I'm going to run the car into a trillion-dollar piece of art and see if anybody says,
Poor Jimmy
.”

Dad told him to shut up. Kieran told him to get his crap out of the room and back down to the basement. Mom told Kieran not to say
crap
.

And so it began, the chorus of bickering, everyone bumping into one another, grabbing the last of this or that while someone else loudly complained, all of them trying to navigate the small space without causing a collision. And me—I stood there and said nothing at all. The fight with Tru, the way he'd left, all of it had bruised me, and I was trying very hard not to prod around and test for damage. Not yet, at least. But there in the kitchen, with him gone, I felt my old nervousness and quietness threatening to return, ready to wrap me up like a blanket.

I wasn't going to let it.

Tru had gotten me out into the world, but now that he was gone, I had to keep the door open. I wouldn't go back to the way things had been.

I couldn't go to the jump-off like we'd planned, not after last night. Mom and Dad seemed okay, but I was sure they'd be on the alert, wary of more trouble. So what, then? It's not like I could go on a date with Devon—he hadn't asked, first of all, and besides, nobody went on dates. And I couldn't just hang out with him and the band, or him and P.J. None of that felt right. I needed girls, I realized, but I didn't have any.

Or maybe I did. I did have some girls. If I was willing to call them.

And I had vodka.

Grabbing the phone, I went up to my room and called Devon. I said that Tru was gone, breathlessly explaining why—an abbreviated version, at least. As I told the story, he just kept saying, “Holy shit,” over and over again until I got to the end.

When I told him how the cops let us go, he responded at first with a pause.

“I can't believe they let you go,” he finally said, with a short, hard laugh. “Or maybe I
can
believe it.”

His voice sounded odd, but I rushed on, because I was actually getting a little thrill from telling this story, my first encounter with the police.

“I know—when it was happening, I was totally freaked out. I thought we were screwed. But I guess they just saw us as dumb kids or whatever. I don't know, maybe cops don't really have time to bother kids. They probably just like to scare them.”

Another heavy pause. “Some kids they have plenty of time to bother. Some kids they do more than scare.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?”

For a few beats, I sat there dumbfounded. I genuinely didn't understand. But then I did.

He meant if it were him, it wouldn't have been that easy.

“Oh.” This was all that I could come up with, and it hung there in the air between us.

“So you know what I'm saying?” he asked.

Completely mortified, I tried to think how to answer, how to save myself. I thought maybe I should try to be funny.

“Yeah. I mean, I do. I know what you're saying. This, ah, wouldn't be a good situation to try Black Guy, White Guy, I guess.”

This time, though, Devon wasn't laughing. I mumbled a practically inaudible “Sorry
.
” Then like a total moron, I kept talking, trying to make things better.

“Actually, one of the cops was black. She was, ah, she was kind of nice, I think. I mean, she wasn't nice, she was mad or whatever, but . . . she seemed like a good cop.”

At first he said nothing. Then he cleared his throat.

“Yeah, you'd think that would matter, if the cops are black, but it doesn't always matter. Which . . . it makes these kinds of things even more screwed up.”

And with that I was out of things to say. I was still so freaking clueless sometimes. First Tru, now this. It was like I knew just enough now to realize that I knew almost nothing. I wanted to hang up the phone and go hide in some dark corner of my closet. That would have been the easiest thing to do.

But now there was a question burning in my mind, and I thought it was better to ask it.

“Have the cops ever bothered you before?”

I heard him shifting around on the other end of the line, and when his voice came back, it was softer than before.

“Actually, no. My friends, some of them can tell you stories. But I've been lucky. Part of that is because I'm careful. My mom
has seriously
drilled
that that kind of shit into me, because she worries. A lot. She comes out and watches me lock my phone in the glove compartment before I can leave the driveway.”

“In the glove compartment? You mean so you can't text?”

He laughed a little. “Yeah. She's crazy. Plus if I wrecked her precious hybrid she'd kill me.”

I could feel a purposeful change in his voice: he wanted to get away from this conversation. He was trying to sound light.

“So, ah, what's going on with tonight?” he asked.

I took a breath and plunged ahead, pretending like everything was fine. I told him then that I couldn't go to the jump-off, not after everything, not with my parents on edge. And even though I was now nervous as hell, I asked if he and P.J. and Winston and Tara wanted to come to my neighborhood instead, to hang out in the park across the street and have a drink. He said yes, and relief rushed through my body like a physical force. As we hung up, I closed my eyes, told myself that everything might still be okay.

After that, I called Mary Beth, asked if she wanted to bring the girls and meet in the park. I said that I had boys. And vodka. She said yes, too.

Finally, I asked Kieran if he and Sparrow wanted to come, even though it was just a bunch of dumb younger kids, doing nothing much. He smiled at me kind of sadly and said no thanks. He told me he had wanted to hang out with Sparrow that night, but she'd passed. She didn't think it was a good idea.

“You should call her again,” I said. “Maybe she'll change her mind.”

My voice wavered a bit when I said it, though. We both sensed, I think, that the fleeting spark between them had passed, or been extinguished, perhaps, by one bad night.

Mary Beth, Dawn, and Marissa met me at our house after dinner. I told Mom we were going to sit in the park for a bit, just until it started to get dark, then we were walking down the block, to meet Devon and the other guys for ice cream or maybe something from the coffee place. She looked a little suspicious, but I reminded her that those shops only stayed open until ten. We'd be back by ten fifteen.

She gave me her cell phone. She told me to be good. She told us that we were not to stay in the park after dark, not under any circumstances. She eyed the red dress she had given me, looking at my legs. I scuttled away to grab a few iced teas, and then we hurried out the door, across the street, and down the hill.

The park was still mostly empty from the heat. Mary Beth and Dawn couldn't stop giggling. Marissa was quiet and nervous. We walked quickly to the bridge, slipping into the white cavern. This was the first time I'd passed this way in a few weeks. Looking at the walls, I searched for the summer's new graffiti, but couldn't separate it from the old—the confessions mingled with the anger, woven in with the declarations of love.

I told them to wait there, while I went to get the vodka. Popping out the other end of the tunnel into the fading sunshine, I picked my way through the overgrown grass and weeds. My hands dove into the sumac and pulled out the red handle. Trying
to keep from getting too dirty, I dug into the ground just enough to open the lid and lift out the bottle.

I was ready to rush back to the girls, but as the vodka lay heavy in my hands, I paused. I realized now how silly my initial plan seemed, the idea that I could have won Tru over with this, that it would be the key to our friendship. Clearly he'd been able to find booze and pot just fine without me . . . and becoming his friend was a lot more complicated than some lame little bribe.

All summer, I'd been saving this for some epic, perfect night with Tru. But this afternoon, when I'd made the plans to finally drink it, I'd forgotten all that. It wasn't some magic token to a better summer. It wasn't a secret weapon to impress people.

It was just a bottle of cheap vodka. Something to share with my friends.

Moving more slowly now, I tiptoed out of the overgrowth, slipped under the bridge again, where right away I heard the girls murmuring. They had their backs to me as I approached, and they were whispering to one another in a strange way, like maybe something was wrong. As I come up behind them, they looked toward me for only a second, then turned their focus back out to the open field of the park.

I realized they were watching Devon, who was jogging quickly toward us.

Devon
. As soon as I saw him, his easy stride, his smile visible even from here, I wanted desperately for everything to be okay. I wanted not to be so stupid; I wanted us to be able to talk. I wanted a second kiss, an even better kiss than the first.

From my stance behind the girls, I raised both arms, waving big and wide, smiling back at him.

“Frannie, why is that sketchy guy coming down here?” asked Marissa. “Should we leave?”

Her words hit me like a blow.

“I have, like, tons of shit in my purse,” Mary Beth said. “My iPad, my new phone.”

They turned back to look at me, wide-eyed and nervous, and only then did they see my frozen pose, arms still raised in the air, calling Devon to us.

As I lowered them to my side, comprehension flooded their faces. They looked embarrassed.

But not, I thought, embarrassed enough.

“Oh, shit,” Marissa said. “Sorry. I mean, I didn't know. We didn't know.”

I had no idea how to respond, and I couldn't have anyway—Devon was almost here. As he approached, I took in every detail of him. The skinny jeans, the David Bowie T-shirt, the perfectly white sneakers. His big eyes shined, his hair was twisty, as it had been since the day I met him. I still thought he looked like he belonged on a college brochure. He didn't look
sketchy
.

Except that he did. To the girls.

He arrived at my side, and I did my best to smile as he grabbed my wrist, gave me a kiss on the cheek that felt more friendly than anything else. He pulled his cell out of his pocket.

“We came in way at the other end, at the top of the path? Everybody else is by the creek—I just came to find you.” His
thumbs flew over the keys, and when he was finished, he shoved the phone away, gave his most charming smile to the girls. “Hey there. I'm Devon.”

He shook all their hands as they told him their names, and I tried to read their faces, hoping to see more guilt than they had shown before, but I couldn't tell what they were thinking, what they were feeling. And now I could see P.J., Winston, and Tara were hurrying over to us, too. They came from a break in the trees, their necks craned, looking around and smiling, taking everything in. A moment later they were there beside us, everyone introducing themselves in a flurry, telling me thanks for the vodka.

Meanwhile I could barely think straight, could barely form a word. All I could do was replay what the girls had said, again and again. I was angry at them, but I was angry at myself, too. Because I knew that a couple of months ago, I might have reacted exactly the same. Even now, I cringed to admit this, but I'd probably be edgy, too, having the same kind of thoughts they did, if it was a black boy I didn't know. If it wasn't Devon.

I felt a little pinch on my arm. I turned and there he was, smiling. Concerned.

“You okay?”

I tried to smile back, felt myself failing. “It's been a weird couple of days.”

He tilted his head, looking at me closely. We were standing a little bit apart, and he kept his voice quiet. “Look, I'm sorry about earlier. On the phone.”

“No,” I said. “I'm sorry. I said some stupid things.”

“It's fine. I mean—I don't expect you to get it.” I winced a little, and then he did, too, as if it had come out sounding worse than he'd expected. “I just mean it's hard to understand.”

I looked down, nodding, because nothing had ever seemed more true to me. Everything, everyone, was so hard to understand—this summer had convinced me of that completely. Everything that Sparrow had said that day at the stadium was suddenly echoing back to me. I was hearing her words about the quiet, subtle way we view people, how insidious it can be. And I knew that she meant the way that the world looked at black boys, and I felt a little chill when I thought of the emotion in her voice, and when I thought about that the fact that she was right. The big, tragic things that happened with the cops, the little ugly judgments made by people like my friends, like me—they were all part of it. I'd spent so much of my life never bothering to think about things like that, and even now that I wanted to, it was hard to know where to begin. I was starting to understand how many little biases I had, how much they affected the way I saw people, the assumptions I made. And not just the Black Guy, White Guy kind of assumptions. There were so many others. I was starting to realize how unfair I'd been to some of the people in my life, really important people. Two months ago, I hadn't understood Kieran—not really, at least. I hadn't understood my mother either.