The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (15 page)

BIND IT TIGHT WITH STICKING PLASTER

Trish’s boyfriend Artie was an AVT guy. This meant he was one of the students who knew how to work the classroom DVD players, hook the teachers’ laptops up to projectors, and so on. Artie had keys. In a small, darkened room of Founder’s House, there ran a short film of Alabaster students in 1938 playing various sports, raising flags, and standing proudly in front of the Guppy. Artie had been in there to fix the projector more than once.

Which meant that Artie had keys to Founder’s House.

The building would close by five p.m.—before anyone was out of sports practice, so Alpha couldn’t return until ten a.m. the following day, if he could get himself excused from class somehow, and not until lunch, otherwise. To be sure of beating him, though, Frankie had to get in there before the place opened the next morning.

Directly after modern dance, she called in a favor from Trish. “I just need them for twenty-four hours, the sooner starting, the better,” she said as they stood by their lockers peeling off sweat-soaked leotards.

“What are you up to?” Trish narrowed her eyes as she wrapped a towel around herself and headed for the shower.

Frankie followed, her voice low. “Nothing. Something. I won’t steal anything.”

“You could get suspended for this, you know that?”

Frankie nodded.

“I mean, it’s one thing to be out on the golf course after curfew, but letting yourself into locked buildings full of valuable china and whatever—the administration is gonna take that seriously.”

“No one will see me,” promised Frankie. “I’ll be totally petuous.”

“I don’t know,” said Trish. “I feel like they see everything.”

“Trust me,” said Frankie. “You can be completely turbed.”

“You’re not even talking normal.” Trish closed the curtain on the shower stall and turned on the water. She didn’t speak for a few minutes. Frankie stood under the spray in the next stall over, knowing that her thoughts had crossed some kind of line.

If she were normal, she would be worried about her geometry test and whether she’d get a good part in the midwinter dance show and whether Zada was okay off in California with degenerate Berkeley students and whether Matthew loved her like she loved him.

But nothing seemed important except getting herself back on that roof.

Matthew had called her harmless. Harmless. And being with him made Frankie feel squashed into a box—a box where she was expected to be sweet and sensitive (but not oversensitive); a box for young and pretty girls who were not as bright or powerful as their boyfriends. A box for people who were not forces to be reckoned with.

Frankie wanted to be a force.

“Okay,” said Trish, turning off the water and heading back toward her locker.

“You’ll do it?”

“I said, okay.”

“Thank you,” said Frankie, shutting off her own shower and following, wrapping a towel around her as she went. “I am so mayed.”

“What?”

“Mayed.”

Trish sighed. “From dismayed?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re going crazy. You do know that, right?”

“Yah. Probably.”

Trish went with Artie to “study” in his dorm room after dinner, and came back with the AVT keys in her pocket. “He’s gonna miss them by Wednesday afternoon, for sure,” she told Frankie, handing them over. “So do whatever your creepy business is and get them back to me before then. He has to work the movie projector for the senior cinema elective.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

“And don’t copy them.”

“I won’t,” lied Frankie. “I would never.”

The keys were on a large ring, twenty-five all together, but Frankie got lucky. The fourth one she tried fit the lock. No alarm system. She had a small flashlight on her, but she kept it off, feeling her way up three flights of stairs and onto the roof.

She stood at the west railing of the widow’s walk, staring out. The library was there, just to the north, but what was she to see? Was there some secret in the buildings?

Or was whatever the chant referred to long gone? The campus had developed and changed since the oath was written, probably fifty years ago.

It sounded like the history was bound with tape. But how could anything be bound with tape that she could see from up here?

Frankie flicked her flashlight on briefly and walked over to the north railing to look at the bronze map. It was dated 1947, and didn’t include the new gymnasium, the arts complex, or the addition to the science building.

Look to the west, boys.
On impulse, Frankie dropped to her knees and felt underneath the map. The underside was smooth, unlike the raised surface, and she ran her fingers over the cool west edge.

Nothing.

Look to the books, men!
She ran her hands up and down the underside methodically, and there, underneath the tiny raised dome of the library, stuck to bronze with duct tape, was a small package.

It took most of twenty minutes to loosen the ancient silver tape enough to release it. When she did, Frankie flipped on her flashlight and shined it on the object in her lap. Wrapped in three layers of paper bags was a small leather-bound notebook.

HISTORY

The Disreputable History of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds
is filled with the minuscule print of schoolboys beginning in 1951. On the inside of the first page is a surprisingly competent painting of a basset hound, done in watercolor. The basset looks serious and ridiculous, simultaneously.

Herein are tales of the adventures of Bassets from the beginning of the Loyal Order, transcripted for use of future generations. Let history be your guide, oh hounds of the future! We, the undersigned, do formally commit ourselves to acts of disreputability, ridiculousness, and anarchy, reserving the possibility that we will also commit acts of indecency and illegality, should theoccasions call for it.

The Basset kings had recorded the activities of the club from its ’51 founding until—Frankie flipped forward—1975. That year, as was clear from the erratic handwriting as well as the prose, the primary activity of the Bassets (including one future president of the United States) was the smoking of marijuana. And because there was now this detailed record of the Loyal Order’s most illegal activity yet—the bags of “grass” and the “doobies” they smoked on the widow’s walk late at night on weekends—the Basset king that year (one Hank Sutton) insisted that a poetic Basset named Franklin Banks write a poem that simultaneously sang the praises of the Loyal Order and which would indicate for future members the top-secret hiding place of the
Disreputable History
, so that it wouldn’t be in danger of falling into the wrong hands over summer vacation.

Banks wrote the poem after inhaling, and that’s why it had come out as obscure as it had. He’d also set it to music, strumming on a guitar late at night in his dorm room. The next day he taught it to all the Bassets, including the future kings, and shortly thereafter, he and Sutton graduated—without ever telling the younger boys where they’d hid the History.

“Our song will reach down through the ages,” Sutton wrote, “and this record of our misdeeds and adventures will be unearthed when grass is legal and no harm can come to our reputations.”

Those younger Bassets had been too dumb to find the history, Frankie guessed. Probably they searched, but without luck. Years passed, and no one found it— and it was not long before none of them knew there had ever been a history at all. The oath had become nothing but an oath.

The book had been lost for more than thirty years. And her father used to smoke pot with that old Sutton guy. Frankie flipped back to the beginning.

“September 30, 1951,” wrote the king who signed his posts Connelly. “The first and foremost goal of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds is to acquire the Guppy.”

And then, in an entry written two weeks later:

The Guppy has been seized. Bassets Kennedy and Hardewick dressed in aprons and carried a large flower-delivery box. Skipping chapel (a time when the proverbial coast was guaranteed clear) they approached the piscine statue unobserved and loosened it from its moorings with wrenches and a bobby pin Kennedy had his sister send him in a package. Hardewick and Kennedy enclosed the Guppy in the box and loaded it into Hardewick’s car. The Guppy now resides in the basement of the Hardewick house in Williamstown.

Administration furious. Students protesting, demanding return of Guppy for Alabaster morale and good fellowship. Local paper covers event.

Basset Sheffield’s genius idea put into execution: we sent a note to the administration promising return of the Guppy in exchange for leniency and ten boxes of Mars bars. Administration agreed. Mars bars were delivered to a specified location and a flower box was returned to the headmaster’s office containing... an actual guppy.

(We are hereby regretful that the life of an innocent guppy was taken as a result of our mission, and resolve not to harm any more animals in the pursuit of our misdeeds.)

Anyway, administration absolutely livid. Actual stone Guppy to be returned the day after graduation so long as Hardewick’s mom doesn’t find it in her basement. Tee-hee.

In 1968, the Order erected a small tent on the central quad, outside of which was a sign: “Do Not Enter.”

Inside was nothing at all. The rather esoteric Basset king that year had simply wanted to see if people would disobey the sign, given that there was no apparent reason for the prohibition. Few of them did.

That same year they posted an official-looking list of rules in the caf—some of which were reasonable (“Do not cut in line; do not take two entrees”) and one of which read “Please walk only on the black tiles.” For the first few hours, the History reported, many students did in fact attempt to walk only on the black squares of the checkerboard floor.

Other years the pranks had been more traditional: Bassets had toilet-papered the headmaster’s car, hung underpants from flagpoles, put Jell-O in the toilets, and booby-trapped the doors of unwitting teachers.

Some years, the entries were packed with anecdotes, while others consisted of the barest sketches. Most years, the members pledged eternal loyalty to one another in writing, promising to “back each other through and through” and “never to forget, never to reveal.”

What struck Frankie most, as she read, was the sense of togetherness. The king usually wrote most of the entries, but Bassets edited each other’s writing, scribbled in comments, and took turns telling stories as well. They planned to know one another when they were ancient and gray—“when we’re doddering around with canes and have forgotten the names of our wives, we will still be Bassets, and still be young in our hearts,” wrote one rhapsodic boy in 1957.

The notebook was tattered, and on every fragile page Frankie could feel the fundamental connection between the boys. They were going through life together—whether the pranks they pulled were dumb or brilliant.

She was going through life with no one.

At the back of the notebook, a key was attached to the inside of the jacket with sticky tape. Underneath it was written in the cramped schoolboy script of Connelly: Hazelton, sub-16.

Hazelton was the library.