The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

by E. Lockhart

  I, Frankie Landau-Banks, hereby confess that I was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. I take full responsibility for the disruptions caused by the Order—including the Library Lady, the Doggies in the Window, the Night of a Thousand Dogs, the Canned Beet Rebellion, and the abduction of the Guppy.

  That is, I wrote the directives telling everyone what to do.

  I. And I alone.

  No matter what Porter Welsch told you in his statement . . .

  Examination week began that same day, and Frankie was grateful. The semester’s classes were over and the usual rhythms—meals, sports practice, dorm check-in times—were all suspended in favor of a test schedule.

  Frankie, her arm bandaged and a prescription for antibiotics in her pocket, dropped the letter in Richmond’s office and went up to the widow’s walk to call Zada. She explained everything.

  “Senior is going to lose his mind,” Zada said after she’d listened.

  “I know.”

  “Why did you want to be a member of his dumb old club anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I doubt he’ll be mad that you wanted to be a member,” said Zada. “I mean, I think it’s like his dream that you follow in his footsteps. But he’ll be furious you got the whole thing exposed and lost the Disreputable History. He’ll think you showed disrespect to his sacred institution and compromised the secrecy of the club.”

  “Do you think he’ll pull me out of school—if I’m not expelled?” asked Frankie. “Like, he’ll refuse to pay for it anymore?”

  “Maybe. But do you want to go to Alabaster anyway?”

  Frankie did—and she didn’t. She wanted the good education. She wanted the power that being an Alabaster alum would give her. She wanted the doors to open that Alabaster could open for her.

  She was an ambitious person.

  But she also hated the boarding school panopticon, the patriarchal establishment, the insular, overprivileged life. And she hated the thought of another half year in company with Matthew and Alpha, after what had happened. Part of her wished Richmond would expel her, the way he had been planning to expel Alpha; or that Senior would refuse to pay, and the choice would be made for her.

  “You can sic Ruth on him if he tries to pull you out,” continued Zada, when Frankie didn’t answer. “If she starts in on him, he’ll keep you in school. He can’t say no to her whenever it comes down to it.”

  “I know,” said Frankie.

  “Bunny, do you need to be on medication?” Zada asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “I mean, should you maybe go have a chat with a counselor? It sounds like you’re kind of—like you got obsessed.”

  “I think it’s the institution,” said Frankie.

  “I’m not saying an institution, I’m just saying a counselor.”

  “No, it’s the institution that’s wrong with me,” said Frankie.

  “Alabaster?”

  “I was trying to master it.”

  “Bunny, go talk to the counselor for one hour. I’ll help you deal with Senior.”

  “I have a geometry test,” Frankie told Zada. “I have to go now.”

  Outside Founder’s House, Frankie ran into Porter. He had been waiting for her. “Let me walk you to geometry,” he said, stepping onto the quad. “Are you ready for the test?”

  Frankie shook her head. “I’ve been in the infirmary. I haven’t studied that much.”

  The last time they had spoken, she’d been screaming at him in the Front Porch, but Porter acted as if nothing could be further from his mind. “I didn’t know it was you,” he said as they walked. “When I turned in those e-mails, I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Oh.”

  “I thought it was Alpha. I mean, I know we’ve had our differences, and I was a jerk last year, but I wouldn’t turn you in to Richmond like that. I had no idea. I would feel so bad if you got expelled because of what I did.”

  He still had an impulse to protect her—he who’d done her more damage than anyone. “Why did you turn them in at all?” Frankie asked. “Weren’t you a member of the Loyal Order?”

  Porter shook his head. “Not really,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I was a spy.” He said it with a glimmer of pride. “Last March, when Richmond let Alpha back in to Alabaster for senior year—he knew he was letting in a troublemaker. Alpha had broken all kinds of rules his first two years; he got caught with alcohol. And cigarettes. He snuck off campus. You know.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Anyway,” said Porter. “Richmond wanted to give Alpha a chance to graduate from Alabaster, but also wanted someone in the student body who could keep track of what Alpha was up to, because Alpha potentially wielded a lot of control over the senior boys.”

  Frankie looked at her feet, stepping in the muddy, packed snow of the unsanctioned path across the quad. “Why would you do something like that?”

  “Richmond knew I was failing bio.”

  “You were?” Frankie hadn’t known.

  “I had blown off the homework at the start of the term and couldn’t catch up. Puffert was threatening to make me repeat the class, but Richmond called me in and told me he could make the problem go away if I would do something for him. He knew I was friendly with Callum and Tristan from lacrosse, and asked if I would, you know, join the pack. And report back if anything major was brewing.”

  “Richmond knew about the Bassets?”

  “No. The guy was clueless until all those dogs started popping up this year. He just told me to see if I could get in with those guys and keep an eye out. I knew that meant becoming a Basset, but that if I made the right moves it wouldn’t be too hard.”

  “Why not?”

  “My dad was a member, and my older brother, too.

  Whole thing. I’m a legacy. So I was fairly certain I’d get the tap, if I only got those guys to like me.”

  “Didn’t you think how upset your family would be when you betrayed the Order?”

  Porter laughed bitterly. “Yeah, I thought about that.”

  “So how could you do it?”

  “The last thing I want is to be like my dad, Frankie.” Porter shook his head. “Or my brother. You should remember that. I hate everything they stand for.”

  “So you told Richmond yes.”

  Porter shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, I thought it over carefully. I’m not saying it was easy. But Richmond was rescuing me from repeating bio, I got to say F.U. to my dad, and in addition, it was a chance to knock Tesorieri off his perch.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I got new clothes, I joked around in the locker room, I showed up at parties even when I wasn’t invited, until eventually—I was invited. It wasn’t hard, really.”

  “What’s your grudge with Alpha?” Frankie asked him.

  “He went out with my sister Jeannie when they were sophomores. Didn’t you know that?”

  No, she didn’t.

  “He broke her heart. Completely stopped talking to her one day. No notice, no formal breakup. She ended up sinking into a huge depression and spent all of the next summer locked in her bedroom, drinking and listening to The Smiths. Ruined.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, my parents had to send her to a shrink.” Porter took off his scarf and folded it neatly as he walked. “So I never liked the guy,” he went on. “And then once I was in the Order, he was so full of himself. Sure, I had to admire his ideas—well, they were your ideas—but I hated the way he acted like he owned us. Leader of the pack. It just grated on me.”

  “What about Callum and Tristan? You didn’t care about betraying them?”

  “They’re good to play lacrosse with. But they’re— they’re very clubby. Very old school. I’m a geek, Frankie. They’re not like my real friends.”

  “Matthew made you apologize to me, didn’t he?” Frankie guessed.

  “I would have anyway.”

>   “And he made you give him a printout.”

  “Well, yeah. He did. You knew about that?”

  Frankie nodded. “I found it.”

  “He’s not everything he seems, Frankie. I tried to warn you away from him at the Front Porch, but I couldn’t say anything else because he got seriously mad that I asked you to come to lunch with me, and then even madder when he heard we’d been arguing.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, for weeks I was getting these notes from Matthew every couple days, questioning my loyalty and telling me I’d better adhere to the code of the Bassets or lose my place. So there was no way I could report to Richmond or do anything but exactly what Alpha was telling me to do in the e-mails—or the Bassets would kick me out and the whole spy project would be for nothing.”

  “Only it wasn’t Alpha writing the e-mails.”

  “No.” He looked at her and pulled his winter cap down farther over his ears.

  They were standing in front of the mathematics building now. Students were filing in for the eleven a.m. exam. “Anyway,” said Porter. “I wanted to say that I didn’t know those e-mails I turned in would implicate you. I’m sorry for all the trouble it’s causing.” “What’s the difference?” Frankie asked him.

  “How do you mean?”

  “What’s the difference between me and Alpha? Why would you turn him in, and not me, if your mission was to turn in the person responsible?”

  Porter frowned, thinking. “I have some kind of loyalty to you, I guess. Because we used to go out. I think you always have some kind of leftover loyalty to a person you went out with.”

  “And you don’t have any loyalty to Tristan? Or Callum?”

  He shrugged. “I was never really there, you know? I was just pretending to be there.”

  Neither of them knew what to say for a minute. Frankie scuffed her boot in the snow.

  “Why did you do all that, Frankie?” asked Porter. “I mean, it was brilliant, what you did, what you made us do—but why would you bother? That’s what I can’t figure out.”

  Frankie sighed. “Have you ever heard of the panopticon?” she asked him.

  Porter shook his head.

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Then I can’t explain it,” Frankie said.

  They went inside and took the geometry test.

  SOME MORE E-MAIL

  In some ways, we can see Frankie Landau-Banks as a neglected positive. A buried word.

  A word inside another word that’s getting all the attention.

  A mind inside a body that’s getting all the attention.

  Frankie’s mind is a word overlooked, but when uncovered—through invention, imagination, or recollection—it wields a power that is comical, surprising, and memorable.

  Now, not only is it true that a student with significant family wealth is less likely to be kicked out of a fancy boarding school than is a scholarship student, it is also true that a sweet-looking girl with no prior record of misbehavior gets a more lenient sentence (even with a full, written confession) than would a senior boy with a history of visits to the headmaster’s office.

  Headmaster Richmond and the committee on discipline agreed to keep both Alpha and Frankie at Alabaster on probation. They let her know two days before the end of winter exams.

  And Frankie found that she wanted to stay.

  Or rather, she chose to stay, even though she also found it terrifying. In the long run, staying was more likely to get her where she wanted to go. Wherever that was. Wherever that is. Because the education, and the connections, and the Alabaster reputation were worth the trouble—even though Matthew and his friends were forever lost to her.

  Winter break. Hannukah. Ruth, the vile pack of boys, Zada home with a suitcase full of hippie clothes and feminist literature. I will not tire you with details except to say that Frankie’s position at family gatherings was slightly different.

  She had surprised everyone.

  They were not sure quite where she fit in anymore. If she was not Bunny Rabbit, as it was finally clear she was not—who was she? Senior, down for a visit, could not look her in the eye. Ruth squeezed her shoulders frequently but rarely engaged in conversation. Uncle Paul and Uncle Ben refrained from their usual questions about boys and school, settling instead for offering to play a game of Monopoly when they came over for a holiday meal.

  Frankie beat them both easily.

  December 22nd, after a big family dinner of latkes and applesauce, complete with Paulie Junior throwing a potted plant out a second-floor window and paying the smallest of the vile cousins to run all the way around the block with no shirt on, Frankie closed herself in her room and opened her laptop. At the top of the screen was her Gmail icon. Messages: 1.

  She hadn’t had mail at thealphadog since Matthew had turned her in.

  From: Alessandro Tesorieri [at114@alabasterpreparatory.edu]

  To: thealphadog@gmail.com

  Subject: A compliment, believe it or not

  I’ve thought about writing you, a lot—but then I didn’t. I don’t think you deserve it, seriously.

  But then I keep remembering the work.

  The plotting, and the access to the buildings, and the letters and the e-mails.

  Even the shopping.

  Getting all those dogs to do your bidding.

  I remember that you made Matthew and everyone—the whole school, even—think I was a genius.

  That I was the guy I’d like to be. The guy I’m not, really. The guy who has the cockfights and the drag races.

  The amount of time it must have taken you to do all that is phenomenal.

  Psychopathic, probably.

  I took credit for everything, yes. Because it was all freaking brilliant, and I’m a brilliant guy sometimes, but I don’t always act on it.

  I don’t really act on it.

  I’m gonna be sorry I sent this. It’s late at night and I’ve been drinking. My mom is freaking crazy. She wants to move us to California so she can try and be on television. The woman is 43.

  It’s not like I want to be friends with you now, Frankie. Don’t even talk to me, I seriously can’t deal with you.

  I’m just writing to say I underestimated you. I significantly underestimated you. I don’t actually think it is possible to overestimate you. Although you are not a nice person.

  Alpha

  Frankie’s heart jumped at the letter. Victorious and hopeful.

  She had impressed Alpha.

  Won his admiration.

  Was this what she’d really been trying to do all along?

  For a brief moment she thought about writing back. Despite what he’d said, despite everything that had happened, maybe they could be friends. Maybe even something more. They were alike, he and she, in so many ways. And now he had finally recognized himself in her, or herself in him.

  Had he not?

  But she wanted something more than Alpha. She did. Something much more.

  So she did not reply, but played the strategist. She retained more power by withholding an answer.

  AFTER THE FALL, SPRING

  When Frankie returned to Alabaster

  at the start of the winter term, she was something of a celebrity. Star and Claudia shunned her for getting Alpha and his pack in trouble, as did Elizabeth and numerous other seniors, while Trish stood by her staunchly. The people in the Debate Club and the rest of the Geek Club Conglomerate elevated her to legendary status and asked her to sit at their tables in the caf. Members of student government were surprisingly interested in discussing strategies for social change, and the AVT guys got inspired and began regularly sneaking into the new theater at midnight (since they had keys) and screening films for their friends.

  Frankie appreciated both the accolades and the rejections equally, because both meant she’d had an impact. She wasn’t a person who needed to be liked so much as she was a person who liked to be notorious.


  As a condition of her return to Alabaster, Ruth and Zada insisted Frankie begin counseling. She sat through weekly sessions with the school mental health professional in order to explore her “aggression” and to work on channeling her impulses into more socially appropriate activities. The counselor suggested competitive team sports as a positive outlet, and pushed Frankie to join the girls’ field hockey team.

  That was not a productive solution.

  It was the girls’ team.

  Boys didn’t even play field hockey.

  Boys thought nothing of field hockey.

  Frankie was not interested in playing a sport that was rated as nothing by the more powerful half of the population.

  The counselor also suggested meditation. Finding a bit of time each day to focus on deep breathing and the acceptance of life as it was presently occurring.

  That was not a productive solution either.

  Frankie did not accept life as it was presently occurring. It was a fundamental element of her character. Life as it was presently occurring was not acceptable to her. Were she to mellow out—would she not become obedient? Would she not stay on the path that stretched ahead of her, nicely bricked?

  She did not get much out of therapy.

  Frankie Landau-Banks is an off-roader.

  She might, in fact, go crazy, as has happened to a lot of people who break rules. Not the people who play at rebellion but really only solidify their already dominant positions in society—as did Matthew and most of the other Bassets—but those who take some larger action that disrupts the social order. Who try to push through the doors that are usually closed to them. They do sometimes go crazy, these people, because the world is telling them not to want the things they want. It can seem saner to give up—but then one goes insane from giving up.

  On the brighter side, Frankie has life easier than a lot of people with similar drives, similar minds, similar ambitions. She is nice-looking and will be well educated. Her family has a good amount of money, though not as much as some. Many doors will open to her easily, and it may be that she can open the ones she wants to without too much pain or strife.