by Sarah Ockler
As Frankie shoved a spoonful of brownie into her brother’s mouth, laughing her soft Frankie laugh, a flash of guilt squeezed my stomach. Until the night before, there were no secrets between the three of us but the ones I kept for myself — my silent, formerly unrequited feelings for Matt. I could hardly look at him without my insides tying up. Please, please let’s tell her.
“Listen,” Matt said. We were out back under the stars again, sneaking out after everyone else had gone to sleep. “You know she needs to hear it from me. I think the best time for me to tell her is when we’re in California. It’s only a few weeks away, and then I’ll have some time alone with her to tell her about everything. It’ll give her a chance to let it sink in.”
The thought of keeping something so important, so intense, so unbelievable from my best friend for even one more day almost killed me. Never before in our shared history did I hide so much as a passing crush — she knew everything. She’d been there for every tragedy, every celebration, every embarassing moment. She’d been with me when I got my neon green braces in fourth grade. With me in seventh grade when I walked out of the school bathroom past the entire lunch line with my skirt tucked into my tights. With me when Jimmy Cross and I kissed during the eighth grade assembly and got hauled off to the principal’s office. Birthdays, dreams, fears, laughs, obsessions — everything. Inside her head, Frankie had the map to my entire life, and I to hers. I hated that my feelings for Matt were uncharted and unmapped like a secret buried treasure.
But he was Frankie’s brother. I trusted him. And when he took my face in his hands and breathed my name across my lips, I knew that I would keep my promise forever.
Days passed quickly into weeks, Matt and I perpetuating our “just friends” charade as best we could in front of Frankie and our families. So many times during family dinners or casual visits in our adjoining backyards, I wanted to end the charade, to throw my arms around him in front of everyone and just make it known. I censored every look I gave him, every word, every touch, certain that I’d mess up and someone would find out.
But no one did.
To our parents and Frankie, we were the same best friends as always, innocent and inseparable. Whenever we could steal a few minutes alone, that’s when we became the “other,” the charged-up thing that kept me up at night, afraid of falling so fast, afraid of losing, afraid it wouldn’t last once Frankie found out. We stole too-short kisses in the front hallway, shared knowing and devious looks across the dinner table when we weren’t being watched. We snuck out every night behind the house to watch for shooting stars and whisper about life, about our favorite books, about the meaning of songs and old memories and what would happen after Frankie knew. It wasn’t the topics themselves that changed — we’d talked about all of those things before. But now, there was a new intensity. An urgency to know as much as we could, to fit as much as possible into our final nights before Matt revealed the secret.
On their last day before the trip, after they’d finished packing, the three of us went back to Custard’s for an ice-cream send-off. I ordered the mint chocolate-chip brownie sundae, Frankie got a dipped cone, and Matt got a strawberry shake. Matt and Frankie were buoyant, floating on the anticipation of their upcoming trip, carrying me along in the current of their excitement. I couldn’t wait for them to get to Zanzibar, to their summer house, down to the beach where Matt would tell Frankie about us and she’d smile and laugh and hug him and everything would be perfect again.
“It will be fine, Anna. You’ll see,” he whispered to me when Frankie went up to the counter for more napkins. “I know we’re dragging it out, but she’s my little sister — I can’t help it. We just have to look out for her.”
I smiled, envisioning our final kiss before tomorrow’s departure, later tonight at our usual meeting place behind the house.
We split our ice creams three ways again, saving just enough for the ride back home. In the car, Matt turned up the volume on his favorite Grateful Dead CD. Frankie and I sang the melody while he filled in the harmony, his face tight and serious as he concentrated on the words. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other tapping the dashboard, then his thigh, then back to the dashboard — a wild imaginary drum solo. I stopped singing long enough to shove in another spoonful of my mint chocolate-chip sundae, a pothole causing me to miss, the ice cream toppling down my shirt to my lap. I was in the front seat, right next to him, and I didn’t care. In just three weeks, my best friends would be back home, helping Matt get ready for college, enjoying the sunsets of summer, and looking forward to the rest of our days — the rest of our forever.
The chorus started again through the speakers and I sang louder, “Ca-sey Jones you bett-er… watch your speed…” Frankie laughing from the backseat, Matt smiling at me sideways, fingers secretly brushing my knee, the noon sun laid out and happy on the dusty road ahead.
Together. Happy. Whole.
The three of hearts.
The possibilities endless.
And then… my sundae flying out of my hands into the dashboard.
Veering.
Screaming.
Slamming.
Broken glass.
A wheel spinning.
Casey Jones skipping, over and over. “Watch your — watch your — watch your speeeeeed.”
Someone squeezing my hand, hushing, asking for my parents’ names and phone number. Helen and Carl Reiley. But don’t tell them, I think.
An ambulance. Paramedics. Stretchers. “I’ve got him,” someone shouts. “Get the girls out!”
“Can you hear me? Can you move your legs?”
“Jesus, you girls are lucky to be alive.”
In the hospital lobby, I curled myself against Dad’s chest, letting him stroke my hair and hum Beatles songs like he did when I was little to chase away the monsters. My head hurt, my knee was bandaged up, and my wrist was immobilized and wrapped in white tape. Frankie, sitting across from me with her knees pulled to her chest, had a fat lip and eight stitches sticking out like angry black spider legs through her left eyebrow. She was still — all but her fingers rubbing the red glass of her Matt-bracelet. I closed my eyes under the fluorescent lights and tried to make another birthday wish, a onetime do-over, a rebate, a trade-in on the kitchen sink kiss that started everything, offered up for just one last miracle.
I thought about Matt’s clove-and-marzipan-frosting mouth and his favorite books stacked up on every flat surface of his bedroom as the doctor told us what happened. Matt wasn’t a careless driver; he just had a hole between the chambers of his heart, a tiny imperfection that had lain dormant for seventeen years until that moment on the way home from Custard’s when it decided to make itself known. They used a more medically appropriate term when they explained it to Red, handing him a plastic bag full of Matt’s things. Watch. Wallet. The Syracuse Orangemen T-shirt he’d worn that day. But I knew what it meant. I knew as soon as Red started shouting, as soon as Aunt Jayne collapsed in Mom’s arms, as soon as the hospital chaplain arrived with his downturned mouth and compassionately trained eyes.
Matt — Red and Jayne’s Matt, Frankie’s Matt, my Matt — died of a broken heart.
And everything else that ever mattered in my entire existence just… stopped. I was underwater again, seeing things in a slow-motion fuzz without sound or context, without feeling, without care. The world could have ended and I wouldn’t have noticed.
In a way, it did end.
They must have let Red and Jayne and Frankie say goodbye to him, but I don’t remember.
Mom and Dad must have called relatives and friends and funeral directors, but I don’t remember.
There were probably nurses and apologies and organ donor papers and Styrofoam cups of cold coffee, but I don’t remember any of it. Not in a way that makes sense.
I don’t even remember how I got home. One minute I was underwater in the hard plastic hospital chair, and then I was back in my own bed with the door closed against my parents’ m
uffled conversations downstairs and the endlessly ringing phone.
I must have fallen asleep, because I dreamed about him. In the dream, he gave me his blue glass necklace and Frankie’s red bracelet.
“We need to look out for her, you know?” he said. “I have to be the one to tell her. It’s the only way.”
I know.
And when he smiled at me, I promised. I promised him I would protect her.
I promised him our secret would stay locked up for all eternity. And it will.
three
Stretched out on my stomach across Frankie’s new purple comforter in a T-shirt and yoga pants, I read Rolling Stone’s Helicopter Pilot interview three times.
“Brandywine.” Frankie caps her lipstick and admires her pout before the aptly named vanity mirror. “It might be too dark for you,” she says, handing me the tube, “but try it if you want.”
I don’t need to try it. It will be too dark. My skin’s so white it’s almost blue, save for nineteen freckles that I hate, completely immune to peel-off pore strips and exfoliating citrus scrubs.
“Frank, please.” I flip back to the beginning of the interview. We’re supposed to be making our packing lists and mapping out all of the exciting things we’ll do in California next month, but I’ve spent the last hour watching Frankie primp, preen, and fluff. “I refuse to get glammed up for this.”
“Who’s getting glammed up?” Frankie asks. “I’m just — oh, shut up, Anna!”
Frankie gets glammed up for everything — trip planning, movie night, grocery shopping, the rare event of taking out the trash. The earth could get knocked out of orbit by a bend in the space-time continuum, and as North America careens toward Europe at half the speed of light, with houses and pink plastic lawn flamingos and people’s dogs whizzing by — aroooooooof! — Frankie would be like, “Hold on, Anna. Do I have anything in my teeth?”
Frankie’s always been the cute one, even when our moms dressed us in the same pastel sundresses or elastic-waist diaper jeans. But she used to be shy and sweet and a little awkward about it, even.
Last year, when the shock of Matt’s death wore off and she stopped calling for him outside his bedroom, Frankie withdrew into a cocoon like a baby caterpillar, lonely and uncertain. She wouldn’t talk to anyone — her parents, my parents, not even to me. Not in a way that mattered. Sometimes I wondered if I was going to lose both of my best friends from the same broken heart. But by the time school started again last fall, she emerged, metamorphosis complete, a brand-new butterfly who stopped crying, loved boys, wore sparkly makeup, and smoked Marlboro Lights in secret out her bedroom window.
Now, wherever we go, Frankie enters the room like a dazzling black hole and, in accordance with my Fifth Theorem on Quantum Physics and Beautiful Girls, sucks up all the attention around her.
“Anna, do you want it or not?” she asks. “Or not. It’s too dark for me.”
“Suit yourself, Casper.” She presses her lips together, blotting them with a tissue and dusting a layer of translucent powder on top.
The Frankie remix. Perfectly applied glitter eye shadow, French manicures, trendy brown-black hair with red highlights flipping out around her chin and shimmering. “Anna” and “shimmer” don’t belong in the same sentence. My hair is curly, all over the place, and looks an awful lot like wild hay if I don’t apply enough gel. Other than the basics of moisturizing and proper hygiene, the last time I spent more than twenty minutes getting in touch with my inner diva was for the time I spent with Matt. Now, my makeup sits in the bottom bathroom drawer under an ever-thickening layer of sparkly pink dust.
“You used to love this stuff,” she says, rummaging for a lighter shade. “Here, try this one — Moonlight Madness. It’s got ground-up crystals or something.”
I shrug and focus on the pictures of Helicopter Pilot’s self-appointed mascot, the Air Guitarist, until she gets distracted mixing eye shadow shades on the back of her hand with a Q-tip. I can’t fault her for trying. She doesn’t know about Matt, the ghost that floats in and out of my heart, haunting and unresolved.
Don’t worry. It’s our secret.
“Do you like this color?” She bats her eyes at me and laughs. Something about her smile reminds me of him, and I have to look away to block the flood of memory. It’s officially more than a year now. I know I should let go, but it never really leaves me. Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened.
But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks.
Once my eyes open, I’m heavy, like there’s too much gravity pressing on my heart.
I never talk to Frankie about it. Matt’s her brother for real, not her best-friend-that’s-a-boy in the big-brother way. I never say anything about him.
I just swallow hard.
Nod and smile.
One foot in front of the other.
I’m fine, thanks for not asking.
“That color’s great on you, Frank,” I say.
“Have you seen my big powder brush?” she asks. “I can’t find anything since Mom turned my room into the Hotel Sahara.”
“Check those treasure box things on your desk.” I nod toward a set of gold-colored boxes lined up smallest to largest.
Frankie locates the brush in the middle box. “I have to put a lock on the door or I’ll never find anything again.”
For the past six months, Aunt Jayne’s been on some kind of decorating kick. Every time I walk into Frankie’s house, something is different — new throw pillows or moved furniture, more plants or fewer, splashes of color or minimalist neutrals, a whirlwind of throws, shams, swags, and swatches. Last week, she transformed Frankie’s 1920s flapper bedroom into a Moroccan oasis, draped in deep purples and reds and wooden beads for curtains.
“It’s like a new adventure every day,” Frankie said last month when her dragonfly bathroom became sexy cowgirl central almost overnight, complete with real rope lasso towel holders. I guess it’s good that Aunt Jayne is excited about something again — running out to the fabric shop or the home-and-garden store whenever inspiration strikes, which is basically whenever one of those leave-town-and-let-total-strangers-redecorate-your-house-in-forty-eight-hours shows comes on. In the past month alone, she’s filled half the garage with boxes of magazines, pillow covers, paint swatches, antiques, switch plates, and faux fur. There’s only one room she doesn’t touch — the one at the end of the hall. The one with the perpetually closed door that might as well not exist anymore.
“Frankie, are you done yet?” I know all there is to know about Helicopter Pilot, including the fact that the rock-star drummer Scotty-O had a liver transplant when he was four, and I’m tired of watching Frankie’s head bob around in a hair-teasing frenzy. “I read this article so many times I feel like I’m in HP.”
“Yeah,” she says, “except that they’re the best band in the universe, and you can’t even sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in tune.”
“Maybe not. But I passed my English final, which is more than I can say for some people in this room.”
“Hey! Sixty-seven is still passing. And for your information, smarty, I just signed up for the word-a-day e-mails to expand my vocabulary.”
“Oh, really?” I ask.
“Today’s word is judicial. As in, just because Anna’s an übernerd doesn’t mean she has to be so judicial against people who aren’t.”
“Judgmental. You mean judgmental. And I’m not.”
“Judge — shit.” She grabs a spiral notebook and pen from her desk and scribbles in it. “Judg-ment-al. Judgmental. You,” she says, clicking her pen closed and dropping the notebook back on the desk, “love being right, don’t you?”
I toss the magazine on the floor. “It’s painful, but someone’s got to be the smart one in this operation.”
Frankie shrugs, taking her powder brush on a final trip across her nose. “I guess I’ll have to rely on my looks. There — I’m done.” She rises from the vanity chair
and smiles, hands frozen on her hips like she’s waiting for some kind of stage direction. My butterfly. Just like her brother. When she smiles, her blue eyes light up and put a voodoo magic love spell on everyone around.
“Perfect,” I say, twisting my hair up with a pencil. “Now, can we please start planning this trip, preferably sometime before it ends?”
Frankie tosses me a purple gel pen and lined paper from her desk. As I work on our packing lists, she paces the room shouting out potential items, sweeping back and forth with her video camera. One of her aunts gave it to her after Matt died to “take her mind off things,” and she hasn’t put it down since. I think she’s afraid of missing something important — or not being able to remember it later, when it matters.
In less than an hour, we cover clothing (casual day, dressy day, casual evening, dressy evening, sleepwear, and nonwater beach attire), swimwear (for which we still need to shop), toiletries and makeup (for Frankie), games, music, and books (for me). We also pick the official name for our upcoming adventure — the Absolute Best Summer Ever (A.B.S.E.) — because that’s exactly what it will be, according to my newly appointed tour guide.
“You okay, Anna? You don’t seem too excited all of a sudden.” Frankie sits down in front of me and tilts her head, frowning. Matt used to do that same thing with his head whenever he was worried about one of us and needed a closer look at the situation.
“No, I’m good,” I say. “I guess it doesn’t seem real yet. You know how weird Dad was about the whole thing. I don’t want to get too excited till we’re actually on the plane.”
Dad already thinks I spend too much time over here. “Red and Jayne need to get more involved with Frankie’s grief,” he’s said on more than one occasion, lately following up with something like, “especially since this will be their first trip without Matt.” But what does Dad know? His idea of grief support is bringing over a six-pack for Uncle Red and not saying Matt’s name.
Frankie shakes her head and flips off the camera. “Don’t worry. He already said you can go. You just need to do some — oh, what’s that thing called — envisionation, I think.”