Frannie and Tru (13 page)

I couldn't do it, though. There was one thing I really wanted to know.

“How did they break up? Richard and my mom?”

His fingers stopped tapping, and he pulled out a cigarette but didn't light it. Just flicked it around with that elliptical motion of his fingers.

“I believe they hadn't officially broken it off before Debbie slipped in, although it's a bit of a gray area, the way she tells it.”

In that moment, I was very sick of Tru. I didn't want to be in the car with him anymore. But even as a lump had formed in my throat, I pushed it back, kept talking.

“Is that why our moms aren't close?”

He laughed at that, his fingers still twirling.

“Oh god, no. That would be awfully petty, at this point, don't you think? I mean, it was superdramatic at the time, when he and Debbie took up with each other instead. She's recounted it for me, with lots of hand flourishes. But it's nothing anyone cares about anymore. My mom married a college guy from a rich family. Your mom married a nice boy from the neighborhood. That's that. Just a family history lesson for you. Didn't want you to be in the dark.”

I was crying a little. I didn't want him to see, but of course he did. He put the cigarette away, cocked his head to the side to see me better.

“Seriously? It happened a million years ago. You can't be that upset.”

I wiped my eyes with my hands, then crossed my arms.

“You were telling that story to upset me,” I said. “Or shock me or whatever. You know you were. So mission accomplished. Now we're late, and I want to go home.”

He paused for a moment more and then slipped the van away from the curb, back toward the house.

When we'd gone a couple of blocks, he glanced over at me. My tears were dry by then, but I kept my eyes focused on the road.

“I know it's a little unsettling,” he said, “to find out that your mom would ever associate with him. But think how I feel. Half my DNA is his.”

He was waiting for a laugh, but I didn't give him one. Two minutes later we were parking the van. As he turned off the lights, he spoke again, much more softly than before.

“I'm not sure why they don't talk, to tell you the truth,” Tru said. “I don't know if
they
know why they don't talk. My guess is they're just different people who wanted different things.”

The whole neighborhood seemed asleep, and the two of us shut our doors quietly. We went to the front porch without another word, and I opened the door as quietly as I could, hoping that no one was waiting for us. By now we were twenty minutes late.

The lights were off in the living room, but Mom and Dad were
still on the couch, the TV on low. She was leaning against him, asleep, his arm draped around her. He looked at us and glanced pointedly at his watch. But then he smiled. Put his finger to lips in a
shhhh
motion.

Tru and I parted then, him slipping downstairs while I tiptoed up.

I crawled into bed without washing my face, without changing into my pajamas. I tried to focus on the band, the show, the park, but instead I kept thinking about my mom and Richard.

Why couldn't I be like Tru? Why did I have to care?

Maybe I didn't like to think about my mom as a teenager, dating people. Maybe I didn't like that she'd been dumb enough to date someone who was apparently awful. Or maybe I didn't like how random that made everything seem, like Mom could have ended up with someone else . . . and then I might never have existed.

For a few minutes I pondered that. At first it made me feel small and alone, but then I sort of collapsed into the abyss of it—and that made me feel free. I was just a speck of matter in the middle of creation. Nothing mattered. Like Tru said in front of the reservoir: look head-on into infinity and it doesn't fill you up, it empties you out.

I came out from under my pillow, thinking that I was okay, that I had calmed down enough to close my eyes and sleep.

Except I wasn't quite there. Something still nagged me.

In those dark minutes when we'd sat outside O'Malley's, the moment I'd felt the absolute worst was when Tru had confirmed that Debbie stole Richard away from my mom. But it wasn't even
the betrayal that bothered me so much—it was the fact that it made my mother seem like the second choice. Which then made my dad seem like the second choice. Which then implied that my family was second-tier. I was second-tier.

That thought burned in my chest, a bitter little ember, and I realized that I'd been nursing this feeling for a long time. And why exactly? Because Tru's family was rich and he went to a fancy school? Because he'd been brilliant enough to be on TV? Because he made friends so swiftly and easily here in this city that was my home, not his? Yes, yes, yes. All of that.

I realized that it was a terrible thing to think about my family. A pathetic thing to think about myself. Still, in a strange way it was a relief to admit it. To put it into words.

So maybe I wasn't a brave little speck in the universe anymore, but at least now I understood my own feelings, even if some of them were ugly. I really did believe that gave them less power.

And besides, I might not want to face infinity and be emptied out. Maybe I was the kind of person who wanted to be filled.

I hid out most of the next morning in my room, until Mom came to retrieve me and drag me to the grocery store with her. She wanted to know everything about the battle of the bands and these “young musicians” I was spending time with. At first I pulled Tru's old trick of rolling my eyes and answering in annoyed monosyllables, so that I wouldn't risk revealing anything about our late-night trip to the park, our run from the cops, everything I'd learned about her and Richard. But I could tell right away I was hurting her feelings, so I finally opened up a little. I told her how the guys played crazy covers of “Heatwave” and “Lola,” and she laughed and said she loved those songs and that she wished she could have heard them.

That afternoon, she and Dad dragged us all to the beach again. Tru sat shotgun and played Bruce, while I sat in the wayback. I
was glad for the distance, because I was still mad at him. Not because of what he'd told me, but because of the way he'd treated me.

We emptied out of the van and surveyed the park before us. Everything was different from the first time we'd come. Summer had reached its full rage, the sun merciless, the quarry water thick with bodies, lifeguard whistles screeching overhead.

Jimmy and Kieran went off to play volleyball. My mother and Tru settled at an empty picnic table, her with a mystery novel, him with his phone. I joined them but kept my head down, methodically making my way through my chemistry workbook, the one I'd shoved under my bed and tried to forget about after Tru had arrived.

Dad had gone back to the car for the cooler, and when he got back, he plopped it on the grass. Then he took a spot across from me, awkwardly folding his giant's body to fit the gap between bench and table. He snatched the workbook from my hands and held it before his face, upside down.

“This? This is easy. I could do this in my sleep.” He lowered the book just enough so that his eyes peeked over the top. They were big and warm and moist. He winked and looked back down at the page.

“Oh, right!” He flipped it right-side up, pretending to fumble as he did so.

He handed it back to me, face crimson in the heat. “At least one of us understands this stuff.”

He gave me a smile that creased the lines around his eyes. I
smiled back and felt my mouth waver, as I suddenly wanted to cry. Bending over my book, I hid my eyes, pretending to shield them from the sun.

Dad announced he was going for a dip, then lumbered down to the quarry, swimming out until the found an empty spot and flipping over. He was an incredible floater. Even here, in freshwater, he could suspend himself for hours. I watched him for a minute, then felt overwhelmed by the need to get away. I said nothing, just took off for the pavilion to get a soda.

I'd fed my dollar in, but hadn't pushed a button yet, when I heard someone whistling. It was a Stones song, “Sympathy for the Devil,” and there was Tru, leaning against the machine. He had a roll of SweeTARTS and was doing that trick again, weaving it through his fingers. He paused and offered them to me, but I shook my head.

“So, after I'd given up chess, but before I'd taken up spelling, I had another hobby.”

I looked at him briefly, then hit the Dr Pepper button. The machine spit out my can with a rattle and thunk.

“Magic,” he said. “I wanted to be a magician. I had a cape and a top hat.”

I tried to arch an eyebrow but failed.

“I begged my parents for a rabbit,” he added.

This was a form of apology. I stood there and weighed it in my mind.

“I don't believe you,” I said. “I can ask Sparrow. She'll tell me.”

The edges of his mouth lifted just a bit.

“Please don't. This is one thing about me she actually doesn't know, and I'd never hear the end of it. Seriously.”

Popping the tab slowly, I let the mouth give a loud, cold hiss. I took a long drink before I spoke again.

“Did you have a name?”

His smile grew. It reached his eyes.

“That's the best part. For some reason—and don't ask me where I got this—I called myself ‘Truman the Destroyer.'”

I laughed. Then Tru laughed. Another moment passed and the two of us were laughing together. At first we did laugh for Truman the Destroyer in his top hat, but then we kept laughing. The laughter was its own spark and its own accelerant. Once lit, it burned and burned.

Tru caught his breath and wheezed out a confession. “Last night? In the park? Those weren't cops. I caught a quick look, and I think they were some dads from the neighborhood. Huge dorks. They looked even more scared than us. I would have told you, but I was having too much fun running through the woods, smashing into fences. I probably have internal bleeding. I'm going to need one of your kidneys.”

I wasn't even mad; I didn't care that he'd lied, because we were laughing harder than ever and it felt so good. I laughed until my insides were sore. I laughed until it hurt to breathe.

Then I decided to take a chance.

“Are we really friends?” I asked.

For once, I'd caught Tru off guard. He gaped at me, looked almost embarrassed.

“Frannie! Oh my god. Don't do that.”

I could have let it go, like I'd let so many things go with him before, but I didn't want to be deflected. Not anymore. I wanted to talk.

“It's just . . . if we're friends, you should tell me things. Nobody tells me things!”

“I told you things last night,” he countered, with a bit of his old wicked smile returning.

I scowled at him, even though I was starting to feel better. Like I was going to be okay. Like Tru and I were going to be okay.

“That's not what I mean,” I told him. “I don't know anything about what you're thinking. About how you feel about important stuff. About your parents. I don't want you to go back there to them. Not unless they change.”

I hadn't planned on saying any of that, and now my eyes filled with tears. Tru took my elbow, gently.

“Let's walk,” he said.

We trudged in silence up the steep hill that led to the hiking trails, but before we got to the trees, Tru veered off, sat us in the grass where we could look down on the quarry, the water shining in the sun like a coin.

“Do you remember my parents much?” he asked

I thought about it first, answered carefully but truthfully. I even said the stuff that made me feel guilty.

“Just a little. I haven't seen them in years. Your mom talks exactly like my mom, and looks a lot like her, too. But, you know. Thin. Nicer hair. Your dad is short with glasses and a big chest
and shoulders. That first morning when we drove out here, you were joking about the Hamptons. You did an impression of him.”

I'd surprised him again, I could tell. He chuckled a little. “Maybe I did.”

For a couple of minutes we just sat there quietly, looking down, listening to distant laugher, splashing. Happy little-kid screams. Everyone looked small and insignificant from up here. I felt calmer.

“Can I tell you a story?” Tru asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

He looked at me, then away. “When I was thirteen, I got in a shit-ton of trouble with these four other kids, kids I'd known forever. Cameron. Brandon. Brody. And, ah, Skip. Skip was there. We were just so pent-up all the time, burning to do bad shit, but we were still too young and dumb to do anything real, you know? But we were desperate for it, so we did all the terrible boy things you can think of. Setting fires in the woods. Stealing stuff from convenience stores. One afternoon, we just went on a tear. Knocked down a bunch of mailboxes. Popped people's car tires. Set firecrackers off. We left this perfectly obvious path of destruction, a perfect little bread-crumb trail of our transgressions. And at the end of it was this enormous house that everybody in town knew, because it belonged to some guy who won the lottery and then had a string of terrible luck. His family died or something. So cliché, right? Supposedly he had a bunch of people that waited on him, and he never left the house. Or that was the exaggerated version kids told. The place is insane,
looks like a castle, a turret at the top with a little stained glass window. So we top off our campaign with a giant rock launched right through that perfect, beautiful window. It was a serious triumph. Three stories up, small target. I can still hear the sound of it shattering.

“So we get picked up right there in front of the house and dragged to the police station. Our parents are all there, and the cops are giving us some stupid talk they reserve for white, upper-middle-class idiots like us, who aren't really going to get in any trouble. But they're still definitely screwing with us, saying, ‘Wow, whoever did that window must have some arm; that was a hell of a throw.' None of us will say who it was, so there's this awkward silence. And then Richard starts yelling that it was me, that he knows it was me, that it had to be me, so whatever was coming, they should just dish it out. My mom is mortified, and everybody is giving him this
whoa, whoa, settle down
look, even the police officers. The other parents just think he's being a dick, because, I mean, these people know him, and he is a huge dick, but I just have a feeling that's not really it. There's this weird insistence to what he's saying, and eventually I figure it out.”

Tru looks at me now. He seems to be gauging my reaction so far, but I've tried to quiet my expression. To keep my entire body still and just listen.

“He wants me to have thrown it. Because it was this crazy, impressive, manly feat of strength. He doesn't give a shit about anything else at that point, not about me getting in trouble, none of that. He just wants me to have launched that rock. And I'm
not . . . I'm not talking about my being gay right now; I'm not saying he suspected or anything. That doesn't factor in here. Not yet. All his weird Napoleonic insecurities predate that, trust me. But anyway, as I realize what's going on in his head, I meet eyes with my mom, and I know she knows, too, and she's horrified.”

He was running his fingers through the grass, watching the blades get pushed down and ripple back into place.

“In that moment, I had this pure realization that he was never going to
get it
, you know? Whenever something great or something terrible happens, he's going to cloak whatever it is in his fucked-up issues and priorities. And I know Mom feels the same way, which in a way makes it better, but in a way makes it much, much worse. What is she doing with her life? How does she stand it?

“Anyway, Skip's dad, who's at least as big a dick as mine, is this rich-ass defense attorney. Eventually he gets us out of there with just a bunch of warnings. The next day, Richard has me up at the crack of dawn, running laps at the track and doing push-ups in the rain until I puke.”

Tru stretched his legs out in front of him, looking at his Nikes, now scuffed a bit from their first weeks of wear.

“The other day, I said I was good at running until I puke, and you asked me why. That's why. I'm pretty sure some people think he hits me. He gives off that vibe, to be honest. But he never does. He just does stuff like that. But that morning, for the first time, I really didn't care, because I felt like I knew what his specific brand of bullshit was, and that I was never going to be like that.”

The grass was sharp and itchy against my skin, but I didn't dare move. I felt a million things all at once. I felt like a useless know-nothing, a little girl with an easy life who had zero to offer or say. At the same time, I felt drawn close to Tru in a way I hadn't all summer, knitted up with him.

“Can I ask a stupid question?”

“My favorite kind,” he said.

“I know it's not the point of the story. But I really want to know who threw the rock.”

He laughed, one of his real laughs. “Of course you do. That's the best part of the story, that I don't tell you. Look, let me be totally honest, that's not the first time I've told that story or anything. I don't know if you do this yet, but when you get older, you'll have your own set of favorite stories that you've perfected. You'll take them out after a night of drinking, or when you've been dating somebody and you're starting to get serious, because they help explain who you are. So that's one of my stories. And most stories are, you know, at least half bullshit. But that one's the truth,” he said, and looked right in my eyes.

“Of course,” I said. “I believe you.”

He bit his lip a little, glanced away, and shook his head. “You're not just honest, Frannie. You're trusting, too.”

I looked back down at the water, searching for my family and finding them slowly. First Dad in the water, then Mom at the picnic table. Finally, the twins, standing at the edge of the sand.

“I'm trying to think,” I said, “if I have a story like that I could tell. Maybe something from this summer.”

Tru cocked his head and thought.

“Well, it's got to be something with danger. All good stories have a little danger.”

First I thought of last night, the battle of the bands and our run from the fake cops. But that didn't seem like enough. I thought of that first night in Siren, but the danger there was the man, and that wasn't something I wanted to think about, let alone talk about.

Except sitting there with Tru, after everything he'd said, I thought that maybe I should. I angled myself toward him, but kept my eyes on my shoes.

“Um, that night at Siren. The man you yelled at?”

He didn't say anything, just looked at me and waited for me to go on.

“I don't know if this is really anything? I don't want to, ah, be dramatic. But he kind of really freaked me out. Not just because he touched my hair. He said something about how I looked really young, but he wouldn't tell on me. And then he asked where I lived and said he thought he'd seen me. Walking in the park.”

I'd actually been hoping he might laugh, but his brow was furrowed and he looked mad.
Really
mad.