Frannie and Tru (23 page)

He yanked the wheel to the left, turning at the last possible second into the drop-off lane, the whole van leaning to the side, wheels screaming as we skidded, bumped, rebalanced.

“We'll turn around right now,” he said.

He directed us to the roundabout, the one that looped the base of the sculpture. The man and woman towered overhead. Tonight they didn't look like art or a stupid joke either. They looked like a pair of monsters set to terrorize the city. Tru drove us around the circle but didn't drive out of it. He went around again.

And again.

“Tru,” I said quietly, hoping to snap him out of whatever this was.

Instead, he sped up.

We went around. And around. Faster and faster.

Someone honked, but still, we whipped around endlessly, to the point that I was dizzy and I knew Tru must be, too. I grabbed the door with one hand, my seat belt with the other.

“Stop it, Tru! You're going to hurt us!”

“Well, it's just me being a dick again, right?”

And still we went around. Around. I could feel the van starting to lean, really lean. My heart was a hummingbird, thrumming in my chest.

“JUST STOP! I'VE HAD A SHITTY FUCKING NIGHT, AND I NEED YOU TO STOP!”

For a second he kept us flying, but then he exhaled sharply. He eased up on the gas, gently pushed on the brakes. We were still moving around the circle, but at least we were going more slowly. I waited for my pulse to stop careening.

But Tru didn't quite have control.

The front tires were where he wanted them, but the back swung
out like we were doing a doughnut. I yelped as he tugged on the wheel, trying hard to correct us, to get the van back on track. He whispered, “
Shit, shit, shit
,” just under his breath, knuckles white as he strained to get everything in line, trying to slow us down just gently enough that we wouldn't spin out.

And he did it. We eased to a stop. We were at a slightly awkward angle, the front of the car facing the sculpture, but we were okay. I could hear both of us breathing.

I was about to punch him in the shoulder and shriek at him, but when I turned to do it, I saw a security guard running right toward us. Tru saw him, too.

Again he said, “Shit, shit, shit.”

Tru threw his arm over the back of my seat, turning to look over his shoulder. He just needed to back up a couple of feet, and we'd be positioned to fly out of there. He hit the gas.

He hit the gas before he put the car in reverse.

He hit the gas, and we hopped right up onto the base of the sculpture.

The security guard was screaming.

A pale old man with a scraggly beard, he yanked open Tru's door, sputtering and red-faced, shouting something about the police being on their way. He grabbed Tru's arm, as if he were going to physically pull him from the car, but Tru jerked free of him with a violent motion, turning a hard gaze on his face.

“Don't. Touch me. We're getting out.”

The guard staggered backward, and Tru swung the door wide with a shove, jumping out. I quietly opened mine, stepping awkwardly out of the tilted van. With a small rush of relief, I realized it was really just on the curb, not touching any part of the sculpture itself. No damage. Not even tire marks on the asphalt. Even the van looked fine.

With an angry sweep of his arm, the guard ordered us toward
the sidewalk in front of the station. It was so late that there weren't many people around, just a few onlookers, whose eyes I avoided. The guard muttered the whole time as we walked, then yelled at us to sit on the curb. I slumped right down, hunching over into a semifetal position, letting my hair fall down around my face.

When I finally chanced a look at Tru, he was leaning back on his palms, face open to the night. He was looking up, toward the glowing hearts.

As the guard continued to pace behind us, I said something to Tru, as quietly as I could.

“Text Kieran. Tell him to cut Siren out of the story. Just say we all went to the party, and then you and I left with the car.”

Tru didn't say anything, but he did ease his phone halfway out of his pocket, and I was pretty sure he was doing what I'd asked.

“They're going to breathalyze you,” I said gently, warningly.

For a moment, he said nothing. He tucked the phone away, looking up again at the intertwined figures. Then he finally spoke.

“Different bartender tonight at Siren. Wouldn't serve me. Never got a chance to have a drink at the party. Guess it's my lucky day. Now please, for god's sake, let me sit here in silence.”

That's when I realized that despite the casual pose, his face looked defeated in a way I'd never seen before. This wasn't the frustration he'd shown at the edge of Prettyboy or the raw collapse after he'd sung. He just looked . . . tired.

As for me, I was a mess. I was mad at Tru, but I was mad at myself, too. Not until just now, as we screamed at each other in
the car, did I start to realize the mistakes I'd made, the depth of them.

I'd told myself a story about who Tru was, a story that made him into both a certain kind of victim and the sort of hero I needed. It was a story that fit my view of the world. A story that made me feel good about myself. A story that I leaned on to help me break free. But it wasn't the truth. The truth was far more complicated. Tru was far more complicated.

I couldn't quite look him in the face, so I just shifted my eyes from my shoes over to his. The black Converse he'd worn the first day here.

This was a moment when I needed to say something meaningful. I searched for some words that would ease the pain of our fight but also let him know that he was kind of a shit. I wanted to tell him that he was still my friend.

But I couldn't think of anything, and then came the thunder of a siren.

The cops were already here.

There were two officers, both young, one a smirk-faced white guy who seemed to be trying not to laugh, the other a black woman who was much more businesslike. She couldn't have been older than twenty-five or so, but she was looking at the two of us the way a mother would look at her unruly children.

I met her eyes and felt more ashamed than ever.

For a couple of minutes they just walked around a bit and talked to each other. They went over to the van and gave it a
look. My eyes kept moving to their guns, their handcuffs. Staticky messages burst from their radios, making me jump.

Finally, they came to stand in front of us. They recorded our names, our addresses, asked what our relationship was. They took Tru's license and kept it tucked away.

The woman asked for Mom's number and walked away to call her. She kept her back to us, and I was actually glad that I couldn't quite hear what she was saying. Imagining my mother's face was bad enough without any words to go along with it.

After they had finished with the near-hysterical guard and ushered him back inside, the two of them came to stand in the pickup lane, looking down at us. They both seemed weighed down with too much equipment, their belts creaking and shifting as they moved.

The woman asked us to stand up, and we did.

“Would you like to tell me what happened?”

I assumed that Tru had a story ready, some beautiful lie that would put all the other lies to shame. A lie of redemption, a lie to save us.

The seconds ticked by, and he said nothing.

“You were driving,” Smirky said, pointing his pen at Tru, notebook waiting in the other hand. “So why don't you tell us?”

Tru had been looking up at the sculpture again, but now he cast his eyes back down. He folded his hands and spoke simply. Not the bullshit polite way he had. Just calm, emotionless.

“There's no good reason for what I was doing. We were just driving, not headed anywhere, and we were out past our curfew.
We needed to head home, so I came in here. To turn around. But then I drove around the sculpture a few times. I thought I was being funny. But I went way too fast.”

The woman cop gave him a raised eyebrow, and it was a thing to behold. Nothing else moved on her face. It almost put Tru's to shame.

“That's it? You just decided to have a little Indy 500 around . . . this thing?” She waved her finger behind her, pointing at it without bothering to look.

“I know,” Tru said. “It sounds stupid. It was stupid. We just . . . Frannie and I . . . We have a little joke. About the sculpture. I guess that's why I did it.”

“A little joke?” she asked.

Smirky put his hands on his belt and turned to look up at the two figures, stretched into the sky.

“Isn't the whole statue kind of a joke?” he asked.

The lady cop shot him a look, and he went back to scribbling in his notebook. She stared at Tru a moment more, then looked at me, assessing.

“And you? You look pretty embarrassed, and that makes me think you must be a nice young lady who knows better. Do you have anything to add?”

“No,” I said, but it caught in my throat. I coughed and tried again. “It's exactly what he said. That's what happened. And I'm very, very sorry.”

For a few minutes, they ignored us, talking to each other, making a call or two. Not long after a cab pulled up and out walked
Mom. Still looking nice in her black dress and big jewelry, but her face . . . her face was a twisted mess of fear and anger.

They breathalyzed Tru, and it came back at zero.

They called and checked for anything on his record. Nothing at all. Not even a speeding ticket. Mom stepped to the side with the female cop, speaking quietly just out of our hearing.

In that moment while we were alone, back to sitting on the curb, Tru spoke to me, softly enough that no one else could hear.

“I came up with a slightly different story. I told Kieran we'd go with this version: I went to The Mack's house tonight with the twins. But then I took the van and ditched them. I was really upset about something. I came home, and I was a mess. I talked to Richard on the phone, and I seemed even worse. I went to take off and you came with me, to be with me or talk to me or whatever.”

He sighed.

“It's not the best, I know. But let's just go with it. I think it will work. It makes me the only real bad guy tonight, so consider it my little mea culpa. That way we can say good-bye on nice, neutral terms. Wipe this summer from our memories, go back to ignoring each other like our mothers do.”

I didn't know what to say. I couldn't tell if he was still mad at me, or if maybe he'd stopped caring at all. I didn't want either one to be true.

Tru shifted his weight, trying to sit more comfortably on the curb.

“Mea culpa? That was Latin, you know. So I learned a little something this summer after all.”

A classic Tru joke, only this time it was stripped of its fire. He didn't even look at me to see if I had a reaction.

The cop was back in front of us now, arms crossed. She looked at Tru.

“You don't want to hurt yourself, and you definitely don't want to hurt somebody else. Trust me. You won't be laughing at your ‘little jokes' when something like that happens.”

Then she looked at me.

“And you. When you get in a car with somebody, you put your life in their hands. Don't ever forget that.”

Smirky took charge of easing the van off the curb and setting it right, just to be extra careful that nothing happened.

And like that, they let us go.

We drove home in complete silence. When we walked in the door, Kieran was waiting in the living room, in the dark. He shot up off the couch and looked at us.

“Upstairs,” Mom told him. “Now.”

He didn't hesitate, and I tried to follow him, but Mom ordered me onto the couch and told me to wait. Then she went into the backyard with Tru.

For a moment I slipped to the edge of the kitchen and spied on them. They stood just outside the door, beneath the glow of the light, bugs buzzing around them. Tru's head was down, but Mom kept looking right at him while she spoke.

I went back to the living room and sat alone in the dark, not bothering to turn on any lights. I didn't want to think about what Mom was saying to Tru or what she was going to say to me, so I tried to distract myself with thoughts of Devon. As I had a million times over the past week, I relived the kiss, every moment of it, from me running down the path to the magic appearance of the horses. Like one of my old fantasies, but this time it was real life. It ran through my mind again and again, blocking—if only for a few minutes—the memory of everything that had happened after. The man at Siren. The fight with Tru. The look on my mother's face when she got out of the cab.

The front door rattled, and I jumped.

It was only Jimmy.

He slunk inside rubbing his head, looking slightly tipsy. His ride sped off with screeching tires. He looked at me, then looked at the time on the glow of his phone.

“I am in so much trouble.”

“Nope,” I said. “It's your lucky day. Or night, I guess. Mom's out back. If you go upstairs now, you're saved.”

He looked around, confused.

“Why the hell is she in the backyard? Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

I didn't know where to begin. Instead, I asked who his little blonde friend from the party was.

“Some new chick.
Candy.
Seriously, Candy.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that's kind of a bad name.”

“It's kind of a stripper name. Do you think she liked me?”

I tilted my head, tried to remember her body language.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

He did a stupid dance, pumping his fists and shaking his hips. I tried not to laugh, but couldn't help it.

“Oh, so you think I'm funny, too? Am I as funny as your best friend,
Truman
?”

“You're an ass,” I said, but my voice was light.

He paused, swayed, considered.

“Oh, I'm a huge ass,” he said. “Sometimes I don't know what's wrong with me.”

Then he made for the stairs, tiptoeing up, doing an exaggerated
shhhhh
motion with his finger. I almost laughed again, but I felt my face crumple a little as I did. He paused where he was, squinting at me.

“Hey,” he said. “Is everything, like, okay around here? And what the hell is going on between Tru and Jeremy Bell?”

Just then the back door creaked open, and I shooed him away. He hurried up the last of the stairs as Mom came back into the living room, and Tru disappeared to the basement.

She sat next to me on the couch, in the dark. For a minute we seemed to have achieved some state of equilibrium, a perfect silence. As long as I didn't speak, she wouldn't speak, and eventually I could run to my room and hide until the world ended.

“Do you understand how busy and tired and worried I am right now?” she finally said.

I didn't trust my voice, so I just nodded while she watched me.

“No, Frannie,” she said. “You actually don't. You can't
understand at your age, I'm sorry to say. But I'd like for you to imagine it the best that you can. And I want you to promise me that you will not add more grief to my life.”

“I promise,” I said, and the words were soaked in tears.

If I had escaped upstairs just then, I think she would have let me go. But I didn't want that to be it. It seemed like just this week we had finally started talking, and I didn't want to stop.

“I'm really, really sorry. And I know you must be mad at Tru. But I just think he was upset. About stuff at home.”

My words seemed to echo in the air between us. Mom began to nervously move her bracelet up and down her arm. She was never good at staying angry, and already I could feel some of the heat of tonight receding from her.

“I imagine you're right,” she said. “I don't know how much he's told you about everything. But things are bad. Debbie and Richard are separating. Officially.”

A sinking started in my chest, landed in my stomach. I said nothing.

“I know you're not a kid anymore, I know that, but still. I'd rather not go into all of the details, at least not right now. I'm hoping . . .”

She let that thought die. Again she was methodically moving the bracelet up and down, up and down.

“Everybody has a different cross to bear. That's something to remember. I know it doesn't feel like it right now, but we don't have it so bad. Not really.”

There was so much I wanted to say to her, but I could only manage one brief mumble.