The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (13 page)

THE OLD THEATER

Matthew made a left at the library and headed across campus. It was dark, a little before eight p.m., and the paths were fairly crowded. Kids were heading to Front Porch, the arts complex, the Geek Conglomerate party, and other school-sponsored events that kicked off the weekend. It was easy for Frankie to follow Matthew without his seeing her. She ditched her pink sweater on a tree branch, hoping to come back for it later, and proceeded in her dark T-shirt, black skirt, and brown boots.

He arrived at the old theater, which had passed for an arts complex before the new one had been built. This part of Alabaster was dark after sundown—at least so long as no school plays were being rehearsed in the evenings—and there were no lights on. Matthew went around to the side of the building that was deep in shadow, climbed onto a folding chair that stood under a tree, pulled himself up into the tree, slid through a window, and was gone.

Frankie ducked into a shadow beneath the stairs of a neighboring building and watched as Callum, Dean, Steve, and Tristan, one by one, entered the theater.

When it seemed certain no more boys were coming, Frankie climbed the tree. She peeked into the second-floor window and climbed through into a storage room for lighting equipment. Piles of lights and gels and extension cords lined the walls on either side. Light came through the window, but the hall before her was nearly black.

Frankie peeked around the corner and saw no one, caught no shadow of movement. At some distance, she could hear voices and the clink of bottles.

She felt her way down the hall and found a staircase. Heading down, stepping as quietly as she could, she came out in the lobby of the theater—a small, somewhat shabby room with a marble floor. Two sets of double doors led to the auditorium. She pressed her ear against one of them—yes, the boys were in there.

On the other side of the lobby was a second stairwell. Frankie eased up it, heart pounding, then felt her way in the darkness down that hall to the back of the building, past drama teacher offices and storage, down another set of steps, until she found herself where she wanted to be. In the wings.

She could see here. Someone had turned a few red lights on, illuminating the stage, and from the dark curtains she could see out into the audience.

Only there was no one there.

Frankie shivered. She was sure Dean or someone would pop out from behind the velvet curtains and . . . she wasn’t sure what.

Make her feel small. Make her feel like no one.

A moment later, Alpha’s voice came from above. They were in the catwalks—a group of three narrow platforms high above the stage, used for dropping fake snow, arranging lights, hauling set-pieces up and down. The boys were sitting on two of the walkways, facing each other with their legs hanging down. They leaned their chests on the spindly railings.

“I hereby call to order the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds,” Alpha intoned.

“Sorry.” It was Matthew’s voice talking to the assembled group. “We gotta find something better to say than ‘call to order the loyal order.’”

“We’ve been saying it this way for decades, dog,” retorted Alpha.

“So?”

“So, it’s the thing that is said. To convene a Basset meeting.”

“It’s still bad.”

“You have
got
to kill your inner copy editor.”

Matthew ignored him. “Let’s proceed. Does everyone who wants a beer have a beer?”

“Yes, oh Basset Kings.”

“And does everyone who wants soda have soda?” he confirmed.

“Yes, oh Basset Kings.”

“And there are chips, let me see, um, ranch and barbeque,” Matthew announced. “Callum, toss ’em out.”

Callum threw bags of chips from one catwalk platform to the other. The boys—there were eleven of them—caught them easily.

“No dribbling your beer, no dropping chip crumbs, do you hear me, dogs?” said Alpha.

“Yes, oh Basset Kings.”

“Because if some early morning drama students find bits of barbeque chip on the floor of the stage tomorrow,” Alpha explained, “we’re gonna end up with increased security in this building. They’ve already alarmed the door to the roof of Talbot, thanks to you nimrods smoking up there.”

“Yes, oh Basset Kings.”

“All righty then. The oath,” said Alpha, and the boys began to chant:

Atop the crown of Alabaster,

Bind it tight with sticking plaster.

Look to the west, boys;

Look to the books, men!

History is our guide!

Keep the secrets, tunnel under,

Climb the heights, our pack defend.

The Basset is a hardy beast,

We vow our loyalty to the end.

Their voices rang out across the hollow space of the theater, and Frankie could feel the weight of their commitment as they chanted. She looked up through the red light, trying to see which boys were there (besides those she’d seen go in), but the angle was so strange and the light so dim that she couldn’t make out their faces well.

When they finished chanting, they all banged their drinks on the floors of the catwalks three times, then drank.

“We’ve called this meeting to figure out what to do on Halloween,” announced Alpha. “That’s next Friday. Livingston, tell me what we did last year.”

“A large pumpkin was carved with the shape of a Basset Hound and placed in front of the headmaster’s office.”

“What?”

“That’s what we did,” admitted Matthew.

“That sucks.” Alpha was aghast.

“Yeah.”

“That’s worse than the year before!”

“That was a basset hound?” asked Dean. “On the pumpkin?” Unlike Matthew and Alpha, he and the other seniors hadn’t been Basset Hounds until late spring of their junior year. “There was no way to tell that was supposed to be a basset. Seriously, it looked like a blob. I saw that pumpkin in the hallway, and was like, what the—?”

“I never even saw it,” said Callum.

“Me neither.”

“Me neither.”

“Who goes by Richmond’s office anyway, unless they can help it?”

“Do you think he even knew what it meant?”

“Okay, okay,” said Matthew. “It was Hogan’s idea. He read something on the Internet about these amazing carved pumpkins and got all craftsy on us. He thought it would be a real coup, you know, like ‘The Bassets have been here!’—only, yeah, no one saw it, and the people who did see it didn’t know what it was. Not one of our best efforts.”

“The year before,” explained Alpha, “we got glow-in-the-dark paint and painted the Guppy.” A three-foot-long statue of an unidentified fish, commonly known as “the Guppy,” stood proudly on the front lawn of the school.

“That was us?” Callum nearly squealed. “I loved that.”

“It just, like, started glowing as the sun went down. It was good,” said Alpha.

“But Callum was your roommate sophomore year, and if even he didn’t know, that’s a problem,” said Matthew. “Don’t we want to make a mark people can actually recognize? ’Cause if two years down the line, no one’s even talking about the Halloween prank as anything to do with the Basset Hounds, then there’s not much point. We should be creating a legend.”

“I agree,” said Alpha. “Dean’s girlfriend thought the hound on the invitations was a Snoopy. We’ve got to change that.”

“She’s not my girlfriend anymore,” Dean objected.

“I move that if we can’t think of anything really good,” said Matthew, “there’s not a lot of point to doing
anything
on Halloween. We could just meet here and drink beer.”

“Fine by me,” said Callum.

“No, you nimrods,” said Alpha. “We have to do a prank. Basset Hounds always do a prank on Halloween. It’s a tradition.”

“Since when?” asked Tristan.

“I have no idea. Since at least two years ago when I joined, okay? It’s not like that movie
The Skulls
, where everyone gets a supposedly top-secret rule book with their name embossed on the cover. There’s no written history, no handbook.”

“All right, I get it.” Callum sounded annoyed.

Frankie’s mind reeled. Because she knew.

There
was too
a handbook.

Senior and Hank Sutton and Dr. Montague had told her and Zada about it at the steak house.
The Disreputable History.

Why didn’t Alpha know about it?

Where could it be?

“We’re a seat-of-the-pants operation, dogs,” Alpha continued. “But we gotta get a prank going for Halloween, that’s clear. Something awesome and destructive, something that’ll build the legend of the Hounds. Are we in agreement?”

“Yes, oh Basset King.”

“Matthew?” asked Alpha.

“Agreed.”

“Good.”

“Oh, and our youngest members?” added Matthew. “You, as tradition demands, will have the honor of executing whatever we decide.”

“Why them?” asked Callum.

“They have the least to lose if they get caught. No college applications.”

“Harsh.”

“Not harsh, my dog,” said Alpha. “Fair. It’s part of showing your worthiness to ascend to the kingship next year, and it’s a way of getting the backs of the kings who went before you.”

“So did you carve that dumb pumpkin?” Callum asked Sam, the junior.

“Me and Matthew,” said Sam.

“And you painted the Guppy sophomore year, right?” Matthew asked Alpha, though clearly he already knew the answer.

“I most certainly did. Dumped the rest of the glow-in-the-dark paint down the boys’ john, where late-night tinkles glowed phosphorescent for nearly a month afterward. Nearly plopped myself thinking someone was going to notice the stuff under my fingernails.”

“Okay, then,” said Matthew. “Whatever we decide on, it’ll be executed by the two-man team of Sam and Porter, in the traditional show of loyalty to the Order. Understood?”

“Yes, oh Basset King.”

Frankie shivered.

The sophomore chosen to be the future King— was Porter.

Matthew must know she’d been lying when she talked about going to the party with Porter. Because he knew where Porter was going that night.

And Porter had a connection to Matthew.

Frankie tried to remember
when
she’d told Matthew she’d dated Porter—she was sure it had been late September, when they’d been going out only a couple of weeks. They’d sat on the lawn during a free period together and talked about their exes. But the Basset Hounds, they’d had the golf course party at the start of the year—had Porter been there?

He had. She had crossed the green to avoid him, she remembered. So he’d already been a Basset when she and Matthew started going out—and Matthew had been lying when he’d pretended not to know who Porter was.

So why had Porter tried to warn her about Matthew?

Frankie tailed it back to the tree where she’d left her sweater, and from there to the Geek Conglomerate party, where she danced and talked to people as if nothing were on her mind. She felt she needed an alibi.

THE OATH

The next morning, Frankie ran into Alpha at the English muffin table—which was mainly inhabited by large loaves of bread and toasters, but that’s what everyone called it. “Morning,” he said, like everything was great between them. Like he had never made Matthew cancel his date. He was “Alpha in the Morning,” unshaven and scraggle-haired, taking up space just in the way he loaded his tray with breakfast—dashing across the room for butter, calling to the caf lady to please yelp at him when the new bacon came out, drinking his tea while he waited for his toast to pop, balancing his tray under one arm like a football. He was, as she always found him, delightful. But a small war had been declared, Frankie knew. For possession of Matthew. For a position at the senior table. For status, really, as the alpha dog.

“Hey,” she answered, fork-splitting a muffin and sticking it in a toaster.

Alpha warmed his hands over the orange glow. “You look incredibly fetching today, Frankie.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it. You’re such a pretty girl. Matthew’s a lucky guy.”

Was this an apology? Or a reduction of Frankie to the status of Pretty Girl, rather than Serious Competition?

“Well,” she said, smiling, “I do brush my hair before I come to breakfast.”

Alpha scratched his head. “Yeah, well. It works for you. You coming to sit with us?”

“I got my friend Trish. She’s over there, in the red sweatshirt.”

“She can come. I want to meet her.”

He is smarter than I thought, Frankie realized. He’s betting that if he gives me more of what I want, I won’t try and take it from him. That if he invites my friends to the table, hangs with me when Matthew’s not around, lets me
in
a little more, I’ll be so wild about him, them, the whole thing, that I won’t take Matthew away. I’ll forget to fight.

He’s wrong, she thought. But he doesn’t have to know that. “All right,” she said, as her toaster popped. “Lemme negotiate the jam situation here and I’ll come by.”

They ate breakfast—Alpha, Callum, Trish, and Frankie. Matthew and Dean joined them twenty minutes in. Frankie scanned Matthew for signs that he harbored any suspicions of her having lied to him about Porter being at the Geek Conglomerate party—but there was nothing. He just sat there being “Matthew in the Morning,” which meant wet-haired and slow-moving, leaning his head on her shoulder and complaining he was still asleep, inviting Trish (now that she had entered his world) to come, hypothetically, over to Martha’s Vineyard from Nantucket next summer.

Frankie felt a surge of affection for him. How adorable he was. How generous his spirit. How smart. How funny.

Dean and Alpha bussed their trays, leaving Frankie, Trish, and Matthew alone at the table.

“Hey, how was your party?” Matthew wanted to know.

“Good,” Frankie answered. “We danced with the members of the Chess Club. You would not believe what some of those chess boys will do when they get their groove on. And there was a disco ball.”

“I’m jealous.”

“Of the chess boys or the disco ball?”

Trish rolled her eyes. “You do
not
need to be jealous of the chess boys.”

“Maybe.” Matthew turned to Frankie. “But didn’t you go with your ex-boyfriend, Peter what’s-his name?”

“Porter.”

Why was he asking? To see if she’d lie?

“Porter, right. He’s bigger than I am,” Matthew went on. “You always gotta worry when your girlfriend goes to a party with a guy who’s bigger than you.”

“Porter didn’t show,” said Frankie.

“I didn’t see him, either,” said Trish. “Maybe he was sick.”

Matthew pouted. “Here I was, all worked up to be jealous that Frankie went out with her ex-boyfriend, and now I got nowhere to put my energies.”

“You want to worry about the chess guys instead?” asked Frankie, reaching over and taking a drink of his tea.

“Wow. Maybe I will. Because I’ve got to live up to what Elizabeth was saying about moose and testosterone.”

“Go to town. Those chess guys were some hot dancers.”

“I’m seething,” said Matthew. “I’m turning green, can you see me?”

“Hm.” Frankie pretended to examine his face. “No.”

“Maybe just a little, around the gills?”

“Nothing.”

“All right. I can’t work myself up about the chess guys. Peter-Porter what’s-his-name better be glad he went to bed early, though.” Matthew laughed.

“Welsch,” said Frankie. “Porter Welsch.”

Frankie had never before thought to ask Matthew what he was doing on the nights he cut out of the library at nine to “go meet Alpha,” or on the evenings she didn’t see him at all.

But in the days after that canceled date and the meeting in the catwalks, she followed him.

She found herself to be a talented tail—as if her years of meek inconsequentiality had trained her. She remembered what if felt like to be invisible—and she felt as if she could will herself back to that invisibility and follow Matthew and his friends quite easily, just by becoming the girl they’d never noticed. (If, in fact, they had honestly never noticed her.) In any case, she was swift. She was silent. She had an unerring sense of direction and a sharp intuition. And she owned a black coat and dark gloves, which didn’t hurt.

The Bassets met fairly often in the days before Halloween. Frankie witnessed a meeting down by the pond Sunday night and a small meeting Tuesday after lunch, when she trailed Dean, Callum, Matthew, and Alpha back to a library study carrel, where they conferred alone for fifteen minutes. She couldn’t hear what they were saying; but as they headed out through the stacks, they mentioned another conference Tuesday night in the theater.

What she heard at the meetings was relatively uneventful. The Bassets chanted the oath and drank beer or soda and ate chips.

Atop the crown of Alabaster,

Bind it tight with sticking plaster.

Look to the west, boys;

Look to the books, men!

History is our guide!

Keep the secrets, tunnel under,

Climb the heights, our pack defend.

The Basset is a hardy beast,

We vow our loyalty to the end.

They bickered over what to do on Halloween, but more often than not, talk degenerated into stuff about girls, sports, and other matters of a decidedly unsecret nature. Callum couldn’t get anywhere with Gidget. The lacrosse team was having an awesome year. The seniors were applying to colleges.

However, Frankie was not confused. She understood exactly what was going on, because the purpose of the Loyal Order was connection. Bonding. Exclusivity. Maleness.

And even though Frankie found the meetings disorganized and their Halloween ideas dumb, she wanted to be part of it. They had such a large part of Matthew’s heart, and Matthew had them.

They had such loyalty and joy.

And because of her sex, because of her age, because (perhaps) of her religion and her feminism, she could sit at their table every day and she would never, never, ever get in.

Frankie had fallen in love not only with Matthew but with his group of friends. And she knew they didn’t rate her as anyone important.

Sure, they liked Frankie fine, found her attractive and didn’t seem to mind her hanging around; but if Matthew had dumped her, none of them would ever have given Frankie a second glance. None of them.

It was a closed door.

Only—

The oath. They chanted it because they’d always chanted it, because even to teenage boys who might never publicly admit it, the act of chanting together creates a bond. But she could tell that few of them had ever listened to the actual words.

Bind it tight with sticking plaster. When Hank Sutton had refused to tell Frankie about
The Disreputable History
, Dr. Montague had said, “Bind it tight with sticking plaster,” and Senior had added, “Look to the west, boys!” As if the oath were the answer to the question she had asked: Where do you keep this history?

The oath was a puzzle. It would tell her where the history was.

And none of the current members of the Order seemed to even know it existed.

The second time Frankie heard the oath, as she hid in the trees on Sunday, listening to them toss pennies into the pond and discuss Callum’s chances with the still-elusive Gidget, she wrote down the words. And that night she sat in bed with a flashlight, making notes.

The crown of Alabaster.
What is this? Flagpole? Main building? New gym? Some person, famous alum?

Bind it tight
—what is
it
, the thing being bound? The history itself?

Sticking plaster
—Google says adhesive tape.

Look to the west.
West from where? From the crown of Alabaster? or more metaphorical, meaning look to the West, look out to the expansion, gold rush, etc.

Look to the books.
General exhortation to excellence? Study hard? Or is it literal—look to the books, meaning toward the library? They do have meetings in the library.

History is our guide.
Probably just that there’s a history of the Bassets, hidden somewhere, that they should use as a guide. But possibly the history building?

Keep the secrets.
Self-explanatory.

Tunnel under.
Do basset hounds make tunnels? Google. Okay. They don’t. So what tunneling does this mean? Tunneling under what?

Back to crown of Alabaster
: New arts complex? Catwalks over theater? No. Widow’s walk?

Climb the heights.
Just metaphorical striving for excellence/power, etc.? Or something else. Heights of what?

Our pack defend
. Obvious.

Hardy beast
, etc. Obvious.