The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (16 page)

ENGLISH MUFFINS

On Wednesday before Halloween, Elena Tesorieri demanded Alpha leave school for several days. It was a manufactured crisis. Elena couldn’t bear the empty penthouse and insisted Alpha accompany her
and her mother
to a yoga retreat in the Berkshires. She said it would be good for him, and she missed her son, and the retreat was necessary to her mental health—but her own mother would drive her batty if Alpha wasn’t there to act as buffer.

He had classes, papers due, secret-society pranks to orchestrate—Elena didn’t care. To the Berkshires he would go, for four days over Halloween.

An hour before his departure, Alpha held court at lunch in the caf. “Can you picture me?” he asked. “I’m like the most inflexible man alive. There will be all these fifty-year-old women wearing hot pants and squeezing themselves into pretzel shapes and then there will be me. Just reaching for my toes like they’re China. ‘Hello, there! You’re so far away, I can’t get to you! Can you even hear me?’”

“I think some meditation could be good for you,” said Elizabeth.

“What? You think I’m high-strung?” Alpha laughed and dunked a french fry into his soda. “I’m the guy who’s blowing off the calculus test and the Euro history paper, not to mention the Harvard early-action application I am supposed to be finishing, all to go do stretchy exercises in the woods.”

“I’m just saying. It wouldn’t hurt you to mellow out.”

“You’ll see. I’m gonna come back here with like ultra yoga man vibrations coming out of my pores. Those yoga guys are very sexy. You’ll be completely unable to resist my charms.”

Elizabeth snorted.

Frankie thought: Alpha and Elizabeth are having sex. Is Matthew upset that he and I aren’t having sex?

And then she thought: He’s leaving school. Alpha is leaving school.

“You gonna call in about the Halloween thing?” Callum asked.

“Shut up. We’re in the caf,” snapped Alpha.

“Did you have too much coffee?” Callum complained. “Sheesh, you’re like trip-wired.”

“No,” said Alpha, answering the original question. “I can’t call in. No cell phones, no Internet. This yoga place is old-school.”

And Frankie thought: He won’t even be able to call anyone. Incommunicado for four days.

“Well, what are we doing?” Callum persisted.

“Later,” said Matthew, looking at his food. “You have a big mouth, you know that?”

Callum laughed. “I know. Literally. Frankie, you wanna see me fit three English muffins in my big mouth? I seriously can.”

Dean nodded. “He can. It is a truly vile sight.”

“Sure,” said Frankie, handing over the two halves of a toasted English that were sitting on her tray. “You want butter?”

And inside, she thought: Four days. That’s an opening if I ever saw one.

But for what? An opening for what?

“Nah,” said Callum. “Butter is cheating. It greases them up. The pure accomplishment must be done without the aid of butter.”

“At the yoga place,” said Alpha, tossing Callum his English muffins, “they teach you to put four in your mouth at once. Every morning, every single person there practices at breakfast. They put in all four, and anyone who chews it all and swallows without gagging gets a prize.”

“He is so full of it,” sighed Elizabeth.

“What’s the prize?” asked Matthew.

“Oh, um. Let’s see, the prize is some kind of certificate of English muffin enlightenment, and once you have eight of them you get a medal that proves you are Master of the Muffin. I’m serious. All the yoga teachers can do six muffins. They do six muffins every morning as a matter of course.”

Callum had wedged the three muffins into his mouth and was grunting and pointing to his face.

“Very good,” said Frankie.

Thinking: An opening for the Halloween prank, that’s what.

“It’s nothing!” cried Alpha. “Haven’t you been listening to me? When I get back from yogaland, I am going to out-muffin his dumb jock self. You wait and see.”

Joke as he might—and all Alpha’s powers of self-aggrandizement in the guise of amusing self-deprecation were called into play here—the alpha male had been effectively and efficiently (though temporarily) emasculated by his mommy.

Frankie felt a glow of schadenfreude, which quickly changed into excitement. She ducked out of lunch early and took Artie’s keys to the hardware store, where she made copies of each and every one. Then she slid into sixth period fifteen minutes late, dropping the keys into Trish’s backpack with an apologetic smile, just in time for Artie to spend seventh period showing films to the senior cinema elective.

In between classes, Frankie opened her laptop, went online, and opened a Gmail account.

Screen name: THEALPHADOG.

What she planned to do with this e-mail account during Alpha’s absence was not yet clear to Frankie. Something, though.

Something big.

Something Halloween.

She had to sort it out, fast.

At nine twenty p.m. that evening, as she took off her own plain cotton bra and pulled on her pajama top, Frankie noticed Trish’s blue lace underwire lying on the floor of their dorm room.

She thought: That’s a silly bra.

And then she thought: But it’s cute.

It just seems so funny to dress up your boobs. Like when no one is going to see them. Or even if someone is. It seems so undignified to deck out your private bits in flashy bits of lace you’d never wear on the outside of your clothes in a million years.

And then she thought: Boobs.

Boobs are just inherently undignified.

These are what I’ve got that keeps me out of the Loyal Order. Yes, it’s my chromosomes, and maybe other things, too, but for a symbol of the difference between me and those boys—I could do worse than boobs. Or a bra.

Just then someone knocked. Frankie pulled on her bathrobe and answered. It was Artie, with two of his friends from AVT, Charles and John. They were a riot of sparkle, color, and ridiculous amounts of lipstick. All three of them were dressed in drag.

“Hey, is Trish here?” Artie said, giggling. “We’re having a dress rehearsal for Halloween. I need her advice.”

“She’s in Mabel’s room cramming for the geography test,” said Frankie, stepping out in the hall to admire them. “Aren’t co-study hours nearly over? They’re gonna kick you guys out of here any second.”

“Oh, we’ve got ten minutes,” said Artie. “What do you think? How do we look?”

He twirled, showing himself off. He wore patent-leather high heels, bold stripes of blush across his cheekbones, and a purple taffeta party dress.

“What are you supposed to be?” Frankie asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What are you dressed up as? Like, are you a singing group or something?”

“No, no. Just girls,” Artie answered. “Right?” He turned to his friends, who nodded. “Just girls.”

Do girls really look like that to them? wondered Frankie. Because she felt like she herself was the furthest thing from this shiny, fluffy, lipsticky creature in front of her, this Artie in drag. “Good luck with that.”

“Can I ask you something?” Charles said.

“Sure.”

“Do we need to shave our legs? I’m trying to avoid that by wearing black hose.”

“You don’t have to,” Frankie told him. “I hardly think you’re going for realism here.” He was wearing a silver miniskirt and platform heels. He was six foot one.

“Oh yes I am!” he cried. “I don’t want to have my leg hairs showing!”

“Then you have to shave, Charles,” said Artie dryly. “I told you already.”

“He wants to see if Trish will lend him one of her bras,” piped up John, dressed in a pink strapless prom dress.

“I got this one from Charlie’s sister,” explained Artie. “But it’s only an A-cup. I want to have a little more impact.”

“You can ask her,” Frankie said. “Mabel’s in room 209.”

“Or could he have one of yours?” John wondered.

“I dulge that,” said Frankie. “My underwear is not going out on loan.”

“Dulge?” Artie squinted at her.

“Neglected positive of indulge. I’m not indulging that idea of yours. I’m dulging it. No bra.”

“Come on,” pleaded John. “Just till Halloween.”

“Shut up!” said Artie. “She doesn’t have to. I can get one from Trish.”

“If you put a shrug on over those outfits,” said Frankie, “you won’t have to shave your armpits.”

“Oh no! I forgot about armpits!” cried John.

“I forgot about armpits, too!” moaned Charles, whose shirt was nothing more than a camisole. “What’s a shrug?”

“Like a minisweater,” Frankie told him.

“There are so many girl-things we don’t know!” cried Charles. “I’m so glad we did a dress rehearsal. This would have been a disaster otherwise.”

“Come on, ladies,” said Artie. “We have to go to 209 and find me a bra.”

“And a shrug,” said John.

“Two shrugs,” said Charles. “I’m still going to see if I can get through this whole night without shaving anything. Bye, Frankie!”

Frankie watched them totter on unsteady heels down to Mabel’s room. Then she shut the door behind her and flipped open her laptop.

She was very, very gruntled.

She had her plan. It was full and complete, down to nearly every detail. It had formed itself in the back of her head while Artie and the boys were talking about their costumes, and waited, poised, to flood itself into her mind the moment they departed.

She started by Googling the word
parachute
.

HOW TO GET THROUGH A CLOSED DOOR

You will recall that Frankie had been researching and writing early drafts of her Cities, Art, and Protest paper on the San Francisco Suicide Club and the Cacophony Society. SantaCon? The Brides of March? Clowns on a Bus? You remember.

After Frankie opened the Gmail account, she wrote an initial draft of the following section, which is useful for a full understanding of what happened next:

The upperclassmen at the California Institute of Technology skip school each year for a day and depart campus. The tradition is called “Ditch Day,” and it has morphed from a simple prank against the university administration into a complicated backand-forth. Now, those who traditionally were
committing
the prank (the upperclassmen, by skipping) have become those who are
pranked against
.

It all began when, with the seniors gone, the underclassmen started breaking into their rooms and booby-trapping their closets, moving the furniture around, emptying the rooms entirely (Steinberg,
If at All Possible, Involve a Cow: The Book of College Pranks
). So while the upperclassmen were asserting power over the
university
, the underclassmen asserted power over the upper.

But the upperclassmen fought back. They began to blockade their doors. It being Caltech, they quickly gave up blocking them with furniture and began “stacking” them with cement and huge pieces of metal. They booby-trapped the doors with sand and shaving cream. The underclassmen retaliated by using chain saws, bolt cutters, and jackhammers.

They got into the rooms so often that the seniors resorted to what Neil Steinberg calls the “finesse stack”—which challenges the underclassmen to solve a problem in the hallway before they can get into the room. It works on the honor system. The door is left open, and the students must reassemble an engine, decode seemingly random notes played by a synthesizer, or solve some other extremely complicated puzzle that has no doubt taken the upperclassman (or woman) many weeks to create.

A later development was the upperclassmen’s invention of the “honor stack,” which asks the younger students to go out and “Humiliate themselves in a variety of creative ways, tied together under an underlying plot or scenario” (Steinberg 150). They’ve got to run naked through campus, buy a house, or steal the athletic director’s car.

Steinberg sees this struggle as symmetrical: “the underclassmen wanting in, the seniors wanting to keep them out” (147). But I think the most interesting thing about Ditch Day is the way the older students went from pranking authority by skipping school to
being
the authority that was pranked by the younger ones. Then the younger ones would often end up counterpranked by the stacks the seniors had created.

The administration was forgotten along the way, until the time of the honor stack, when the seniors managed to get the younger students to do their antiadministration pranks
for
them. So the younger students, thinking they were sending up the seniors by gaining access to their rooms, were sending up the school itself by running nude, stealing cars, etc.

These pranks resemble the activities of the Suicide Club/Cacophony Society in that they take a symbol (a closed door, symbolizing privacy) and reinvent it. The closed door of a senior on Ditch Day symbolizes a challenge to the underclassman (or woman). It says, “Break through me” or “Outwit my owner.”

Like Cacophonists, the Caltech students critique a time-honored institution (the university) by breaking its unwritten rules: you must wear clothes, you must honor your teachers, you must not attack fellow students’ dorm rooms with chain saws.