The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (7 page)

“Did you do any other matchups tonight?” she asked instead, thinking of Gidget and Callum.

“A few. Nothing too nefarious, though.”

“Like what?”

“A buddy of mine we hooked up with a girl he likes. We put some friends together who don’t know each other well. You know, seeing what would happen. We invited a few lowerclassmen, but not that many.”

“So you didn’t mastermind any conflicts, put people together with their archenemies, nothing like that?”

Matthew looked at her. “I’m not one for schadenfreude.”

“What’s that?”

“Happiness at the misfortunes of others.”

Frankie liked that word.
Schadenfreude.
“I’m not either,” she said. “But I might have been tempted anyway. To see what would happen to the social order if I made some unusual pairs.”

“You have an evil little mind, do you know that?”

Frankie laughed.

“I’m serious. I bet you’re trouble wrapped in a pretty package.”

“Who says it’s little?”

“What?”

“My evil mind. “

“Okay, a sizable evil mind. Wrapped in a pretty package. That was the point.”

Frankie felt herself flush. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Matthew. “I like a girl who knows how to take a compliment. You know how so many girls are all, ‘Oh, me? I’m not pretty. I’m a hag.’”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s so much nicer when someone just says thank you. So don’t become that girl, okay?”

“That haggy girl? Okay.”

They stepped out of the woods and headed up the path to the near edge of the golf course. “Frankie?”

“What?’

“That thing about me and Alpha organizing the party. You won’t go telling your friends, or anything, will you?”

“No.”

“Promise? Your lips are sealed?”

Frankie didn’t see why it was such a big deal, but she nodded. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I am exceptionally good at keeping secrets.”

THE GOLF COURSE

They reached the small clubhouse, with a garage for golf carts and storage lockers for students’ clubs. The lights were off and the building was locked. For a moment, the night landscape seemed deserted. Frankie and Matthew skirted the side of the clubhouse and looked down the hill to the course.

Nearly forty people were walking down. All dressed in dark colors, many lugging beer and a few carrying blankets to spread out on the grass. Most were seniors, though Frankie could make out Star holding hands with Dean, who was easy to spot because he was wearing an orange hunting jacket.

Matthew grabbed her arm and they ran down the hill together.

* * *

An hour later, Frankie was cold, and so was everyone else. They had all underestimated what they’d needed to wear. The blankets people had brought to lie on ended up wrapped around the girls, and without blankets, there was nowhere to sit—so nearly everyone was standing.

People were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, but there hadn’t been that much beer (everyone was underage), and most of it was gone. Ash and cigarette butts littered the golf course, and Frankie felt irritated that no one was thinking to shove them into their beer bottles or even their pockets.

Matthew was flitting around. Playing host even though no one was supposed to know it was his party.

There was no one for Frankie to talk to. Most of the people there didn’t know who she was. She stood alone, thinking. She knew she shouldn’t be irritated that Matthew wasn’t standing next to her—it was a party, and there were so many people here he’d probably barely talked to since last June. But as she looked at him laughing with Callum, Dean, and Alpha, Frankie remembered how Matthew had called her a “pretty package,” how he’d called her mind little, how he’d told her not to change—as if he had some power over her. A tiny part of her wanted to go over to him and shout, “I can feel like a hag some days if I want! And I can tell everybody how insecure I am if I want! Or I can be pretty and pretend to think I’m a hag out of fake modesty—I can do that if I want, too. Because you, Livingston, are not the boss of me and what kind of girl I become.”

But most of her simply felt happy that he had put his arm around her and told her he thought she was pretty.

Frankie sat down for a moment, but the grass was cold and slightly damp, so she stood again. She saw Porter—her ex, one of the only other sophomores there—talking to Callum on one edge of the group. She didn’t want to see him, so she went the opposite direction and found Star. “You were right,” Frankie said, tapping her on the shoulder. “I got an invitation.”

Star turned. “Did I ask you about it?”

How could she not recall asking about the invitation? She must have known Matthew was interested in Frankie, because she had thought to ask Frankie about the party, rather than any of the more popular, more obvious underclassmen in their history class.

Frankie was trying to like Star, a feat she’d never before bothered to attempt. What with recent developments on the Matthew front, there seemed like a reasonable possibility she and Star would both be sophomore girlfriends of senior boys who were friends, so it was worthwhile getting to know one another. But Star’s dismissal was annoying.

Frankie was beginning to realize that the kind of selective memory exhibited by Dean, Star, and their ilk was neither stupidity nor poor recollection. It was a power play—possibly subconscious on the part of the player—but nevertheless intended to discomfit another person who was in some way perceived as a threat. Maybe Star was threatened because Frankie was smart and Star was not; maybe because Star wanted to be the only sophomore girl with the high status of having a boyfriend in Matthew’s set; or maybe because Star was generally insecure and suspicious of women and girls who weren’t similar to her. In any case, she was threatened by Frankie, so she feigned forgetfulness, just as Dean had done.

“In history,” Frankie reminded Star.

“That class is so boring.” Star grimaced. “I can’t stand it. Grigoryan starts talking and I go la-la-la up to my happy place in my head and wait for it to be over. You should see my notebook. It has some of the most complicated doodles in, like, the history of Alabaster.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“Well, not compared to geometry,” Star said.

“You didn’t like that Napoleon lecture with the slides?”

“Um. No.”

“With his short-man complex and his receding hairline and paunchy stomach? Didn’t you kind of like that painting we saw this morning? And the whole thing about him being the Little Corporal, the one who knew all his soldiers’ names?”

Star’s friend Claudia came up. She was a tall redhead without a single freckle. A soccer player. Inclined to pepper her sentences with enormous words, the meanings of which were not entirely within her apprehension. “Hey-hey,” she said to Star, with a nod at Frankie. “Look at this.” She held up the envelope that had enclosed her blue invitation. “What kind of dog is that?” she said, pointing to the wax seal.

“I don’t know,” said Star. “Maybe a beagle?”

“Snoopy is a beagle,” said Claudia with a shake of her head.

“But it looks kind of like Snoopy.”

“Uh-uh. Snoopy’s epicanthic folds aren’t like that.”

Star laughed. “Snoopy rules! He’s the cutest dog.”

“It’s a basset hound,” said Frankie.

“Snoopy’s not a basset hound,” said Claudia. “Snoopy’s a beagle. I already told you.”

“Yes, but—”

“Ooh, there’s Dean,” Star said to Frankie, pointing. “He’s my boyfriend now, did you know that?”

Frankie nodded.

“I guess people talk. Anyway, I’ve gotta go remind him how he’s driving me off-campus to see a movie tomorrow. Come on, Claudia.”

And they were off.

Frankie watched them go, ponytails swinging, and realized she had bored Star and Claudia so much that Star had made an excuse to get away.

But on the other hand, they had bored Frankie, too.

The party was boring. It was people standing around in the cold.

A little after one a.m., everyone started drifting into the woods, heading back to the dorms a few at a time so as not to make noise. Matthew walked Frankie home through the dark trees, holding her hand and whispering conspiratorially about wanting to be a newspaper editor and how last summer he, Dean, and Alpha had hitched a ride with the driver of a Mack truck when the Volvo had broken down, and had eaten pie at a truck stop for several hours before calling Triple-A.

He walked her to the woods behind her dorm. “Can I kiss you?” he whispered as she was opening her phone to call Trish.

How could he ask that?

How could he ever think she wouldn’t?

“No way,” she told him, and pulled him toward her.

“You’re being mean to me,” he whispered in her ear.

“Okay, I changed my mind,” she said.

His lips were cold on the outside, and Frankie was shivering even with his arms around her.

Matthew stopped kissing her and breathed his warm breath down the back of her shirt, laughing. Then he kissed her again.

She didn’t call Trish for another half hour.

Most young women, when confronted with the peculiarly male nature of certain social events—usually those incorporating beer or other substances guaranteed to kill off a few brain cells, and often involving either the freezing-cold outdoors or the near-suffocating heat of a filthy dorm room, but which can also, in more intellectual circles, include the watching of boring Russian films—will react in one of three ways.

Some, like Trish, will wonder what the point is, figure there probably is no point and never was one, and opt for typically feminine or domestic activities such as crumble-making, leaving whatever boyfriends they have to “hang with the guys.”

Others, like Star, will be bored most of the time but will continue attending such events because they are the girlfriends or would-be girlfriends of said boys, and they don’t want to seem like killjoys or harpies. If the boys are there, playing games on the Xbox (indoors) or letting off cherry bombs to make a big noise for no reason (outdoors), the girls will chatter among themselves and generally make a quiet display of being interested in whatever the boys think is interesting.

The third group aggressively embraces the activities at hand. These girls dislike the marginalized position such events naturally put them in, and they are determined not to stay on those margins. They do what the boys do wholeheartedly, if sometimes a little falsely. They drink beer, play video games, light off the cherry bombs. They remain alert during obscure Russian films. They even buy the beer, win the video games, and show up with an M-80, just when the cherry bombs are beginning to get old. If required by their social circle, they read articles on Andrei Tarkovsky.

Whether their enthusiasm is forced or entirely genuine, these girls gain respect from the boys—who are not, after all, cavemen, but enlightened twenty-first-century males who are happy to let females into their inner circles if the females prove their mettle.

As I said, most girls will engage in one of these three behaviors, but Frankie Landau-Banks did none. Although she went home that night feeling happier than she had ever been in her short life, she did not confuse the golf course party with a
good
party, and she did not tell herself that she had had a pleasant time.

It had been, she felt, a dumb event preceded by excellent invitations.

What Frankie did that was unusual was to imagine herself in control. The drinks, the clothes, the invitations, the instructions, the food (there had been none), the location, everything. She asked herself: If I were in charge, how could I have done it better?

A GARLIC KNOT

The next day, Sunday, Frankie woke to the sound of someone knocking. Trish was already out, so Frankie went to the door in her pajamas. There stood Alpha, wearing a dark red sweater with large holes in the elbows. He hadn’t talked to her since she’d met him in the gym. Even last night he’d done nothing more than nod at her as she stood next to Matthew on the lawn. “Come down,” he said now, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “We’re going to get pizza.” What “we”? She and Alpha? Was he asking her out now? He must have known she had gone to the party with Matthew. Frankie stalled for time. “It’s only ten o’clock,” she said. “We’ll call it brunch.”

“Where are you getting pizza at this hour?”

“Luigi’s in Lowell is open twenty-four hours.”

“I’m not allowed off-campus,” Frankie told him, still turning over in her mind whether she wanted to go. Only seniors could leave without express permission or supervision.

“Who’s gonna know?” he asked her.

Alpha had a point. But such is the nature of the panopticon: most students at Alabaster didn’t leave campus—even though it was as simple as hopping over a low stone wall. “I don’t want to get caught,” Frankie said, wondering if her pajama top was see-through and crossing her arms over her chest.

“Matthew went to pick up his car in the lot,” Alpha told her. “He should be waiting for us at the gate in a couple minutes. He told me you’d be a sport.”

Oh. Alpha was here for Matthew. It was okay.

She didn’t have to choose.

“So. Are you gonna come get pizza?” Alpha asked. “Or are you gonna be a good little girl and stay on campus?”

“I’ll be down in five,” Frankie told him.

Matthew’s car was a navy Mini Cooper. It was already running when Frankie and Alpha arrived at the gate.

“Shotgun,” said Alpha.

Frankie felt a wave of annoyance, but it dissipated on seeing Matthew’s smile light up. “Hey there, Frankie. You ready for some serious pizza?”

She nodded and squeezed past Alpha’s bulk into the backseat. Matthew put the car in gear.

“I would like to state at the outset,” said Alpha, lighting a cigarette and rolling down his window, “that anything made outside Italy or the five boroughs of New York City has no legitimate claim to be called pizza.”

“What should we call it?” asked Matthew.

“Call it a disk of dough with tomato and cheese. But it is not a pizza.”

“A DOD,” said Matthew.

“If you must.” Alpha exhaled. “We’ll go have a rubbery, bready DOD. And it will be better than the food in the caf, and it will be nice to have a big pile of grease and salt first thing on a Sunday morning, but it won’t be pizza.”

“You are such a snob, dog.”

“I am not. Pizza is a food of the people. It’s cheap, you can get it on any street corner in the city. It’s categorically impossible to be snobby about pizza.”

“Do you remember that Russian diner we stopped at in Chicago where that lady with the hair growing out of her nose wouldn’t let you put ketchup on your steak?” asked Matthew.

“Yeah, so?”

“So it’s possible to be snobby about anything. That wasn’t even a good steak,” said Matthew. “And she was not going to let you put ketchup on it even if it killed her.”

“What’s your feeling about pineapple?” asked Frankie from the back.

“On a pizza?” said Alpha. “Unforgivable.”

“How come?”

“Because it’s fruit. There’s no fruit on a pizza.”

“A tomato’s a fruit.”

“That doesn’t count.” Alpha took a drag of his smoke. “A tomato may be a fruit, but it is a singular fruit. A savory fruit. A fruit that has ambitions far beyond the ambitions of other fruits.”

“Really.”

“Sure. It’s a staple ingredient in Italian cooking. You put it in sauces, you put it in salad with a little mozzarella and olive oil, you make ratatouille. And what do you do with your average fruit? Nothing. You just eat it. No one is going to found a whole cuisine on a grape.”

“What about wine?” asked Frankie.

“Okay, okay. But grapefruit? No. Or pineapple? No. Can you imagine founding a cuisine on blueberries? Everyone would be so sick of them within a week, they’d starve to death. The blueberry has no versatility. The country with a cuisine based on the blueberry would be a country of lunatics, turned mad by the unwavering sameness of their daily meals.”

“Okay,” said Frankie. “But have you actually tried pineapple pizza?”

“I don’t have to try it,” said Alpha. “It’s disgusting.”

“How can you write it off when you haven’t tried it?”

“She caught you, dog,” laughed Matthew. “Pizza snobbery is coming out of your pores right now.”

“Oh, bull.” Alpha threw his cigarette butt out the window and pouted.

“You’re not a pie snob, I’ll say that,” said Matthew, consoling him. “Frankie, we drove across the country this summer for three weeks trying to eat as many different kinds of pie as we could—”

“I—”

“What?”

Frankie had been going to say, “I know,” but had thought better of it. “Nothing.”

“Anyway,” continued Matthew, “Alpha was a completely egalitarian pie lover. He liked everything. Whereas by like, day three, Dean had narrowed it down to only one kind he liked enough to be eating every day.”

“Which was?”

“Lemon meringue. But then he’d only eat half of it anyway.”

“That was abnormal,” said Alpha. “I mean, I ask you: is it normal to eat only half a piece of pie?”

“I don’t think so,” said Frankie. “If it’s in front of me, I want it.”

“What about ice cream?” asked Alpha. “Or frozen custard?”

Frankie was speechless for a moment.

Alpha did remember her.

That day on the beach.

She had figured he did. Probably.

But it was good to be sure.

Though now, it wasn’t something they could talk about. Because she was with Matthew.

She had picked Matthew. Or he had picked her.

Or Alpha had picked the she-wolf. Or something.

“I’ve eaten half a frozen custard before,” Frankie told him. “But custard has a cold factor. It’s never too cold or too warm for pie.”

“It’s never too cold for custard, either,” said Alpha. “Not in my universe.” He reached into the glove box and shuffled through the CDs. “If you don’t like food, you don’t like sex,” he continued. “I bet that’s Dean’s problem. His grades are so excellent because he’s completely repressed.”

“I doubt that,” said Matthew.

“Why do you think he’s going out with that ball of fluff half his age? Sorry, Frankie.”

“Star’s all right.” Matthew turned off the highway.

“You don’t like Star?” Frankie asked. She’d seen Star sitting at the senior tables more than once, talking and laughing with Dean’s friends.

“Oh wait, she’s not a ball of fluff, she’s a DOD,” said Alpha. “Like she’s fine, she’s okay, but she’s not— delicious. Which is perfect for Dean, because he’s so repressed anyway, he’s not interested in delicious.”

“That has nothing to do with her being a sophomore,” Frankie argued.

But she was out of her depth.

They pulled into Luigi’s, which turned out to be a dark place with red Formica tables and a pinball machine in the back, catering to the late-night crowd from the bar next door. NO PIZZA TILL NOON, read a sign on the counter.

“Is there really no pizza?” Matthew asked a busboy.

“The guy who makes it didn’t come in,” was the answer. “Sunday morning, nobody wants to get up and make pizza. We got soda. We got garlic knots.”

“I’ll take garlic knots,” said Alpha. “Let’s get, I don’t know, what? A dozen of them to go.”

There was a Ms. Pac-Man machine in the back of the restaurant. Frankie felt in her bag for some quarters and fed them in. While her little Pac-lady chomped energy pellets, she listened to the boys talk. They were sitting in a booth near the front.

“Those are like the ultimate DODs,” said Matthew. “All dough, no tomato, no cheese.”

“No, they’re BODS,” said Alpha. “Balls of dough. But”—he sniffed the bag—“these have got a serious garlic punch, I’d say. We shouldn’t underestimate them.”

“Lemme smell.” Matthew stuck his face in the bag.

“What do you want to bet your new girl doesn’t eat them?” Alpha said to Matthew under his breath.

“I don’t want to bet,” said Matthew, taking one out of the bag and popping it into his mouth. “I never bet on what girls will eat.”

“That’s the thing about women,” said Alpha, drumming his fingers on the Formica tabletop. “They’re not voracious.”

“You don’t think?”

Alpha ate another garlic knot. “Maybe they are, somewhere inside. But they don’t act on it. They’re always eating half the custard and then giving the rest of the cone away.”

There it was again. The custard. Alpha wanted Frankie to know he remembered. And that, somehow, he was disappointed in her.

Was that why he hadn’t pursued her? Because he could have, couldn’t he? Despite Matthew’s interest?

He thought she wasn’t voracious. That she didn’t go after what she wanted. That she was a girl who left the boardwalk as soon as her mother called her cell.

“That makes Dean a woman,” said Matthew. “He left half-eaten pie all across the country.”

Alpha laughed. “He is a woman. About some things.”

Frankie didn’t like garlic. It made her nauseated. But she forced Ms. Pac-Man to eat the last of the pellets in her video maze and left the intermission between levels to play on its own while she walked to the booth where Matthew and Alpha were sitting.

“Weren’t you getting those to go?” she asked, sitting down and pointing at the bag of garlic knots.

“Yeah, but where are we going?” asked Alpha. “They’ll stink up the Mini Cooper anyway.”

“Let me have one,” she told him.

He handed her the open bag.

Wincing only slightly, she ate the knot in two bites.

“Last night he said he wanted to show me around the Vineyard,” Frankie gushed, on the phone with Zada later that afternoon.

“Typical,” Zada said. “That’s a classic Matthew move.”

Earlier, Frankie had kissed Matthew good-bye in a haze of garlic fumes before he ran off to soccer practice.

Then the sky had cracked open and it began to rain. Now she was walking through campus on her way to the library, holding an umbrella and stepping deliberately in rain puddles. She was wearing red rubber boots.

“What’s typical?” Frankie asked her sister.

“I’m not saying he’s a bad guy or anything. I like Matthew,” answered Zada. “I’ve just noticed that’s how he operates. Once he decides he likes someone, he’s like insanely welcoming.”

“So you’re saying it’s not just to me.”

“No, it’s not. But it
is
only to people he really likes. I think it’s a coping strategy to dissipate anxiety about his wealth and his family. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.” Frankie didn’t want to hear Zada’s interpretation of the Livingston psychology. She just wanted to be happy Matthew liked her and wanted to take her to his summerhouse.

“It’s like this,” explained Zada. “Matthew knows some people will back off from being friends with him because of his dad’s position in the world. Like they won’t invite him places or ask him to do stuff because they assume he’s always got somewhere better to be. Or ’cause they don’t think they belong in his exalted circles.” Zada paused. “Hold on. I’m in the coffeehouse and I just have to order. Can I get a carrot-walnut muffin, a fruit salad, and a soy latte?”