Since You've Been Gone (21 page)

“So,” he said, and in his voice, I could hear Frank Porter, class president, beginning an assembly.  “I’ve made a list of all the Jamies at our school, and divided them by gender, and—”

“Actually,” I said, feeling myself start to smile as I leaned back on my hands, “that one’s taken care of.” Frank raised his eyebrows, and I extended my legs out in front of me, settling in for the story. “Okay, so the other night . . .”

I told Frank the story about delivering pizzas, and chickening out, but then going back to the gas station, remembering what he’d told me about the guy’s name, and then we somehow moved on to other things. Before I knew it, the conversation was just flowing without me having to try and guide it, or be aware of its every twist and turn. I was no longer thinking about what I should say.  I was just going with it, letting the conversation unfold.

“That makes no sense whatsoever.” He just stared at me. “It’s on the list because you’re afraid of
horses
?”

“Yep.”

Frank just tilted his head to the side, like he was trying to figure this out. “So, uh,” he said after a moment. “Would these be, like, regular horses? Or possessed demon horses?”

“Regular horses,” I admitted as Frank looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh. “I don’t really know why.”

“Well, for me it’s heights,” he said, shaking his head. Then he looked at me and I could see him start to blush a little. “As you probably saw the other day. My dad took me on a site visit when I was three, and I remember looking down and just freaking out. It’s one of my earliest memories, and it involves sheer terror. And I tried to get over it last year, when we flew to Montreal for an academic decathlon . . .”

“It is not a good movie.” Frank and I were now walking along the water’s edge; as he’d been sifting through the sand, he’d come upon a rock and wanted to try skipping it. He also wanted to try and convince me that
Space Ninja
, the movie that had been playing at the multiplexes since Memorial Day, was an example of quality filmmaking.

“It is,” he insisted, and when I raised my eyebrows at him,
he laughed. “Okay, maybe the fact that I saw it with Collins colored my appreciation of it. But you have to admit, it was way better than
Ninja Pirate
.”

I just stared at him, wondering how he’d ever gotten a reputation for being one of the smartest people in school. “How is that proving your point?”

“In a well-ordered universe,” Frank said as we looked for more stones, since the first round of skipping hadn’t gone as he’d hoped, “skipping stones would boomerang back to you, and wouldn’t just be an exercise in futility.”

“In a well-ordered universe,” I countered, “people would stick to skipping stones on lakes and not,  you know,  Long Island Sound.”

“Can I ask about Lissa?”  We had temporarily moved back to the steps after Frank had gone inside to get us both sweatshirts. “Do you miss her?”

He nodded and was silent for a moment before he said, “Yeah. I mean, we’ve never really spent this much time apart, so . . .” He shrugged. There was a long pause before he added, his voice quieter, “I think it’s harder to be the one left behind.” He looked over at me. “Do you?”

I knew he meant Sloane. “Yeah,” I said. I thought about
telling him how it sometimes felt like I was only half there, without Sloane to talk to about what I was experiencing. How it felt like someone had chopped off my arm, and then for good measure taken my ID and sense of direction. How it was like I had no idea who I was, or where I was going, coupled with the fact that there was a piece of me missing that never seemed to stop hurting, never letting me forget, always reminding me I wasn’t whole. But instead, I just looked at him, somehow understanding that he knew exactly what it was like to feel these things. “I do.”

“Oh, I meant to tell you,” Frank said as I tried my own hand at skipping a stone. But I must have been missing some crucial component, because my stone just landed in the water and sank. “I checked with my mom. I saw
Bug Juice
when it was on Broadway—my first Broadway play.”

I glanced over at him, and wondered if I’d been at the theater that day, as I usually was, hanging out with the merch girls and trying to score some peanut M&M’s from concessions. I wondered what I would have thought of eleven-year-old Frank, if I would have known him back then. “It’s based on me,” I said. “Cecily is.” Frank raised his eyebrows, looking impressed, and I went on. “I mean, in the beginning. She becomes less like me as the play goes on.”

“What do you mean?” he asked as he picked up a stone,
tossing it in his hand a few times, like he was testing the weight.

“She becomes . . . brave,” I finally said. “And really strong. Fearless.” I dug my toes into the sand, then added, “Plus, there’s the whole arson thing.”

“Well, that too,” Frank said, nodding. He sent his rock flying across the water, and it bounced off the surface five times before finally sinking.

I smiled. “Nicely done.”

“We’ve been friends since we were little,” Frank said. We were back to sitting on the sand, and I was writing my name with my first finger, over and over, the looping
E
, the hook on the
y
. The conversation had turned to Collins, and the likelihood of him having any success with Gwen the Projectionist (slim to none) versus the likelihood of her ditching him for another guy as soon as they arrived at the party (high). “One of those friends you can’t even remember making, you know?” I didn’t, but I nodded anyway. “He was really excited I was staying in town this summer. We usually don’t get to hang out this much.”

“And plus, now he’s got a wingman,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” Frank said. “For all the good I’m doing him.” He shook his head, but then smiled. “He’s actually got some big camping trip planned for the two of us in August.”

“In a well-ordered universe,” I said, smoothing out my name and starting again, “camping would take place indoors.”

The conversation started to slow around the time I began to feel the coldness of the sand through my jean shorts, and Frank started to yawn. We brushed off our hands and feet but tracked sand across the deck nonetheless. As we stepped inside, I waited for it to get strange, now that I could see him clearly again—his brown eyes, his reddish hair, his freckles.

But it didn’t.

And I didn’t understand why until I’d gotten back into the car and Frank had waved at me from the door and I’d turned in the direction of home. It seemed that somewhere between the arguments about the merits of ninja movies, he’d stopped being Frank Porter, class president, unknowable person. He’d stopped being a stranger, a
guy
, someone I didn’t know how to talk to.  That night, in the darkness, sharing our secrets and favorite pizza-topping preferences, he’d moved closer to just being Frank—maybe, possibly, even my friend.

I pulled my car through the gates at Saddleback Ranch, feeling my hands tighten on the steering wheel. This was what I’d been afraid of, ever since Frank told me that he had an idea for the list. Since he didn’t know what Penelope meant, or which dress Sloane was talking about, and whenever he’d brought up the list, he’d avoided even mentioning the skinny-dipping or stranger-kissing, that only left a few options. And it seemed that Frank had decided today was the day I would finally ride a horse.