The 10 P.M. Question (20 page)

“Are you
on
drugs?” said Frankie. He sat down on the bed.

“Don’t sit down,” said Gordana, eating three more candies. “What do you want?”

“How is this Careers?” said Frankie.

“It’s a fashion quiz. What do you
want
? I have to get to fifty points before dinner.”

Frankie had seen Gordana like this before. She had these kinds of jags, which was how Uncle George styled it, and Uncle George would know, because he too had jags. In the past they’d sometimes had them together. Jigsaws, for instance. Frankie could recall the jigsaw jag very vividly, because the giant puzzles had taken over the dining-room table. For months there had always been a puzzle-in-progress — a half-completed picture surrounded by dozens of waiting pieces, random arrangements that took on a kind of independent sculptural life — spread across the length of the table, so that the family was obliged to eat meals at the very edges. When a puzzle was nearing its completion, Uncle George would bring home a new one; he would prop the box up on the end of the table, both enticement and threat for the two fanatics as they approached the homestretch.

The rest of the family participated intermittently. Ma liked to study the pictures between cakes, complete a small patch perhaps; Louie specialized in moments of casual genius, strolling past and lighting suddenly on the piece that had eluded everyone else for days; Frankie, too, would find himself seduced from time to time, teased by a tricky bit of sky or grass, staring at pieces with shadings so subtle they seemed to disappear if you blinked. But Gordana and Uncle George approached the puzzles with the ferocity and purpose of warriors fronting up to the enemy; they beat those puzzles into submission; they gave war cries when they found a home for a piece; they set themselves targets for evening bouts and vied always with each other for most completed pieces.

The puzzle jag had ended as suddenly as it had begun. Gordana, frustrated by a fifteen-hundred-piecer of
The Last Supper
by Leonardo da Vinci, had discovered six puzzle parts, comprising the left-hand marble column, hidden inside the bowl of Louie’s under-fourteen trampoline trophy. A protracted battle had broken out and distracted everyone thereafter.

Frankie sighed. He missed those times, when Louie had been at home and domestic life had been rowdy and occasionally startling, and everybody had been somehow more
present
.

“Who invented the miniskirt?”

“Coco Chanel?”

“Wrong,” said Gordana. “Mary Quant.” Click,
tring.

“What is a Paddington?”

“A bear?” said Frankie hopefully.

“A
bag
! By Chloe!” Click,
tring
.

“Who brought message T-shirts into the mainstream?”

“Adolf Hitler?”

“Very funny. Katharine Hamnett.” Click,
tring.“
Yes! Complete this phrase: Posh and . . . ?”

“Becks!” said Frankie. “I know that!”

“Doesn’t count,” said Gordana. Click,
tring
.

“Why doesn’t it count?”

“Obviously you know that ’cause of the soccer.”

Frankie lay back on the bed and let his head sink into Gordana’s voluptuous royal-blue duvet. How could knowledge count
against
you? Oh, but who really cared? He had other matters on his mind. And he was preoccupied with how to raise them with Gordana.

“What are you going to do next year?” he said. This was a warm-up line. “Are you going to the university? Or work?”

“Oh, good
God, I
don’t know,” said Gordana.

“Are you going to stay at home?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Gordana.

“Do you believe in work?” Frankie asked.

“What
is
this? Twenty questions? Is this what you wanted to ask me?”

“But, do you?”

“
Believe
in work? I like
doing
it; I like being busy; I like earning money. Is that believing?”

Frankie took a long breath. “Sydney’s mother doesn’t believe in work.”

“Does she believe in being hungry?”

“Not exactly,” said Frankie, wishing Gordana would
listen
. Not just to what he was saying, but to what he was not saying yet. Ma was very good at that. It made talking so much easier. Ma heard what was in the silence. But he didn’t want to talk to Ma about this.

“How
is
your gf?” asked Gordana.

“She’s not my gf,” said Frankie automatically.

“You have a fight?” said Gordana. Click,
tring,
click,
tring
.

“She’s a
friend,
” said Frankie.

“Sure, sure,” said Gordana. “You wouldn’t believe how much I know about shoes. It just seems to have always been in my head. For instance, do you know what a kitten heel is?”

“No, and I don’t really want to,” said Frankie.

“I even know who popularized it. I know about you and Sydney, too, by the way.”

Frankie shot upright and stared at Gordana’s back. She sat very straight at the computer, tensed up and alert, like a bird of prey. Ready to swoop down on fashion facts. Click,
tring,
click,
tring.

“What do you know? There’s nothing to know.”

“I know that you both skipped camp. Living dangerously, little brother. There’ll be trouble.”

“How do you
know
?” Frankie couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know which surprised him more — Gordana taking the slightest bit of notice of anything he did (or didn’t) do, or her keeping quiet about his deception.

“My spies are everywhere,” said Gordana.

“We went to school every day,” said Frankie. “We worked in the Year Seven class.”

It was quite true. While room 11 had been at camp, Frankie and Sydney had sat at the back of the Year Seven class reading and working on their book project. At lunchtime, they’d sat on the bench outside room 11 and talked and talked; there had been so much to talk about. When they were exhausted by talk, Frankie tested Sydney on her Chilun vocab.

“But how do you know?”

“Think about it,” said Gordana. So Frankie did and in a few seconds he had it.

“Suzie Newcombe,” he said with a sigh. Of course. How could he not have thought of this? Suzie Newcombe was the younger sister of Jilly Newcombe, one of Gordana’s forty-seven friends.

Frankie Parsons is in our class,
she would have said,
and the weird girl, the one with dreads and the nose stud.

So, how come your brother didn’t go to camp?
Jilly would have asked Gordana. Her spies
were
everywhere, for heaven’s sake.

“You can’t tell Uncle George,” said Frankie. “Or Ma. Please.”

“What will you give me, you sad fashion disaster?” said Gordana. “That new hoodie’s a horrible color, by the way.”

“A marshmallow egg?” said Frankie, pulling it out of his pocket.

“Oh
yum,
” said Gordana, twirling around on her chair. “But I was kidding, you idiot.”

“I don’t care, anyway,” said Frankie. “It’s too late for them to do anything.”

“I don’t care, either,” said Gordana. She unwrapped the Easter egg from its tinfoil and began picking the chocolate off the marshmallow, which was her marshmallow-egg-eating practice. “I know why
you
didn’t go,” she said. “But why didn’t your gf go?”

“She’s not my —” He stopped. “How do you know why I didn’t go?” he said.

Gordana batted the question away with her hand. “How come Sydney didn’t go? She an indoors kind of girl?”

And suddenly, there it was, the exact opening he’d wanted, the way he could tell Gordana, the way he could understand,
clarify
. “It’s complicated,” he said, which was both true and not true. Gordana was concentrating on the Easter egg, expertly detaching chocolate slivers with her long Ming-blue fingernails. Miraculously, she seemed to have forgotten she wanted him to hurry up and go away. She was practically being nice to him, for heaven’s sake.

“She was supposed to go,” Frankie began. “She
wanted
to go. She’s
not
an indoor girl, and she really wanted to do rappeling. She wanted to do everything.” He paused, getting the sequence right in his head.

“It was her birthday,” he said finally, speaking very deliberately. “She didn’t come to school. . . .”

Frankie thought he must have been in some kind of shell shock following his visit to Sydney’s. He was like a puppet, wound up tight, his movements jerky and random. His brain seemed made of wood, too. He’d ridden the number 40 bus home, his head full of pictures and words, but no actual
thoughts
occurring. He simply stared out the bus window, his eyes passing over cars and pedestrians and city landmarks but not really registering any of it. At home he had practically thrown the dinner ingredients at Ma, then run out the door and down to Gigs’s house. He felt a great need to tell Gigs everything he’d learned.

Gigs was in his bedroom, tenderly nursing his new trombone, a proud parent with a goofy look on his face. It
was
a beauty, Frankie acknowledged — so gleaming, so silvery. You could see your face in its shining surface, elongated and vaguely monstrous. Frankie listened to Gigs play “Beautiful Dreamer” and “When the Saints,” but then he could wait no longer.

“Stroshky no weesack stupends,” he said. (Serious info to pass on.)

Gigs lowered the trombone. “Huh? Oh, man. Sydney. I forgot. Did she like the present?”

“In the end,” said Frankie, thinking about how Sydney had eventually unfurled the scroll of Chilun vocab and then cried all over again at the immensity of the gift. She had particularly plump, wet tears, Frankie had noted, with the strange part of his brain that carried on heartlessly observing during moments of emotional calamity.

“But she was crying so much,” he said. “Because of the fight. With Freya. And other stuff.”

“Crying,”
said Gigs. “Sydney?” He looked incredulous.

Frankie was idly rearranging the platoon of soldiers on Gigs’s desk. There was a score of them now. They were Fimo and Gigs had been making them for a couple of years — a bohemian and strictly democratic army of bizarrely dressed multinational mercenaries. They were all second lieutenants and all called Fox: Second Lieutenant Fox (British), Sottotenete Fox (Italian), Fanrik Fox (Finnish). Frankie’s very favorite was Anthypolokhagos Fox, who was Greek. He loved that name, and he loved the Second-Left Army. Normally, it could cheer him up in a flash, but not today.

“But
crying
?” Gigs repeated. Frankie knew what he meant. It did seem an impossible notion, Sydney crying. Until you’d actually witnessed it.

“It was about camp,” Frankie said. “The fight was about camp. You know how much she wanted to go. But next thing, her mother says she can’t, there was no money for it — even though she’d promised ages ago — and Sydney’s dad had actually sent the money.”

It seemed easier, somehow, not to look at Gigs, to get the words out while his eyes were fixed on the army. Frankie started placing the soldiers in a two-by-two formation, Sottotenete Fox and Podporucznik Fox (Polish) in the vanguard, because their accessories were the most dashing.

“But Freya spent the money,” he continued. “She’s — she does it all the time, so mostly Sydney’s dad pays for things straight, like school fees. He pays the school, you know, so she can’t get it. He pays her dance teacher for the lessons; they send him the bills . . .” He was rushing through it and jumbling it up, but it was hard to be orderly —

“But that’s . . .
mean,
” said Gigs. “That’s taking money from a
child
.” He sounded like a child himself, his face screwed up, as if someone had just swiped his sweets. They looked at each other, both imagining the same thing, Frankie knew — the awfulness of such a parent.

“Worse, though,” said Frankie, putting Tweede-Liutenant Fox (Dutch) on the left flank. He had a wooden leg. “The
other
reason she can’t go to camp is that she has to look after her sisters — at night, sometimes
all
night — she has to be home at nights to look after them. She has to look after them all the time. Freya goes out at nights, stays out —”

“Working?” said Gigs. And then he remembered. “But she doesn’t work.”

“She goes out with guys,” Frankie said quickly, looking steadfastly at the Fox formation. “That’s how she gets money.

“They give her money,” he repeated, meaningfully. He stole a look at Gigs, saw him taking this in, saw the full dimensions beginning to dawn. Gigs’s eyes grew very round, and he seemed to draw the trombone close to his chest, hugging it.

“Is she a . . . a . . . ?” His mouth began forming a word, but he stopped, shocked, frowning disbelievingly at Frankie.

“I don’t know,” said Frankie. “Sort of. Maybe. But . . . maybe not really. I don’t think so.” In fact, he didn’t know what he thought. He felt utterly confused. “Sydney says they’re actually her boyfriends, but they’re always rich, and they pay for her houses, for travel, for her clothes. That’s how they live. She’s a genius at having rich boyfriends. This guy right now, he’s given her a Porsche.

“Well, lent it,” he amended. “She’s . . .” he searched for a suitable word, and failed. He still hadn’t met Freya, but now he never wanted to. There was hatred in his heart.

Gigs was clasping the trombone tighter still, his face busy, his thoughts almost visible. Frankie could just about hear him mentally assembling the parts of the equation. It was how he’d felt all the way home on the number 40 bus, his brain creaking and avoiding. It was how you felt when two plus two was adding up to a very indigestible four.

“But Sydney’s not old enough to look after them at nights,” said Gigs finally, fastening on something they both knew for a fact. “She’s not old enough to babysit anytime. You have to be fourteen. It’s, it’s . . . child
labor
.” They knew about child labor. They’d done a project on it in Year Six, but all the child labor had been in other countries.

“She’s been doing it for years,” said Frankie.

“Bonga,” said Gigs. He made it sound like a sorrowful curse.

They sat there in silence for a minute, each preoccupied with his thoughts. Frankie picked up Shao Wei Fox (Chinese) and studied her. She wore a miniskirt and a beret and carried an elaborately jeweled dagger. He placed her beside Luteni Wa Pili Fox, from Tanzania. He was very tall with shiny black skin and wore a magnificent red cloak and top hat. His weapon was a delicately fashioned slingshot. Really, Gigs should consider a career in Fimo.