Nothing by Annie Barrows
“We’re not going to,” said Max firmly. “Come on.”
“Bye,” said Zack. He gave her a little smile. “See you in about five years.”
“I’m going to kick your ass, Dobranski. Come on. Downstairs.”
Frankie heard the conversation switch to guitars as they went downstairs. She turned to face the bay once more and found that the sun had somehow set without her. Wow! She took a deep breath, and then she began to chuckle.
“What?” It was Charlotte, holding an enormous cake on a platter. She was wearing a very small black skirt and a very tight white sweater that Frankie had never seen before. Around her neck was a black silk ribbon.
“Whoa,” Frankie said. “Beyond.”
“That means good, right?” said Charlotte’s mother, thumping up the stairs behind her with a duffel bag.
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Right.”
“And dank means bad?” her mother went on, frowning in concentration.
“Dank means good,” Charlotte said.
“But bad means good too,” Frankie volunteered. Charlotte glanced at her in surprise.
Charlotte’s mother shook her head and dropped the duffel bag by the front door. “No wonder you’re all insane,” she said. “Is your mom home, Frankie?”
“Nope, they already left,” Frankie said. “Max is here, though, if you want to talk to him.”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll talk to the two of you. Now”—she turned to face them—“there will be no leaving this house until tomorrow morning, right?”
“Right,” said Charlotte.
“There will be—”
“Nobody allowed in the house while Sharon and Tom are gone,” recited Charlotte. “There will be no drinking. No drugs. No teenage pregnancy.”
“Right!” said her mother. She turned to Frankie. “Right?”
“We’ll do our best,” giggled Frankie, and again, Charlotte raised a surprised eyebrow.
Charlotte’s mother, on the other hand, seemed unfazed. “There will be good behavior. Am I right?”
“Yes, Mommy,” said Charlotte, just as Frankie had.
There were kisses and good-byes and Happy New Years, and after that, Charlotte’s mother thumped away, down the stairs.
“I love your ribbon thing,” said Frankie happily as they walked into the house.
“Did you smoke without me?” asked Charlotte, looking at her closely.
“No!” said Frankie. “I am clean and sober.”
Charlotte narrowed her eyes. “What’s with you, then? You look fantastic, by the way. But you seem bizarrely—I don’t know—cheerful.”
Frankie grinned. “You won’t even believe what just happened.”
NOTHING
“You won’t even believe what just happened,” says Frankie.
And she is right. I don’t believe it. Is it believable that a guy she’s never seen before in her life suddenly appears—ta-da!—on her front porch at the exact same moment that she happens to be out there in her best dress all alone and then—without talking—they walk toward each other and he just bends down and kisses her? And she lets him? And it’s totally sexy and not gross and weird and awkward?
No, it is not believable.
And then Max sees, and he yells at the guy, and still, neither of them is embarrassed or freaked out?
And then the guy just goes downstairs?
And he’s still down there?
Not believable.
Frankie laughs. “You’d believe it if it was in one of your teen books.”
“If it was in a teen book, the two of you would be having sex in your room right now, and I’d be sitting all by myself in the living room, having an eating disorder.”
“No.” Frankie giggles. “You’d be cutting yourself with my mom’s fancy silverware.”
And it is this, more than anything, that makes me believe her. The laughing. She’s, uh, I guess radiant is the word. On top of the world, as my dad would say. Exhilarated. I am suspicious, as usual. I am also probably a little jealous. A lot jealous. “So. Are you going to be leaving me alone in the living room later on, so you can go downstairs and hook up with him?”
She shakes her head. “No. I told Max I wouldn’t. Besides, it’d be creepy if he hooked up with me knowing that I’m a kid. Then I wouldn’t like him. Nah. It was just a great moment.”
I stare at her, wondering what it must be like, how she must feel. “Not a plot twist that’s going to change the rest of your life?”
She laughs again and shakes her head. “Just—fun.”
“You seem really happy,” I say.
She whacks the kitchen counter with a wooden spoon for a moment, and then she says, “It makes me feel like things I don’t expect can actually happen. And like life is going to get more interesting than it is right now. Like there might actually be some potential.” She looks at me. “So, yeah, I’m happy.”
“I would be, too,” I say, and I am totally sincere about this, even though I think a man appearing on your porch and kissing you is kind of an outlier, statistically, and I don’t think I’d base my worldview on it. “How old is he, do you think?”
“Deek. Twenty? He’s a friend of Max’s, so college age. But he seemed a little older than Max.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Can’t really picture Max walking up to someone and kissing her in manly silence.”
She giggles. “Me neither. Besides, Max has a girlfriend.”
I nod and look around the kitchen at all the yummy-looking stuff that—I’m pretty sure—Sharon has laid out for us. “I’m getting hungry.”
Frankie whacks the counter again. “Let’s do it!” She is peppy as hell.
Frankie and I are lame-os. We run around and crash into each other and spill the cream and have to cook the pasta twice (not the same pasta) because we have a little cognitive problem with the colander. We forget the salad and then remember it after the pasta’s done (the second time), and then we (I) toss it too hard and it goes over the side of the counter, and we (Frankie) get scared of the frying pan and pour a lot of fancy Italian grease all over the pasta, which we (I) don’t think is really supposed to be there. But, finally, we sit down in the living room at the pretty table, in the candlelight, and maybe it isn’t the best spaghetti I’ve ever eaten, but it’s really good, and we are proud. We eat a ton, but we are elegant, too, and we’re looking at the lights come on in the city and we’re talking about things we used to do for New Year’s when we were little, like how I couldn’t believe that I was actually allowed to bang pots together; it seemed like something I’d get in deep shit for, but no, the grown-ups stood around, gazing fondly at me while I made total fucking mayhem. Frankie had this really sad memory of her creepy brother Leland telling her it was New Year’s when it wasn’t. They made all this confetti together and threw it at her parents, and her mom cried.
Anyway, we are having conversations and it’s an elegant dinner, and we agree that we are having a way better time than we would be if we were doing what everyone else is doing, which is going to Reed’s dad’s apartment to play video games (except for Noony, who’s in Texas). We take a lot of pictures of how great we look by candlelight and put some up, and we get like, sixty-three likes in about eight minutes, including from Johnny, Merle, Chris, Cora, Kellen, Chloe, and Sid, which not only means that we are hot, but also that they are not at the most amazing party in the world that everyone’s invited to except us. So we’ve got us a FOMO-free New Year’s here. Cool.
We are still proud and happy even when it’s time to clean up. We play our current songs and dance around and clean the burners, because we are wonderful human beings. Plus, we still have chocolate cake (thank you, Charlotte) and movies to go! All our old favorites are in the lineup: Mean Girls, 500 Days of Summer, Easy A, and this movie Frankie loves called Caterpillar Spring, about a guy who runs away from home on his backhoe (pause while we lose our shit about the word backhoe).
It’s 11:00—no, it’s 11:08—and
Frankie mutes. “Who’s that?” she calls, a little nervously. Because what if this guy is a creep who would try to get something going on even though he knows she’s fifteen? (I’ll protect you, I think. I am Charlotte, defender of local virginity.)
Max sticks his head in the door. “Me.”
She relaxes. “Are you guys hungry? There’s leftover pasta in the kitchen.” She hesitates. “There might not be enough for three people.”
Max makes a face. “It’s just me.”
“Where’d Grant and, uh, Zack go?”
“To the city.” He looks bummed.
“They went without you?” asks Frankie. “That’s kind of fucked-up.”
“I can’t go,” Max says. “I have to stay with you guys.”
“Ohhh. Right,” says Frankie.
“Sorry,” I add.
“Do you want some leftover pasta?” offers Frankie apologetically.
He sighs. “I already had pizza.” He looks at the plates on our laps. “Is that cake?”
“Yeah. It’s really good,” says Frankie.
“Help yourself,” I say. “There’s tons more.”
“And then come watch movies with us, if you want,” Frankie says, trying to make it up to him for ruining his New Year.
“Maybe,” he says. He goes off, and I think we won’t see him again, but he comes back in a few minutes with the biggest piece of cake in the world and some milk. He sits down in a chair and starts wolfing cake, and Frankie turns the movie up and we watch together.
It’s a pretty good movie—this kid is in love with this girl, and the only way he can get to her is to drive his backhoe, like, a hundred miles. At night he sleeps under it, and people keep trying to steal it—but none of them are really mean about it and they help him and stuff. Finally he gets there, and the girl turns out to be at camp, so he doesn’t get her after all, and he has sex with her mom instead. Then he drives home. The end.
“Okay, that is a weird ending,” I say. “Why does he do her mom, if he’s so in love with the girl.”
“He doesn’t even know the girl, hardly,” says Frankie. “It’s all a—not a dream, but the other thing—a projection. So he might as well do the mom.”
“Why would the mom do him?” I ask. “He’s just this little dweeb.”
“Maybe she thinks he’s cute,” says Frankie.
“Maybe she’s trying to regain her lost youth,” I say. “Or maybe the whole thing is a male fantasy.”
“Harsh,” says Max. But he’s smiling.
“Just wait till she gets going,” says Frankie. “She’s totally cynical.”
“I’m not,” I say. “I love everyone.”
“You are such a fucking liar.”
We laugh.
“Hang on,” says Max. He gets up and we hear him go downstairs. He comes back in a minute with an open bottle of champagne. Frankie and I exchange looks of excitement.
“Really?” she asks him. “We can have some?”
He peers into the bottle. “Grant already drank about half of it. But yeah. It’s New Year’s, right?”
I glance at the clock on the TV. It is 11:57. “Run get glasses!” I tell Frankie. “Quick!”
She runs away and returns with three glasses. Max carefully pours them out so they’re all evenly full, and then, at exactly twelve o’clock midnight we lift our glass and say, “Cheers!” and take a sip of champagne. Which I like.
“It’s better when it’s colder,” says Max.
“Chill, man,” says Frankie. Which for some reason they both find hilarious. Maybe they’re lightweights.
We are just finishing our champagne when there is a rumbling noise below the house—is this an earthquake that will change Nothing into a dramatic tale of survival? No. It’s Frankie’s garage. Her parents are home. 12:14 p.m. Way to par-tay, Tom and Sharon. Max laughs and takes his champagne bottle downstairs, while Frankie races the glasses into the kitchen to wash and dry and put them back on the shelves. Max reappears and says, “You guys can come down and finish it up later if you want.”
But now Sharon and Tom are cracking the hall door, so there is a flurry of parental questions about the quality of our evening and exclamations about what great cleaners we are and groans of exhaustion because it’s now 12:22 and apparently that is just the end for Tom and Sharon. They go staggering off to their room and close the door, and then Sharon staggers back to say they’re going to sleep in tomorrow, which is, I guess, a major revolution, because they usually get up at 5:30, even on weekends. Weirdos.
Once they are tucked away, we go creeping down to Max’s lair, which is, wow, really lairlike, with guitars and a keyboard and, weirdly, an oboe, not to mention a couch and a big chair and a TV and a desk and—dang, what is that?—a king-sized bed over in a kind of separate part of the room.
“You got stiffed,” I say to Frankie. “Your room isn’t nearly this good.” Jeez—he’s even got the view. I guess we’re under the living room.
Frankie and Max both laugh. “They did it for Lee,” she says. “They were thinking that he wouldn’t be so—” She looks at Max for the right word.
“Difficult,” he says.
She snickers. “Difficult, if he had his own space.”
“Didn’t really work,” adds Max.
There’s a pause. “You and Lee are so different,” she says.
He nods. “Yeah. Lee’s a trip.”
“Think it was—?” She jerks her head upward, toward her mom and dad.
He shakes his head kind of sadly. “I don’t know. Probably. But he was always pretty uptight. One of the first things I remember is him trying to smother me, and that was way before Dad bailed.”
Frankie winces.
“And part of it’s got to be genetics,” says Max. “Lee’s like Mom and Dad on steroids.”
“Yeah. Poor Lee.”
“Nice room, though,” I volunteer.
Max nods—he’s gotten much better-looking, I notice—and says, “Want to kill the champagne?”
“Yes!” Frankie and I say together, and he laughs.
“Sharon would freak if she knew I was doing this,” he says, looking around the room for cups.
“Yeah, yeah,” says Frankie. “She did stuff when she was young, too. She went out with a twenty-two-year-old when she was sixteen. You want me to go get cups?”
“Yeah,” he says. They’re funny people, Frankie and Max. I know they just had a real conversation, but they sure don’t use very many words. In my house, everyone talks all the time, blah, blah, blah. Nobody shuts up. I think we probably are not saying anything very meaningful, or anything more meaningful than Frankie and Max just did, but there is a lot more noise. Frankie comes back with juice glasses (more innocent-looking) and—yay!—her stash.
“Dro!” I say happily.
“Happy New Year!” she says. “Max? You want some?”
“Sure,” he says. We sip our juice glasses of champagne and Frankie rolls, which she is very talented at. “I can’t believe my little sister is smoking me out,” he says.
“Don’t feel like you have to,” she says. “No pressure here.”
He laughs. “You get it from the skater kids still? Those guys over in the park?”
She nods, concentrating on her joint.
“Was Lefty around when you were there?” I ask. Lefty is this big dude with no left hand. He is an amazing skater and everyone loves him. He is also a major drug source.
Max laughs again. “Shit, he’s still there? He’s got to be at least twenty.”
“He only goes to class about four times a year,” I say. “It takes a while to graduate when you do it that way.”
We down our tiny glasses of champagne and light up, and then Max says he’s going to watch a movie and we can stay and watch it with him if we want, and we do want, even though it’s Iron Man 3 and we’ve seen i
Frankie Saves the Day, She Really Does.
Frankie heard someone say, “Look, I’m sorry.” Was it a dream? She shifted her head slightly and felt an unfamiliar bump under her neck. Shoot. Not a dream. “What else do you want me to say?” she heard. “You want me to say I’m dick? Okay, I’m a dick. I fucked up.” It was Max.
Frankie opened her downward eye. She was on Max’s couch. Her head was—ouch—resting on the arm of the couch. She opened her upward eye. The sky was a heavy gray. It was morning. It was probably not very late morning, though. She tried to focus at least one of her eyes on the tiny TV clock. Impossible. She burrowed a hand into her bra and took out her phone: 8:06.
“Oh, come on.” Max sounded pissed. “I’m not allowed to make a mistake? Look—yeah, I know—okay, but that’s you.” Pause. “I’m not saying that, you’re saying that.”
Slowly Frankie unbent her knees and felt a big, warm lump against her shin. Charlotte. Frankie lifted her head to look. Fast asleep.
“No. You know what I was doing. I was babysitting my sister and her friend. Fine. Nothing I can do about that. Think what you want. Fine.” Pause. “Really?” Pause. “That’s what you want?” His voice thickened. “Okay.” Pause. “Bye.”
Silence.
Cautiously Frankie lifted her head to look toward her brother’s bed. He was sitting on the edge of the mattress, staring at the floor. She saw his shoulders rise up as he took a deep breath. Very quietly, Frankie swung her legs off the couch and stood. He didn’t notice her until she sat down on the floor in front of him.
“Was that Raina?” she said softly.
He nodded, still looking at the floor.
Frankie waited. Nothing. “What happened?” she asked finally.