No One Watching, 3

The third chapter of the novel I started writing 2 years ago. This chapter ends very abruptly. I'm not sure why I did it that way. I remember I was really weird about writing this and didn't want to tell anyone that I was writing it until it was finished. That was my master plan. I was going to write this whole novel and end it with THE END and print it up and dedicate it to this person who inspired it by not being in my life and then I was going to send it to this person and never ever think about him/her again because I would have already written THE END, our story would be over and there'd be nothing left to say. Needless to say, things did not go as planned. 

On January 4^th, the quote of the day was from Doris Lessing. Frankie had never heard of Doris Lessing, but she found the quote to be insightful: “All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.” She was lying in bed contemplating sanity and flesh and what things she found to be delightful when Tim entered her room.

“Oh, come on. You’re not out of bed yet? The bros are coming over today,” Tim whined at his apathetic roommate.

“The ‘bros’? Since when do you have ‘bros’?”

“Frankie, just because your ex-best friend is dating your boyfriend or whatever-he-is doesn’t mean I’m going to let you waste your life crying about it. That’s high school shit.”

“I don’t care about Andrea and Dustin. Andrea’s a bitch, and she wasn’t even my best friend.” Frankie thought about what she had just said. A montage of their friendship played in her head. She remembered trying on clothes with her at the mall, sharing a sundae with her at their favorite ice cream place, taking pictures with her in a photo booth at the movie theater, and when they went to the beach together and came back looking like lobsters. Truth be told, they’d had a lot of fun together, but Frankie didn’t want to think about Andrea anymore. She tried to preserve the memories by cutting out Andrea and replacing her with Beignet. It wasn’t the same. Frankie went back to arguing with Tim to get her mind off of the memories. “Beignet was always my best friend, and Dustin has a big head, and it’s not like I loved him. I’m probably asexual, anyway.”

“That makes me kind of sad.”

“And if you think I’m not getting out of bed just because I’m sad that Andrea’s a bitch, and she’d rather hang out with Dustin’s big head than my perfectly-normal-human-sized head, then you’re wrong because I’m pretty sure I have swine flu.”

“Swine flu? I’m taking you to the doctor. You can die from that.”

“Can’t. No insurance.”

“You’re a liar. You’re still on your dad’s insurance. “

“I don’t have money for medicine.”

“Your dad gives you $500 on the first of every month. It’s only the fourth, and you’ve been lying in bed for three days. How could have possibly spent $500 already?”

She had to think for a second. “Ebay.”

Tim sighed and threw his arms in the air. “You’re being ridiculous, and I’m pretty sure you know that.” Instead of admitting that he was right, Frankie shot Tim an angry look. “The bros are gonna be here any minute. It would be really cool if you came and hung out with us. I think it would be good for you.”

“This information creates in me no sense of obligation,” Frankie replied coolly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t give a fuck. Leave me alone.”

“Whatever, Frankie.”

The buzzer rang just as Frankie was about to say something mean. Closing her bedroom door behind him, Tim left to let his friends inside. Tim and his bros headed to the living room, where Tim then enticed them with a rousing round of Hobo Havoc, which he had just purchased. Frankie was quickly annoyed at the sound of the game’s theme song. A man with a painfully high falsetto voice sang, “Life is hard on the streets/ A man’s gotta fight for his eats/Ho Ho Ho Ho-ho-hobo Havoc! Ho-ho-hobo Havoc! Ho-ho-hobo Havoc!/Life is hard on the streets/ Ready to kill for some deli meats.” Before the song got to the next round of ho-ho-ho’s, Frankie grabbed her headphones and her laptop and prepared to spend the day watching movies on Netflix.

  Just as she turned on her computer, Frankie’s cat jumped into her lap, meowing and rolling around on her keyboard. At first, Frankie tried shooing Beignet away, but it seemed that he was determined to capture her full attention. Frankie gave up on Netflix and tried quelling Beignet by scratching his back, but Beignet was still unhappy. She then realized that her pet’s behavior was probably due to the fact that she had spent the past two days lying in bed and hadn’t remembered to feed her furry friend. In the meantime, Beignet had gnawed most of the leather off Frankie’s favorite pair of boots. Perhaps the boots were just a snack to tide the neglected cat over until her owner remembered to feed her again, but perhaps she was feeling spiteful. When Frankie found the ruined boots the next day, she thought that the latter was more likely.

Beignet’s cat food was kept in a bag, in a cabinet, in the kitchen. In order to get to the kitchen, Frankie would have to get out of bed, put something resembling clothing on, and walk down the hall and through the living room where Tim and his alleged bros were engaging in irritating video game activities. Tim and his bros would probably see her and try to talk to her. They would probably even try to sucker her into hanging out in the living room and playing Hobo Havoc with them, if they saw her. Frankie had not showered for at least three days. Her hair looked as if someone had tarred and feathered her cranium. Like bacon right out of the frying pan, her skin glistened with a slick film. Her eyes were little puffs of pink stuck onto her head like a goggle-eyed fish; they looked fragile, like they could burst and flood a room with saline at any given moment. And she smelled. The scent of sweat mixed with despair and a hint of unwashed feline radiated from Frankie’s every pore. While the logical thing to do may have been to shower and get dressed before braving the living room, Frankie was determined for her depression to rage on and to spend the day unshowered, watching shitty independent films on her computer. She would have to do her best to remain unnoticed by Tim and the bros.

Frankie rolled out of bed and picked up a bathrobe from her floor. It was a fluffy rainbow monstrosity that he grandmother had given her six years ago for her seventeenth birthday. Frankie pulled the robe’s hood over her head, scooped up the still meowing Beignet, and headed for the hall, resembling a gaudy yeti.

Because Tim had said that the “bros” were coming over, and “bros” was a term that Frankie had previously only heard applied to men, she was taken completely by surprise when she crashed into a small, soft body in the hallway. Frankie dropped Beignet, and both girls let out sharp gasps of surprise. Frankie pulled back her hood to get a look at the girl that she’d nearly knocked over. The girl was very pretty, but there was something dark in her demeanor. She had the kind of beauty that the twenties femme fatales had—sinister yet childlike. There was a strange innocence about her. She had a very tiny frame, and her eyes were a soft shade of green. Frankie was so mesmerized that she wanted to reach out and touch the girl but feared that she would vanish into a puff of pixie dust or flit away like a humming bird or that it would just be a really awkward thing to do and the perfectly human girl would be weirded out.

“I’m so sorry,” the strange girl said, blushing. “I was just looking for the bathroom, and I wasn’t watching where I was going. Sorry.”

Frankie didn’t know what to say. She wanted to scoop the girl up, like she had Beignet, and whisk her away to a world where good things happened where they could be best friends until the end of time.  Then, she was hit with a pang of sadness as the memories of Andrea came flooding back. The dressing room. The ice cream shop. The photo booth. The beach. Starting to feel sick to her stomach, Frankie wished that memories were erasable. If she could’ve, she would have taken a giant pink eraser and rubbed Andrea out of her life and replaced her with this small girl in the hallway, who was probably much nicer and more fun than Andrea had ever been. If this small girl in the hallway had always been Frankie’s best friend instead of Andrea, there probably would’ve been thousands of good memories to think about, and all of them probably would have been infinitely cooler than getting sunburned.

Frankie was forced to snap out of her daydream when her fantasy best friend shoved past her saying, “Oh, that must be the bathroom!” Before disappearing into the tiny room at the end of the hall, she turned to Frankie, and said, “Sorry again.”

That’s when Jean Beignet Ramsey began nipping at Frankie’s ankles, causing her to remember her original mission. As she attempted to sneak through the living room, the aforementioned bros noticed and paused their video game so that they could devote their full attention to heckling her.  The group was comprised of Tim’s old college roommates. Frankie and Tim hung out with them regularly, and though they were probably Frankie’s closest friends, she did not particularly like any of them.

Will was the prettiest one. He was about Frankie’s height with a toned body from the martial arts classes that he religiously attended. Will was very competitive, especially when women were around and took pride in juggling multiple girlfriends. If they weren’t friends, Frankie would have hated him. Simon was Frankie’s favorite to talk to. During an hour-long conversation with Simon, Frankie only ever had to say a few sentences. He was a genuinely fascinating person. Simon towered over most people; he was also very gaunt, despite his large appetite and endless knowledge of food. Little round wire glasses sat perched on his beak-like nose. And then there was Thomas. Thomas talked with his hands and had a very low, masculine voice. His interests included sports, sports bars, sports themed video games, and men.