No One Watching, 1

Once upon a time (2 years ago), I missed someone very much and began writing this novel in attempt to get my mind off that person:   

            The quote of the day was a bible verse from Corinthians. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. Frankie was not a religious person. She did not necessarily believe in God, but she did not think about those things enough to consider herself an atheist. Theistic beliefs aside, Frankie liked to consider herself a fairly spiritual person. Lately, however, she was feeling very unspiritual. In many ways, Frankie felt sanctified when she created art. Unfortunately, it had been days since she had felt inspired enough to get out of bed, let alone pick up a paintbrush.

As a result of Frankie’s lack of inspiration, all that she had created in two and a half months was a page of worthless doodles of her cat, Jean Beignet Ramsey. This is not to say that Jean Beignet Ramsey was not a worthy object of Frankie’s doodling. Beignet was the cutest ball of orange fluff that anyone had ever seen, and Frankie loved her more than she loved most humans. Frankie’s cat had even been the source of inspiration for one of her best paintings: the cat once spent hours playing in a cardboard box, which caused Frankie to do a painting of herself in a box. Her art professor interpreted the painting as “a feminist commentary on the modern day sexualized female.” He put it in a big art show. It won some award that Frankie had never heard of, and Frankie got her picture in The Times Picayune.

Unfortunately, for the past two and a half months, something had grown inside of Frankie that would not let her create anything that she considered worthy of human eyes. This same something forced her to sleep for fourteen hours a day, to refuse food and human contact, and to be an asshole to her roommate when he tried to cheer her up.  The only things that she kept up with were feeding her cat and ripping pages off of her Quotes for Life calendar, so that she could keep track of how many days she’d been moping. Her record had been thirty-nine days, but she’d shattered that with her latest depression.

Tim, Frankie’s roommate and best friend, took notice of his friend’s sulking right away and had tried every day since she first began sulking to get her back to normal.  Though his attempts were almost always to no avail, Tim was not the type to give up. In fact, persistence was in his blood. Tim’s great uncle Lowell regularly dressed himself in his dusty military uniform and attempted to rally his neighbors together to fight the rest of the U.S. for Texas’s independence. Even his father, a writer who would never admit failure, shared this trait. He’d made submissions to the New Yorker week after week for twenty-six years, though none of his work was every published. He began decorating his office with rejection letters after the first sixty or so. Eventually, Tim’s father ran out of room in his office and began wallpapering the rest of the house with rejection letters. Tim also claimed to be a distant cousin of Ralph Nadar, though this was never proven. Tim did have a good heart, though, and on this particular day, his good heart was hard at work trying to entice his sullen friend to get out of bed.

It was 4:41 in the afternoon. Frankie had not bothered to get dressed and had been wearing the same matching bra and underwear set for six days. She had been lying in her bed for thirty-eight hours. She had not even gotten up to eat, drink, or use the bathroom. The title menu of disc two of season four of Seinfeld had been illuminating her room from the screen of her tiny Wal-mart television for three days. Tim banged on Frankie’s door shouting, “Christ, Frankie, it’s almost five! I hope you’re dressed! I’m coming in!”

This had become part of Tim’s daily routine. He knocked on Frankie’s door three times a day: once before work, again when he got home from work, and then before he went to bed. In the morning, Tim would get up, get ready for work, and make breakfast for him and Frankie. Usually, Frankie refused to eat or ate very little of what he made, and Tim ended up eating her portion as well as his own. Once Frankie started looking particularly emaciated, Tim started cooking her favorite meal every morning, chocolate chip waffles made in a waffle iron shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head. On a good day, she would pick at the syrupy offering ungratefully before eating Mickey’s ears off and shoving the plate back at Tim. Sometimes she would refuse the waffle all together. This hurt Tim’s feelings, and Frankie was well aware. She could see the hurt in her friend’s chocolate chip-colored eyes. And still, she did not feel obliged to eat.  “You have to be so fucking finicky,” Tim would mumble, as he ate her untouched waffle. “I know that you like this. I know it’s not my cooking. What’s wrong with you, Frankie?”

Frankie would answer his question by retreating back under her blankets; she would not come out until she heard Tim leave for work. On his days off, she would start sobbing so that he would leave faster. Once Tim heard the sobs, he would scuttle out of Frankie’s room as if he had just detonated a bomb. Tim was confused by tears. Especially women’s tears. He didn’t like being confused. After fleeing Frankie’s room, Tim would usually play video games to get his mind off his weepy roommate. It was his rule to wait at least seven hours once he fled Frankie’s room before reentering.  He was fully aware that it would be almost impossible for a twenty-three-year-old girl whose eating habits bordered on anorexic, even when she wasn’t depressed, to be able to produce enough tears to last seven hours. Frankie probably didn’t have the energy to carry on with her sobbing for more than twenty minutes, but Tim felt that he could never be too careful with these kinds of things.

Tim left for work at Zotz Coffee House at 8:45 every morning, except Wednesday and Saturday, which were his days off. He would arrive home between 4:30 and a quarter ‘til five when he would promptly resume his position banging on Frankie’s bedroom door. Typically, he would yell at her for not getting dressed and for spending the whole day in bed, she would cry, he would run away, and she would continue to lie in bed. Sometimes she would come out to shower after a few hours, but this did not happen often.

Tim would come into Frankie’s room one last time at the end of the day, just before he was about to go to bed. He would offer to make her food, which she would refuse. Next, he would try to tempt her into going on what he called “a late night adventure,” which was really a trip to a diner or the video store, which she would also refuse. Tim would then say goodnight to Frankie, and she would say goodnight back. They would both go to bed, and the entire process would begin again in the morning.

On this particular day­—the day that Corinthians appeared on the quote of the day calendar, the day that Tim had convinced Frankie to eat an entire waffle, the day that Tim got off work an hour early—Tim knocked on his friend’s door ready for disappointment. “You’re not dressed, are you?” he called through her door, which was so spattered with magazine clippings that it was impossible to tell the door’s color. There was no reply. He ventured another try. “Frankie, I don’t want to act like your father, but I’m giving you until the count of three, and then I’m busting in.” Still no response. “One…Two…Two and a half… Hey! I’m really coming in, okay? You’d better be dressed. Three!”

Frankie burrowed under her bedspread as Tim swung open the door. His gaze fell upon the Frankie-sized lump on the bed, and he sat down next to it. “Frankie, how long are you going to do this? You don’t eat. You sleep all day. You don’t talk to anyone. You don’t see anyone. You just watch Seinfeld and cry at me when I try to hang out with you. You’re my friend, and I care about you, and you need to stop this. I know you’re upset that Luly is gone, but you smell like a corpse, you look like a skeleton, and there are only so many episodes of Seinfeld.”

Frankie didn’t respond to her friend’s well-intentioned monologue. She was trying to lay as still as possible. She was picturing herself as a corpse­—a mostly rotten corpse, well on its way to becoming a skeleton. She wanted to say that she didn’t care that Luly was gone and that Luly was a bitch anyway. Though truthfully, she did care. Frankie wanted to say that she didn’t care what she smelled like because her only real friend was a cat, and cats don’t care if you smell. Though truthfully, Jean Beignet Ramsey had been keeping his distance for the past few days; he did care. She wanted to say that she didn’t care if she ran out of episodes of Seinfeld because she could always start watching Friends instead. But truthfully, she cared about that, too. Friends couldn’t hold a candle to Seinfeld. So, Frankie didn’t respond. She just tried to enjoy being a skeleton. A mute skeleton with no friends. Skeletons don’t need friends, anyway. Or food. Or Seinfeld. Or anything at all. They have bones and silence, and really, what’s better than that?

Tim assumed that Frankie was crying quietly under the blanket, got freaked out, and left her to enjoy her bones and her silence by her lonesome. Once Tim closed Frankie’s bedroom door, Frankie began to examine her boney hands and how they connected to her boney wrists and how they connected to her boney arms. She wrapped her long fingers around her torso and slid each finger over the grooves of her ribcage. Frankie decided that she wanted to paint herself as a skeleton. “That’s meaningful and shit, right?” she thought to herself. “I’m inspired as I’m going to be.” Frankie decided to get up. Her muscles twitched, not used to being out of bed, and her joints popped like a sheet of bubble wrap between an overactive eight-year-old’s fingers. Though she did not feel like showering, Frankie realized that she would have to go to the store to buy canvas and that it was probably not becoming to go out in public smelling like decay.

Frankie made her way to the bathroom. Rifling through the medicine cabinet, she found an unopened stick of Secret and a dusty bottle of Tim’s Ralph Lauren cologne. She swiped deodorant under each arm, between her tits, and along her thighs and spritzed her hair and chest with the cologne. After running back to her room, Frankie decided that it was time to change underwear. She swapped out her tiny red satin bra and matching half-slip underwear for a gray sports bra and a pair of boyshorts speckled with little yellow stars. Frankie pulled on her Transformers t-shirt and grabbed a pair of jeans from her floor. After a brief search for her flip-flops, she located one in her laundry basket and the other beneath Beignet. Her purse was in the living room, in the same place it had been for two weeks.

Once Tim heard Frankie’s footsteps in the living room, he rushed out of his room. “Frankie!” He called in the direction of her bedroom, “Don’t freak out, but there’s a robber in our living room! And she’s after your purse!”

“Shut up, Tim,” Frankie said, not amused with her friend’s teasing.

Tim didn’t let up. “Hey, Frankie! You’d better get out here. It’s worse than I thought. She’s not a robber! She’s an identity thief! She looks just like you, only she’s not all mopey, and she’s out of bed.”

“Tim. Shut the fuck up. Seriously,” Frankie snapped.

Holding his cell phone to his ear, Tim barked in a mock-worried tone, “Hello? Police? This is Timothy Chambers. There is an identity thief in my living room.” Frankie then lunged toward Tim, attempting to pry the phone from his hand. “Identity thief is very aggressive. Bring lots of guns! The address is seven-zero—“

As the phone fell into Frankie’s clutches, Tim dramatically fell to the ground, crumpled his chubby body into the fetal position, and began wailing, “Police! I fear for my life! Can you still hear me? Police!”

“You’re such a dork. Get up, you look ridiculous.” Frankie extended a hand to Tim, who was still on the ground clutching his knees and calling for help. “I’m going out for art supplies, okay? Don’t act like it’s a big deal.”  

After he got back to his feet, Tim huffed with dismay. “You realize that you haven’t left the apartment, let alone your bed, in forever. Don’t you act like it’s—“

“Tim—“ Frankie began to whine.

Realizing that he was grating on his friend’s last nerve, Tim decided to change the subject. “Can I come?”

Frankie sighed. “I’d rather you not.”

Tim made his best attempt at puppy dog eyes. He managed to be as adorable as a bullfrog, at best. Frankie appeared unmoved. She turned her back to her pouty friend and headed for the door. Tim hurried in front of her, and his frog face raged on. She pushed her way past him. “Come on, Frankie. We haven’t hung out in forever. We could get ice cream on the way back.” Tim continued to beg with more desperation. “I’ll buy your ice cream. I’ll even drive. You know I hate driving.”

This was a very generous offer coming from Tim, whose top three least favorite things in order included: driving, being robbed and gunpoint, and losing at video games.

“Thanks, for the offer.” She was trying to let him down easy. “But I really just want to be alone. Just because I’m going out doesn’t mean I want to be around people.”

Tim was determined not to make it easy for her to let him down easy. “Fine. Whatever. Go alone, but only if you’ll play Hobo Havoc with me when you get back.”

Frankie did not want to play Hobo Havoc when she got back from the art store. In fact, she did not want to play Hobo Havoc ever. Unfortunately, Hobo Havoc was Tim’s very favorite video game, and he had played it nearly every day for six months, often in hopes that Frankie join in. It was kind of like Mortal Kombat or Tekkon, but all of the fighters were modeled after homeless people. Virtual scraps of food or half-empty bottles of alcohol were given as trophies to whoever won the fight. Tim insisted that the plot in the game’s “Story Mode” was amazing and that the graphics on their own made the game worthwhile. Frankie secretly wondered if there wasn’t a special circle of hell reserved for people who entertained themselves by forcing virtual homeless people to kick the shit out of each other. She also wondered if maybe someday she might die and end up someplace in hell where she’d be forced to play Hobo Havoc for the rest of eternity. This was as far as Frankie’s contemplation of the afterlife ever went.

“Fine. I promise to play Hobo Havoc with you when I get back, but not for more than an hour.” She had no intention of keeping her word but Tim believed her.

“Not more than an hour? No, come on. Serious?”

“Okay, an hour and half, but I’m going to paint first.”

“But it’s gonna be fun! Hobo Havoc is fun for everyone! I want two hours at the very least!” Frankie darted towards the door, but Tim followed close behind. “Hey! Wait! Do we have a deal, or what?” She slammed the door in his face. Tim sighed as he walked back to the living room.