I got up to help her. “Thanks,” she said, and slid the pan into the oven, then set the timer. “Okay, now what?”
The clock said 5:58. Jeffrey was coming at six-ish. “Now we wait,” I said.
Everything else was already set. We’d been to the video store and only rented one movie—Sholay. It’s about two small-time crooks and a cop working together to get revenge on a big-time crook . . . in India . . . with subtitles . . . and musical numbers. I realized once that I like those Bollywood classics for the same reason I like the way Frannie dresses. Anytime someone can take a bunch of different elements that no one else would think of putting together and then make them work in some unexpected way, I’m interested. To me, that’s art. It’s surprising. It’s strange. It’s inspiring. It’s all of the above.
Plus, we wanted to rent something we’d seen a million times just in case Jeffrey turned out to be a movie talker. I’m not a completely high-maintenance person, but I do have a few rules where movies are concerned, and no talking is one of them. It usually wasn’t an issue at Frannie’s house because it had always been just the two of us.
I couldn’t help feeling a little pressure over the fact that Jeffrey was coming. I didn’t mind so much since I had a lot of ideas about how I wanted it to go. Frannie and Jeffrey were moving past the neutral-ground phase of things and into the part where you start sniffing out each other’s territory to see if you can deal with hanging out there. I wanted Jeffrey to see me as a permanent structure in Frannie’s world. I also wanted him to think of me the same way Frannie thought of Glenn: as the cool best friend. And yes, if I’m being honest, I just plain old wanted Jeffrey to like me.
The doorbell rang at 6:10, about two seconds after Frannie’s father happened to pass through the kitchen and into the foyer. “I’ll get it!” she yelled, but we heard the front door open anyway.
Then Jeffrey’s voice. “Hi, is Frannie home?”
Frannie froze. She stood just inside the kitchen door, listening with her eyes closed. It looked like she was praying that her father wouldn’t say something like:
“Sure, come on in. You must be the reason Frannie’s been buying so many new clothes lately.”
Which was what he said. Frannie whipped out into the hall while I kept listening from the kitchen table.
“Dad, Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Dad.”
“Nice to meet you.” Jeffrey sounded polite, in a cute way. Not ass-kissy.
“Okay, Dad, thanks. We’re all set. Come on in.” Her voice got closer to the kitchen door. I could see the back of her head now.
“I’ll be up in my office if you kids need anything.”
Mr. Falconer’s steps receded up the stairs while Frannie kind of shuffled backward into the kitchen with Jeffrey following. His hair was parted on the side, different than usual. Good different.
“Sorry about that,” Frannie said. “He’s so embarrassing sometimes.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jeffrey told her. “He seemed really nice.”
“Oh . . . he is nice.” She sounded a tiny bit defensive. “It’s just, he’s just . . .” She looked over at me. “We were thinking about pizza. Does that sound good?”
I waved the pizza menu at Jeffrey in greeting. “Just plain cheese okay?”
“Great,” he said. “Do they have whole wheat crust?”
His shirt rode up as he slipped off his fleece pullover and I couldn’t help noticing the line of hair that ran down from his belly button. I forced my eyes back to the menu. “Um, we can ask when we call.”
We ended up ordering two mediums—ham and pineapple on white and Way Too Many Veggies on whole wheat. Then we sat down to wait for the delivery.
“Marcus and I like to get the food before we start the movie,” Frannie said. “If that’s okay.” I liked that she said “Marcus and I,” even though it was more my thing than hers.
While we sat there talking, I kept wondering what Jeffrey thought of the house. The foyer is two stories high, with a marble floor and a big open staircase. The kitchen, where we were hanging out, is like from a magazine. There’s even a TV in the refrigerator. I remembered seeing it all for the first time, and how much I had thought it said about Frannie, and how wrong that assumption had been.
Once the food came, we went into the TV room and started the movie. I sat in the big leather easy chair. Frannie and Jeffrey took the couch. From my position, I could watch the TV and the two of them without being obvious about it. They both sat on the cracks between the outside couch cushions and the middle one, which was nowhere you’d ordinarily sit unless you weren’t sure how close to get to the other person. I thought the matching shyness thing was a good sign.
Then, about fifteen minutes into the movie, Jeffrey started looking bored. He scratched his chin, smiled at Frannie, looked around the room, took another piece of pizza. All bad signs. I knew this movie wasn’t for everyone, but now I felt self-conscious about it. It’s one thing to watch some crazy esoteric musical with your best friend who you know is into it. It’s another thing to watch while you’re wondering if someone else in the room is wondering what kind of an idiot would choose a movie like this.
Half an hour in, Jeffrey got up to go to the bathroom right in the middle of a song. When Frannie reached for the pause button and Jeffrey said, “Keep going. Don’t worry about it,” that was all I could take.
“We can turn this off and do something else,” I suggested as casually as I could. Frannie shot me a look, like, Who are you and what have you done with my friend Marcus? I’m not exactly known for stopping movies in the middle.
“Whatever,” Jeffrey said. “I’m good either way.” Although I’m sure he was just being polite.
After he left the room, Frannie turned and whispered to me, “I can’t believe you just said that.”
I couldn’t believe it either. To me, the whole point of a movie is that it’s supposed to be an uninterrupted experience. But this was Flexible Marcus, who I hoped was part of Cool Best Friend Marcus.
“It’s fine,” I whispered back. “Let’s just have dessert or something.”
She started closing up the pizza boxes and scrunching up napkins. “He’s totally bored, isn’t he?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her, even though I couldn’t help feeling a little worried myself. Maybe Sholay had been a big mistake. Maybe we should have gotten a few new releases as backup. . . .
Maybe Jeffrey wasn’t my boyfriend and I needed to not think about it so much.
Back in the kitchen, Frannie cut the blondies into huge squares and put them in bowls with big scoops of vanilla ice cream and hot fudge on top. She barely touched her own while Jeffrey and I mowed through ours.
“These are good,” I said.
“They are good,” he said.
“Really good,” I said, and then wondered if that had sounded competitive. I hadn’t meant for it to.
I saw Frannie stifle a smile. “Thanks,” she said into her bowl.
“So what else do you guys do when you hang out?” Jeffrey asked us. I loved that he wanted to know.
What was strange, though, was that I couldn’t come up with an answer. For all the time Frannie and I spend together, I couldn’t quite think of how we filled it. Apparently, she couldn’t either. We both looked at each other for a long couple of seconds and then burst out laughing.
“I don’t know,” Frannie said. “I guess we just . . . hang out.”
“Watch movies, of course,” I added.
“Do homework. Procrastinate from doing homework,” Frannie said. “Eat. Talk.”
“Play favorites,” I said.
“Play favorites?” Jeffrey looked like he didn’t like the sound of that.
“It’s just a little game we have,” Frannie said. “It’s kind of dumb.” I shot her a “don’t even” look, and she quickly added, “But it’s fun.”
Jeffrey scraped some fudge off the side of his bowl with his spoon. “How do you play?”
??
?I don’t know if game’s the right word,” I said. “It’s just questions. The more random the better. Like . . . favorite shade of blue?”
Jeffrey raised his eyebrows at Frannie, as in, you go first. I noticed his nice blue eyes and hoped I hadn’t just set her up to say that was her favorite shade. It would be overkill if she did.
“You know that color of sky near the horizon just before it gets dark?” Frannie said. “I’d like a shirt that color.”
“Good answer,” I told her, a little relieved. Then we both looked at Jeffrey.
“Oh, uh . . . I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “There’s this color called ‘ocean’ in the Fritz Fielding catalog. It’s nice.” He smiled at Frannie. “And actually, I do have a shirt that color.”
Wow, I thought, how semi-queer of you. Although it did make its own kind of sense now that he mentioned it. Jeffrey always looked like something out of a Fritz Fielding catalog, all muted tones and natural fibers and well groomed but not overgroomed . . . and hot, but attainable.
“What about you, Marcus?” he asked me.
This was all going much better than the movie. Everyone looked relaxed.
I thought about my answer for a second. “I really like that steely gray-blue color, like on—”
Frannie pointed at me with her spoon. “Mrs. Pasternak’s car!”
“Exactly.”
Jeffrey sat up straighter on his kitchen stool. He seemed kind of amazed by us, which I was privately loving. “You guys are like—” he started.
“Brain twins,” Frannie and I said together, and all three of us cracked up. Jeffrey’s stool tipped back and he stumbled off it, which made us laugh even harder. I’d never seen him so loose. It was sexy on him. I always imagine my own face to look kind of circus freaky when I laugh hard.
But it was happening. We were bonding, all three of us. I was going to be the CBF (cool best friend). This was good. It was all good.
And I realized something else just then. Something about the way Jeffrey asked questions, the way he expressed an interest in Frannie, in both of us: he wanted people to like him. Better yet, he wanted us to like him. You’d never think Jeffrey Osborne worried about that kind of thing because (a) everyone already did like him and (b) he just seemed so quietly confident all the time. I loved seeing this new piece. It made him less perfect . . . which made him more perfect.
Which was why, during our recap on the phone later that night, I suggested Frannie go online and talk to him some more.
“Nooo,” she said. “It started off so sketchy tonight, but then it got pretty good by the end. I just want to quit while I’m ahead.”
“Quit?” I said.
“You know what I mean.” Which was true but didn’t mean that I agreed with her.
“Or,” I said, “you can move things forward. You know, get past that phase where you need an excuse to talk to each other even though you just said good night an hour ago.” This was exactly the phase Frannie had never gotten past with a boy. It seemed worth pushing for.
She cleared her throat. “Wouldn’t that count as coming on too strong?”
“My new opinion is that he can take it.”
I heard her adjust the phone to the other ear, probably flipping over on her bed. “How do you have such strong opinions about all this? It’s not like you’re exactly . . . experienced.”
Coming from someone else that might have stung a little bit. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I was a straight girl in a past life. Or a more experienced gay boy.” Or, I thought, maybe this was my thing—helping people do for themselves what I would never able to do for myself. I pushed the thought away.
“And maybe Jeffrey was your boyfriend,” Frannie added. “In the Renaissance or something.”
“And maybe it’s time for you to stop changing the subject,” I said.
She groaned, as in, You’re right, but I don’t want to think about it. “He’s probably not even online,” she said. “He couldn’t have been home for more than—”
“He’s in the RBHS chat room right now,” I said.
Her voice went up a step. “Does that mean you’re in the chat room?”
“Unofficially,” I said. “I haven’t logged on. But I do have a screen name for you. Nicenite, with an n-i-t-e.”
“That’s cute,” Frannie said. There were a few seconds of silence, and then she said, “No. You know what? I’m going to take the rest of the night off. I really want it to happen, but this stuff exhausts me. Maybe I just have to go in short spurts.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, not sure why I cared so much. “It’ll be like saying good night on the front porch, just without the kiss. It won’t take any energy at all, and I’ll be right there with you. If you want me to be.”
She thought some more. “You’re probably right,” she said, and I was already logging in for her with the new name, Nicenite.
“Good,” I said.
“And it definitely couldn’t hurt to say good night or whatever.”
“Exactly.” I found Jeffo, typed in, Hi again, and hit send.
“But I’m just not up for it,” Frannie concluded.
“Huh?” My fingers froze.
“I have to take a shower. I’m tired. The cat died. Insert excuse here. I don’t know.”
Jeffrey’s response scrolled by.
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Looking back, it seems like I could have easily explained to Frannie that Jeffrey was already on the scene and why. At that moment, though, a little spike of panic— or something, I’m not sure what—blocked out my common sense. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“Talk to you tomorrow?” Frannie asked me. “And don’t forget I have a dentist appointment so I can’t pick you up. I’ll see you after first period.”
“Uhhh . . . okay.”
And she hung up.
And there I was, alone with Jeffrey for the first time. My fingers hung about an inch over the keyboard, my heart thumped, and my brain churned out two competing messages:What are you doing? Are you crazy? Don’t even think about it. Just make up some excuse and get out of there. Nothing good can come of this. And stop thinking about Jeffrey. Think about something else. Think about nuns. Nuns crocheting. And eating cottage cheese.
What are you doing? Are you crazy? Don’t even think about leaving now. Just get in there and say something. It would be worse for Frannie if you ditched now than if you just had a quick little conversation and then left. And stop thinking about nuns. Think about Frannie. Think about your best friend and what’s best for her. Now go.
Somehow the right side of my brain was louder and more convincing than the left. I put my fingers back onto the keyboard. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and focused on what I had to do. Frannie and Jeffrey. Frannie and Jeffrey. I’m Frannie. Okay. Go.
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There was a long pause and then he said:
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Well, that was a good sign. For Frannie.
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Whoa.
I sat back from the computer. XX? Did Jeffrey want to kiss Frannie or porn her? I knew the answer, but just thinking about it made my stomach swirl. No one had ever told me they wanted to XX me or anything me, for that matter. This was the closest thing to boy-on-boy action I’d had in a long time. And by long time, of course, I mean since I was born.
Not that it was my action, technically. Or even boy-on-boy, technically. More like boy-on-boy-who-thinks-it’s-boy-on-girl. I had the strangest mix of feelings I’ve ever had—an exact tie between good and bad.
Good: he wanted to kiss Frannie.
Bad: Frannie wasn’t here.
Good: the way
it excited me-as-Frannie when he said it.
Bad: the way it excited me-as-myself when he said it.
It was like borrowing thrills from someone else’s life. Or stealing them. That’s how it felt to the left side of my brain. The right side—the stronger side, the bully who told the left side to shut up or else—was having a shamelessly good time.
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Whatever doubts I had about doing this, there was no denying that it was going great for Frannie. Meanwhile, my own pulse was about twice normal. The whole roleplay thing was blurring around the edges, so I was relieved and sorry at the same time when Jeffrey changed the subject to something more ordinary.
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I Googled Heifer International as fast as I could. At the top of their web site, it said, Ending Hunger, Caring for the Earth. Very Jeffrey. I felt weird about saying yes for Frannie, but saying no seemed like a worse idea.
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I couldn’t help myself, and I wrote:
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A little siren went off in my head, and the Common Sense Department made an announcement to all sides of my brain: STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING. YOUR WORK HERE IS THROUGH. GET OUT. NOW. If I didn’t wrap things up and soon, someone was going to lose her virtual virginity. Or his. Whichever.