AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She doesn’t say anything. My eyes rise to Caroline’s, and there’s softness there. Faith in me that eases some of the sharpness off my temper.
I put a hand on Frankie’s leg and try again. Try to keep my voice level, try to keep from sounding like my dad, from being like him.
“We have to stick together,” I say. “I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me. What’s going on right now—this is actually dangerous. I could lose you.”
Frankie’s trembling.
“You’re scaring her,” Caroline says.
“I’m sorry, but this is a scary situation. Scarier than you understand, I think.”
Frankie starts to cry.
My fists keep closing, clenching tight, my forearms pumped up with blood and violence that won’t do any good here. Not in a school, not in Putnam. I can’t fight my way out of this. Can’t yell my way to a solution.
“You have any suggestions?” I ask Caroline.
She ducks her head and whispers a question to Frankie. Frankie whispers something back. They go on like that for a few seconds, and then Caroline says, “She wants me to tell you for her. Would that be all right?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s do it over there.” She leads me to the opposite side of the closet-room, as far from Frankie as we can get, and refuses to start talking until I sit. I straddle a chair, fold my arms across the back, wondering why she’s going to so much trouble to get me ready for this.
Then she tells me, and it’s worse than anything I could have guessed.
I thought Frankie missed her friends back home, and that maybe she was embarrassed of her boobs, uncomfortable with her body—but what Caroline tells me is there’s a kid, this slimy little Clint fucker, who’s been giving Frankie a hard time on the bus every morning and every afternoon. He’s been saying perverted shit about how she looks, her body, sexual stuff that no ten-year-old should be thinking about.
On Halloween, the teacher moved the kids’ desks into a new arrangement with groups of four desks clumped together, and now Clint’s is right next to Frankie’s, so she’s been hearing his shit all day long, day in and day out.
She took it and took it until she couldn’t take it anymore. Then she attacked.
I run sweaty palms down my thighs. “I’m going to kill him,” I say.
Caroline’s hands are on my shoulders. She’s right behind me, talking soft. “No, you’re not.”
Frankie’s huddled into a ball on the seat of her chair.
I can’t breathe right. It’s not Clint I want to kill. I did this to her. Me.
The whole time she was a baby, I was afraid. If she slept longer than usual, I worried she’d died in her sleep. I wouldn’t be able to make myself look in on her because I was so sure it would come true.
I worried she wasn’t eating enough, wasn’t eating right, wasn’t growing the way she should be.
I worried she wouldn’t have anything to wear to school, and when she had a fever I worried that her brain would fry and it would make her stupid. I worried when I found out about all that recalled Tylenol that I’d given her too much and she was going to get asthma or seizures or whatever.
When I was in middle school, Frankie was a toddler. Mom would leave her at the neighbor’s, Mrs. Dieks, and I would come off the bus and straight to Mrs. Dieks’s place to pick her up. Most of the time I’d find Frankie in nothing but a diaper, slapping her fat little palms on the coffee table, wreathed in smoke and babbling at the TV.
She’s a terror, Mrs. Dieks would tell me, and I knew even when I was twelve years old that Frankie wasn’t. She was normal. Curious. It was Mrs. Dieks who was too old to be watching her.
I could tell from the way she looked at me—like I might be carrying a disease—that Mrs. Dieks didn’t like me. I could guess from the bruises on the softest parts of Frankie’s thighs that Mrs. Dieks didn’t like my sister, either.
But there was nothing I could do about it but tell my mom, who blew it off. She falls down, my mom said. I’m sure they’re from accidents.
I remember being so upset, I threw up. Wiped my eyes, rinsed out my mouth from the bathroom tap, and swore it was the last time I’d count on my mom for anyt
hing.
You’re going to have to fix this, I told myself. You’re going to have to make it better for her.
