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I made myself not look away. The sheer level of Dad’s disappointment over my presence in those photos had lain like a pall over the house. We hadn’t told Mom. Dad didn’t see the point in upsetting her, and he expected me to do better.
“Dad, she’s Frankie. Is her mom a raging bitch for treating her so badly? Yes.” I didn’t give a damn that he scowled at my language. “But she’s still Frankie.”
“I agree, but that’s the point, Ian. Frankie’s clearly got issues because of her mother’s treatment. Son—abuse comes in a lot of forms. I know you didn’t want to listen to me this weekend, but I took you to that hospital for a reason.”
Yeah. To show me what troubled youth looked like. As if I didn’t know. “I spent the night at her place,” I reminded him. “Me and the other guys. After everything that went down with her mother and Archie’s dad—we didn’t want her to have to be alone. Especially if they showed up there.”
“I understand. I also understand it’s very easy to get swept up in the feelings of needing to save her.”
“We’re friends, I’m going to look out for her. Someone has to…”
My father sighed. “It’s easy to get sucked in and to make their problems yours.”
“Just stop,” I told him, and bit into the first Pop-Tart. As hot as it was, it burned the roof of my mouth, but I didn’t care. “I’m not going to take advantage of her. You made your point about her mother’s emotional unavailability and her need for approval and closeness.”
It all sounded like a lot of crap, but Dad had made a compelling argument.
“Ian, I didn’t tell you this to upset you but to protect both of you. You want to make her feel better, but there’s every chance she’s looking for emotional validation through intimacy because she has been so deprived. What I wish…is that I’d realized how bad it was. Her mother’s always been…distant with us. Good for a quick call, but not close. I just always put it down to she was busy.”
“Well, so did most of us.” Except Coop. Coop always said there was something off about her mom. I only noticed the absences. More and more, the woman was gone on her trips. Maybe this year it just stood out because Frankie had cut all of us off and she’d been there alone.
That just sent another swell of guilt through me.
“I told her I wanted to be friends, okay? She’s dating the other guys, and that’s good. But she and I are going to be friends. I’ll look out for her. Take her to Homecoming, try to keep the crap from Sharon and the others from coming down on her. Happy?” I took another bite. Dad had hammered on this point. That Frankie was in a vulnerable place, and I got it. He wasn’t wrong.
Just—now I had to be the bad guy.
“No,” Dad said quietly. “I’m not. But I do want to talk to her about trying to get into some therapy.”
“That’s never going to happen.” I didn’t even have to try and pretend. “She doesn’t want to talk about this stuff. She barely wants to talk about it with us.” Actually, she didn’t want to talk to us about it at all. But her mother had left her little choice.
“So I gathered from the conversation I had with the student advocate. My next step is to talk to her mother myself.”
“Dad…”
I glanced at the clock. I had to hurry up and eat.
“Look, you do that, and it’s just going to blow back on her.”
“Your mother wants to call child protective services—”
“Frankie’s seventeen. She’s going to be eighteen in a few months. You guys do that, and they take her away, she loses her cats, her home, and maybe they even pull her out of the school, and then she loses us. Youcan’tdo that.”
“I understand the concern. CPS isn’t ideal. Nor is leaving her in that situation…”
Fuck. “Dad, I know you want to fix this. But when I talked to you about what was going on, I did it because I trusted you to listen to me.”
“Ian, I’m not just doing this because of what we talked about, but because of what I saw myself when that issue with the post happened last week. Jake’s lashing out because he feels like he couldn’t protect his mother, and he refuses to not protect Frankie. That’s going to get dangerous if this keeps escalating. You throw in the issues at Archie’s home now and how does that not create a conflict for them both? But beyondallof that, neglect is a serious issue.”
“So is isolation. The only thing reporting this does is punishFrankie, and I think she’s suffered enough. Between us, we can look after her. We can give her a place to go. We can keep her safe.”
Dad pinched the bridge of his nose, then shook his head. “I don’t think the answer is anywhere as neat as you’re trying to make it.”
“I also don’t think it’s found in tearing her away from all of us.”
As it was, Archie had already volunteered to move in with her if her mom and his dad were serious about moving them out of that apartment. Fuck—why couldn’t her mom have waited?
A few more months, and none of this would be Frankie’s problem.
