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How the hell had we missed that?
Why would he target Frankie like that? I wanted to ask him, and I wanted to beat him all over again. Not that he could answer at the moment. The last I heard, his jaw was wired shut.
Good.
I was pretty sure he was under arrest, or at least, I hoped he was. No one was talking to us, and after all the interviews with the cops, Archie got his attorney to take over running interference. They said she’d have to talk to them again and…
“Jake—are you angry?”
“Is water wet?” Jake demanded. “What kind of effed up question is that? Of course, I’m angry. He hurt her. I want to…” He clenched his fists until his knuckles went white.
If Jake’s harsh answer bothered her, she didn’t let it show. Instead, she focused on me. “What about you, Bubba? Are you angry?”
I just stared at her. What could I say? I was angry. At Mitch. At myself. At the guys. At Cheryl for giving her the damn water in the first place.
“What about this, are you angry with her?”
“No.” Jake’s answer pounded so closely on the heels of my own, it might as well have been one voice. Then I added, “It wasn’t Frankie’s fault.”
“But you’re angry that this happened to her.”
“Yes.” Was that what she wanted to hear? “I’m pissed off that it happened to her. I’m furious it happened while we were right there, and if we hadn’t been looking for her…” I couldn’t finish that thought,
When she didn’t come back from the bathroom, it had made all of us a little twitchy. Be great if we could have said it had been some kind of sixth sense warning us, but really? I wanted a chance to dance with her, and I kept looking for her to come back and so had they.
“We noticed because we were being selfish,” I admitted. Was that what she wanted to hear? If Coach wanted to kick me off the team if I wouldn’t go through with this, I’d walk. But I couldn’t do that to Jake. I’d already caused enough trouble when he was on uneven ground in the first place. That scholarship of his seemed locked in, and I wasn’t going to jeopardize it anymore than I had.
“Why do you say that?” Diane pinned me with a look.
I didn’t want to explain it, but Jake said, “Because we wanted to dance with her. We’d been having a great time, and she took off to pee real quick and we kept looking to see if she was back.” He verbalized every thought. “One song made sense. But two? When the third song came on, we went looking.”
“Sometimes, it can take a girl a while in the bathroom,” she suggested.
“Not Frankie,” both of us said in one voice again, and Diane almost smiled.
“No,” I continued. “Frankie’s low maintenance, she really isn’t that girl who stands in a bathroom and preens.”
“Well, there’s always a line, too,” Diane pointed out. “It can take girls a while.”
“There was no line at the bathroom,” Jake interjected. “It doesn’t matter why we went looking. Things have been weird for her, she’s taken a lot of crap from some of the assholes at this school.”
“Ah, so maybe you weren’t selfish so much as protective.” It wasn’t Jake she was looking at, and I sighed.
One glance at my watch, and I wanted to sigh again. We’d barely been in here ten minutes, and we had an hour of this to get through?
“Yeah,” Jake said, and I glanced at him. He pinned me with a look that saidpay attention. “We are protective. All of us are. Sometimes, we’re too protective and try to protect her from ourselves. But we weren’t too protective on Saturday.”
“Okay,” Diane said, just like that. “So let’s talk about the anger you still have, and what you can do with it…”
“The only thing I want to do is try and make this better for her,” I stated bluntly. “How do we do that?”
“Well,” Diane mused, spreading her hands. “You start by not denying that you feel something. Those frustrations and that anger, it’s not going to just magically disappear. You need a way to work through those feelings, to take ownership of them and give them a positive place to go. Even if that positive place is—tearing down a fence or building something.”
“Physical activity?” Jake guessed.
“Sometimes,” Diane said. “Boys—gentlemen, sorry, you’re not boys. The worst feeling in the world is to be helpless. You’re experiencing some of that right now, and while you’re both really annoyed with me for sticking here on this subject, I want you to consider for a moment that if you feel this helpless and out of control—that other people, who are just as close to the situation if not closer, are also feeling this way. You want to help them, which is great, but to help them, you have to be able to help yourselves.”
To help Frankie she meant. All at once, I straightened in my chair and studied her. I’d avoided discussing all of this with my parents. I’d avoided going home if I could help it. Dad meant well, but this was one more example of where Frankie’s mom let her down, and we kind of felt like we had—you know, screw it, I had let her down.
