Someone Like Me Page 9

I’m always here. I will never, ever leave you.

  Fran threw the little blister pack back into her bag with distaste and went to her next lesson, which was math with Mr. Van Nuys.

  That was when the changes started.

  Nothing big. Nothing flashy. The first thing she noticed was the graffiti on the top of her desk. The names of the desk’s previous owners, scraped into the wood with the point of a classroom compass, rewrote themselves and slid into new configurations. They didn’t even wait until she wasn’t looking. They did it right in front of her eyes.

  When Fran scanned the room, looking for more bad news, some of the posters on the wall had changed too. The one about Shakespeare’s tragedies, her favorite, was now about someone named Theodore Roethke, who found his fate in what he didn’t fear and learned by going where he had to go. All right for some, Fran thought bleakly.

  That was all. The classroom stayed stable for the rest of the period. But the damage was well and truly done. Fran couldn’t do anything but sit there and wait for the avalanche that these first few pebbles threatened to set off. She exhausted herself with watching, and didn’t hear more than six words Mr. Van Nuys said. The quadratic formula? Variables? Differentiation? Factorizing? Variables she knew about, for sure, but the rest slid off her like water.

  At lunch she sat with Maisie Gillis and Sarah Hatch, both of them chess club nerds like Fran herself, and she didn’t hear them either. They were talking about the regionals and who was most likely to get chosen, and then about Rob Carpenter who was at the top of that list and also coincidentally extremely hot—the thinking girl’s eye candy.

  Fran nodded along and said almost nothing. Ate almost nothing too, until she realized that she must be looking kind of weird when what she wanted was for nobody to notice her or ask her a direct question.

  She cut a corner off her meat loaf. Or tried to, rather, because nothing much happened when she sawed the knife across it.

  The knife was a spoon.

  “Shit!” Fran yelled at the top of her voice. She threw the thing down so hard that it bounced and hit the underside of the next table. She stood there shaking, first at the creepy horror of having a change take place right in her goddamned hand, and then at the enormity of what she had done.

  She heard someone say, “Wow!” A girl’s voice, but not anybody Fran knew. And then someone laughed, and someone else joined in. On the next table, a group of boys started up a slow handclap.

  “Freaky Frankie does it again!” said Lucas Millard. “Outstanding!”

  “Francine Watts!” John Dean Clark whooped, fist-bumping with Lucas Millard. “The woman, the legend, the retard.”

  “Don’t take it out on the poor spoon, Francine!”

  “Hey. Why don’t you leave her alone?”

  That last voice wasn’t anyone in Lucas’s posse, but it was very familiar. Fran looked around in dismay and disbelief.

  And there he was. Zac Kendall. Walking over from wherever the hell he’d been sitting. Kneeling down. Fishing the spoon out from under the table. Bringing it across to her.

  Holding it out.

  “Get lost,” Fran told him in a strangled voice. But getting lost wasn’t an option now. Lucas was up on his feet too. He wasn’t walking over here yet, but his face was stiff with affront. He pushed his chair back, which was total melodrama but also a serious warning.

  “Now what you say?” he demanded.

  Zac flushed a little. “She just dropped a spoon, man. Let it go.”

  “Let it go?” Lucas looked around the room, most of which was watching. “The man is telling me to let it go. What, you want to get into her pants, Kendall? You pulling this white savior shit so you can grab some ass-time with Freaky Frank? She’s my cousin, man.”

  “Then look out for her,” Zac suggested. He held the spoon out for a second longer, then when it was clear Fran wasn’t going to take it he lowered his hand again, his face suddenly, belatedly, full of doubt.

  Now Lucas came across to join them. Three other boys, John D. C. and Nathan and Will Buckell, trailed along in his wake and fanned out around him. “Well, thanks for the advice, Kendall,” Lucas said. “I never know how to behave unless I’m told. You want to tell me some more? You got my attention, man.”

  Zac’s eyes flicked left and then they flicked right. He looked trapped. He was going to say something, Fran thought in despair. He’d already made this into a drama for the whole student body to enjoy, and now he was going to lecture Lucas to his face and get his stupid head punched. Which would lead to Lucas being on a one-week suspension at the very least, and probably the repercussions from that would go every which way including hers.

  She had to stop it. And in the heat of the moment she could only think of one way to do that.

  “Hey,” she said to Zac, who was still holding the spoon. “You want some of my lunch? You only had to ask.” She grabbed a little scoop of mashed potato and flicked it at him. It hit him on the front of his shirt and stayed there.

  Hilarity broke out on all sides. There were no abstainers. Zac Kendall, like Fran herself, was a marginal enough figure in the high school universe that nobody really had his back at a time like this. They might have felt differently if Lucas had thrown a punch at him, but this kind of nonviolent comeuppance ticked every box.

  Lucas shook his head in admiration at Fran’s classy move and pity—probably insincere—for Zac’s humiliation. “Okay,” he said. “I guess you got your answer. Go save someone else, Superman.”

  He went back to his seat triumphant, his posse at his back. Zac stayed where he was for a moment longer. He put the spoon down in front of Fran’s plate. His knuckles, which she got to see right up close, were white. “Probably shouldn’t use it again,” he muttered. “Five-second rule.”

  He walked out of the cafeteria, pursued by chuckles and catcalls.

  “Well, that was brutal,” Maisie observed.

  “Thus perish all creeps and shitheads,” said Sarah.

  Fran bent over her meal and tucked into it with totally fake enthusiasm. She kept her head down so nobody could see her face.

  There was a homework club that ran in the library from 3:30 to 5:00 every afternoon. Fran had seen Zac Kendall there a few times but had no idea what his deal was or which days he turned up. Most times attendance at homework club had nothing to do with homework. It was all about waiting for your ride or about not being able to go home until someone was there to open the door.

  Her luck was in. She found Zac in one of the study bays at the back of the room with nobody else in sight. She sat down opposite him and he lowered the book he was reading. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The margins of the book were full of dense notes that spilled over into the text, pencil lines and printed lines all interwoven. Fran disapproved. Notes were for notebooks. She hated picking up a book and finding someone else’s scrawl all over it—or worse, the gray fog and crumple left by a careless sweep with an eraser.

  Kendall wasn’t holding a pencil though, so maybe they were someone else’s notes. He got the benefit of the doubt.

  He was looking at Fran in silence, waiting for her to speak.

  “I saved you from getting your ass kicked, Kendall,” she said. “I don’t owe you an apology.”

  Still nothing. The boy just raised his eyebrows and then lowered them again, which didn’t mean all that much.

  “But thanks,” Fran said, “for trying to help. Not that I needed it or anything. I’m used to people thinking I’m weird, so none of that mattered as much as it probably looked like it did. But it was nice of you. Hella stupid, but nice.”

  “Why was it stupid?” Kendall asked.

  “Big audience. Big stakes.” Those were the two most obvious things. Fran didn’t bother to say: bad optics. Standing up for a black girl against black boys. Putting them in a corner where they would pretty much have to come out fighting.

  “It’s Zac, by the way,” Kendall said.

  “Francine.”
<
br />   “I know.”

  “Not Frankie. Some people call me that, but only because they forgot to ask me if it’s okay. My name doesn’t shorten to a boy’s name.”

  “So what does it shorten to?”

  “I’ll tell you if you ever need to know.”

  You shouldn’t talk to him. Lady Jinx stuck her head out from under the table and bared her long, white teeth. His mom is a monster.

  Fran shot Jinx a stern glance. She knew better than to interrupt in public, especially if that was all she had to offer.

  Jinx withdrew, growling in her throat.

  “So are we done?” Zac asked. “I’ve got three chapters of this word salad to read for tomorrow.”

  “Gatsby’s not word salad,” Fran scolded him. “It’s poetry, you goon.”

  “Yeah, looks like it’s written in prose.”

  “That’s just to fool you.”

  “It worked.”

  There was a silence. It had definite edges, like they’d come as far as they could with this everyday stuff, and now they had to put up or shut up. Were they friends, or on the way there, or would they just back off into their corners?

  “How’s your mom?” Fran asked, since Jinx had already raised the subject. Zac did that same thing with his eyebrows again, the noncommittal up-and-down. Quite right, Fran thought. It was a lot more than a question. It was an acknowledgment. I’m not just a general purpose weirdo; I’m a mental case. And your mom is too. Like they might turn out to be friends because they already had a secret that was just theirs. Goosebumps.

  “She’s okay,” Zac said. “She’s going through some stuff.”

  I bet. “Did she tell you how Dr. Southern has this huge ass but he sits in a really tiny chair?”

  Zac grinned, then laughed. “No, she didn’t mention that. She just said he eats Krispy Kremes by the box and leaves the evidence in plain sight.”

  Fran laughed too. “Hey, you don’t know. Someone could have had a birthday.”

  “Or maybe he’s working two jobs.”

  “Exactly. Delivering donuts when the supply of crazies dries up.”

  Something crossed Zac’s face. Concern maybe, or a trace of pain. “My bad,” Fran said quickly. “I’m not saying your mom is crazy.”

  “It’s okay,” Zac said. But she could see that it wasn’t and she felt bad for him. Maybe his feelings for his mom were like her dad’s feelings for her—wanting to make things better and not having any idea how that could be done.

  “You go home up Lenora?” she asked him.

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll show you a better way.”

  Every Larimer kid was taught in the third grade and at frequent intervals thereafter that the eponymous William Larimer, local boy made good, had made his fortune as a railroad baron before moving into land speculation. Even so, Larimer wasn’t well served by trains. A loop of the Amtrak came through, but the light rail didn’t get any closer than Steel Plaza.

  There was a plan though, or maybe a pipe dream. All of Pittsburgh was going to be linked up to a fully integrated urban transport system by 2050 so a future generation would be able to get into town without having to take the bus, which was so slow you could grow old and have kids and die before you got to Three Rivers. Mostly this amazing new transport network only existed on paper—blueprints on file at the town hall, puff pieces in the lifestyle supplements of local papers—but a little piece of it existed north of Lenora Street behind the Negley Run, tucked in among mothballed factories and rusting corrugated outhouse buildings that could have been anything before they were locked up and abandoned.

  Fran led Zac through the gap in the fence at the Orphan Street end of Lenora. She felt a tiny thrill of proprietorial pride when she saw his jaw drop.

  “Whoa!” Zac said eloquently.

  “Yeah. It’s cool, isn’t it?”

  Westward, the tracks stretched out ahead of them as far as the eye could see, which to be fair was only about a mile. To the east, they stopped dead after a hundred yards. A barricade of sumac, poison oak and brambles with wrist-thick stems shut them off from Washington Boulevard so thoroughly they couldn’t even hear the traffic. Dragonflies looped in the still, fragrant air, crickets droned and dust motes hung like a curtain.

  “How did I not know about this?” Zac demanded, awed.

  “The city doesn’t keep any secrets from me,” Fran said. “She’s got tells, and I can read them every time she sits down at the table.” Zac shot her a frankly suspicious glance, and although she tried hard to keep up her deadpan it broke into a grin. “John Constantine, Hellblazer.”

  “Whoever that is.”

  “Goon.”

  They walked west, finding a little shade in the lee of a gray brick rampart shoring up the south side of the tracks. After five minutes, Zac got another surprise. Two broad stretches of immaculate white concrete rose ahead of them, bracketing the tracks—platforms about two feet high, twelve feet wide and forty feet long. This was going to be a station eventually, when all the lines got joined up and the trains started to run, but the only infrastructure they’d bothered to put up in the meantime were these two wannabe platforms and a pair of welded uprights supporting a steel and plastic notice board. No notices yet though, except for JAZ SUCKS BALLS and INTERURBAN CREW.

  Fran sat down on the edge of the platform, her legs dangling. Zac wandered around, looking in all directions, probably trying to figure out which real-world location might be the closest to this little pocket wilderness.

  Finally he came and joined her.

  “This is amazing,” he said.

  “I know, right?”

  They sat in silence for a while. It was a good silence. They were both on the same wavelength, drinking in the inexplicable peace.

  It was Zac who broke it. “My dad beat my mom up a few weeks back,” he said. “Almost killed her.”

  “You are shitting me!”

  “Seriously. The cops had to come and arrest him. It shook her up.”

  “Like you’d expect,” Fran interjected.

  “Like you would totally expect. Anyway, she had some kind of a moment at my kid sister’s school. She lost it and got into a fight with someone. That’s why she’s seeing Dr. Southern. For the stress. She wants him to help her keep it together.”

  The silence fell again. My turn, thought Fran with resignation. His confession had created a vacuum and her mind was nudging her to fill it whether she wanted to or not.

  “I don’t need to know what you were there for,” Zac said right as she opened her mouth. “That’s your business. I guess I wanted to explain why I jumped up like an idiot and almost started a fist fight in the cafeteria.”

  “You weren’t an idiot,” Fran told him.

  “I thought you said it was hella stupid.”

  “What you did was hella stupid. Wanting to help isn’t ever stupid.” She looked at his face. There was a conversation going on behind it, she thought, and it was chasing its own tail somewhat. There weren’t many people in Fran’s experience who were easier to read than she was herself, but Zac was one of them. He’d pretty much just told her that his stepping in to help her was a kind of fallout from not being able to help his mom when she needed him. That was simultaneously a sign of him being a real human being and a thing that ninety-nine guys out of a hundred wouldn’t have been able to say out loud except under torture.

  “Your mom’s lucky to have you,” she said. “And your dad’s a huge dick and he should die. Apologies if that’s controversial.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Good. Anyway, you shouldn’t feel bad. If you promise to cheer up, I’ll promise not to pelt you with mashed potato anymore.”

  “You’ve got a deal, Watts.”

  “Fran.”

  “What?”

  “Me. My name. It shortens to Fran.” She took a deep breath, and let it out. “Look, my thing with Dr. Southern goes back ages and ages. To when I was a kid.”

  “I s
aid you didn’t have to—”

  “I know, and I’m not. Not the whole of it, anyway. But there’s part of it you probably already know. It happened right around here, and it was a whole big deal. I can tell you that part in just one word. Get it over with. And then maybe we’ll fill in the gaps another time.”

  “Only if you want to,” Zac said. And then, “What’s the word?”

  Don’t, Lady Jinx said, her sharp little face suddenly right there in front of Fran’s, tawny eyes with no whites blazing into hers. You shouldn’t tell him. We never tell people.

  “Shadowman,” Fran said.

  With a final bark of scandalized disapproval, Jinx faded out.

  “It felt like something we needed to protect you from,” Liz told Zac. “That’s why we didn’t discuss it at the time. And then later, you know, it would just have been … There wouldn’t have been any point.”

  Talking about the Shadowman still made her anxious, she discovered. Even now, the best part of ten years after the fact. She walked to the door and glanced through into the living room. Molly was sitting on the floor with two other six-year-olds from her class at school, Hayley Brake and Rhian Molyneux, all of them watching a Netflix show in which an animated tyrannosaurus was rapping about his eating habits to some dayglo-colored robots. This was nominally a play date, but no actual playing had happened yet. Liz was going to have to initiate some if it didn’t happen soon—that was part of the implicit contract when you invited other people’s kids over—but right now she was happy to find that Moll was fully absorbed and not listening in.

  She rejoined Zac at the kitchen’s tiny, narrow breakfast bar. They were sharing rocky road ice cream right out of the tub. The court hearing was very much on Liz’s mind, and this was a ritual between her and her son whenever one or both of them was feeling hassled or emotionally bruised. Zac fished out and devoured the marshmallows and almonds; Liz then polished off the interstitial ice cream, laying open a new layer for excavation. It was conducive to intimacy, and to a kind of generalized sentimentality. Seven-year-old Zac rose up very vividly in Liz’s mind. He seemed to be sitting right there at the table with them.