The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks Page 18

  Richmond responded by calling a meeting of the faculty, during which considerable discussion ensued. The question of assembly in the chapel had been brought up before, but Alabaster tradition had prevailed against the small number of non-Christian or atheist students who had asked for a switch, and those had been easily cowed by Richmond’s assertion that the stained glass crucifixions and Virgins were part of the Alabaster tradition students had enjoyed for nearly 120 years, and that since the content of the assembly was explicitly nonreligious, no one could possibly object.

  The students had proposed noncompulsory attendance, and indeed that had been tried in 1998, but numbers at assembly had subsequently dropped so low that no one knew when events were scheduled, membership in school activities and charity drives diminished, and a quantity of students got into all kinds of trouble on Monday morning while most of the faculty members were attending morning assembly.

  So mandatory Chapel had been reinstated, and no one had seriously questioned it in the twenty-first century.

  The Guppy statue had been at Alabaster since its third year and was an object of wealthy alumni nostalgia. During its 1951 sojourn at the home of seminal Basset Hound Hardewick’s mother, the Old-Boy outrage at its loss was both vitriolic and impassioned.

  Now, Headmaster Richmond convened a faculty meeting to discuss the contents of Frankie’s note. Some members argued that the bad behavior of stealing the Guppy should not be encouraged. The perpetrators should be located and suspended. Others argued that if the requests of the organization now calling itself the Fish Liberation Society were ignored, the Guppy might never be retrieved. Alumni disappointment would be considerable—and that could cause financial damage to the school, which was heavily dependent on contributions. Also, what if the perpetrator were the son or daughter of a major alum? It was safer and quieter to capitulate.

  Still, other faculty members argued that assembly in the chapel had always bothered them as well, either because the chapel should be reserved for religious worship or because the chapel’s atmosphere of devout Christianity was oppressive to those with other religious affiliations, as these fish people—vegetable people, dog people, breast people, whatever they were— had pointed out.

  In the end, Richmond posted a notice moving Monday morning assembly to the new arts complex auditorium, effective immediately, and demanding the return of the Guppy.

  That afternoon, around five o’clock, Elizabeth Heywood received a typewritten note under her door, directing her and several of her girlfriends on a scavenger hunt for the Guppy. The first clue led them to Richmond’s office, where a second clue led them to the offices of the physical plant; and before long, a trail of administrators, janitors, gym teachers, and underclassmen were following the senior girls as they figured out a series of paper puzzles. Movie night went unattended, study groups disbanded, and the headmaster canceled a date with his wife.

  Frankie, Matthew, and Alpha followed Elizabeth until she reached the final clue:

  Under water I am not

  But you’re finally getting hot

  My tub with chlorine

  Once was deep

  Now it’s dry

  And there I sleep.

  The Guppy was in the empty swimming pool of the old gymnasium.

  A janitor opened the chained door after a fifteen-minute wait, and half the school swarmed into the abandoned building. Frankie reached out and squeezed Matthew’s hand. “The swimming pool. Perfect,” she said.

  He chuckled. “It’s not bad.”

  “What do you think it means?” Frankie asked.

  She really wanted to know. It had been more than a month now, her plotting these escapades and the members of the Loyal Order executing them. And though she took a deep satisfaction in her work and the reaction people had to it, she had begun to hunger for a chance to discuss the projects. She’d expended terrific effort to make these things happen, and she wanted to talk about them with Matthew, whose opinion she valued most.

  “Hm?” He seemed distracted.

  “Putting the Guppy in the old pool. Don’t you think it means something?”

  “How so?”

  She couldn’t believe he’d hauled this several- hundred-pound statue through sweltering underground tunnels in the middle of the night without ever considering the symbolism of the hiding place. “The Guppy is this icon of our school, right? All the alumni remember it fondly, it’s been here forever, etcetera.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you see?”

  “Well, it’s a guppy in a pool, and that’s kind of like a fish tank,” Matthew said.

  “Isn’t it a symbol of the old Alabaster being obsolete?”

  “Maybe.” Matthew laughed and put his arm around Frankie. “But maybe you’re thinking too much.”

  “No, seriously,” she persisted. “The Guppy represents the old-fashioned values of the school, and putting it in the dry pool is like saying those values are old and useless, the way the pool is.”

  “What values?”

  Why was he not understanding her? Was he playing dumb to keep the secret? “The whole Alabaster network, prep school Old Boy thing,” she told him.

  “Seems to me like you’re reading a lot into nothing.” Matthew shrugged.

  “Don’t you think that’s what’s getting shook up here?”

  “You mean, shaken up?”

  He was correcting her grammar.

  She was explaining this whole prank to him, the prank he’d actually carried out, and instead of listening to her point, he was correcting her grammar. “You’re thinking too much,” he had said.

  What? He didn’t want her to think?

  What was the point of doing any of these pranks if people weren’t going to think about them?

  “Yeah,” Frankie said. “Shaken up.”

  Matthew stroked her hair. “You’re adorable. You know I think that, right?”

  “Thanks,” said Frankie.

  The sad thing was, she did know. But it wasn’t enough.

  He leaned in and kissed her neck. “You smell good, too. You want to come shake me up for a few minutes before curfew? Let’s be alone.”

  He was bringing up the grammar thing again.

  He just wanted to make out—he wasn’t ever going to listen to what she wanted to say. He didn’t know they were in this together.

  Matthew thought he and the Basset Hounds had made this happen on their own—and he wasn’t going to tell her about it no matter how interested Frankie showed him she was.

  It wasn’t that he no longer had a secret from her. In fact, Matthew’s secret was getting bigger and bigger—and Frankie finally had to admit to herself that he wasn’t ever, ever going to tell her.

  She turned to him. “I can’t believe you just said that, Matthew. Shake you up?”

  “Aw, I didn’t mean it that way. We were joking around—shook up, shaken up?”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “Fine.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m not mad,” she lied. “I just remembered there’s something I gotta do.”

  TWINE

  Frankie headed for the library. She had left the twine running from the door of Hazelton sub-16 through the maze of overheated tunnels to the old gymnasium. She had done the same thing after the Doggies in the Window project, and at that time had scolded herself for forgetting to have someone roll it up. If the janitorial staff found the twine, it would be a matter of hours before the lock on sub-16 was changed, so it was crucial that the twine be wound up—but not a single Basset had thought to do it without being told. Frankie had skipped a class to take care of it when she was sure no members of the Loyal Order would be around to catch her.

  Perversely, the dogs’ incompetence had made her happy.

  They needed her, she thought as she navigated the steam tunnels with a flashlight under one arm. She was their mastermin
d.

  She had also liked the small opportunity for physical participation afforded her by the steam tunnel escapades. She liked laying out the twine and rolling it up. So many of her efforts in the adventures of the Loyal Order were conducted on her laptop and in the printer lab, while the boys scaled buildings, ran extension cords, or went shopping.

  So in planning the relocation of the Guppy to the swimming pool via the tunnels, Frankie had always intended to roll up the twine herself.

  As she slipped into the Hazelton basement, after leaving Matthew at the scene in the old gymnasium, she kept her flashlight off. She dropped her wool coat, sweater, and thermal near the entrance, stripping down to a tank top and jeans. She ran her hand along the taut twine. When she got to the old gymnasium, she would untie that end and reroll it as she returned to the library.

  The tunnels were noisy with the hiss and banging of steam heat in pipes. It was hotter at night—when the heat had been running for some sixteen hours—than it was during the day. Frankie began to sweat, and found as she threaded her way through the dark that instead of feeling superior and involved, as she had last time she’d rolled up the twine—she felt lonely.

  No one cared enough about the projects of the Loyal Order to think of doing this chore. Matthew didn’t care enough to think through the symbolism of the latest prank. What they cared about, really, she thought to herself, was their secrecy. Their clubbiness.

  She could command them, outwit them; she could know more of their history than any of them ever would—but they would preserve that secrecy and clubbiness against her even so.

  The projects didn’t matter to Matthew, Frankie thought. Sure he liked them, he admired them, he thought they were fun and clever, but what mattered to him was executing them with his buddies. What mattered was that thrill of rebellion and unconventionality without risking the solid security of privilege.

  He likes it better when it’s just a guppy in a pool, or a doggie in a window, she thought. Not anything more. Not anything symbolic. He doesn’t want to change the way things work; doesn’t seriously want to anger the administration or question authority. He wants to drink beer on the golf course with his friends. And so do the rest of them.

  That’s why he wouldn’t analyze the pranks with me, when he’s a guy who likes to analyze everything, she thought. He doesn’t want them to mean anything that would destabilize his world. Even the thing about the Viva corporation—he was annoyed about it, but he wasn’t interested in changing the status quo by editorializing in the paper, because that would have shook things up too much.

  Shaken.

  Shaken things up.

  Frankie had been walking for five minutes when the twine under her fingers went slack.

  What?

  How could it be slack? It was quadruple-knotted to the handle on the door of the old gymnasium. There was no way it could simply have come untied.

  Someone was at the other end.

  Rolling up the twine.

  Someone had cared enough to come down and put it away.

  Someone had cared.

  And now he was going to discover her in the tunnels.

  Frankie’s first impulse was to hide. She let go of the twine and slammed herself up against a wall, but her bare arm hit a steam pipe and she could hear the sizzle even before she felt the pain of the burn. She leaped away, pressing her own hand over her mouth to keep herself from crying, switched on her flashlight, and ran as fast as she could toward the library exit.

  Hiding was dumb anyhow. She had to get to the door and get her coat and clothes so the person behind her in the dark wouldn’t find them and know she’d been there.

  With ragged breath, she reached the door. As she bent down to grab her jacket and clothes, she saw what she should have seen on her way in—hanging from a nail against the wall was a navy blue peacoat, such as most of the boys at Alabaster wore through the winter. Hastily, and with arms full, Frankie grabbed the door handle, dropping her flashlight and several things out of her pocket in the process. She felt her jacket quickly to make sure her wallet was still there and left what she had dropped. She launched herself into the fluorescent glow of the Hazelton subbasement, bolted up the stairs to the basement-level stacks and buried herself behind a bookshelf, hastily pulling her thermal over her head to hide the seared skin of her arm.

  It was quiet.

  Had he heard her footsteps? Or the closing of the sub-16 door?

  Had he felt her touch on the twine behind him?

  There was a jangle of keys, and a pair of security guards trotted through the stacks in the direction of the subbasement entrance. Frankie grabbed a book off a shelf and feigned immersion, looking up only as they passed her. “Hi there,” she said.

  “Hello.” The guard was businesslike.

  “Is anything going on down there?”

  “Not to worry about. Headmaster thinks whoever stole that statue was transporting it through tunnels that link up with the subbasement, so we’re going to check it out,” said the guard.

  Frankie forced a laugh. “You think someone carried that huge thing into the library with nobody noticing?”

  “Probably not. The tunnels down there, they connect most of the buildings on campus. They coulda brought it in any which way. But he told us to go down there and take a look, and this is the nearest entrance from the security desk. Maybe we’ll get a hint who’s been doing all the vandalism around school lately.”

  “Vandalism?”

  “You know, what with the brassieres on the paintings and those Christmas decorations and such.”

  “I never thought of it as vandalism.”

  “We’re going down there now, little lady. Duty calls. But don’t you worry your pretty head about a thing, you hear?” said the guard, and he and his coworker trotted down the stairs, keys jingling.

  BURN

  Frankie ran back to her dorm and thrust as much of her arm as she could into an ice-cold shower. The skin was beginning to bubble, and a welt ran from above her elbow down to her wrist and across the back of her hand.

  It did not escape her notice that this was the second time she’d burned herself on behalf of the Loyal Order.

  It was nearly curfew. Her jeans were wet in the spray of the shower, and Frankie was shivering from the cold—but every time she took her arm out of the water the burning sensation was so intense she shoved it back in again.

  It hurt.

  It hurt.

  There were footsteps in the hall, and the bathroom door began to open. Frankie ducked herself all the way into the stall so no one would see her and wonder why she was standing halfway in the shower. Once under the spray, her jeans felt instantly heavy and waterlogged. She wrestled them off and pushed them to the edge of the stall with her foot.

  Two girls came into the bathroom—Star and Trish. They were brushing their teeth and rubbing their faces with lotion before bed.

  “So I don’t understand why they took the Guppy in the first place,” Star was saying.

  Trish’s voice came: “I think the idea is to get everyone talking. Whoever’s doing this just wants attention.”

  “But if they just want attention, why not say who they are?”

  “You saw how furious Richmond was, didn’t you?”

  There was silence for a moment while Trish and Star brushed. Frankie’s skin felt raw and frozen. She turned the water to warm, but her burn screamed in protest, so she turned it back to cold, teeth chattering. “I saw he was mad,” said Star finally, “but I left when Dean and those guys were helping carry the Guppy back where it belonged. So I missed the speech.”

  “Oh. You missed this long über-headmaster ramble about theft and insurrection and how disrespectful these Snoopy pranks were to the school administration. Snoopy pranks, that’s what he called them.”

  “So clueless,” said Star. “He doesn’t even know what’s going on in his own school. Anyone can see it’s a basset hound.”

  “Yeah. So then he sai
d he’s calling in advisers to school security, to help figure out who the perpetrators are.”

  “Really?”

  “He said Halloween pranks were one thing,” Trish went on, “but stealing school property was another, and he was taking the situation extremely seriously.”

  “So someone’s in major trouble.”

  “Oh, very major. Although I thought it was all clever, actually. Putting this symbol of Alabaster in this crusty old empty pool. Like a commentary,” Trish said.

  “Uh-huh. What do you think of Elizabeth Heywood’s hair?” wondered Star. “Do you think she colored it when she was on TV?”

  When Star and Trish left the bathroom, Frankie flipped the water off and stood there shaking, wearing only her wet tank top and underpants.

  Her wool jacket hung on the towel hook. She grabbed it and picked up her soaked jeans from the floor of the shower and her shoes from under a bench. Someone had left a large jar of petroleum jelly on a shelf, and she scooped out a handful and wiped it down her burned arm. She pulled some paper towels from the roller and dried the rest of herself as best she could.

  Burning and dripping and freezing, Frankie Landau-Banks walked down the hall to her bedroom. Trish was sitting in bed, wearing flannel pajamas decorated with palominos and reading a brochure called “Adventure Kayaking Tours.” “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “I fell in the pond,” lied Frankie.

  “How did it happen?”

  “My foot slipped.”

  “You must be freezing. But why did you take your shoes and pants off?” Trish got up to take Frankie’s jacket and wet clothes from her. “You didn’t walk home like that, did you?”

  “No, no. I took them off in the bathroom.”

  “Why didn’t you come in here and get a towel?” Trish’s eyes widened. “What happened to your arm?”

  “Oh, nothing, that’s from yesterday.”

  “You’re lying to me.”

  Frankie peeled off the rest of her clothes. “No, I’m not.”

  “I’m not dumb, Frankie. You have a huge burn on your arm and your coat’s not even wet. There’s no mud anywhere. It’s obvious you didn’t fall in the pond.”