The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks Read online

  “You’re making me sound like a piece of meat.” “No, of course you’re not. I’m living vicariously.” “How?” “It would be fun to have guys fighting over me. I’m not even sixteen and already I’m, like, married.” “It’s not even clear if he likes me,” said Frankie. “Which one?” “Either one. Matthew.”

  “I don’t think Alpha was talking to you to get your custard.”

  Frankie stretched herself. “Maybe he’s not so alpha after all, if he backed off like that.”

  “Is what I’m saying,” said Trish.

  THE PANOPTICON

  Frankie saw Matthew in the caf several times the next week at a table full of senior boys; but it was impossible for a sophomore to walk over to a senior table and just say hello in front of everyone. Once, he passed her outside, running in his soccer practice clothes—a pair of cleats swinging in one hand. “Late!” he’d grinned in explanation, looking over his shoulder and loping off in the direction of the playing fields.

  Oh, he had great legs.

  Had he not been interested, after all? Frankie wondered as she watched him go. Was she too young for him?

  Had he stopped liking her when she’d talked back to Dean about the Pirates of the Caribbean ride?

  All week she tried not to think of him, and actually studied for her classes. On the weekend she went to town with Trish and Artie, and played an ultimate Frisbee game.

  At the start of the second week of classes, however, Frankie switched out of Latin and into an elective called Cities, Art, and Protest that sounded like more fun. The class was taught by a teacher named Ms. Jensson. She was new to Alabaster and wore beaded cardigan sweaters and unusual skirts. She had a master’s from Columbia in art history and told everyone she’d come to Alabaster to escape New York City—but then here she was, spending all her time discussing it in class. So ironic.

  It was the first time Frankie had ever taken a course that couldn’t be described in a single word: French. Biology. Latin. History. Ms. Jensson explained various ways of conceptualizing cities and how organically developing cities contrasted with smaller, more deliberately planned environments such as Alabaster’s own campus. The students read architecture criticism, a history of Paris, and studied the panopticon—a kind of prison designed by late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, which was never actually built.

  The architecture of Bentham’s panopticon was created to allow a watchman to look at all his prisoners without the prisoners knowing whether or not they were being observed—making them feel as if they were constantly being watched by an omniscient being.

  In other words, everyone in the panopticon knew they could be watched at all times, so in the end, only minimal watching actually needed to happen. The panopticon would create a sense of paranoia so pervasive that its inhabitants became practically self-governing.

  Ms. Jensson then had the students read an excerpt from a book called Discipline and Punish, in which Michel Foucault uses the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for Western society and its emphasis on normalization and observation. Meaning, we live our lives in places that operate like the panopticon. Schools. Hospitals. Factories. Office buildings. Even the streets of the city.

  Someone is watching you.

  Or, someone is probably watching you.

  Or, you feel like someone’s watching you.

  So you follow the rules whether someone’s watching you or not.

  You start to think that whomever is watching you is larger than life. That the watcher knows stuff about you that you never told anyone.

  Even if the watcher is someone dumb like a boarding-school headmaster.

  Or an eighteen-year-old schoolboy.

  Or a fifteen-year-old girl pretending to be an eighteen-year-old schoolboy.

  It’s a systematic paranoia. Like, when you have that creepy sense that your dad knows you drank that beer, even though you drank it four days ago and there’s no evidence whatsoever that he knows.

  Or when you are alone in your house, and you go to use the toilet and lock the door behind you anyway.

  Or when you have a new boyfriend and you’re alone in your room and you pick your nose—and then you think how grodie that was, and how somehow your boyfriend must have been able to see you and he’s going to dump your slimy, nose-picking self as soon as you see him next. And you can also kind of hear your grandmother’s voice in your head, reminding you to use a tissue. And that horrible queen-bee popular girl—you can hear her nasty voice back in the fifth grade when she caught you wiping a booger on the underside of your desk, calling you “booger eater” for half the school year, even though obviously if you were eating your boogers you wouldn’t have been wiping them on the desk in the first place.

  So it’s not that you either pick your nose because you want to pick it, or you don’t pick your nose because it’s germy. It’s that you are having a mental conversation with all the forces that could be watching you and condemning you for your nose-picking (potential or actual)—even though rationally you know that no one can see you.

  That’s the panopticon.

  Cities, Art, and Protest was so much better than Latin. Frankie did all her reading early.

  THE INVITATIONS

  Frankie first noticed the pale blue envelopes in her morning history class a week and a half into the school year. Star Allan, a sophomore who lived on Frankie’s hall, sat with her friend Claudia, comparing notes.

  Star was petite. A crew team coxswain. A brash, loud voice. A ponytail so long and swingy, Frankie wondered it didn’t topple her backward. A brain the size of a corn kernel. “Did you get one of these?” Star called across the table, flashing her envelope and the matching card within.

  Star was going out with Dean, Frankie knew.

  “No.”

  “Did you?” Star asked Trish.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, you’ll know if you’re supposed to know!” sang Star. “If you don’t have one, I can’t show you mine!”

  Later, eating lunch in the caf, Frankie couldn’t help but notice pale blue envelopes in the hands and pockets of several popular seniors. And when she looked over toward the corner table where such people always sat, Matthew, Dean, Alpha, and their pack were leaning back in their chairs, the cards scattered across the table.

  Frankie checked her mailbox after lunch, but there was nothing inside except a flyer about Saturday water polo.

  That night, Frankie was alone in the library. She had signed out of the dorm to go to a study session for tomorrow’s biology test, and when the session ended, Frankie went down in the 8000 section of the stacks to look for something fun to read.

  It was cold among the metal shelves in the basement of the library, and there was a smell of dusty paper. Frankie was looking for a book by P. G. Wodehouse, having read Something Fresh over the summer; but she hadn’t bothered to look him up in the catalog, and so was wandering through the W’s, misremembering the spelling of his name (pronounced Woodhouse), and wondering whether she should bother going upstairs to do a computer search or just see if there was anything decent to read that would be easier to find—when she heard voices.

  At the end of the long line of bookshelves was a row of study carrels, each a fluorescent-lit cubicle with a Plexiglas door and room inside for two chairs and a desk. Four senior boys—Matthew, Alpha, Dean, and Callum—were squeezed into one of them, two sitting on top of the desk and two in the chairs. The carrel was nearly soundproof, and Frankie couldn’t hear what they were saying. She thought no more about it, aside from a lingering consciousness that Matthew Livingston was within several yards of her body—and wandered farther down into the W’s, where she eventually found a shelf of Wodehouse stories.

  She took The Code of the Woosters because she liked the title, and opened it, sitting down on the floor. She was involved enough to feel mildly startled when the boys opened the carrel door and their noise spilled out into the stacks.

  “Gid
get . . .” Matthew’s friend Callum was laughing. “I can’t believe you guys.” Gidget was a good-looking junior who had thus far managed not to date anyone at Alabaster.

  Matthew biffed Callum gently on the back of the head. “It’s not charity, nimrod.”

  Callum asked, “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a reward in anticipation of future service,” Matthew answered.

  “Whatever.”

  “We’re serious,” said Alpha, putting his arm around Callum’s shoulders. “We may need your talents later in the year.”

  “Okay.”

  “Meanwhile, you have a date on Friday with Gidget.”

  Matthew said, “Alpha, you are such a matchmaker.”

  “It’s true.” Frankie watched as Alpha, in the lead, walked past the aisle where she was sitting. “I love interfering in people’s lives,” he continued. “It provides me oodles of entertainment.”

  “You’re a sick man, you know that?” Matthew smirked.

  “They should probably institutionalize me,” Alpha said philosophically. “Oh, wait. They already have!”

  The panopticon, Frankie thought.

  “The Alabaster prison,” laughed Matthew.

  “So beautifully green, so pungent, so highbrow,” moaned Alpha in mock distress, “that even when the alpha dog escapes, he ends up crawling back and begging: incarcerate me!”

  The boys mounted the stairs, making noise in the library like they owned it. ***

  A minute later, Frankie heard footsteps coming back through the stacks. She looked up from her spot on the floor, and there—silhouetted against the light that shone from inside the study carrels—was Matthew.

  “Hey,” he said. “I thought that was you. What are you reading?”

  She lifted The Code of the Woosters and showed it to him.

  “Nice.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “I read something by him. I forget what. Listen.”

  “What?” She wanted to stand, but he was right there, looking down at her, and to get up would have brought their faces uncomfortably close together.

  “Did you check your mail?” Matthew asked.

  “Um. This morning. Not recently.”

  “Well.” He grinned and turned to walk back out of the library. “You should check it.”

  His footsteps hastened to a run, and he was gone.

  Frankie left her stack of books lying on the floor and headed for the mailboxes in the main building. The lobby was deserted but for past headmasters and board presidents glowering down from paintings on the walls. Frankie stuck her tongue out at them and opened her mailbox, hands shaking.

  Inside was a pale blue envelope sealed with red sealing wax like a Victorian love letter.

  “Frankie Landau-Banks,” the card inside read, in glued-on letters cut from a newspaper. The rest of the words were printed on a computer and would have been the same for all recipients:

  Tell no one you have received this invitation. On Saturday night, ten minutes after curfew, dress in black. Get some alcohol if you can. Come to the golf course. Do not be seen! Your partner in this life of crime is—

  And here there was a space, and letters were glued in again:

  “—Matthew Livingston.”

  There was no signature, no hint of who had sent the invitation. Frankie flipped the card over. Nothing. She looked again at the envelope. Stamped into the red sealing wax was a line drawing of a dog with droopy ears. A basset hound.

  Senior had been a Basset at Alabaster. Every couple of months he took Frankie and Zada out to a fancy Boston steak house with some old friends of his— Hank Sutton (CEO of a paper company), William Steerforth (a high-profile lawyer), and Dr. John Montague (head of a Boston-area hospital). The men usually finished off two bottles of wine and three large steaks while Frankie and Zada ate cheese fondue. They would get silly, the Old Boys, from all the wine and animal protein—and they’d talk about the Bassets.

  It was a secret society, but what precisely for was hard to tell. Senior’s reminiscences were largely of campus escapades like posting mysterious coded messages on the message boards or sneaking out after curfew. He and his friends seemed to want Frankie and Zada to know the society existed—and that they’d been members; but they didn’t want to answer any direct questions. One night as they all sat looking at the remains of a heavy meal spread out across a soiled white tablecloth, the Old Boys did admit they’d kept a record of their misdeeds in a notebook they called The Disreputable History. But when Frankie asked Mr. Sutton what they’d written in it, he laughed and shook his head. “Now if I told you that, it wouldn’t be a secret, would it?”

  “But you’re telling us about the society,” Frankie said, “so how big a secret can it be?”

  “Secrets are more powerful when people know you’ve got them,” said Mr. Sutton. “You show them the tiniest edge of your secret, but the rest you keep under wraps.”

  “Where do you keep this history?”

  “Bind it tight with sticking plaster!” laughed Dr. Montague, who had drunk more than his share of the cabernet.

  “Look to the west, boys!” giggled Senior.

  “Oh no,” moaned Mr. Steerforth. “Not that again.”

  “I can’t believe we did that,” chuckled Dr. Montague. “Look to the books, boys!”

  “What do you mean?” Frankie wanted to know.

  “Nothing, nothing,” said Dr. Montague.

  “Ignore your father and these silly fellows to my left,” said Mr. Sutton. “You two charming young ladies know much more how to behave in a good restaurant than they do.”

  “Who’s to say Frankie won’t be a Basset?” asked Zada, at that time a senior, while Frankie was a freshman. “Maybe she’ll join. You should tell her all about it.”

  Mr. Sutton laughed outright, and Mr. Steerforth said, “Sorry, Frankie, it’s an all-male organization.”

  “You knew that, Zada,” Senior scolded. “Why do you have to go giving Bunny Rabbit ideas when she’ll just end up disappointed?”

  “Yeah, I knew,” said Zada. “I think it’s dumb, that’s all.”

  “Enough,” snapped Senior.

  “Who’s getting dessert?” asked Dr. Montague. “I’m getting Boston cream pie.”

  Now Frankie looked at the basset hound seal on the edge of her envelope and wondered briefly about her father’s society. It still existed, that was clear, and she wondered how it operated and what power it had on campus.

  But mostly (let’s be honest here) Frankie’s thoughts were elsewhere. After all, Matthew Livingston— Matthew Livingston!—had finally asked her out.

  THE WOODS

  Security at Alabaster was lax. The feeling

  of being watched generated by the panoptical nature of the boarding school institution was enough to keep most of the students obeying the rules without the need for any serious levels of surveillance.

  Matthew stuck a note under Frankie’s dorm room door on Saturday morning, explaining that she was to take the north stairwell down to the second floor (thereby staying as far from the hall supervisor’s room as possible), then cross through the lounge to the small kitchen nobody used, which had a back door onto a tiny porch with steps leading down to the Dumpsters behind the dorm. The bar across the door claimed to be alarmed, but Matthew knew that last year, at least, it never had been.

  A note in Matthew’s writing.

  Although it said BURN THIS in large letters at the bottom, Frankie carried it around for half the day before setting it on fire.

  She was going out with Matthew Livingston.

  Late at night.

  To a party he was giving with his friends.

  Last year, if you’d asked her, Frankie would have said such a thing was impossible. She had been a kid, and he was almost a man. She had been nobody and he had been golden. And yet here it was, happening—as easy as, well, falling off a bicycle.

  Trish hadn’t been invited. Her boyfriend Artie hadn’t been
either. Frankie felt apologetic, but Trish waved her off. “I’m gonna be on the golf course for like two hours already Saturday. Artie wants to play. I’m not going back in the middle of the night to watch a bunch of senior guys drink beer. I hate those kinds of parties.”

  “Since when?” asked Frankie, stretching herself across her single bed. “Since when have you even been to these kinds of parties?”

  “My brothers took me to some on Nantucket this summer, and I was just cold and bored, watching guys show off on the beach and get drunk.”

  “Weren’t there any girls?”

  “Yeah, there were girls, but it was—” Trish sighed.

  “It was macho, somehow. I went a few times, and then I just told Topher and James I was staying home.”

  “What did you do instead?”

  “Watched movies with the parents. Made crumbles.”

  “What, like berry crumbles?”

  “And peach. And rhubarb.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s fun,” answered Trish. “Way funner than listening to guys talk about sports and slur their words, I’ll tell you that.”

  Frankie found her friend’s attitude infuriating. By opting out of what the boys were doing in favor of a typically feminine pursuit, Trish had closed a door—the door between herself and that boys’ club her brothers had on the beach. Sure, she was still invited. She could open the door again. But another summer spent making crumbles in the kitchen, and the boys would stop asking her to come out. Instead they’d expect warm dessert to be waiting for them on their return.

  “Will you get up when I call you and let me back in through the kitchen?” Frankie asked, suppressing her irritation.

  “Of course,” said Trish. “I’ll sleep with my cell.”