Chapter 48
“He’s an abuser,” Frannie says, jutting out her chin. “What a sick, sick man. This is absolutely disgust-een.”
“Frannie, please. It’s not like that. He didn’t—”
“He did. He abused you.”
I should’ve never told her. It was a moment of weakness. That’s the problem with pain. It rattles you. Makes you lose sight of yourself and lean on the wrong people. The people who pervert being leaned on.
“You know what we’re gonna do?” she asks, pacing around her bedroom with a put-on toughness even as she wears the fluffiest slippers I have ever seen. “We’re gonna report it. Get him fired, maybe even arrested.”
I’ve never seen her this excited. Selling the most Girl Scout cookies in her troop was a close second, but this is the next level.
She’s trying her best to hide it behind faux outrage, but the glow is still there.
The glow of opportunity, the opportunity to turn my heartbreak into her shining moment.
I can see it. Frannie on the local news, wearing her favorite sweater and that plum shade of lipstick she doesn’t realize she doesn’t pull off, bobbing her head as she listens to some long-distance news anchor feed her questions through her earpiece.
“Right, when Wally told me, I knew I had to do some-theen,” she’d say. “For the greater good. For her and for our community.”
I tell Frannie that I don’t want her to report anything. That it’s over between us anyway and that if this got out I’d be known as the homewrecker who fucked her high school teacher.
“I know, as my best friend, you wouldn’t want to do that to me,” I say, exploiting Frannie’s own technique against her. Now I’m the creepy doll in the horror movie.
Frannie ever so slightly squints at me, knowing what I’m doing but unable to address it because she’d out herself as having done it too. Here we are, locked in the dark underbelly of friendship.
Frannie grabs her glass of lemonade off of her nightstand with the petunia-shaped top and takes a sip as she decides her next move.
“Waldo, he could prey on somebody else—”
“He didn’t prey on me, Frannie. He had deep feelings for me,” I say, and I hate the way I sound when I say it.
Like a woman in her thirties who calls her boyfriend her partner.
The stink of desperation to make his commitment more than it is while she crosses her fingers, praying for her shut-up ring.
Frannie looks at me, her lip quivering with self-importance, like she’s a social worker in a Lifetime original movie, here to save the poor, molested foster child.
She needs this. She needs Korgy to be a bad guy and me to be a victim, because it lets her be the savior.
Gives her something to be up in arms about. A righteous cause. A purpose.
“Wally, you sound groomed.”
The Mormon who believes she gets her own planet when she dies is scolding me about being groomed. I want to laugh, but instead my face grows hot and twitchy, and I fold over myself and start to cry.
“I miss him,” I say. “I don’t know what to do. He’s all I think about. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I love him, Frannie. I just love him.”
I hate my cry-voice, how high and shrill and strangled it sounds, and my cry-face, how blotchy and warped it gets, a tragedy mask but it’s my fucking face.
Frannie doesn’t mind. The opposite. She softens.
She sits next to me and pulls me in for a half hug, and tells me that if I really don’t want her to she won’t report it.
Then she takes my hand in hers and squeezes it.
“And Waldo,” she says, “did you know this is the first time you’ve cried in front of me?”
This is why I don’t cry in front of others.
Because people like Frannie use tears as a fucked-up currency.
They mistake tears for a compliment to their caretaking, their hand-holding.
The tears make them feel bigger than, better than.
Make them think you’re weak. Vulnerable.
And your weakness gives them something to do. Something to feel power over.
“No,” I say. “No, I didn’t.”
“It is,” she nods. “It’s the first time you’ve cried in front of me.”
And her eyes twinkle like it’s a compliment to her.