Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
FRANKIE
Ifroze in the doorway, my backpack still slung over one shoulder. Cardboard stacked in uneven towers, tape guns clicking, the scrape of furniture being dragged across the floor—it all pressed in on me. My cats. Tabby. Tiddles. Tory. Gone.
No.
“Wait, what do you mean you’re almost done?” It was like I was on information overload and nothing would process as that one nugget suddenly clogged up my gears to be regurgitated.
The man closest to me looked up from his clipboard. “Almost done, as we should be fully loaded in the next hour. We had a late start or we would have already finished.”
Already finished? Bafflement surrounded me as another man strode around me with a huge box that had the word books scrawled on the side of it.
I opened my mouth as I pressed against the hallway wall and then straightened.
“Where are my cats? Who sent you? What’s going on?
” My hands shook as I gestured to the half-empty dresser and the piles of boxes that were even now being carted away.
“You’re taking—my bed, my desk, my stuff—is all of it?
” What fucking nightmare had I woken up in?
And I couldn’t really deal with any of that because… “Where are my cats? Tell me!”
He blinked at me slowly, one corner of his mouth hitching up in that smile you give a crazy person. Apparently, my panic was inconvenient. “Now, honey, just take it easy.” That slow, Texas drawl scraped over my last nerve. “Nothing to get too excited about.”
Nothing. To. Get. Too. Excited. About.
I’d never felt more like a cartoon character. Like my head should legitimately be turning bright red as steam poured out of my ears, and a train horn shrieked.
“Like I said,” he spoke slowly, enunciating each word like I was an idiot.
“They’re all packed up, their food, their litter, their litter box—” He gave me a bit of a wrinkled nose at the last. “And crated them. They were sent on to the new residence…well, they have a stop at the vet, then the new residence, but that was all taken care of.”
New. Residence.
“What new residence?” What vet? No one took them to the vet except me. “I didn’t—who arranged this? Who are you people?” My voice hit a higher pitch than I realized, echoing off the walls.
As he started to reply, my eyes landed on the piles of boxes all labeled with someone else’s scrawl.
Books.
Clothes.
Knickknacks.
Misc.
Bathroom.
The other pair of men kept weaving around us, scooping up boxes and carrying them out. Rapidly, my apartment was emptying out, bit by bit, being stripped of any identity. My home was vanishing.
I locked onto the next box of books that passed me. Jake’s voice in my head, the arguments over The Reality Dysfunction, dog-eared pages and notes in the margins. That book, our fights, our debates… taped up in a box. Gone.
It had been more than three years since I even thought about that series and how much it pissed me off and made Jake shake his head. Now it was all I could think about. They took my cats. They took my books.
“Maybe you want to get yourself something to drink,” the man was saying, every slow drawled tone telling me that I was on the edge of losing it. Or maybe it was just me and I was already there. “We’re just here to pack and move.”
Strangers. Just here to pack and move. Packing up my stuff.
I pushed into the bedroom, swinging my gaze over the corner where the wire crate shelves had once stood. They were gone. Only the imprint of their shape in the carpet to reveal they’d even been there.
My shoebox of seashells from Galveston with Coop, sunburnt shoulders, sand between our toes when we were seven—they were already boxed. My fingers itched to hold them. Gone.
I swallowed hard, heart hammering. Then I started looking around wildly, the photo of all of them with me from Freshman year.
Even after all the crap, I hadn’t put that away or hidden it.
It had stayed on that shelf in the corner where I could see it every morning.
All of them standing shoulder to shoulder, and for that one brief moment in time, we had all been mostly the same height.
Mostly.
It had been taken on Archie’s first birthday with us. By the following year, all four of them had shot up, some skinny like a beanpole, but even then they’d filled out. That perfect moment, captured in frozen glossy ink—gone. They’ve boxed that too.
My gaze drifted to where the holiday program from tenth grade—me as an elf, Bubba as Santa, his ridiculous grin while tipping the hat at me—had been pinned to the cork board.
The cork board that wasn’t there anymore.
My stomach twist. The memories were slipping away, boxed and stacked, and I couldn’t reach any of them.
I sank to the floor, phone trembling in my hand, and typed out a quick, almost desperate text to my mother.
Me:
MOM. WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS MOVE?? MY CATS ARE GONE. MY STUFF IS BEING PACKED. WHAT THE HELL?
Even as I scanned her earlier messages. Nothing said anything about us moving.
She wanted me to talk to her, to meet her, that had been once or twice.
Mostly about being nicer to Mr. Standish.
But nothing on this level. Nothing this important.
The phone buzzed with a delayed “seen” notification. No response yet. Great.
Behind me a tape gun clicked and screeched as more boxes were sealed.
My fingers hovered over my phone again, opening the group chat with Bubba, Archie, Jake, and Coop.
I had muted this one over the summer and never took it off mute.
There were literally dozens of messages, but until the past few weeks, I’d mostly ignored it.
But I had to reach someone, anyone, who could do something.
Me:
THEY TOOK MY CATS. MY BED. MY DESK.
I sucked in a breath, then pushed it back out.
Me:
Everything is being packed. Guys, I need help.
I’d never felt more pathetic or desperate. Almost immediately, Archie’s message appeared:
I’m on my way. Stay put.
Jake:
Dropping the girls off. Then I’m there. Hang tight.
Bubba:
Tell me exactly what you need.
Coop hadn’t responded yet.
I pressed my phone to my chest, closing my eyes for a second. The room felt hollow, echoing, like someone had pulled the heart out of it. My blankets were gone, my desk stripped bare, my memories stacked into cardboard towers I couldn’t reach. And the cats… my cats… my world… already out of sight.
I opened my eyes. The movers didn’t look fazed. They moved like I wasn’t even there, like this was all routine, clinical, and I was just in the way. My throat tightened again, my chest pounding as I tried to steady myself.
The apartment didn’t smell like mine anymore. The scent of their sweat, of dust, and warmer air that came in whenever a door opened, of the kick of ozone in the air conditioning when it cranked on…
Even the roses were gone. The ones I’d been saving carefully and starting to press. At least until I knew who sent them. Had they boxed up the notes too? Who told them what was important and what wasn’t?
I could feel panic rolling up my spine, memories flicking in my mind like a slideshow I couldn’t pause—Jake’s book, Coop’s seashells, the freshman-year photo, Bubba’s holiday program. Everything I loved, my world, being dismantled before me.
The fact a cat should be rubbing against me and informing me loudly and stridently that they were hungry made the tears burn in my eyes. The vet…
They said they took them to the vet. So I immediately dialed my vet’s office… but they were already closed. It kicked over to the recording that said if it was an emergency to reach out to the clinic off the highway. I sucked in a hard breath that actually hurt to fill my lungs.
I finally responded to Bubba.
Me:
I don’t know.
Archie was coming, Jake was coming, Bubba was asking how to help, Coop… nowhere. My heart hammered. My cats, my life, my memories, all in someone else’s hands.
Bubba:
I can call. Want me on the phone until Jake and Arch are there?
Did I?
Before I could answer, the sound of the front door opening carried down the hallway.
Not the careful, polite way the movers had been coming and going. This was decisive. Familiar. Heavy footsteps that didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask permission.
“Frankie?” My name cut through the haze like a blade.
Archie.
Relief and panic slammed into each other inside my chest. I scrambled to my feet just as he appeared at the end of the hallway. He took one look at me—as I pushed up from the carpet, backpack still on, eyes too damp to hide—and then his gaze snapped past me into the bedroom.
And his whole body went rigid.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.
The tone was calm. Too calm. The kind that carried weight. The movers reacted instantly.
The man with the clipboard straightened, his easy drawl vanishing. “Sir—we’re just finishing up here—”
“Stop,” Archie said.
Just that one word.
They did.
He stepped past me into my bedroom, taking in the bare walls, the empty floor, the scuffed rectangle where my bed had been. His jaw tightened as his eyes tracked the last box being lifted out.
“What company are you with?” Archie asked.
The man rattled it off immediately.
“Who authorized this move?”
Another beat of hesitation. “Ms. Curtis. The resident.”
Archie exhaled slowly through his nose. “And where are you taking her things?”
The clipboard shifted in the man’s hands. “To the new residence listed on the work order.”
“Which is?”
He glanced down. Read it. Then looked back up at Archie, something uneasy creeping into his expression. He glanced past him once to me, but the irritation he’d worn earlier was gone. Now he just looked uncomfortable.
When he recited the address, he framed it more like a question than a statement.
The world tilted.
My brain tried to reject the information outright, like it didn’t belong to me.
I blinked once.
Twice.
That was—