Frankie & Bug: List 4

Who showers before the beach? Bug thought, but she held her tongue. She was realizing you didn’t always have to say the things you thought. She didn’t even balk when Danny asked if he could stop by Muscle Beach first.

“Of course,” she said, enjoying how magnanimous she felt. She turned to Frankie. “If it’s okay by you.”

Zeus was out with his boom box, skating with a group of people, each one taking a turn at the center of the scrum in a sort of skate dance-off. Bug and Frankie walked over to watch. The tricks were impressive, spins and leaps. At one point, a very tall, very dark-skinned skater wearing a spangled unitard and a hot-pink wig took the center.

Frankie gasped. At first Bug thought he was reacting to the outfit, but then she heard the skater say something to Zeus in a baritone voice.

She expected Frankie to be tentative in the water, given his fears of sharks and being from Ohio, where they didn’t have oceans, just Great Lakes, but Frankie ran in without hesitating, same as she and Danny did, whooping, like they always did when the first shock of cold licked at their skin.

Bug sometimes fretted about things happening to Mama, or to Danny, and usually she had to scrunch her eyes shut and push the worries away. Because it was just too scary to contemplate. They were all she had.

Bug sometimes fretted about things happening to Mama, or to Danny, and usually she had to scrunch her eyes shut and push the worries away. Because it was just too scary to contemplate. They were all she had.

“Who did this?” Hedvig asked.
“Was it the Midnight Marauder?” Frankie and Bug asked in unison.

Frankie didn’t answer. He was subdued. “Phillip’s going to be okay,” Bug insisted. “On St. Elsewhere, once people are awake, they don’t die.”

They got into the cafeteria line and Bug was suddenly ravenous.

She couldn’t tell if Frankie had ever really believed they’d catch the Midnight Marauder either. But by the way he was looking at her now, his eyes pinpoint focused, his mouth set into a grim line, Bug understood that this time he meant it.

Mama laid a hand on his shoulder. “They want to keep him for observation for a few days.”
“You’ll stay with us,” Bug said to Frankie, to preempt any discussion.

“A taxi?” Aunt Teri tsked to Bug as they walked from the bus station to the parking lot, Mama lagging behind them under the weight of Aunt Teri’s flowered suitcase.

“My office is a mile away, Teri,” Mama said. “And no one’s attacked me yet.”
“'Yet' being the operative word.”

Teri clucked her tongue at all the homeless people pushing shopping carts full of their belongings. “I don’t understand how you can live in this cesspool.”

“There’s poverty everywhere,” Mama said. “Even in Visalia.”

They’d only just begun discussing their plan to catch Phillip’s attacker when Aunt Teri began interrogating Frankie.

“I have to go with Aunt Teri on a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous tour,” Bug said sullenly.

“Welcome to the Lifestyles of Wealthy Celebrities tour,” the guide began after they’d climbed onto the bus, “which is not affiliated with the television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

“Your mother was so beautiful,” Aunt Teri said. “Prettiest girl in town. Prettier than any Hollywood actress. She was homecoming queen. She could’ve had the pick of the litter. Married someone respectable. Lived in a mansion like this.”

“Your mother was always so naive, always trying to save the world.” Aunt Teri frowned, like saving the world was a bad thing.

“Phillip is being discharged in the morning.”
“Hooray!” Bug said, dousing her French fries with vinegar, which made them deliciously mushy and pungent.

Bug wasn’t clear what they were fighting about. Phillip’s place was immaculate—everyone knew that, even if Teri didn’t believe it.

“Why would Phillip deserve it?” Bug asked as Frankie kicked her under the table.
“He doesn’t. Nobody does,” Mama replied before turning to Teri. “What a despicable thing to say!”

“They’re just people,” she’d often said in the blasé tone of someone who regularly saw famous TV reporters like Tad Draper, not to mention the mayor, who was always on TV.

“We go to a good school,” Bug interjected, before she remembered that Danny wouldn’t be going there this fall.

As if he could read her thoughts, Phillip teased, “I don’t look that bad, do I?”
“Y-you look great,” Bug stammered.

She made a great show of pouring a glass and handing it to Phillip, who hesitated and then took a sip and winced.

Maybe there were no crisp fall days, no snow, but the seasons at the beach distinguished themselves just as surely as they did anywhere. Maybe not in temperatures, but by the shorter lines at the food stands, the empty spaces on the sand. The crowds were thinning.

As Bug watched an airplane take off over the water, her melancholy deepened.

Unless she could convince Mama and Phillip he should stay, Frankie would soon be on such a plane. Before Phillip got hurt, this was going to be hard enough. But now that he was out of commission, Mama said, for at least a month, it was even more complicated.

“We have to find out who did this to Phillip!” she said fervently.

They caught up with Zeus in front of Sidewalk Café, where he was doing a dance routine to “Walk Like an Egyptian” for the patrons sitting at the outdoor tables.

“The fearful fear what they do not know and become the thing the rest of us fear,” Zeus said, holding his toe stopper in one hand as he extended his leg into a gliding arabesque in front of the impressed diners.

“We lost track of time,” Frankie explained.
“We were about to send a posse out to look for you,” Duane said.