Harder (Caroline & West #2)(32)

“What time is bed?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“So if I get you back by seven, that should be enough time?”

“Yeah.”

“Unless you don’t want to hang out with a bunch of college students …”

A muscle twitches in her jaw. She looks so much like her brother, it wrenches my heart. “I’ll come.”

“Good.”

She drops back into the car.

I make a three-point turn in the driveway, and we’re off.

The farther we get from the apartment, the better I feel about the decision I’ve made. We go to my meeting, where she turns out to be surprisingly adept at making posters. I take her back to the house for dinner, introduce her to Bridget and Krishna in the kitchen, feed her some kind of curry thing that Krishna whipped up on a dare when Bridget bet him he didn’t know how to cook a meal. The mood is lighthearted, which I guess means Krish and Bridget are on again.

Bridget sends me a look that says, What do you think you’re doing?

I send her one back that means, We’ll talk later.

Krishna teases Frankie until she’s laughing so hard she falls out of the chair and makes her lip bleed.

When it gets dark, I drive her back to the farm. The farmhouse is blazing with light, the shapes of people visible through the curtains. She’s talked all afternoon about the sculptor, Laurie, and his wife, Rikki, who’s also an art professor. Frankie hangs out sometimes in Laurie’s shed while he works on his art. It’s clear they’ve got a bond going.

West must know it. He must have arranged it so Frankie has these adults to go to. He wouldn’t leave her unprotected and alone.

Except that she obviously needed someone today, and she didn’t call her brother.

“About the bus,” I say on an impulse. “You didn’t miss it, right? You just didn’t want to get on.”

She’s bent over in the seat, zipping her backpack.

“You don’t have to tell me what’s happening,” I say, “but if you want me to pick you up sometime, you can just text. We’ll hang out.”

Frankie lifts the pack onto her lap, compressing a strap in her hands. “You mean it?”

“Sure. I can’t be, like, your personal chauffeur, but if you’re having some kind of problem …”

She toys with the door handle. “I feel like a freak here.”

“How come?”

“The other kids … They’re just different than the kids back home. I don’t fit. And … there’s this kid on the bus. He looks at me. Says things.”

“Mean things?”

She nods. “About the way I look.”

Her body, I guess. Her breasts. Man, kids are mean. “Did you try telling the bus driver?”

“She wouldn’t do anything.”

“You can’t know that.”

“If I report it, he’ll say I’m making it up, and she’ll take his side. Then he’ll turn it into a thing where I have a crush on him and I’m just trying to get attention.”

I wrinkle my nose. We never moved to a new town, but I remember how kids who came to our school from outside the state might as well have arrived from another planet. They had different slang words, accented different syllables. Sometimes they had toys or games we didn’t know about, or they wore a brand of jeans we’d never seen before, and these contrasts seemed enormous.

“Did you talk to West about it?”

She shakes her head. “He’s mad at me.”

“What for?”

“He just is. He acts mad all the time, but like he doesn’t want me to know. It’s my fault we had to move here.”

“I thought you moved so he could come to school.”

She shakes her head again, but she doesn’t say anything.

I don’t know what to tell her. The silence lasts half a minute. There aren’t any crickets chirping. The night’s cool. Summer’s over.

I look at her with her hand on the door handle, her hair in her eyes.

This kid.

The thing is, I love this kid. Not the way West does, but my own way, because she’s so young and sweet. Because she tries so hard to be tough, and because her mouth and her stubborn jaw are the same as her brother’s.

I reach out to touch her arm. “When you just can’t, call me. I’ll come get you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

“West won’t like it.”

“That’s his problem. If he doesn’t like it, he can talk to me, okay?”

She smiles slightly. “It was fun tonight.”

“It was.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The door slams behind her. I watch her climb the steps to the apartment, fish a key out of her backpack, go inside.

I know she’s right. West isn’t going to like it. But I sit there watching her shut herself into her empty apartment, and the hair stands up on my forearms.

I’m so looking forward to it.



Every time my phone buzzes after that night, I think it must be West.

Usually, it’s Frankie.

Frankie, wanting me to see the earrings she bought on a recent trip to Walmart.