Harder (Caroline & West #2)(47)

My sister shakes her head no.

“Great. That’s just f*cking perfect.”

What I know from Caroline’s phone call is that Frankie launched herself over a desk in an apparently unprovoked attack, sat on some kid named Clint, and hit him repeatedly in the face until the teacher and an aide pulled her off.

Frankie’s never done anything like that. Not once in her whole life.

“Caroline?” I ask.

“It’s better if she tells you.”

Frankie’s staring at her feet like someone nailed them to the floor.

I pace back and forth behind the chairs. Every time I walk behind my sister, her shoulders draw tighter until they’re up by her ears. She looks like she’s afraid I’m going to hurt her, but I’m the one who holds her when she wakes up from nightmares. She’s got no f*cking reason to be scared of me, not one.

“Start talking,” I bark.

Frankie scoots her chair away from where I’m standing, burying her face in Caroline’s armpit.

“West,” Caroline says.

“What?”

“Calm down.”

“How?”

It’s an honest f*cking question. I wish she’d tell me where the handbook is for this. I’d memorize the whole thing if I thought it might help me out here.

I squat down next to Frankie. Pitch my voice as low as I can, as calm as I can manage. “In a few minutes, that counselor’s coming back in here. He’s going to ask me what happened, and I’m supposed to tell him you’re catatonic? You think that’s going to go over well?”

“I don’t know what that means,” she mumbles.

“It means you’re practically in a coma.”

“I’m not catatonic. I just don’t want to talk to you.”

“Well, who do you want to talk to, huh? The social workers who show up at the apartment when they decide I’m not fit to take care of my sister who’s beating kids up at school? Unless I missed something, we’re on the same team, Franks.”

She doesn’t say anything. My eyes rise to Caroline’s, and there’s softness there. Faith in me that eases some of the sharpness off my temper.

I put a hand on Frankie’s leg and try again. Try to keep my voice level, try to keep from sounding like my dad, from being like him.

“We have to stick together,” I say. “I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me. What’s going on right now—this is actually dangerous. I could lose you.”

Frankie’s trembling.

“You’re scaring her,” Caroline says.

“I’m sorry, but this is a scary situation. Scarier than you understand, I think.”

Frankie starts to cry.

My fists keep closing, clenching tight, my forearms pumped up with blood and violence that won’t do any good here. Not in a school, not in Putnam. I can’t fight my way out of this. Can’t yell my way to a solution.

“You have any suggestions?” I ask Caroline.

She ducks her head and whispers a question to Frankie. Frankie whispers something back. They go on like that for a few seconds, and then Caroline says, “She wants me to tell you for her. Would that be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s do it over there.” She leads me to the opposite side of the closet-room, as far from Frankie as we can get, and refuses to start talking until I sit. I straddle a chair, fold my arms across the back, wondering why she’s going to so much trouble to get me ready for this.

Then she tells me, and it’s worse than anything I could have guessed.

I thought Frankie missed her friends back home, and that maybe she was embarrassed of her boobs, uncomfortable with her body—but what Caroline tells me is there’s a kid, this slimy little Clint f*cker, who’s been giving Frankie a hard time on the bus every morning and every afternoon. He’s been saying perverted shit about how she looks, her body, sexual stuff that no ten-year-old should be thinking about.

On Halloween, the teacher moved the kids’ desks into a new arrangement with groups of four desks clumped together, and now Clint’s is right next to Frankie’s, so she’s been hearing his shit all day long, day in and day out.

She took it and took it until she couldn’t take it anymore. Then she attacked.

I run sweaty palms down my thighs. “I’m going to kill him,” I say.

Caroline’s hands are on my shoulders. She’s right behind me, talking soft. “No, you’re not.”

Frankie’s huddled into a ball on the seat of her chair.

I can’t breathe right. It’s not Clint I want to kill. I did this to her. Me.

The whole time she was a baby, I was afraid. If she slept longer than usual, I worried she’d died in her sleep. I wouldn’t be able to make myself look in on her because I was so sure it would come true.

I worried she wasn’t eating enough, wasn’t eating right, wasn’t growing the way she should be.

I worried she wouldn’t have anything to wear to school, and when she had a fever I worried that her brain would fry and it would make her stupid. I worried when I found out about all that recalled Tylenol that I’d given her too much and she was going to get asthma or seizures or whatever.

When I was in middle school, Frankie was a toddler. Mom would leave her at the neighbor’s, Mrs. Dieks, and I would come off the bus and straight to Mrs. Dieks’s place to pick her up. Most of the time I’d find Frankie in nothing but a diaper, slapping her fat little palms on the coffee table, wreathed in smoke and babbling at the TV.