Archive of Our Own

Work Text

SaturdayThe ShowThe guy is here again. Geoff’s friend. Mikeyway’s brother. Pencey Prep’s most frequent flier—Gerard. He does what he always does when Frank sees him at one of their shows. Half the set he spends hunched over the drink counter—by the state of his spine he’s a chronic huncher—and the other half, he inches into the audience to mosh if there’s a crowd, or to jump to the beat if there’s not. Even after seven or eight shows Frank’s never seen Gerard singing along to their music. But maybe that’s because Frank’s usually too busy on stage singing the lyrics himself to notice. “So, is the plan to stare at that guy all night and let the rest of us pack up all your shit?” says Hambone after their set. His voice is strained because his hands are gripping a heavy speaker, one part of the sound system they have to give back to Shaun’s cousin in one piece tomorrow afternoon. “Just checking in.”“Sorry.” Frank moves to ease his burden and as they’re hoisting the thing into the back of the van (which they have to give back to Mom’s boyfriend Ralph in one piece tonight) asks, “Do you know what’s up with him? Like, Gerard, or whatever?”“Besides him turning into our number one fan overnight?” Hambone rubs his hands on his jeans and leans against the side of Ralph’s van. It’s a humid, fucking miserable August night and a layer of dampness forms on anything that spends more than a minute outside—including them. “I don’t know. Ask Mikey if you want to know so bad, unless you don’t want him to know you think his brother’s hot. Or just invite him to the diner with us.”“Fuck you, John,” Frank says, regretting that he ever told his friends he liked dudes, since it opened a million doors for them to make, like, accurate jokes about his love life (or, more frequently, lack thereof). “Wait, like, should I actually invite him?”Hambone shrugs and so Frank finds Shaun to ask him, too. “Do whatever, man,” Shaun says, his back against the wood-paneled interior wall of the VFW hall. He’s drinking a can of caffeine free Diet Coke. Who fucking knows where he got it from—the drink counter definitely wasn’t carrying that tonight—but since he quit coffee and cigarettes cold turkey a few years back he always has a can of sugarless, caffeineless Coke in his hand. Frank can’t really tell how much Shaun does or doesn’t care about interlopers at their traditional Saturday-night residence at the Tick Tock. But if Shaun gave permission (however nominal), that works for Frank, and anyway Shaun has said enough recently about the people Pencey Prep hangs out with. Standing up straight, Frank approaches what passes for the bar at Post 493 and after a second turns to the side like he’s just now noticing who’s next to him, only to find Gerard already looking at him intently. “Uh, hey,” Frank says, a little caught off guard. “Hi,” Gerard says. He doesn’t offer more. He’s waiting to see what Frank does next.Suddenly Frank gets a little performance anxiety. Maybe he should just turn back. Hang out at the Tick Tock with the guys and not give himself more reasons to toss and turn in his bed all night long, thinking and rethinking everything he said. But his restless mind late at night probably wouldn’t give him a break even if he did walk away. Fuck it. It’s ammunition either way. “So, like, you’re Gerard right? The comic book artist, or whatever?”“Who told you about that? Geoff? Mikey? It doesn’t matter, I guess.” Gerard gives him a small grin. “You’re from Pencey Prep.”Gerard has messy, spiky hair like out of a sitcom, like a bully off of Boy Meets World or Chandler Bing now that he’s a little greasier. His sweatshirt, dark blue and from Foley, Alabama, has holes in the collar and a washed out spot on the shoulder. And now that Frank is this close, he can see the rows of abnormally small, crooked teeth in his mouth. By all accounts Gerard shouldn’t look cool. And yet he does. “Frank,” Frank says, though Gerard probably knows that. He scratches at his neck. “Um, listen, so me and the other guys, we have this tradition where we hang out at the Tick Tock after a show. You know it?”“The Tick Tock? ‘Course I know it.” “Okay, yeah, so do you want to come with us?”Frank expects Gerard to take longer to respond, but he says, “Sure,” pretty quick. Then: “Why?”The question throws Frank. “I don’t know,” Frank says. “Because you’re always at our shows, and maybe that means you’re cool?”Gerard laughs a little bit, unnerving but also a music in itself, mesmerizing in its ability to disorient. “That’s a good answer,” and he sort of sounds surprised to say it. “Alright, fuck it, I’ll come.”The Diner“Hold on, hold on,” says Gerard and the whole table quiets down, all five of them. “How often were you getting into fights?”Shaun starts to say, “Like once a—” but Frank gets on that before Shaun can reveal some shit that makes him look like a real fucking jackass in front of Gerard. “It only happened a couple times,” Frank insists, “usually ‘cause Shaun kept running his fuckin’ mouth.”Shaun grins as he chugs the rest of his caffeine free Diet Coke, like it’s whatever to him, taking the blame. Shaun definitely didn’t start most of the fights Frank got into. Maybe, like, one-third or something. More often than that it’s punk kids who say shit about his crew or rednecks calling him a wimp or a faggot or other backwoods insults. But here’s Shaun, letting Gerard believe that Frank only squares up to defend his honor, because Shaun’s always got Frank’s back, and that’s not the kind of thing you should forget. “I mean, imagine it: three dudes, like buff dudes, fuckin’ wailing on Frankie here—” This is Hambone, and he’s gesticulating with a forkful of eggs and a mouth half-full of breakfast sausage, “but they can’t keep his scrawny butt still long enough to get any punches in. It’s kind of, you know, fuckin’ astonishing, like, somewhat.”Frank passively rubs the scar on his temple where those guys had basically cracked his skull open last year. Mom went ballistic, yelling and screaming at him in the hospital, like Frank had done it to himself, instead of blaming some drunk idiot after a show. “They got some fucking punches in,” he says. “Trust me.”“But once you step through the door—” and Gerard leans back to wave in the general direction of the Tick Tock’s front entrance, “it all just— stops? Like this is your own Doc’s Drugstore?”“Is that in Kearny?” Tim asks. “No, you idiot, it’s from West Side Story,” Hambone tells him. It’s probably the third musical theater reference Gerard has dropped since they arrived at the Tick Tock about an hour ago—and those are the ones Frank has caught. He’s also told them all about internet leaks about the next Star Wars prequel, which he promises will fix all of the problems that made the first kinda suck. Gerard, it seems, is not that cool. He’s self aware about it, though, and sort of refuses to be embarrassed in a way that actually magnifies the respect Frank has for him. Frank says, “Yeah, I mean, kinda, it’s just that there’s not that many places that are open late at night anymore, and none of us hate each other much as we’d hate to get kicked out of here, you know?” He sinks in his seat as the ever-present waitress Deb stalks by, sending an innocent smile to meet her calculated glare. To Gerard he says, “You’ve gotta know this stuff already if you come here.”For the first time that evening Gerard looks less sure of himself, like he physically becomes a little smaller. “I’ve come here in the day, and I’ve picked my brother up after shows before, but I guess I’ve been missing out,” he says. “So, wait a minute, how did the fight end? The three against one.”The atmosphere grows awkward with a speed that Frank only recognizes because Gerard, a third-party presence, the outsider, is there to see it. “We just dragged Frank inside, where they wouldn’t fuck with him,” Hambone says pretty quickly, so fast that Gerard either can see right through it or doesn’t notice at all. This is kind of how it’s been going these days when a Neil-sized hole appears in a story. It happens pretty often, which is to be expected after they spent, like, thirty hours each week of the last two years with the guy. No one’s ghost disappears that quickly. What actually happened that night is that Pencey opened for a garbage metalcore band from Newark called Slyme and three of its members decided they had a problem with Frank after they offered him a bump or something and he rolled his eyes. This was back when Pencey was first starting and Frank was barely legal, just an eighteen year old shithead who egged them on when they came at him. That’s maybe why they felt like they could take him, his general teenaged belligerance—it’s definitely why he thought he could fight back. Finally, after evading the meaty grasp of all three guys for what felt like an hour but was probably less than five minutes, they had him pinned to the ground and were ready to maim him or kill him or something. Frank squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for the impact. He braced himself even harder when he felt someone lift him off the ground, but the touch was too careful and gentle to be one of his attackers. Frank had opened his eyes and it was Neil. Neil whose hands burned, almost, where they gripped his side and shoulder, half-guiding, half-dragging him into the diner and shoving him into a booth. “Pointless violence is a fucking poison, you idiot,” Neil had said, literally spitting on the poi in pointless and poison. “Those jackasses aren’t your fucking crew! They aren’t your scene! They don’t matter!” Just like Mom would be, later that night after Frank admitted to himself that he probably needed to go to the hospital, it seemed that Neil was actually angry with Frank, not the dudes who fucked him up. But unlike with Mom, it actually hurt when Neil told you he was disappointed. “You can’t claim edge in one breath and in another start fights with anyone who thinks it’s lame,” Neil had told him, to the darkness of his car on the drive to the hospital. It had been close to three a.m. and by then Frank had known he’d be hearing it from Mom when he called her from the E.R. “We’re supposed to stand for peace, you know? If you want to be violent in the name of straight edge, go pledge your life to one of those gangs in Utah.”At the time, and actually for the entire period that Frank knew Neil up until about six months ago, staying true had seemed so simple for him. Like Ian Mackaye had been singing about Neil. I don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t fuck. At least I can fucking think! He really lived the values. Or maybe that’s how it always is, looking at the guy who brought you into a certain world. You’re supposed to forget that they can disappoint you. I’m a person just like you, but I’ve got better things to do—I’ve got straight edge!The way Frank sees it, devotion is one of those things that most people have to ration. Lots of people sell out after meeting a girl. Neil’s not special that way. And Frank and Shaun, they used to worship Neil. But when it came down to it, on that fucking awful night in Middle-of-Goddamn-Nowhere, Michigan, when Frank had to choose between Shaun, who never once left those Xes off his hands, and Neil, the choice hadn’t been that hard to make. He just didn’t have any more fucking devotion to spare. The CurbGerard sits on the curb outside the Tick Tock, the one separating the sidewalk from the street. At any normal hour, cars would be whizzing by at fifty, sixty miles an hour and it would be way too dangerous to sit there. But it’s three a.m. and even though it’s Saturday night (technically Sunday), the street’s mostly deserted. Frank coughs a little, partly to get Gerard’s attention and party because a waft of cigarette smoke hits his nose the second he walks outside. “Yo,” is all he can think to say so he just sits down next to Gerard. “Hi,” Gerard says with some warmth, as though he hadn’t abruptly slid out of the booth and slipped out the front entrance of the diner without so much as an explanation. He holds out his cigarette. “You want?”“Nah,” says Frank. “I don’t smoke.”He watches carefully, more caught up in the motion of Gerard placing the cigarette between his lips and inhaling than he should be. What would Geoff call it? Phallic. There’s no urge to pick up the death sticks himself but he wouldn’t mind watching Gerard do this for the rest of the night.“Good. Don’t start.”“I quit already. Years ago,” Frank says before he admits, “I’m edge.”Telling someone in the scene that he doesn't drink, smoke, or sleep around always brings to the forefront of his mind the uneasy feeling of sitting on the couch at age fifteen and telling Mom that her son likes guys. Anticipating the weird, invasive questions. Not expecting downright rejection but rather disapproval the other person might not even know they’re showing on their face. As if noticing for the first time, Gerard picks up one of Frank’s hands and squints at the big black X on the back of it. “Huh,” Gerard says. “I guess I should’ve known—it’s not like that hall was carding. Is this, like, fresh? Like do you, I dunno, keep a sharpie in your pocket at all times?”Frank sheepishly pulls a marker out of his Dickies. Gerard laughs in delight. “No fuckin’ way,” he says. “It’s pretty useful. Like, give me your hand,” Frank says in a moment of bravery. Gerard does, and Frank uses the marker to write his number on the back of the hand Gerard’s not using to smoke.While Frank is writing, Gerard says, “Okay, you don’t smoke, so you’re out here…why?”“I don’t know,” says Frank. “Those guys in there are loud as shit and, like, fuckin’ determined to make me look like a dickhead.”The guys also convinced him that Gerard leaving meant something. And Frank could see why they thought that. As Gerard stood up to leave his hand had ghosted past Frank’s shoulder, intentional as anything Gerard seems to do, which includes possibly everything and possibly nothing at all. “You should be proud of what you guys have,” Gerard says once he has his hand back. He runs a finger over the seven digits scrawled beneath his knuckles, the ink already bleeding into the lines in his hand. He doesn’t try to return the favor. “Seriously, dawg, you guys believe in what you’re doing, no matter how awesome or, you know, fuckin’ terrible it is, ‘cause you made it together. Like, that’s faith, you know? Fuck all the other shit.” Gerard’s voice sounds like it’s coming at a lag, like how Dad’s ancient TV sometimes gets the picture faster than the sound. Frank thinks Gerard might be drunk, and maybe he came out here to collect himself, not because he wanted Frank to follow him. There’s also something within what Gerard has just said that is not exactly meant as praise. Frank is just a little too sleep deprived, and a little too distracted by Gerard’s sheer proximity and the steady inhale, exhale of his lips on that damn cigarette to find backhanded compliments anything but thrilling. “If you don't believe in something a hundred percent,” Frank says, “I just think, what’s the point, you know what I mean?” Gerard smiles around his cigarette. “I believe that you believe that.” He falls silent, only to continue once he’s blown out a steady line of smoke into the empty space of the street in front of them. “Okay, so here’s the story.”“The story?”“The story of when I first saw you perform,” Gerard says. “Obviously.”Frank braces himself. “Ah, fuck.”“It’s not embarrassing. Don’t worry. Geoff dragged me to see you guys last spring, and Pencey was playing at this—this dive in East Brunswick or something—”“Hendrick’s,” Frank says. Most of the bars in the area don’t admit minors, but Hendrick's does, so Pencey plays there. “There were like fifteen people there, max,” Gerard says. “Half of them were regulars drinking at the bar, or playing pool, whatever. But you were up there like the size of the crowd didn’t matter at all. You had this smile on your face when you thanked everyone, and you kept smiling, even after you got off stage, which is how I know it was genuine.”Frank feels like he should remember the night Gerard’s talking about if it was so important. He just doesn’t. Truthfully that could be almost any performance, any night. Maybe it wasn’t even at Hendrick’s. He swallows. “And that’s why you keep coming to our shows?”“When someone believes in something that much, it kinda makes you want to believe in it, too,” Gerard says. “Or, you know, at least makes you want to find out what the fuss is about.”SundayThe CreedIt’s like Frank’s eyes have only just shut on their own accord before Mom throws open his door and asks if he’s awake yet. “No,” Frank groans into his pillow, where he’s hiding his face from the harsh morning light (the limited amount of it let in by his basement windows). In all actuality it probably has been less than an hour since he fell asleep for real. “Sorry. I’m dead.”He hears Mom’s loud house slippers stomp over to the side of his bed. “So I see,” she says, and he can tell she’s in a funny mood today. Not necessarily preferable to something more dour. “Is my dead son going to join his mother for Mass?”Frank turns over to look at her. Mom is half dressed, wearing her dress on top of pajama pants, a few curlers still in her hair. According to his alarm clock it’s fifteen til eight, which means that even if they leave right now they’d still arrive ten minutes late for the eight o’clock service. This is kind of par for the course when it comes to Mom. The only time he remembers her ever regularly leaving on time for Mass was when she was dating Joe, and he left her for the Franciscan Order six months in. Ralph isn’t even Catholic. “No thanks,” Frank says, wondering why she even bothers to ask, when it doesn’t seem like she cares about church ninety percent of the time. “I got a lot to do today.”“Like what?”Frank shrugs. Neither of them are under any illusion that he has a real reason besides plain old not wanting to go. He tells her, “Practice,” though him and the guys aren’t getting together until later. “Well, alright,” Mom says, basically proving that she doesn’t actually care if he’s there or not because band practice hasn’t been an excuse that worked since he joined the jazz ensemble in middle school.If Frank ever has kids, he’s going to expose them to every single religion he can think of. Catholicism, Judaism, fucking Hare Krishna, one of those snake churches in Kentucky. Then he’s going to give them a choice to follow one of those traditions or to forge their own path. They’re not going to play stupid games every Sunday morning where the parent pretends to care about the kid’s spiritual welfare and the kid pretends to not notice the apathy. As Mom moves to leave the basement, she pauses at his landline for a brief moment. The light indicating a new message flashes red as it has since the message was left a few days ago. “You ask me to pay for an extra line, then don’t bother to use it,” she says, mostly to herself but entirely for his benefit. Right as she makes her exit, Mom presses the button to play the message.The MessageThere’s a reason Frank’s left his answering machine alone for a few days. “Hi Frank. This is Sandra Doherty from Essex County Community Health. I wanted to give you a call because the office reached out a few days ago to confirm your appointment for…two weeks from today, it looks like, and you didn’t give them an answer. Since you missed your last appointment, I’ll need you to give us a call back by a week from Monday, or we’ll have to give your appointment away to someone else.” Sandra pauses. “And…while this is probably a waste of breath, I wanted to make sure you had the name of the psychiatrist I recommended during our last session. Of course we can continue with counseling whether you try medication or not. But Dr. Rava works with a lot of young people with anxiety disorders. I hope you’ll consider it.” Frank considers it the whole time he’s stumbling out of bed and over to the answering machine. He hits the button to delete the message before his therapist can finish reciting the phone number of the psychiatrist. The PracticeEverything basically halts when Shaun starts wailing in the hallway. He sort of sounds like he’s being murdered out there, with the pleading and the loud metallic thumping, like some wackjob is hitting him over the head with a shovel. Impromptu death by homicidal stranger would make sense, considering the area of town where Pencey Prep’s lockout is, and the murder bathroom upstairs that judging by vibes alone definitely has a history of vengeful demonic activity. But Shaun’s not getting killed out there. At least not in any way that counts. Three minutes ago he left practice for a second to grab a new Coke from the vending machine down the hall. If he sounds this upset, Frank can really only draw one conclusion. “We’re going to have to buy this place a mini fridge, right?” Hambone says, already one step ahead. Shaun bursts into the room, a can of regular Diet Coke instead of his precious undrinkable caffeine free version in his hand. Last month, the building manager warned them that as soon as the supply of caffeine free Diet Coke in the vending machine ran out, that was it forever, because he wasn’t special ordering a kind of soda for the one guy who drank it.“This place fucking sucks,” Shaun declares. To show how pissed he is at this targeted personal injustice, he throws the full can of Coke into the one corner of the room where people and equipment aren’t, which also happens to be the corner of the room with the open window and windowsill lined with full bottles of unidentifiable yellow liquids. The can goes flying out the window, taking two of the bottles with it. The subsequent crash and explosion of Coke and what might be piss, might be ice tea is clear as day. If the building manager doesn’t already hate them (he does), he’ll really hate them now.“Okay, so I think I’m gonna go home,” Tim says after they’ve spent an appropriate full two minutes gawking at the window. “What?” says Frank. “It’s only nine o’clock.”Hambone avoids making eye contact with Frank, saying, “Yeah, I got a shift at the bar in an hour, so I should go, too,” as he starts unplugging his equipment. Frank doesn’t want to come off as desperate but it’s hard to deny that’s what he feels like. “Come on, guys. We can’t practice for the next week and a half. Shouldn’t we get the time in while we can?”“You know, maybe it’s a good thing,” Hambone says. “Like, we take the break until Tim gets back from his grandma’s, and that’s when we start trying out new guitarists. It’ll be a decompression.”When Neil was in the band, Pencey practiced, like, six hours minimum. He didn’t start the trend—more like picked it up from Frank, who picked it up from Dad—but he definitely enforced it. Neil and Frank’s perspectives usually aligned like that, at least in the beginning. It was really useful as the youngest person in the band to have someone a year older than even Hambone on his side. Neil had made Frank feel heard. He made the others hear him. They’d kicked Neil out because it hadn’t seemed like the band could survive with him in it. Now Frank wonders if those guys even give a shit. Or if Pencey Prep is going to survive the next six months at all, even without Neil. Frank looks helplessly at Shaun. “Are you leaving too?”“Well I don’t wanna practice,” Shaun says, “but I can hang out. Pretty sure Ricky has a show going at the Firehouse tonight.”And that’s why, despite all of the shit, despite the fact that Shaun was the one who refused to play that shitty show in Michigan and fought Neil and made Frank and Hambone choose to throw Neil out, Shaun is still Frank’s best friend. He knows what’s going to make Frank feel better, and that it’s body slamming against body, writhing to the music. The HoldoutFour hours after Shaun finally left and after three hours spent tossing and turning in his bed with sleep still out of reach, Frank kicks his blankets to the floor and gives up. When the insomnia first started, he tried a lot of stuff. Meditation. Going on runs right after dinner. Pretending he was dead (not that different from meditation). Eating a bunch of junk food (almost helped, until stomach cramps kept him awake the next night). Nothing helped. Nothing turned his mind off enough. Lack of sleep brings with it a unique kind of desperation. His basement room is pitch black. On the average night little light breaches the small windows of his basement bedroom, but it’s been raining since around sleepless hour two. The sheer weight of the darkness morphs with sleep deprivation and makes the room, and Frank inside it, feel less than real. Using touch more than any other sense to guide his hand, Frank opens his side table drawer and pulls out a small bag and then Mom’s lighter. He has to stand on his bed to open the window. So it’s with his feet planted on his pillows, rain leaking into his room and onto his bed, that he pulls the singular joint out of the bag and lights it. Just as the weed will dull the sharp edges of his mind, his desperation for some kind of control over his job numbs the sting of guilt. The joint only lets him inhale and exhale twice before it burns down to a useless stub. It’s like he can feel his brain lose its sharp edges in real time. The thoughts slow down. Frank throws out the joint and hopes the rain washes it down the street. Before he crawls back to bed, he grabs his Walkman, headphones, and Surfer Rosa cassette. It’s not long before Frank is drifting off to the sound of Black Francis in his ears, singing Where is my mind…where is my mind…where is my…MondayThe ParkPhil Chang and Mike Czupak are already at the skatepark when Frank arrives. Two edge kids Frank’s known for a while. Best friends from preschool. Mike is, like, the closest thing to hardline edge as exists in the Jersey scene north of New Brunswick; Phil is Frank’s ride to Food Not Bombs when Ralph or Mom bail. Phil and Mike are throwing fake punches, one taking a comically slow swing and the other ducking the fist. “Hit me like you mean it, you sad sack of shit,” Phil says with melodrama, improvised Fight Club dialogue. Mike leans backwards like he’s dodging bullets in the Matrix. “Fuck you, son of a bitch, self destruction is self improvement.”Frank jogs up to them and makes a big show of putting himself in between them to break up the fight. “Woah, woah, woah, what is wrong with you idiots? Aren’t we all brothers here? You’re disturbing the peace and love or whatever.”He’s sort of doing an Ian Mackaye impression, or rather Ian Mackaye if Fugazi played at a drug-free version of Woodstock. He’s not playing off a very clear vision but Mike and Phil don’t really seem to care that much. They pull him into the fight and once that gets boring go back to their boards.The really annoying thing about the skatepark in Passaic is after the headache of getting out here—a forty-five minute bus ride—the terrain is not even that good. There’s a pretty okay halfpipe, a few ramps, and a bowl you have to be a little brave to use. The park is old, one of the first in this part of Jersey. One of these days the concrete is going to crumble underneath them. A group of kids shows up around noon and takes up residence in the halfpipe. Mike and Phil make do on the ramps but Frank meanders around the shallow bowl. His thoughts keep returning to Fight Club. All of the crazy shit in that movie—the blown-up buildings, the fight clubs, Brad Pitt in the coolest fucking outfits anyone’s worn, ever, probably—it all happens because one guy can’t sleep. The narrator has this line near the beginning. Something about how insomnia makes everything distant and unreal. A copy of a copy of a copy. That feeling isn’t something you can really understand unless you’ve been through it. Frank gets it now, after night after night of staring up at the dark ceiling, too exhausted to let his mind do anything except replay every shitty thing he ever did or didn’t do and remind him of every reason his closest friends have to hate him. That kind of thing can make you fucking crazy. If it was any better he wouldn’t need the weed. His therapist thinks that anxiety meds are the actual solution, but he’s not sure that would be any better. He’s met at least ten kids claiming edge because they or someone they know got hooked on that exact stuff. Or who almost offed themselves because they felt like a zombie on it. No thanks. He already gets that from his current lifestyle. A car pulls up at the light next to the skatepark. It only catches Frank’s eye because the person inside looks familiar, with their black hair and upturned nose. Gerard, Frank thinks. Maybe it’s not him—maybe Frank just wants it to be him. Maybe this is his Tyler Durden moment, when he starts hallucinating, and everyone turns into Gerard. He skates closer but the car is already pulling away. As he leans forward to try and catch one last glimpse of the driver, he forgets to mind the uneven concrete beneath him and his board hits a divot. Frank is lucky he only skins a single knee, though the scrape is deep. “Shit, dude,” Phil says once he and Mike notice Frank’s wipeout. “That’s fucking gnarly. Are you, like, okay?”Frank refuses the hand Mike holds out to him and stands up on his own. “I’m great,” he says. “I’ve been banged up worse in the pit.”Blood trickles out of the wound and stings, but it grounds him too, and Frank wonders if the crazy narrator from the movie knew what he was talking about, creating his own pain like that. The DealerHis second semester of college, Frank took a Women’s Studies class because it looked easy and he wanted to meet girls. It worked, sort of—at the very least he met Dana, who lived in a house off campus with a bunch of girls who didn’t shave their legs and wore suspenders to the cafeteria and stuff. One of those roommates, she told him with a hushed voice one class period when they were paired up to make a list of all the barriers to higher education women faced, was trying to grow weed in the basement. “Don’t the police have, like, radar equipment that detects that shit?” Frank had asked her at the time, but she had shrugged and then a few months later told him that if he ever needed any bud he could ask her. So the basement thing must have worked. “Hi,” Dana says, really bright and cheery when he slides into her car. Frank fiddles with the key hanging around his neck, flips it a few times. “Hi,” he says. She’s parked between the back end of the Belleville Radioshack and the river. Could not be a more obvious spot to make a drug deal. Dana has this sensible schoolgirl look about her, though, a sweet smile, big tortoiseshell glasses, straight bangs that cover her whole forehead, half a linguistics degree. If the cops caught up with them they’d probably figure Frank was the dealer and she was the one who hadn’t drank beer in six years. It makes him feel better, anyway, buying from a nice Rutgers girl instead of some idiot from Queen of Peace or one of Alex Eyeball’s crusty friends. Support your local scene, or whatever. “So, you said you wanted the same thing as last time, right?” she says. “Two grams?”“Uh, yeah.”She asks him for five bucks, and as he’s fumbling for the money in his bloated wallet, she says, “So are you taking anything interesting next semester?”His search slows a little. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I haven’t registered yet.”Frank hands over the five and she gives him an old TicTac dispenser filled with weed. “Last time it was already rolled,” Frank says. He doesn’t know how to roll a joint. And where do you even get rolling paper? A smoke shop or something? “Oh, sorry. You didn’t tell me that’s what you wanted. But you have a grinder, right? It’s not that hard to get the hang of it,” she says, and Frank gets the impression that he’s being condescended to. By this girl, who probably has never risked a hair on her head for anyone. “Wait, so why haven’t you registered for classes yet? Isn’t the deadline pretty soon?”“Next week.” Frank just stares at the TicTac dispenser and gets a real sick feeling in his gut, not unlike the kind he’d get as a kid before he’d be sick in bed for a week because of stomach cramps that wouldn’t let up. “Actually, um, I think I’m good.”Dana says, “Huh?” He tosses the weed into her lap. “I’m good, actually. I don’t need that shit. Can I get my five bucks back?”Tentative and confused she hands back the money. “Did I say something?”“No, just, I don’t need that shit,” he says. As he’s opening her door and kicking a leg out of the car, she says, “I didn’t have to come all the way out to Belleville for five freaking bucks, you know? Call someone else next time.”She drives off and he tries not to be mad at her. But Dana’s the one making a few extra bucks off lowlifes who have to numb themselves to face the world. She’ll ruin her own life one of these days. That’s not on him. TuesdayThe All-Nighter“What are you doing up?” Ralph asks.He’d jumped a little, coming down the stairs from his and Mom’s room to find Frank at the table, eating Oreos straight from the package at five in the morning. Frank is happy to see him, oversized navy blue Pathmark uniform shirt and creepy mustache and all, with the joy of an insomniac finally seeing another person's face after a long, sleepless night. “And, hey,” Ralph continues, “isn’t that gonna aggravate your whatever-you-call-it? Should you really be eating that junk?”Mouth full of Oreo, Frank says, “Should you?”Ralph shakes his head and opens the fridge, probably wondering why such a kind and generous lady as Linda Iero had to come with baggage in the form of a bitchy teenager. “So, come on, tell me, why are you up so early?” he asks again.Wrong question. It should be Why are you up so late? since Frank gave up falling asleep about an hour ago. Frank doesn’t bother correcting Ralph, though. “Early bird catches the worm, or whatever. Lotta stuff on the docket today,” Frank says. “Can you drop me off at the Dunkin on your way in?”Frank’s relationship with Mom’s boyfriend is more an ongoing question and answer session than something resembling a parent-child relationship. Where’s your mother? Can I borrow five bucks? Have you seen the remote?Not that different from their relationship before Ralph met Mom, back when he was just the assistant manager at the Pathmark. Only the questions had sounded a little different then. Did you clean up the mess in aisle eight yet? I think I’m still sick—can I clock out early? Who promised that old lady a refund on hemorrhoid cream yesterday? “Sure, fine,” Ralph says. “I can drop you.”Ralph is okay, Frank guesses. He’s usually willing to donate extra food from the grocery store to Food Not Bombs when Frank reminds him. The last few Christmases he gave Frank, like, sixty bucks. When his days off align with Mom’s, he takes her out to the movies or the park and keeps her from zoning out in front of the TV with a beer in her hand all day long—which is how she spends most of her days when she’s single. That’s not nothing. It’s just that no one could ever replace Dad. Frank knows that, Mom knows that, and he’s pretty sure Ralph does, too. “Um, so,” Frank says a few minutes later, in Ralph’s car a few stoplights away from the Dunkin. “Would you, like, mind telling Mom that I’m spending the night at Dad’s tonight?” “Don’t you and your mom usually plan these things in advance?” Ralph asks. They do, if they know in advance. But Frank just decided two hours ago to head over to Trenton today so he hasn’t had the chance to fill Mom in. She also sometimes gets a little pissy when he visits Dad on impulse, like she thinks Frank’s doing it because he’s mad at her or something. Which is just stupid. Regardless, Frank is an adult now and doesn’t need her permission. “Not really,” Frank says. “Then I’ll let her know,” says Ralph, and he doesn’t ask any more questions. The Coffee ShopDunkin Donuts isn’t a place people tend to linger, not at six a.m. on a Tuesday. America’s workforce staggers inside, squinting underneath the fluorescent lighting, gets their shit, and leaves for whatever soul crushing nine-to-five they need six shots of espresso to make it through. Some of them smile or nod at Frank through bleary eyes, still half asleep, as they stumble out the door. Which is nice of them. Like, it’s nice to feel seen, to be reminded that he hasn’t yet reached Tyler Durden levels of crazy. More than that, though, the movement of the coffee shop around him—the baristas darting back and forth behind the counter, the cars already lined up to the road, the steady trickle of men and women in business formal heading up to the counter and ordering the sweetest drinks on the menu—makes him feel the most normal when it doesn’t pay Frank much attention. Frank wants to feel like an integral part of the landscape. Like he belongs there but isn’t special. The late summer sunrise has almost faded to the light blue of early morning when someone walks into the Dunkin and halts in front of Frank’s table, kind of sudden. “Aren’t you guys supposed to, like, stay away from coffee?”Frank looks up from his book—he’s rereading Catcher again; he doesn’t really own that many books, and people-watching gets boring pretty quick, so Catcher it is—and jumps a little. It’s Gerard. There’s no reason for Gerard to be here, if only because Frank’s been thinking all morning that he kinda wishes Gerard was. Frank doesn’t believe in coincidences. Maybe he should, but he doesn’t, and if the universe has put both of them in the same coffee shop at not even seven a.m., it must mean something. “It’s decaf,” Frank says, drinking as if to prove his point. “And it’s black, so no dairy.”Gerard cocks his head and places a hand on the chair across from Frank. “I’m trying to figure out what kind of college student drinks decaf black coffee alone at a Dunkin Donuts this early in the morning, and you know, I just don’t know how to make it make sense.”Frank bites his lower lip but he giggles a little anyway. “There’s a—reason.”“Long story?”Frank shrugs. Gerard looks out at the parking lot, then at his watch, then back to Frank. “I’m gonna go order a coffee,” he says. Once he has his coffee in hand—a concoction the color of cardboard, which beads condensation onto the giant plastic cup holding it—Gerard returns to Frank’s table and sits down. “Okay, so there’s a story?”“You don’t have somewhere to go?” “I was trying to be at work a little early this morning,” Gerard says, “but I think they’ll settle for just on time.”Now that Gerard is here and listening, the story doesn’t feel like one anyone would want to hear. “It’s not that interesting,” Frank admits. “I just didn’t want to be in my house anymore. You know? Like, when I’m there, my head gets stuck in this loop, and so I had to get out. Maybe that’s just stupid teen shit. But that’s the reason.”Gerard sips through his straw thoughtfully. “That’s not stupid teen shit,” he says. “I mean, it might be teen shit, categorically, but—do you live with your parents?”“In my mom’s basement,” Frank says. “Then it’s living-in-your-mom’s-basement shit.” Gerard grins a little. “Me too.” “Really?”Even though Frank knew Mikey still lived with his parents, and Gerard still lived with Mikey, the idea that Gerard isn’t a full-blown adult, living in his own curated space, comes as a surprise. Frank never made the conscious decision to imagine what Gerard’s place looked like. Now that he knows it doesn’t exist, his mind conjures up a fully formed picture. A studio in an old house somewhere west of Belleville. Dusty antique wooden floors and big windows clouded with nicotine residue. Books and art supplies and Coke cans piled up on flat surfaces. Not some stuffy old basement like the one Frank lives in.“I was in the city for a while and you know how that goes,” Gerard tells him. “I moved back in with my parents last year, and at first it was nice not to worry about rent and feeding myself and stuff. But after a while it was like you said—my head got stuck in a loop. I was restless and trapped at the same time.”Frank is quiet for a moment. His finger traces over the bright red carousel horse on the cover of Catcher. “Too intense for this early in the morning?” Gerard asks. “No,” Frank says quickly. “I was just thinking about the tour we went on this summer. Neil planned it all out, so it was supposed to be this fuckin’ awesome time, right? But in the end it was—I don’t know. And since then shit’s been weird. It’s like…have you ever had sleep paralysis? Where you wake up but you can’t move?”“That’s what it’s like,” Gerard says, and he actually looks thrilled about it, like Frank’s cracked some complex mathematical puzzle. “God, that’s exactly what it’s like. I can’t tell you what it is, but that’s it. So, like, okay, yesterday I was supposed to meet with one of my supervisors at work, because I’ve been working on this project with Ray Toro—”“Ray Toro?” Frank echoes. An image of a dude with Coke-bottle glasses and a collared shirt flailing behind a kit on a stage, out of place, flashes through his mind, a memory from a show he caught part of a month ago. “The drummer in that shitty pop punk band?”“If you ever heard him play guitar, you’d know that calling Ray Toro a drummer is basically sacrilege,” Gerard says. “That’s him, though. Anyways I had this meeting in the morning, but I didn’t set my alarm right so I woke up three hours late. And even then I probably could have made it to the meeting if I ran, only I just stayed in bed for two more hours, doing nothing at all. Wasn’t even fucking sleep paralysis. I was awake and could move, I just didn’t. Just stared at the goddamn clock until it was past noon. Is that fucking crazy?”It’s not crazy, or at least it means that Frank isn’t crazy, because it means that the car he saw yesterday might have been Gerard after all. He wasn’t imagining it—not unless he’s imagining this conversation too, though that remains to be seen.Frank pulls a leg up onto the seat of his chair and hugs it close to his chest, resting his chin on his knee. “Dude, I think you might just hate your job.”That earns him a loud, round cackle from Gerard, the cracking of a whip in the relatively subdued atmosphere of the morning coffee shop. “You’re goddamned right. I fucking hate my job. A hundred thousand dollars in student loans for a lousy art degree, and I hate my stupid job.”Wincing, Frank says, “A nine to five sucks that bad?”Gerard takes a moment to drink some of his coffee. “You know, it’s an office job. You ever been to the Time Warner building? It’s where Cartoon Network has their offices, you know, in this skyscraper in Midtown. Right next to Central Park, so the big offices in the animation department face the park, and mine and all the others look out onto a fuckin’ stairwell.“ He stares out the window, head resting on a hand, and says, “It’s not that bad. It’s just not what I thought it would be.”“Sounds awful,” Frank says, “like, the skyscraper and the full-time art job and shit.”He does mean to push Gerard’s buttons just a bit. At the same time he’s earnestly sorry. As a kid he always kind of dreaded getting older because Dad took every chance he could to remind Frank that music wasn’t something you could do full-time and still love it. When Pencey caught a little traction, signed to Thursday’s old label, booked a tour to the Midwest and everything, Frank had thought, fuck you Dad, this is gonna be it, forever. But if this summer proved anything, it’s that shit you’ve been working towards for years can fall apart in a second, as fast as a van can run out of gas or an amp can short-circuit. Actually he finds Gerard’s total pessimism refreshing. Since the tour ended last month everyone around Frank has been pretending everything went great, like losing Neil after those disastrous weeks away from home was just a small bump in the road and Pencey was still on the same track as it always was. Frank doesn’t hold it against them. Edge kids shun pessimism like it’s a new street drug. But that attitude really only works if the solution requires pushing through to the end of a problem that only needs time to resolve itself. And soon Frank’s going to have to start making hard decisions about his life, decisions he isn’t prepared to make, and staying posi to the end isn’t going to solve his problems. And here’s Gerard, whose darkness is simply one more thing about him, mostly unremarkable. Not a face he wears all the time or one he’s trying to drag Frank down into. Gerard just thinks a lot of his life sucks—from the way he describes it Frank doesn’t blame him—and he’s uninterested in putting on a show like he’s happy or satisfied. Gerard’s pain is probably the only transparent thing about him. Gerard’s gaze swivels away from the window to land squarely on Frank. For a second Frank thinks he’s pissed, but a wry smile forms on his small mouth. “You should come by sometime and I’ll let you see the cartoon. It’s called Breakfast Monkey.”“You’ll show me the stairwells, too?”“Ha!” Gerard says. “You couldn’t miss the stairwells if you tried.”The BluesTuesday night at the Flying Pig Tavern vibrates at the same excited frequency it has since Frank was a kid. The thirty, forty people in the audience push the place at least ten people past legal capacity, but he’s witnessed an audience at least triple that in here before. A haze of cigar smoke hangs above his head. And Paul Plumeri takes a swig of beer then starts the last verse of the last song of the evening. He was born under a bad sign. All he wants is women and wine. Frank catches Dad’s eye as the final bars of the song come to a close. Dad winks but it’s too important a moment to hold his attention for long. Dad traverses from cymbal to snare to tom and then, in unison with the rest of the band, lands the final hit of the song on the crash cymbals with a dramatic, sweeping thrust of both hands. At his age Dad still puts his whole body into the music. That’s how much he loves it. If Frank didn’t share the driving need to get in front of a crowd and play, he’d still understand just by looking at Dad why he worked shitty, soulless jobs all throughout his childhood so at the end of the day he could be there, behind his kit. He starts playing and forty years of bullshit melt right off his face. He belongs there more than he ever belonged in Belleville with Mom and Frank. Dad certainly hadn’t looked so at ease when he came home from work this afternoon and found his son sitting on his front step. “It’s not that I don’t want you here, son,” but Frank hadn’t given him any warning, and Frank showing up unannounced on a weekday usually meant something was wrong. So had Mom done something? Said something? Had Ralph?No, no, and no. Frank was just bored and wanted to catch Dad’s show tonight. “Before the fall, since, you know, I’m probably gonna be too busy to come out here that much.”Thirty minutes later and Dad was buying Frank extra large fries at McDonalds like Frank’s arrival in Trenton had been planned all along. Of all of the members of Dad’s band, Paul Plumeri emerges first after the show ends. Total lead singer syndrome, but if anyone here has earned the right to skip out on the load up it’s Paul, the man whose name Dad’s band wears. “Don’t tell me you’re old enough to drink,” Paul says, approaching Frank at the bar and clasping him on the shoulder. “I can’t be that old.”Frank grins and swirls the ice around in his glass. The Flying Pig Tavern is the type of place to serve drinks in a real glass. “It’s just club soda and grenadine,” he says. “I don’t drink but I’m not old enough to for another year anyways.”Paul tells Frank that he’s a good kid and then asks him, “What are you doing here in the middle of the week? Don’t you have more exciting things to do than watch a bunch of old fucks play?”“Maybe,” Frank says. “But when it comes to old fucks, you guys are the fucking best.”Paul throws his head back to laugh. “Don’t you fucking forget it.”On Tuesday nights Frank usually meets up with Gabe Saporta and Phil Chang at the Newark Food Not Bombs, but that only goes until nine p.m. Seeing Dad’s band play is better than that. To be fair it’s better than most things. Dad is about fifty percent the reason why; Paul is most of the other fifty. Paul is a master of the blues guitar. When the drums didn’t work out for Frank, and neither did the saxophone, it was Paul who offered up his old Fernandes Lawsuit Strat and placed Frank’s fingers on the frets to learn his first two chords. He can improv like no one else Frank’s ever met, enough to make Frank want to do that too, until he realized that musical improv was never going to be his thing. Still, Frank has tried to incorporate that energy into his performance with his body. Of all the members of Dad’s band, Dad emerges last. “Alright, gentlemen,” he says. “Let’s get out of here before we all die a natural death.”The SocietyIf Dad feels at home behind his drum kit, Frank feels the most like his son sitting next to his buddies in the same circle booth the band has occupied probably since Nixon was in office. “They went on tour this summer,” Dad tells them. “Him and his friends booked the whole thing themselves.”Everyone with their coffees and cigarettes and pancakes at three a.m. nods at Frank and his little band, impressed. All Frank ever wanted as a kid was to belong to a group like this. Their approval washes over him like a cool wave, better than any drug. They ask him a bunch of questions. Where did they go? How did they get there? How does one book a show in a stranger’s basement? “Basically you just have to call up a band from the area,” Frank says. “They’ll usually know the local places.”Frank basks in the glow of making Dad proud enough that he leaves out all the other shit from this summer, like the van breaking down every ten feet practically, or Neil leaving at the end. What is he studying in school?“Psychology,” Frank says. What does Frank want to do with that?“I don’t really know,” Frank says. “Work at the Post Office and play guitar.”It’s gotta be hard to tour, with classes and everything. Is Frank going to finish his program?“Yes he is,” Dad says. Frank squirms in his seat. “I don’t—” he starts. “Like, it’s hard to predict the future right now, you know?”“He’s going to finish his program,” Dad tells his buddies like Frank isn’t there. “That’s always been the deal me and Linda had for him. He’s got to graduate.”“I mean, yeah,” Frank says, feeling young and stupid next to Dad and the band. “Of course I’m finishing the program.”WednesdayThe FarewellDad shakes him awake around noon and offers him a cup of coffee.“I don’t drink coffee anymore,” Frank croaks out through the fog taking up residence in his morning brain. Dad scratches at his temple. “Right, of course. Forgot about your straight-and-narrow thing. Sorry, Paco.”Dad and his friends are the only ones who still call him Paco. Back when Frank was a kid Dad and Grandpa spent enough time in Belleville that the distinction between the three Franks made a difference. Not anymore, though, not since Grandpa’s heart started giving him trouble a few years ago and he slowed down, and since Dad started the job with the record label. “It’s fine, Dad,” Frank says, because despite all the sacrifice, music has always come first in Dad’s life and always will, and if Frank held that against him, that would make him a hypocrite. Dad and him go to the kitchen and Frank pokes around the cabinets and fridge for some breakfast-adjacent thing to eat that doesn’t contain animal products and won’t irritate his stomach. Unsurprisingly there isn’t much. Frank recovers a slightly stale loaf of bread. “Do you have, like, peanut butter or something?”Dad doesn’t know off the top of his head but he goes looking anyway. He stands on his toes to root around on top of the fridge and then pulls down a dusty jar of Jif. “Ah-ha!” Dad brandishes the jar like he’s showing Frank a thousand-dollar bottle of Champagne. “Here it is. Just for you, son.”Even sitting at the table Frank can tell the jar contains no more than two tablespoons of actual peanut butter. Still, this is better than plain toast. He works really hard to scrape it all out. As he watches Frank work, Dad eats yogurt (what is with old people and yogurt?) and says, “When d’you need to be at the train station? One? One-thirty?”In total honesty Frank had not thought that far ahead. Actually he had sort of been thinking about staying for another night, maybe dragging Dad to a late showing of the new Scary Movie. But Dad has a talent for directing conversation so that it can only end up where he wants it to go. Like last night’s college talk, his tone doesn’t leave much room for argument. Which is fine. Genuinely it is. In the few years right after the divorce Frank would cry when it was time to go back to Belleville. Even through high school he’d leave with a knot in his stomach, twisting tighter and tighter and sometimes bringing actual acid up his throat. A few times he actually threw up—that was how much he hated being away from Dad.Today, there’s still a pang of regret as Dad drives him back to the station. But relief is just as present. The two twist together into an ambivalence that’s harder to swallow than either emotion on its own. The Northeast CorridorAs soon as Dad stopped being able to drive from Trenton to pick Frank up, and as soon as Mom found it morally acceptable to let her adolescent son regularly ride public transportation for longer than a few minutes, Frank started taking the train back to Belleville. The ride lasts a little over an hour if he remembers to get off at the right stop and doesn’t sleep all the way to Manhattan. The view isn’t particularly memorable—the landscape is a lot of strip malls and defunct manufacturing plants pockmarked with the occasional small farm or patch of trees. And somehow the trains that run the Northeast Corridor always smell like hot asphalt, exhaust, and ozone more than any other line. But Frank has always enjoyed the journey anyways. There was no one he had to be, no expectations to fail to live up to on this trip between his two parents, two cities, two versions of himself. He could breathe. Today, Frank spends the whole ride back to Belleville dreading getting off at the Newark station. There’s a lump in his throat and a relentless pounding in his head. Plus, he forgot the single book he brought with him at Dad’s. So no Catcher. Only his thoughts and the tinny voice of the conductor announcing their arrival at each new city to keep him company. Frank thinks about skipping Newark and Belleville altogether. He could ride to New York, transfer trains only once and then ride to JFK, and slip onto an overseas flight, one going somewhere really different. London, maybe. Mexico City. Moscow. With an hour and fifteen minutes to kill, Frank slouches in his seat, running his thumb over the rip in his jeans and scraping at the angry, red wound on his knee. Over and over until the conductor announces their arrival and then departure from the Newark station, and until his brain no longer registers the sting as pain. The CityAs Frank squats against the base of Christopher Columbus’s statue and gawks up at Time Warner Center, it occurs to him that Gerard lied. The skyscraper where he works doesn’t overlook Central Park; it overlooks Trump Tower, Columbus Circle, and Central Park. Several tourist families and important-looking businessmen have already thrown him dirty looks and he’s only been here about ten minutes. Safe to say this is not an area of the city friendly to hardcore shows. Or deviance in general. The kiosk lady at Penn Station had told him as much with a single incredulous glance when he’d asked her where the Cartoon Network building was and she gave him directions. Like, what is someone like you doing, going there, where all the civilized people are?Even so, the pulsating energy of a Manhattan summer afternoon pulls Frank along like an electric current. With its frantic forward movement and the disorienting synergy of the sidewalk crowd—intimate and alienating all at once—the city can swallow you whole. Frank had been sorry to emerge from the cool dampness of the subway tunnel. And even sorrier to see the huge skyscraper. It’s too elegant and pristine—Frank had been nervous to even peek inside, like security would fine him for putting one foot in the doorway. Designer retail shops line the perimeter of the first floor. There’s a five-star French restaurant inside, too. And somewhere, on the tenth or twentieth for five hundredth floor, Gerard sits in his cubicle and looks out onto a stairwell.Frank doesn’t like thinking about Gerard inside a place with such a sense of importance. No doubt Gerard’s going to do big things, but Frank gets the sense that he’s going to do them in small places. Like the backroom of a comics shop. Or standing on a stage made of shipping flats in someone’s basement. People like Frank are okay to be a face in a crowd, but Gerard doesn’t have that luxury. Gerard is the type of person who stands out whether he wants to or not.While he waits for the end of the work day, Frank creates in Columbus Circle a little pocket of mayhem. He steals pennies from the fountain. He sends menacing looks to passersby who look like they have a stick stuck up their butt. He ruins as many family vacation photos as he can, but only in ways that they won’t notice until they get the photos developed. When the late afternoon sun threatens to bake him alive, Frank takes a break from his chaos-making to buy a soda from a nearby hot dog stand. Then he considers ditching this whole thing and trying to track down a Hare Krishna temple to get some actually decent vegetarian food, but then he looks at his watch and it’s almost five. So he hangs around the entrance to the building, fully aware that every single suited-up normie walking by thinks he’s a delinquent ready to rough them up if they look at him the wrong way. They probably think that he’s there to sell drugs or something worse. Which is pretty ridiculous. When it comes to his subculture Frank sits somewhere on the normal end of the spectrum, appearance-wise. No tattoos yet, and Neil talked him out of the lip piercing he wanted last year. If Frank looks so weird to these strangers, that says a lot about the kinds of places they’ve been and the kind of music they listen to. Those idiots probably think they know a lot about the world but they don’t even know their own city. At around five-thirty, Gerard finally emerges from the Time Warner Building. He looks like a vampire, totally washed out, like nine hours spent in fluorescent office hell literally sucked the life out of him. “Hey,” Frank says as Gerard passes, presumably on his way to the A train. “Gerard, hey!”Gerard glances over his shoulder, keeps walking, glances again, and finally halts in his tracks. “Frank?” he says, carefully approaching Frank’s bench. “Why are—what are you doing here? Are you, like, okay?”Frank hops to his feet. “I’m good. Great, actually. You know how yesterday you said you would, like, show me your cartoon or whatever it is?” Frank rolls forward on his feet and adds, “And also the stairwell?”“Oh,” says Gerard. “I guess I did say that.”Gerard squints and rubs his eyes a little. If he’s happy to see Frank it’s not showing on his face. Which in turn makes Frank feel a little weird, like he’s just bothering Gerard after a long day at an exhausting job and maybe Frank shouldn’t have assumed Gerard’s offer was anything more than a hollow gesture yesterday morning. “Frank, you know, normally I might, but honestly the last thing I wanna do right now is go back into that building. And I’m actually meeting a friend pretty soon.”“Right. Shit,” Frank says. His face heats up against his will. “Sorry. I’ll just—”He starts off towards the subway station but Gerard grabs him by the backpack before he can make it more than a few feet. “Hey, wait, no, that’s not what I meant,” says Gerard. “I’m not going back up there today is what I’m saying. But you can come with me if I’m the…if there’s…if you, like, wanted to hang out?” “Sure,” Frank says after a moment of collecting his ego. Frank feels seen, a little vulnerable, but he thinks Gerard might be feeling vulnerable too. As far as trades go he’s seen worse.The Friend“You ever seen this one, Frank?” Ray Toro asks from the other side of Gerard through a mouthful of popcorn. “I don’t know,” Frank says, thinking back to the kaiju movies Dad used to show him. There were a lot, all totally great but relatively indistinguishable. “Is this the one where there’s the dragon thing with three heads?”Toro throws another hand of popcorn in his mouth. “Yeah, but Ghidorah’s in, like, six of these films.”“This is the one where they fight the dragon thing with three heads in space,” Gerard offers helpfully. “It’s fuckin’ terrible, but awesome.”“You’re not making a good monster movie if it doesn’t basically suck,” Frank says and is validated when he makes Toro laugh. “I don’t think I ever saw this one though.”They’re waiting in the Ogden Mills Theater for the movie to begin. It’s Invasion of Astro-Monster, one of the later installments in the original Godzilla franchise. A layer of dust coats the entire theater, which has fallen on hard times if the washed-out red curtains bracketing the screen and the lack of any other moviegoer besides the three of them are anything to judge by. The place has its charm, though. It used to be a live theater, back in 1910 or whenever, and has kept much of its original architectural ornamentation. Dust and empty seats and all, it retains a level of class.It’s also possible that the Ogden Mills’s charm comes not from the theater itself but from Frank’s company. When Gerard explained that he was meeting Ray Toro for a movie, Frank had worried that he was interrupting a date or something. The connection between the two of them runs deep; that much is obvious just from the way Gerard talks about his friend. But even if it is the case that Frank is intruding on something, Toro doesn’t seem to mind. Gerard showed up with a plus one in tow and all Toro did was smile brightly and offer Frank some of his popcorn. As for Gerard—who knows how he feels. He’s been frustratingly casual since Frank showed up at Time Warner. Frank sort of wants to grab him by the shoulders and scream into his face, “Why the fuck are you so hard to figure out?!” Though any single straight answer would ruin the mystery, and Frank likes the mystery.After Astro-Monster, Toro’s hungry so the three of them get pizza. “You sure you don’t want some?” says Toro, pushing a slice towards Frank. “You don’t have to pay if that’s the problem. ’S on me.”Frank thinks that Toro might express love through sharing food. “Nah, I’m good.” He plays around with the plain slice of bread on his plate. “I’m vegan, so no cheese.”“Really? Like no cheese ever?”Toro doesn’t sound, like, outraged or disgusted or anything. Some dudes can get so defensive when they find out that another dude doesn’t eat meat or dairy or eggs, as though their masculinity hinges on eating steak once a week. Which is just the stupidest shit ever. Some of the buffest, scariest-looking guys Frank knows are hardline and have been vegan for years.“Frank is edge,” Gerard tells Toro. He ordered a beer with his pizza. They both did. “Like, straight edge. Hence the veganism. Right?”Frank shrugs. “Kinda,” he says, because that’s only half the story. “I mean, yeah, basically.”Gerard tilts his head and says, “So there’s more to it?”Gerard is the kind of person who loves a good story. He looks for them everywhere he goes, Frank is finding out. Like, when they were walking to the pizza parlor, they passed by this old typewriter repair shop that had clearly been in business since the fifties or sixties. The open sign was lit up and the lights were on but they couldn’t see anyone in the front of the store. They didn’t start walking again until Gerard had constructed an elaborate fiction about the typewriter store as a front for a mobster who only kept it open because his late wife had been one of the world’s fastest typists, and this store was the way he remembered her after his rival had put out a hit on her. At least Frank is pretty sure that’s the story. Momentarily distracted by a flier for a show later that night stapled to a pole a few feet away, Frank had only caught about half of what Gerard said. “Well, I mean, kinda,” Frank says about there being more to the story of his veganism. “Like, edge is all about living poison-free, you know? There’s stuff that is gonna poison most people’s bodies and minds, regardless, and then there’s the stuff that’s poison to one person but not to someone else. When I first claimed edge I thought that I was mainly dealing with all of the alcoholic shit that was messing me up. And it was actually messing me up, because I got a stomach ulcer before I stopped drinking.”“Hold on,” Toro says, suddenly eyeing his beer with suspicion. “That can happen?”Frank giggles. “Don’t worry about it, dude. Turns out I have a full-blown stomach condition. But that’s what I’m saying, for me meat and dairy and stuff is like, you know, a poison. Maybe I can live and be okay if I eat it but I can actually fuckin’ think if I don’t.”It’s still just about a third of the story. Only a few people really know why he started to claim edge, mainly those who witnessed it. Neil, more than anyone else. Hambone and Shaun know most of it. But Frank keeps the story pretty close to his chest. So here it is. In middle school Frank started drinking because that was just what everyone did. At house parties, at smaller social gatherings, whenever. He could keep up with his friends at first. Outdrank them, even. And it was never, like, a huge issue, like he never started drinking in private, never needed a drink to get through the day. It was just what him and his buddies did on the weekends not spent in Trenton with Dad. But then high school started and he was feeling sick constantly. Everytime he drank so much as a beer and a half he’d throw it all back up the next morning, if not that night. After a while the problems started to bleed into his life outside of the parties, making him duck out of class to retch over the toilet. What was going on wasn’t, like, a mystery or anything. Mom had kept antacids on her side table since he was a kid, and Frank had always considered the rattle of those pills an integral part of the general soundscape of his childhood home, just like the splash made when she poured one of her three nightly glasses of wine. There were problems that ran in his family, and it was looking like Frank wouldn’t be an exception to the rule.When Mom discovered he was puking his guts out all the time, she took him to her doctor. Frank was laying there on the table trying to simultaneously explain and not explain how he got there. And that’s when it hit him, that he was going to have his own bottle of pills to keep in his pocket at all times, too, before long. After that, none of his friends understood why Frank didn’t want to drink anymore. Then he met Neil, who understood how difficult it was to stop doing what everyone else did to have fun, and who told Frank that it would all be worthwhile, because he had a community now. “I think my mom would kill me if I was vegan and couldn’t eat her food anymore,” Toro says. “But it’s cool that you figured that out, and that it works for you.”Once Toro and Gerard finish their pizza and their first beers, Frank pulls from his pocket the flier he’d ripped off the lamppost while Gerard was sticking his head inside the typewriter store. He unfolds it and smooths it out on the table and says, “I saw this earlier. You guys want to go?”“What is it?” Gerard says before he takes a swig from his beer. He’s on his second beer even though Toro had declined another. “I mean, it’s just a show?”“These are straight edge bands,” Frank explains. He points to each band name, scrawled in crude permanent marker and then Xeroxed to hell. “See the Xes on either side? That means they’re edge. I’ve actually seen Earth Issue before, and they’re pretty cool.”Gerard and Toro exchange a glance. Frank’s leg starts to bounce of its own volition and his thumb rubs circles around the scab on his knee. Not that it happens that often, but in the past his regular hardcore friends haven’t reacted that kindly to invitations to straight edge-specific shows. Besides that, the longer Frank can postpone going home, the better. “I think I should go home, actually,” Toro says. “I just got Pro Skater 2 on Game Boy and I’ve been waiting to play it.” Toro’s answer is so earnest that it soothes any pang of disappointment Frank might have felt. “Oh, okay,” Frank says. “That’s cool.”Toro is—confusing, in a completely different way from Gerard. Like Gerard, he’s uncool, sort of the definition of uncool. But he’s also sort of the healthiest person Frank’s ever met, if you can call someone who inhales pizza that fast healthy. It’s true, though. Frank gets the impression that the most significant sources of pain and comfort for most people Frank knows—the drugs and alcohol and the scene itself—remain relatively uncomplicated to Toro. For him a beer has always been just a beer. “I’ll go with you, Frank,” says Gerard. Frank sits up straighter and says, “Really?” He doesn’t know why it comes as such a surprise that Gerard would accept his offer. Frank hadn’t been anticipating a no, but he hadn’t been anticipating a yes, either, not exactly. If the past few days of becoming acquainted with Gerard have taught Frank anything, it’s that Gerard does not prioritize predictability or transparency when it comes to the people around him. Frank is learning to limit his expectations. Only time can tell if this aspect of Gerard’s personality will remain as stimulating as it feels in the current moment. Gerard shrugs. “Why not? Sounds like it could be interesting. I’ve never been to a show with only edge bands before.” Frank can’t really keep the grin off his face. When he places his hands back on the table, there’s blood on his fingertips. “You’re gonna fuckin’ love it.” The SceneGerard and Frank get there and the show’s already begun, though the PA is turned up so high that the entire block trembled as they made their approach, cutting through even the sheets of rain that appeared as soon as they parted ways with Ray. So they haven’t actually missed much even if they do arrive halfway through the first band’s set. “Gabe wasn’t wrong about edge kids. Christ,” Gerard yells into Frank’s ear as they inch around the edge of the room. “This is motherfucking hardcore.”Frank takes in the atmosphere. He tries to see it through the eyes of someone whose position within the scene has largely been peripheral, who observes the mob more than he joins it. This place is such a crowded swamp of sweaty dudes and dim lighting that it renders the sticky summer evening outside a brisk winter morning in comparison. “Gabe Saporta? He said something?”Gabe Saporta used to be edge, back in high school. Frank and him sort of knew of each other but didn’t run in the same exact circles until right before he quit the lifestyle. Learning that Gabe had sold out was a disappointment for sure but he definitely wasn’t the first friend Frank had who did, and he stayed cool afterwards, so it wasn’t really a thing. Frank got the impression that if a fight broke out between edge kids and regular punks, Gabe would take whatever side Frank fought on. “Just that you guys went harder and crazier than—Oh, fucking shit!” Gerard jerks sideways to avoid getting smashed when the pit spits someone out at them and the guy goes stumbling backwards in their direction. “...harder and crazier than the rest of us.”Frank helps the guy to his feet and then takes Gerard’s hand in his own. “Who needs fuckin’ drugs, right?”He pulls Gerard along the edge of the pit. Right now it’s impenetrable, a rat king of tangling limbs and writhing bodies, parts of a whole but in competition to give the most destructive and controlled show of force. The mob churns and sputters in time to the music like a boiling pot of something viscous and the whole club smells of mud and musk. An assault on the senses but one Frank welcomes with open arms.An opening appears in front of them and Frank dives for it before it closes. “Let’s fucking go!” he tells Gerard before yanking him right into the center of the pit. He thinks he hears Gerard cackle loudly into the air, but everything here and now is so loud, he can’t be sure. The push and shove of body against body reminds Frank of the afternoon crowd at Penn station earlier today. That sort of strange intimacy you have when you’re in such close contact with a group of strangers all moving together with the same intention. If anything, tonight feels more intimate. Tonight, people he doesn’t know and will never see again throw their stomachs against the backs of others and send him and Gerard into each other, over and over. Tonight feels something like sex.“One of the best goddamn hardcore shows I’ve been to in years,” Gerard flatters him during the break between two sets when they’re taking turns gulping water by the mouthful from the bathroom faucet. Gerard’s soaked to the bone from the rain on their walk over, the sweat earned moshing, and now the overflow from the sink. His shirt might have been gray at the beginning of the night, or maybe it’s been black this whole time. He continues, “Smelly dudes, pits that will definitely send someone to the hospital before the end of the night, shitty fuckin’ music…This is what punk rock’s all about, you know?”Giggling, Frank pulls his head out from under the faucet. “You’re totally right. These bands fucking suck.”“Is everyone here really edge?”“Probably,” Frank says, only comfortable with the specifics of this conversation since they’re alone—the bathroom is single-occupancy and they locked the door behind them. He plays with the hem of his shirt when neither of them make a move to drink more water nor continue talking. “What?” says Gerard. Outside the bathroom someone bangs on the door and yells something unintelligible through the deafening noise of the hall. “Nothing,” Frank says but then gathers his courage and continues, “I guess I was just, like, wondering? About Ray?”Gerard blinks. “What about him?”“It’s just that you guys are—something, right?”It’s a moment before Gerard talks again, but when he does, his words are considered and cautious. “So, look, labels aren’t my thing. But if you’re worried that whatever me and Ray are is gonna mess up whatever—whatever this is, or is going to be, or…” Gerard trails off and looks Frank in the eye. “Don’t, okay?”Frank holds his gaze for several seconds, anticipation and something warmer boiling up in his stomach. “Okay,” Frank says, only half sure he understands Gerard’s meaning—though Gerard certainly intends to send a message—and less sure that it’s the message Frank wants.Outside the bathroom, the next band starts to play. As if against his will, as if a compulsion, the music draws him away from the sink and Gerard and towards the crowd again. His hand reaches for the doorknob but Gerard grabs his arm before he can go. “Frank,” Gerard says, “wait. Hold on.”Frank gently pulls his wrist from Gerard’s grasp and runs his thumb from Gerard’s wrist down to the tips of his fingers. Frank gives him a grin. Gerard wants more than that, he can tell. But Frank isn’t sure he can give him more than what he’s already offered, right here and right now with this uncertainty churning his stomach, equal in force to the exhilaration and anticipation right beside it. “Music’s starting,” says Frank. “Hey, let’s talk after, right?”Frank loses himself in the crowd again. Only now the thrashing violence is not an adventure but instead a home, just not one Frank is confident he wants to keep. The PoserThere’s a shift in the air, a collective shift in attention away from the stage and the pit towards the door of the club, like a clan of hyenas sensing spilled blood. More than anything else, that subtle change in atmosphere alerts Frank of the fight outside—he senses it before he hears or sees it. Infighting happens all the time. That’s normal. But there’s nothing that comes to physical blows faster than the discovery of an imposter in their midst. Suddenly too aware that he hasn’t seen Gerard since the bathroom and he doesn’t remember Gerard following him back into the pit, Frank shoves through the crowd to the entrance and then out the door, where two black-shirted kids with shaved heads and worn out sneakers are trying to push someone out from under the canopy. They’re not yelling, more like barking in the face of their victim, enunciating so hard every other syllable sends a glob of spit flying into the air. Hyenas, spilling blood.Their target is Gerard, and to his credit he’s not taking their attack lying down. “Jesus Christ, I’m fucking here with someone!” Gerard is saying when Frank finally makes it close enough to comprehend what they’re all saying amidst the heavy rain. “I’m not trying to fuck your show up—I don’t even know how one person could do that!”“You have your own fucking shows,” growls the one in the Ensign shirt, shoving Gerard into the rain. “And I’ll leave, but I have to tell my friend that—Frank! Hey, Frank!”The small crowd parts and lets Frank through. As he puts himself in the middle so that for a moment the violence halts, he says, mostly to Gerard, “Hey, what the fuck is going on?”The two guys size him up, size up Frank who has the same haircut and New Balances and dual Xes marked on both hands as them. In their heads they’re probably calling him a sellout. They’re probably imagining the sound of their fist colliding with Frank’s chin. “You the guy who invited him here?” says the one with glasses.“Jesus, yes, and I was just smoking a fucking cigarette,” Gerard says before Frank can answer. He comes up close behind Frank’s shoulder. “I didn’t realize your personal decision extended to the goddamn public sidewalk.”Frank can guess what actually happened to provoke this fight. Likely Gerard came out to smoke under the awning and, when one of these two shitheads asked him to put out his cigarette, refused. Maybe he said something bitchy. Frank has gotten into fights for less, during his more volatile younger years, when he only rolled with other edge kids and felt ready to die for the cause. Do it if you’re gonna, Frank thinks to the fist clenched at Ensign Shirt’s side. Hit me. Go on.Frank kind of wants him to try. His skin tingles in anticipation of the impact. His jaw aches for the constant thrumming of a bruise actively forming under his skin. It’s been too long. Neil made solid work of snuffing out that specific tendency in Frank a while back. It’s honestly a testament to Neil that Frank went this long without getting into a real fight. But if he’s going to break eventually—and he will, probably—he doesn’t want it to be here and now. He doesn’t want Gerard to see him like that, blood dripping from his lips, punch-drunk and stuck in his rage. It’s weird, though. For a flash of a second Frank thinks he sees that same hunger for aggression mirrored back at him on Gerard’s face. “You guys are why everyone thinks we’re all pretentious assholes,” Frank says, before he turns around, grabs Gerard by the arm, and drags him into the rain and away from this place before the fight starts anew and other people decide to join in or something. “Dude,” Frank says once they’re safe, two blocks away and seeking refuge in the doorway of a thrift store that’s closed for the night. “What’s the fucking story?”“There’s barely a story at all,” Gerard says. “I was just having a cigarette and minding my own goddamn business until they started harassing me to leave. They wouldn’t even let me go back inside and tell you I was going.” Which mostly confirms what Frank already suspected, though it’s a different kind of narrative than the ephemeral tales Gerard litters conversations with. For one, Gerard is in it, and that’s a divergence from all the other stories Frank’s heard him tell these past few days. Frank gets the sense that Gerard doesn’t like talking about himself without a few layers of abstraction. Also different is Frank’s sense that Gerard has erased a few details from the story instead of embellishing it with a little melodrama. Frank doesn’t know what it means that he doesn’t believe Gerard. Gerard continues, “I was really hoping you’d come outside before it turned into a real fight. But I guess there wasn’t any way you could have known what was going on.” Maybe Frank’s just angry at Gerard for getting into a fight in the first place, for getting them both exiled from the show over a damn cigarette. But the disappointment churning in his gut feels bigger than just this show, harsh words on a sidewalk at night. “Soon as I realized, I was out there, man,” Frank says. “If I knew you went outside to smoke I would’ve stopped you before anyone tried shit.”“You could’ve warned me that they’d freak out like that,” says Gerard. Frank bristles. “Sorry, okay, I just didn’t think I had to. Like, these are people who swore off smoking for the rest of their lives. Obviously it wasn’t gonna go over well.”“Sure. Obviously.”A breeze from the rainstorm cuts into the little alcove keeping them out of the downpour and an ocean spray of cold mist sends a shiver down Frank’s spine. Gerard tucks his hands close to his chest and stares blankly inside the thrift store. Frank can see him biting the inside of his cheek. He wonders if Gerard has left the moment, if he’s already in his head writing a hundred stories about the store and its employees and the former owner of every article of clothing on the racks.“What happened to your nose?” Frank asks, just to fill the silence, after a moment of nothing but cold air between them. Gerard’s hand lifts up to swipe blood from one nostril as though he’d forgotten it was there. “I got pushed out of the pit when I tried to follow you. Some dude’s elbow got me right in the face, I guess.”“I didn’t know you followed me out,” Frank says. “I didn’t think you did,” says Gerard. Before he can stop himself, Frank says, “If you’re mad at me or whatever, just fucking tell me. Alright? I’m not doing this, like, passive-aggression shit with any more people in my life.” “No,” Gerard says. “No, I’m not mad, I’m just—”“Yes, yes you totally are,” Frank says. “Don’t lie to me, I fucking hate it when people lie to me.”Gerard runs a hand through his wet, stringy hair and huffs out a sigh. “Okay, fine, fuck, whatever. I’m just—just generally pissed, alright? I just got pushed around for smoking a goddamn cigarette on a public goddamn sidewalk. Which is just fucking bullshit, because what do you people want, total control over every random person on the street? I was only out there at all because you were too busy stage diving to notice the person you brought to the show got a broken nose. But, fuck. Whatever,” he says. “We can just drop it.”“Sorry,” Frank says after a moment. “Sorry for watching the show.” The words sound juvenile even as they leave his mouth. It doesn’t escape Frank and it surely doesn’t escape Gerard, who says, “Jesus Christ, Frank.”There’s a moment of tense silence. Frank’s heartbeat bounces on his eardrums—from anger at being misunderstood or at the fear that none of the little futures he’d imagined with Gerard would come about after tonight. He doesn’t know how things went south so quickly. He can trace back the timeline, the blow-by-blow of the last twenty minutes and the escalating tension, but he can’t quite make sense of it. Still can’t pair the depth of Gerard’s anger with a proportional explanation. “Can I ask you a question?” Gerard says once the moment has passed. “Genuinely?”Frank shrugs. “So, hypothetically. Say you just happened to see that fight but you didn’t know me. Whose side would you be on? Theirs or mine?”It’s not a fucking fair question. Which is why Gerard chose to ask it. He’s trying to make Frank admit that he cares about his values more than his friend, or at least choose who he’d betray. But it’s not that fucking simple. Of course it’s fucking not. And how could Gerard of all people try to trap Frank at the edge of two extremes?“Screw you,” Frank says. “I’m just asking,” Gerard says. “If you saw the fight happening, and you knew what it was about, but you didn’t know me—”“I don’t know you,” Frank says. He pulls away from the wall of the doorway and, as he steps out into the rain, throws over his shoulder, “So you already have your fucking answer.”Frank checks the time when he stumbles into the nearest subway station ten minutes later. It’s only one a.m. Five hours left of night—five hours to sit alone in the dark, waiting for sunrise. ThursdayThe HangoverFrank wakes up sick. Sicker than he’s felt in a while without the churning in his stomach or the pounding behind his eyes precipitated by the late-night decision to take a chance on a questionably old container of pasta or three servings of diner fries. He lurches for the trash can beside his bed, strategically placed for this very purpose. Nothing comes up, but after a few minutes, the racket does have Mom at his door.“Are you sick, honey?” she asks. Which is kind of a no-brainer when it comes to Frank. After almost twenty years you’d think she’d know better than to ask. Water is wet. The Ramones are overrated. Frank is sick. “No,” Frank croaks over the can. Mom hums. “Do you still need a ride to the library today? I’m leaving for work soon, so you’ll have to get up if you do.” He scrubs his face with a hand and pulls it out of the trash. “Yeah.”She nods and turns to leave. “Oh, and when you get up, call your counselor back, okay?”Frank flops down face first on his bed and groans into his sweat-soaked pillow. The LibraryThe Belleville Public Library is old and dusty and usually deserted, which Frank kind of loves, actually. He likes that the library feels private like that. Like that he can read his emails without worrying about some nosy fucking PTA mom looking over his shoulder and ratting him out to the circulation desk for cussing on the library internet. There’s only one email that means anything to Frank when he logs on and deletes all of the other correspondence from Rutgers about registering for fall classes or whatever the fuck. It’s from Tom Keeley. Right now Tom and the rest of Thursday are out in the Midwest somewhere on their fancy Victory Records-funded national tour. Tom’s really cool, to take the time to message Frank. He probably doesn’t have much free time in front of a computer. This is what the email says:
Hi Frank.
Made it to Minneapolis last night. Tour is fucking awesome so far if you ignore all the times geoff has spaced out behind the wheel and drove us into a cornfield. (Three times this month…..seriously this dude needs to see a doctor. And the midwest needs to stop putting roads in the middle of cornfields).
Anyways i wanted to tell you that last night at our St Paul show we ran into Neil. Actually he came to the show on purpose and we all had a drink together. I know what you mean now, how he’s changed and whatnot, because it was fucking weird for him to be drinking beer with the rest of us. Instead of glaring at us from the corner with you, clay, shaun, and whoever else (ha ha kidding…..you guys were always cool.)
The real reason i’m writing, is that Neil sort of asked me to. Or I guess he didn’t ask for an email or anything, but he did ask me to pass along a message. The message is that he’s going to call you soon and he actually has something important to talk about, so don’t hang up right away. Me & tuck tried to get more out of him. I think he is trying to start a band or go solo, and wants to use something he worked on with you. Or something. That’s all he said, but he looked pretty serious. Didn’t sound mad or anything. I know things were weird with you guys at the end but maybe you should give him a shot.
Well gotta go. Thursday headed to Omaha tonight and must keep geoffie alert amidst many many cornfields.
-tom
Frank logs off the computer and goes to hang out in the kids section. The public schools have already started up so it’s deserted on a Thursday afternoon, except for a lady with a baby. She looks at him kind of weird when he lays down on the mat next to one of the activity tables meant for toddlers but she leaves him alone. Frank just suddenly feels dizzy and sick and he needs to be horizontal. The thing is that Tom is right, and things between Frank and Neil were more weird than they were anything else. Fucking tour van. Fucking stupid summer tour that was supposed to be the start of his adult life. Fucking Neil. Maybe the end of their friendship would have been simpler if there had been some singular transgression on either end that caused a falling out in one fell swoop. But it wasn’t like that. It was a lot of little things that compounded over time, and then Neil and Shaun had that fight about whether or not Pencey’d play at that dead bar, and Neil left. With a whimper, not a bang. Frank has a lot to hold against Neil. But he has a lot he once liked about him, and he’s pretty confident Neil has a lot he used to like about Frank. There was a time when Frank used to follow Neil around, like a lost puppy dog begging for treats. Neil would throw Frank a bone and Frank would just glow, and it felt really good. Really fucking good. And it’s not that Frank regrets parting ways with Neil. He knows it was a necessary thing. But sometimes late at night his head cycles through the one million other ways last summer could have gone down, and that’s what bothers Frank. There were reasons Neil couldn’t have stayed in the band. He really fucking hated Alex, for one, and Alex owns Eyeball. Alex is cool. At least Frank thinks so most of the time. Then from the pit Frank will watch Alex hit a stranger with a barstool just to see how they’ll react, and Frank remembers that Neil had his reasons. But at the same time Frank understands the total emotional abandon that lands you at a stranger’s back with a stool in your hands. He gets the need for more, more intensity, more emotion, gets the need to throw yourself at the chaos headfirst. To reclaim the control you can’t get in the pit by surrendering yourself to it willingly. That part of Frank is as firmly rooted in his body as his lactose intolerance or his love for the Misfits. So it makes sense that Neil would need to get away from him. That thought bothers Frank, sometimes. The idea that it wasn’t the situation, or a single bad moment, but Frank himself that was the problem. The part of Frank that helped drive Neil away has always been and will always be there, as immutable as an arm or a leg. Still a phantom even after it’s gone. Real to his mind. The Olive BranchMom picks Frank up an hour later and he’s still fidgety. “You got a call while you were out,” she says when he climbs inside the ancient environmental shock that is her minivan. It’s like Mom knows just what not to say. “A call?” Frank says, completely aware of the way his voice breaks. “Uh-huh,” she says, pulling out of the library parking lot and onto the street. “It kept ringing while I was trying to sleep, so I answered your phone. It was a friend of yours.”He’s almost afraid to ask but he asks anyway. “Neil?” “No,” she says and he feels dumb for assuming that it would be. Now he’s just kind of pissed she touched his phone. “I don’t think I ever met this kid. What was his name? Jeremy?”“Gerard,” Frank says.“That’s right. Friend of yours?”“I don’t know,” Frank says honestly. A moment passes and then Mom says, “Is he… that kind of friend?”Frank groans, “Mom,” but it’s nice that she’s trying, so he tells her, “I don’t know. Not yet. Maybe.”“Well, I wrote down his number if you want to call this boy back. But only if you really want to.” Frank leans his head against the window and closes his eyes. Sometimes he wishes Mom was easier to hate, but he’s too preoccupied with Neil and now Gerard, so he doesn’t think about that.The AskNighttime, and Frank can’t stop staring at his phone. Frank lays in bed, trapped in a fitfulness somewhere between rest and alertness worse than not sleeping at all. His body, exhausted from a full day fighting back nausea and working through vertigo, aches to sleep. But his head spins in circles and holds him hostage right at the brink of nodding off. The second he approaches a total loss of consciousness, the ring of his landline shocks him awake. Time and time again Frank bolts upright only to find the red light on his answering machine dark and unblinking, and by that time the ringing has faded to the back of his mind with all of the other half-dreamt things. He’s gone full Tyler Durden, for real this time. If Tyler Durden’s insomnia-induced psychosis made him hallucinate boring shit like telephone calls instead of Brad Pitt. The night stretches on, impossibly long and unbearable. Frank gives up around two or three. Shoves a live recording of Dad and Paul Plumeri in his Walkman. Lays in bed. Stares at the ceiling. Shivers, even though Mom’s house doesn’t have air conditioning and the air is hotter than Satan’s ball sack as it sticks to Frank’s skin. Thinks about Geoff spacing out and driving the Thursday van into a cornfield. Mom used to drive him around when he struggled to sleep as a kid. That would be nice, to doze off with his head resting on a window to the rumble of the little sedan one of Mom’s boyfriends convinced her to get rid of. A teacher in Hackensack killed herself while Frank was in high school because her schedule was so fucked that she couldn’t sleep. Neil told him about that. She’d taught his brother. Frank should have been nicer to Neil. He should have been nicer to Dana. He should have been nicer to Ralph. Frank thinks about what Gerard’s doing right now, if he’s asleep like Frank should be, or if he’s awake too, tossing and turning, waiting for his phone to ring. Next thing Frank knows he’s standing, holding with one hand the piece of paper where Mom recorded Gerard’s number, his other hand pressing the phone to his ear. The line is ringing. Frank wonders if he dialed Gerard, because he doesn’t really remember doing it, just remembers making the decision to call him and then already having done it. The phone rings. And then someone picks up. “Hello?” The voice is a little sluggish, a little muted. Not from sleep, but like it’s been through a lot. And it doesn’t belong to Gerard, either. “Mikey,” Frank says. He knows he sounds pretty bad. Tyler Durden-ish near the end of the movie and shit. “Hey, um, can I…is your brother there?”Frank hears Mikey shuffle around on the other end and the tail ends of what might be whispers. A scene floats through Frank’s mind of Mikey and Gerard mouthing to each other, Mikey asking if Gerard wants to talk, Gerard vehemently shaking his head no. “Uh,” says Mikey, not meanly or whatever, just Mikey. “Who’s this?”“Frank.”“Frank,” Mikey repeats, probably for Gerard’s benefit. Then there’s more shuffling, and it’s not Mikey who speaks next but Gerard. “Hell of a time to return my call,” Gerard says, and Frank could cry from the total absence of vitriol in his voice. Could just break down in tears that someone almost sounds glad to hear from him. “Yeah,” Frank says. It’s more of a gasp, though, sort of a sob. “Um…”When Frank doesn’t continue, Gerard says, “Frank, um, are you, like, okay?”Not really, Frank doesn’t say. He also doesn’t say sorry I fucked everything up last night. Or hanging out with you this last week was the first time in months that my mind slowed down enough to think. What he says is this: “Do you have any weed?”The ComedownFrank sits on the stoop in front of Mom’s house, waiting for Gerard, a ringing in his ears from the quiet of the night. Everything is still at this hour. It makes Frank paranoid. He picks out all of the sounds he can identify, this game his therapist Sandra used to have him play when he got stressed out. There’s the rhythmic chant of cicadas, the distant hum of cars on a busier road than Frank’s deserted suburban street. He thinks he can hear someone’s music from a few houses down—probably Jake Davis, who Frank went to elementary school with, since Jake’s always up late at night blasting heavy metal from his dad’s detached garage. And droning above it all, drowning out all noise except for the faintest whispers of sound, is the wind. Gerard drives up a few minutes later. “Have you been crying?” he says when he approaches Frank. “Do I look like it?” Gerard shrugs. Stands in front of Frank, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his threadbear hoodie, like he’s afraid to move. “Haven’t cried yet,” Frank says. “Do you have the…?” He doesn’t really want to say the word out loud again. Sighing, Gerard sits down on the steps next to Frank and pulls a joint from his pocket. He holds it out towards Frank but jerks his hand back out of reach when Frank moves to grab it. “This isn’t, like, a weird prank or some kind of test or something,” Gerard says, “right?”“What? No.” Frank squirms a little. “I wouldn’t do that.” “Okay,” Gerard says. “It’s just you’re… you have your whole…edge schtick.”“It’s not a schtick,” says Frank. “Not to me.”The words come out more abrasive than Frank intends them to. He holds his gaze down towards the damp concrete beneath his feet to avoid glimpsing Gerard’s face and seeing the quiet apprehension that it must be showing. His own words from last night echo in his head. How he doesn’t know Gerard. By now it must be clear that Gerard doesn’t know him either. “And yet here I am, at four in the morning, dealing you drugs,” Gerard says without much sympathy.Frank lets the conversation hang there for a moment. Lets himself listen to the wind. Tries to figure out if Jake Davis is listening to Judas Priest or Black Sabbath from what traces of the bassline he can hear. “It’s complicated,” Frank says. “But I didn’t know who else to call.”Without any more questions Gerard nods and hands over the joint. “You ever smoked before? You know what to do? How not to burn it?” “Yeah,” says Frank.Gerard stands up then and lets out a tired breath. The bags under his eyes look much more prominent than the day Frank met him for real, when he first got a good look at the guy who’d been showing up to all of their shows since the end of their summer tour. “Hey, look,” Gerard says, almost as an afterthought, “do you, like, need company right now?” Frank is embarrassed enough that Gerard is seeing him like this at all. He shakes his head. “Right,” Gerard says. “I mean, I should get home to Mikey, anyways. If you need to be alone.”Frank watches Gerard turn away. Before he makes it to the curb, Frank says, “Gerard. Gerard! Hey. I’ll call. Tomorrow.”Gerard nods and Frank thinks he sees through the dim light of the late hour the traces of a smile on his face.Frank also remembers Gerard’s comment from that first night, about how when someone believes in something, it makes you want to believe, too. He wonders if he disappointed Gerard tonight, even if Gerard’s not edge. But he still came, though, didn’t he? Maybe he’ll sleep through the rest of the night and in the morning he won’t feel like a piece of shit. And if tomorrow isn’t as terrible as today, he’ll have Gerard to thank for that.FridayThe ReasonThe pounding in Frank’s head has faded and his eyes don’t threaten to retreat back into his head upon opening for the first time when he wakes up Friday morning. Two marked improvements, though the persisting fogginess between his ears can probably only be waited out. From the weed, maybe. Maybe. Frank stumbles out to the kitchen. It’s light out but entirely quiet in the house. Ralph would have left for Pathmark not long after Frank finally fell asleep and Mom doesn’t work Fridays, which means she’s probably in bed sleeping off last night’s wine hangover. Judging by the half-drank pot of coffee next to the toaster, Ralph’s definitely already gone. A note on the counter contains the word DECAF scribbled next to an arrow pointing lopsidedly to the coffee pot. Frank picks up the note, inspects Ralph’s handwriting, and considers the coffee. It should really just be applesauce for him today, after he ate half a sleeve of Ralph’s Oreos last night and little else for the past twenty-four hours. Coffee will go down as smooth as broken glass on his acidic stomach. He pours a small mug for himself anyways (no use in wasting it). Brings it back down to his basement. Plants it on his bedside table for moral support as he redials the last number he called. This time Gerard picks up. Frank knows it’s him before he even speaks. He’s only really known Gerard a week but there’s something undeniable about the way he breathes. “Frank,” Gerard says.“How’d you know?” “Caller ID,” Gerard says. Mom got Frank’s landline at Delaney Thrift a few years ago when she was dating Joe, the guy who ran off to the Franciscans. Once upon a time it had functional Caller ID but nothing shows up on its screen anymore. “Wow. Shit. Fancy.”“That’s us,” Gerard says. “Money coming out of our ears and shit.” He pauses for a moment. “Hey, look, Frank, I know you called me, but I just wanted to check…you’re alright, right?”“Yeah,” says Frank without hesitation. “Or, I mean—I guess….It’s all just been fuckin’ weird, you know? Like… everything.” Frank sips his coffee and lays down on his bed. “And, you know, I haven’t been sleeping, really.” Gerard makes a noise that’s hard to read over the phone. “Since how long?”“A couple weeks. A month or something. I don’t know.” Frank wishes his phone had a cord to twist around his finger. His hands feel useless, restless. “Since I got back from tour I guess. It’s not a new problem or whatever. It’s just making me kind of crazy. Like, being tired all the time is one thing, but when I really lose it is at night when I can’t turn my fucking head off. You know? Like, did you see that movie Fight Club?”“I know what insomnia feels like, Frank,” Gerard says before Frank can explain every Tyler Durden-esque detail of his last month. “Why do you think I was up when you called last night? Why do you think I’m still at home in bed, and not in my fuckin’ cubicle in the city?”“Oh.” Honestly, Frank had forgotten about Gerard’s real adult desk job, even after everything. “Well, okay, so you know what I mean. The not-sleeping, I know it’s a problem. And I’ve tried everything but nothing works. So….”“So, weed,” says Gerard.Frank leans back on his mattress, twisted up blankets bumpy against his spine. He stares up at the carpeted ceiling and assigns each water stain a number. “My therapist wants me to go on medication,” he says, out loud to another person for the first time since Sandra brought it up a few weeks ago. “Are you gonna do it?” says Gerard. Frank says he doesn’t know. “D’you think I should?”“Don’t know. Kind of on you to decide.” An acute stab of irritation nudges at Frank’s side at Gerard’s non-answer. “That’s all your advice? Like, aren’t you supposed to tell me to take the drugs, because they’re just meds for your brain or whatever?”“I don’t know, dude, I don’t know how I feel about them, is that okay?” Gerard says, his voice echoing some of the annoyance Frank knows shown through on his own, though he sounds tired more than angry. “You don’t have to be edge to feel ambivalent about medication. Like, the world isn’t split up between people who hate the right shit and love the wrong shit. There’s stuff that I won’t touch, and stuff you do even though you’re not supposed to. You know?”Frank is quiet for a while, mostly because he doesn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” Frank says after a few moments of listening to Gerard breathe. The apology is genuine even if he’s not sure, exactly, what it’s for, or even if it’s meant for Gerard in particular. He just needs someone to hear it and believe him, that he is sorry. “Okay, Frank,” Gerard says. “If it’s worth anything, I’m sorry, too. It’s not…” Gerard sighs. “It’s obvious that straight edge means a lot to you, and I’d feel like a real piece of shit if I did something to undermine that. So. I mean. Do you want to go to a show with me?” Frank’s taken aback. “A show?”Gerard explains that there’s a queercore show tonight at a bar in Clifton, and does Frank want to go? “Limp Wrist is playing,” he says. “Limp Wrist!” Frank says, because Limp Wrist is one of best queercore bands out there, but they’re also straight edge, which means that Frank has heard a lot about them. “They’re in Clifton? Tonight?”“Yeah,” says Gerard. “So? Are we going?”Frank considers saying no for a second. Then he considers saying yes. Then he thinks for a minute more and says, almost cautiously, “Can Shaun come too?”“Yeah,” Gerard says after the briefest of pauses, though one that Frank notices. “Sure. I mean, of course. Shows are for everyone.”Frank sees it for what it is: an olive branch, a white flag—the best he could hope for right now. “Okay,” Frank says. “Okay.”The Bill“Dude, how have we never seen them live before?” Shaun says to Frank when they emerge from the pit after Limp Wrist’s set, breathing heavy and soaked in sweat. “Are we just stupid or is there an actual reason?”“Last time they played in Jersey it was the same night as Mariah Carey at Madison Square Garden, remember?” Frank says. They collapse against the wall, away from the crowd enough that the air isn’t so oppressive from heavy breath and hot bodies. “Shit,” Shaun pants. “Your people go fucking hard.” Frank gives him a wide grin. “My people?” He teases, wanting to make Shaun squirm so that he’ll have to say it. “Gay dudes in hardcore. You know it’s true,” Shaun says without giving Frank the satisfaction of looking particularly bothered. “You’re good, right?”“Yeah,” Frank says. “Why?”“Dunno,” Shaun says. “You’ve just looked kind of weird for the past few weeks. I mean, like, the whole band’s been feeling weird since we got back from tour, so I’ve been assuming it’s that. But I just wanted to make double-sure that you’re not, like, wigging out or whatever.”“Nah, I’m fine,” Frank says, but then changes his mind. “Or, well, I don’t know. I mean, yeah, I guess it’s like you were saying. Everything’s been weird since we got back from the tour. Actually it’s been weird since before that.”“Since Neil left?” Shaun fills in. Frank shakes his head, though the fact that Shaun brought up Neil by himself doesn’t escape him. “Since Neil sold out, I think,” Frank says. “I just don’t know how to feel about it. Like, without him and without edge, where would we be, you know?”“Who knows. Who cares? I mean, we gotta keep moving forward for the band, right?” Shaun doesn’t really get why it matters. Right now Shaun is content with straight edge for life, straight edge forever. But every edge kid out there eventually has to come to terms with the enormity of that commitment, whether or not they decide to give it up in the end. Soon Shaun will realize just how long forever is, and then he’ll get it. Frank can wait until then. His best friend might understand parts of him that no one else does, but Frank has other people, people who understand parts of Frank that Shaun just can’t see yet.“Hey,” Shaun continues, “maybe next week once Tim gets back we can start looking for a new lead guitarist. There’s gotta be some shithead cool enough to join the band.” “Okay,” Frank says. “Let’s do it.”They watch the crowd for a second, not talking, just observing. The scene in the bar tonight is one Frank has seen a million times before, at least once a week since he was a kid. Punch-drunk edge dudes stagger onto the stage to throw an arm around the frontman; Gabe Saporta grinds against Mikey Way’s ass in a corner not as dark or as concealed as they think; Gerard slouches against the bar, waiting for Frank where he left him — each a vignette set against the background of a sweaty, pulsing throng of college students, college dropouts, high school kids who snuck out and into the club, chicks with spiked short hair, and convenience store assistant managers, crashing into each other in their New Balances and black shirts. A warmth gathers in Frank’s chest, right above his stomach. It’s hard to tell who’s edge or who isn’t or who once was and isn’t anymore. Tangled up together on the floor, each person becomes a small part of a greater whole. Functionally one. This is Frank’s community. These are his people. His own personal secret society, the next generation’s version of his father’s old-timers and blues clubs. A few minutes later Frank joins Gerard at the bar. “Hey,” he says, loudly, over the music, placing a hand over the warmth of Gerard’s lower back. Gerard gives him a small smile and Frank thinks he feels Gerard shiver beneath his touch, though he’s wearing a sweatshirt in a hot, sweaty bar, so how much sense does that make? “Shaun okay?” Gerard says. Frank shrugs. “He’s cool,” he says. “We were actually, um, talking about finding a replacement for Neil pretty soon.”“Neil,” Gerard echoes. “That’s the old lead guitarist in your band, right? The one who left this summer?”Frank can smell the rum in Gerard’s Coke. Or maybe it’s his mind filling in gaps, making him think that he can smell the liquor because he’s pretty sure it’s there, or maybe he’s smelling the liquor from some other drink. He decides not to care. “Yeah,” Frank says. “I had feelings for him, I think. Like, once upon a time. Never told him or anything, but. You know.” He stares at the crowd again. Pictures himself getting home and his answering machine flashing with a new message. He expects his stomach to fill with dread but it doesn’t. Really he doesn’t feel much at all about talking to Neil except a remote relief at the idea of getting some kind of closure there. “Not anymore, though,” says Frank. “Not since he left. It’s, just, time to move on, you know? For the band and for me.” Gerard looks really thoughtful and it pleases Frank, knowing that he has Gerard’s attention like this. “That sounds like it’ll be good for you, Frank,” Gerard says, Frank’s hand still pressed to his back, Frank feeling every breath Gerard takes, something urgent and fiery hot growing right beneath Frank’s skin.The ActFrank presses Gerard up against the bar and kisses him, right there in the middle of the show, in front of Shaun and the straight edge kids and the bartender and fucking everyone, and he doesn’t give a shit who sees or what they think.“Let’s get out of here,” Frank says, or maybe it’s Gerard who says it, or maybe who said what doesn’t matter at all. Edges“This is it,” Gerard says, a hand making a sweeping gesture in an approximation of grandeur across his dingy bedroom in the basement apartment he shares with his family. “Where the magic happens.”There’s crap everywhere, books and cigarettes and crumpled pieces of paper scribbled over with God-knows-what in Gerard’s handwriting. Old cups and crumb-filled plates stack nearly a foot high on a bedside table, the one farthest from the side of Gerard’s mattress he clearly sleeps on, a shrine to late-night snacks and the distance to the kitchen. Frank thinks he sees a sword, but it’s too buried beneath a mound of laundry to tell for sure. By all accounts Gerard’s room is a shithole, and he does look embarrassed about it. But Frank isn’t in a state to think about stupid, inconsequential things like how many years it’s been since Gerard washed his sheets, or if his pillowcase was yellow when he bought it or acquired that color later on. “When d’you think Mikey’s gonna be back?” Frank says. Gerard, who’s throwing old socks and plastic water bottles off his bed and sweeping crumbs from his mattress to the floor, looks back at Frank. “Not for a while. If ever. Shit,” he hisses after stepping on some unseen sharp object on his floor. Balancing on one leg, Gerard wipes his thumb over his heel. “Fuck. Sorry. I know it’s a fucking disaster in here. Probably not what you were expecting from, like, a….” He puts both feet on the ground and sighs. “Sorry.”They’ve only really known each other for about a week but it still feels strange that tonight is the first time Frank’s been in a space that really belongs to Gerard. Everywhere they’ve met has either been Frank’s turf or in public. But this place—this grimy, dim lagoon of a room—is the sum total of everything Frank has learned about Gerard in the past week. No doubt every carpet stain, old sock, hobbit sword, every whatever has a story. It’s horrible, it’s dark, it’s deep, it’s impossible to sum up. Seeing Gerard’s room makes Frank realize the full scope of the inaccuracy of the image he’d held in his mind before, about Gerard holed up in an artist’s bungalow somewhere. Now he can see that only a bedroom like this could produce a person like Gerard. A bedroom like this is inevitable. Tonight, being in Gerard’s space makes Frank feel more adult than he ever has in his life. “It’s cool,” Frank says, stepping closer when Gerard continues to mess around with his bed. “Hey, Gerard. Hey.”He grabs Gerard’s hand before it can reach for some other piece of junk and pulls it down to his side. Gerard pauses and then, bit-by-bit, relaxes away from his bed. He looks down at Frank. His eyes are big, and underneath how young they make him look, Frank feels grown, grown enough to lean up and kiss him. “I like you, you know?” Frank tells him. “Sure,” Gerard says, and there’s a heaviness in the way he bites his lip, runs a fingernail over Frank’s knuckles, but a softness too. “I know, sure.”They kiss more. When Frank starts tugging at Gerard’s clothes, Gerard pulls back. “Aren’t you guys supposed to not do casual sex?” he says. The question is sudden but the second it leaves Gerard’s throat it’s so startlingly obvious that it takes Frank out of the moment completely. Of course. Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t fuck. Frank hadn’t forgotten the third tenet of straight edge, to turn your back on sex outside of a committed relationship, could never. He and Gerard are most definitely not in a committed relationship. It’s just that the way the night has turned doesn’t feel like it fits the other end of the binary, either. “Is this casual sex?” Frank says in lieu of an answer. Gerard studies him for a careful moment. “You tell me,” he says.“What if I don’t think I can right now?” “Tell me tomorrow morning, then,” Gerard says, and then they’re kissing again, and then their clothes are off, and then they’re on the bed, and then, and then, and then. This thing, the fucking, the intoxication and the rush of connecting with someone so quickly and completely, could be another way Frank’s self-medicating. Not that he’s done a particularly good job at avoiding the other ways, if last night is proof. But it doesn’t feel bad. It doesn’t feel wrong. How is being inside Gerard so different from being inside the pit, bodies slapping against bodies, surrounded by the people he cares about most in the world?If the last week has taught Frank anything, it’s that everyone, from the most hardline edge kid to the freest drinker in the scene, has their medicine. For some it’s drugs and free love. For others it’s faith, ideals, something to believe in. And then there are those in the middle, getting by with a little of both. Gerard comes, and Frank comes. Afterwards they tangle themselves together in Gerard’s messy bed. Gerard strokes the side of Frank’s hair and tells him as many stories as he can think of, and that’s how Frank falls asleep. SaturdayThe AfterwordThe morning comes, and Frank’s okay. “I don’t have an answer for you,” he tells Gerard, who shrugs through the haze of late morning and says that he can have an extension on that deadline. An indefinite deadline, if he needs it, to decide what last night meant for them. They fool around a little more and then Frank leaves. On his walk home, he stops by Dunkin Donuts and grabs a coffee, though he’s not sure he needs more energy. He’s consumed by all of the energy in the world, it feels like. He wants to do a million things, wants to sign up for school and make his family proud and revamp Pencey’s whole sound and find a new guitarist who’s even better than Neil and to ask Gerard to marry him or something if all that other stuff worked out. The feeling won’t last, probably. But he lets it consume him, just for a minute. When Frank gets home to his own basement bedroom, there’s a message on his machine. It doesn’t make his heart pound, though Frank knows who probably left it. He’ll finish this coffee and make lunch. Maybe he’ll make enough food for Mom, too, and as they eat he’ll tell her everything he knows about Gerard. And then, after he leaves a message at Dr. Rava’s office, he’ll return Neil’s call, and maybe they’ll talk.