“Not yet, not here,” he’d said. “First, let me do everything I’ve been thinking about all summer. To you.”

And so she’d let him. With her arms around his shoulders, he’d explored every last inch of her there. And even now, after they’d ruined it all, Frankie remembered that it was the most solid thing that she’d ever held on to her whole life through.

TWELVE

Ezra

Ezra found Frankie on the floor of the ladies’ room. Her eyes were closed, and she was leaning against the wall, and for a moment, he worried she was unconscious.

“Frankie,” he whispered and nudged her shoulder. “Frankie!”

Her eyes fluttered open, and he squatted down to her level.

“What happened? Are you ok?”

Frankie inhaled and looked upward toward the flickering halogen lights. Then her mouth pointed downward in her trademark frown, and a look of disgust washed over her face.

“Ew. Am I on the bathroom floor?” she said. “I got a little dizzy, I guess.”

Ezra pushed himself upright and extended his hand, which she accepted with surprisingly little reluctance. When they were both on their feet, Frankie wobbled a bit and her hands landed against his chest.

“Whoa, ok, come on, I got you. Let’s get you some water,” he said.

Ezra felt her hesitate, and he wasn’t sure if it was because she was going to spurn his help or because they were close enough to feel intimate. He supposed that both things were akin to the same feeling: even Frankie would tell you that she too often panicked at the first sign of emotional surrender. He gazed down at her while she steadied herself. No, that wasn’t fair. Not the first sign. But at the first real sign of emotional surrender, at the most honest sign.

Of course he remembered what had happened here in this dank, dingy bathroom, how he’d been going crazy all summer, delicately trying to get to know everything there was to know in the Frankie Harriman oeuvre without terrifying her and scaring her off. It was obvious to him even back then that he had to proceed carefully, that he had to tiptoe right up to the line that she had drawn for whatever romantic criteria she concocted for herself. Though it didn’t occur to him until much later that he was risking his own heart as much as he risked hers.

That summer, they spent every night on the phone—she always called him to incur the long-distance charges, and what started out as late-night check-ins in their childhood bedrooms when their mothers were asleep soon became conversations over dinner or time spent watching sitcom reruns with the phone held to their ears, neither one of them saying much, just laughing at the same jokes, groaning at the clunkers. Frankie had never seen Cheers or Night Court because she didn’t watch much TV as a kid, she’d told him, so Ezra made sure that Thursday nights were appointment TV.

When he got back on campus—he took the train up by himself because his mother had an oncology appointment in Center City—he’d dropped his bags, and before even unpacking, he went to find her. As if he literally couldn’t wait another beat, another minute, without touching her, without inhaling her. For Ezra, Frankie Harriman was like a full-body infection: once he felt it, there was no way to ignore the way it pulsed through his veins. She wasn’t in her room and she wasn’t in the library, so he’d walked to the bookstore in case she was loading up on supplies, but she wasn’t there either. He checked Laila’s room and then April’s, and he poked his head in to see Gregory, who was sharing a double with a transfer kid from Michigan State named Connor. Gregory, who’d spent the summer at an internship in Houston, bear-hugged him and said, “I’d try Lemonhead, but give me a sec, and I’ll head there with you. It’s five o’clock somewhere.” Gregory was always full of those little idioms, like he carried a quote book around with him.