Frankie exhaled outside the athletic complex. She knew, at the very least, where she’d been at one point last night: she had the Polaroid beside the pool. In college, shortly after their first Christmas break together junior year, Ezra’s mom called and said that her scans were looking uncertain, that the doctors needed to run more tests. Frankie had just nailed a spin at Abel Rink during those skating lessons he’d made her take, and she, high on euphoria, had swung by his room with hoagies and Diet Cokes, when she found him sitting on the floor, the phone in his lap, his face in his hands. That he’d been crying was obvious, and Frankie was surprised to find that she didn’t mind. She’d never been a particularly good caretaker, mostly because she’d had no one to tend to, but also because she was so often in self-preservation mode herself. But she found Ezra’s vulnerability, at least in that moment, endearing. She found that she loved him more for it, and this revelation startled her. Frankie had always assumed that a hardened exterior was the only way to get through the day-to-day; she’d frankly assumed that it was the only way for anyone to love her. But here was Ezra, his figurative guts on the floor of his dorm room, and she wanted nothing more than to open up his whole heart and to open up hers too.

“Come on,” she said finally, as she sung him a bit of “Summer of ’69” (it was stuck in her head from the rink, and she was humming it under her breath before she realized what she was doing), and they then sat in silence long enough for the hoagies to warm and the cheese to congeal. She breathed in and out with him; she implored him to exhale. “Let’s go do something nuts.”

Nuts was a relative term, she realized today, as she swung the door open to the fitness complex. Frankie was still getting her bearings back then, still calibrating how far she could push herself into rebellion. A couple of years ago, she found herself in a Paris hotel with a rooftop pool. Night Vixen was still out doing God knows what with God knows who, but Frankie had called it an early night. She suspected she was getting an ulcer, from either the stress of touring or the stress of managing the world’s top female act who also had the maturity of twelve-year-old girls or the stress of eating shit food on the road for nine months. Or maybe all of them. So she slipped out of her jeans and hoody (standard tour uniform) and into the hotel robe, and then out the door of her room, and pressed the elevator up button. It was well past midnight, and she was the only one there, on the roof with a full view of Paris. In the distance, she could see the Eiffel Tower. It was magnificent. She dropped the robe and dived into the pool headfirst, naked. And when she finally surfaced, the first thing—the first person—she thought of was Ezra.