Sloane, on the other hand, had had more lessons than I’d even really known were options. She could ride horses and ballroom dance, in addition to ballet and tap. She could sail, play tennis, speak conversational French, and, for some reason I’d never been clear on, could play doubles bridge. I had learned to swim at camp, but mostly I just ran. For most of my life, it had been the one athletic thing that I could do well, which was why it was so embarrassing to find myself now limping through the first mile.
I turned up the volume on my iPod, as if this would give me a corresponding surge of energy. It didn’t, but I pushed myself to go faster, even as I was gasping for breath. I was listening to a new mix, complete with embarrassingly motivational name. The mix was filled with the kind of music I listened to but never admitted to—country and eighties pop. It had the same playlist repeating again after the end; my iPod’s loop function was broken, and when it got to the end of a playlist, it just froze. It had been acting wonky ever since I’d left it in the car and an unexpected rainstorm had come through the open roof and drenched it.
I was running a loop near my neighborhood that I’d discovered last year. It took me right along the water, which meant that it was cooler and I would sometimes get a breeze, which I was seriously in need of at the moment. Usually, this was an easy five-mile run, but usually, I wasn’t this out of shape.
I rounded a bend in the road and saw that there was someone running ahead of me. It was a guy, and maybe around my age. . . . He turned his head to adjust the iPod strapped to his arm, giving me a glance at his profile, and I felt my feet stumble and then slow when I recognized it was Frank Porter.
It didn’t look like he’d noticed me. He was back to looking straight ahead, white earbuds in his ears. I slowed even more—I was pretty much just walking with bounce now—and tried to figure out what to do. If I pushed myself, I could run past him, but then I’d have to keep going fast until I could make it home. Also, then Frank would be looking at the back of me unless I really kept up my pace and disappeared from his view. And I had grabbed the first pair of shorts I’d seen in my drawer, and they had GO SH! printed across the back. This was supposed to mean Go Stanwich High, but apparently nobody had realized until we’d all prepaid for them that it looked like GOSH! was written across our butts. But running fast seemed to be my best option if I wanted to keep on this path, unless I dropped to a really slow pace, lagging behind him and hoping he wouldn’t see me, which felt weird and stalkerish.
It seemed like the best solution was just to turn around and run back the way I’d come from. I could do a mile or two nearer to my house, and it wasn’t like this run had been going spectacularly anyway. Because while it had been really nice of Frank to help me with my car, it wasn’t like I wanted to keep struggling to make conversation with him, or for him to feel like he had to run with me when he didn’t want to. One interaction with Frank Porter per summer seemed like the right amount to me.
I turned around just as Frank stopped and knelt to tie his sneaker. He looked over and saw me, lifting his hand to cut the glare, then pulled his earphones out of his ears. “Emily?” he called.
I bit my lip. There was really no way to avoid this now without looking incredibly rude. I pulled my own earphones out and pressed Pause on my playlist. “Hey,” I said, giving him a wave. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, hoping that maybe this had been enough and I could just start running again.
“I thought that was you,” Frank said as he straightened up and headed toward me, dashing the last of these hopes. As he got closer, I could hear that he was a little winded, his breath sounding labored. His hair was dark red with sweat, and he was wearing a faded blue T-shirt that read Tri-State Latin Decathlon . . . Decline if you dare! He was wincing as he walked closer to me. “This is all your fault, you know.”
I just blinked at him for a moment. I had no idea what I’d done, or what he was referring to. “Me?”
He ran his hand over his face and through his hair. “Yeah,” he said. “I seem to remember you said you’d help me learn to run.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again, not sure what to say to this. It wasn’t like he’d found me and asked me to do this. Was I supposed to have tracked him down and offered my running services, or something? “Sorry,” I stammered, as I looked back to the lovely empty stretch of road behind me, wishing I’d turned away a second earlier, or that Frank had just tied his laces more tightly.
He smiled and shook his head, and it sounded like he was getting his breath back. “I’m kidding,” he said. “I’m just so terrible at this.”
I nodded and looked down at the road, at my sneakers on the asphalt, and took a breath. “Well, I should keep—”
“Are you going this way?” Frank asked, pointing in the direction I’d been heading. I didn’t know if I could say no. If I did, I would pretty much be admitting that I was choosing not to run with him.
“Yeah,” I finally said, aware that the answer didn’t require nearly as much time to think about it as I’d given it.
“Me too,” he said. He bent down to tighten his other shoelace and looked up at me. “Want to run together for a bit? Unless I’d slow you down,” he added quickly.
“That’s okay,” I said, then wondered if this response had been rude. “I mean, I’m sure you won’t. I’m not in the best shape myself.”
“Excellent,” Frank said. He nodded ahead, and I started running again, Frank falling into step next to me, groaning a little as he started to match my pace. We were running side by side, with me closer to the side of the road and Frank closer to the center line. We’d only been running for a few seconds before I noticed that he had started to drift nearer to me, so I moved over to the left to compensate. I thought this was just a one-time thing until Frank started to drift toward me again, and when I tried to move over this time, I was now running on the dirt.
“Um,” I said, trying not to cough at the clouds that I was kicking up. “Frank?”
Frank glanced over at me and seemed to realize what was happening. “God, I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe we should switch places?”
“Sounds good,” I said, as I jogged around to run on the outside of him. After we’d been running in silence for a few minutes, I looked over at him, then straight ahead again. I had no idea what the etiquette here was. Should we start listening to our own music again? Or maybe we should just keep running silently next to each other. But wasn’t that kind of weird?
“Bug Juice?” Frank asked. I glanced over at him, surprised, and then I looked down and realized I was wearing the original Broadway cast T-shirt, the one that had been nightshirt-size on me when I’d first gotten it, but now fit me like a regular T-shirt.
“Oh,” I said. “Um, yeah.” I kept on running, Frank keeping pace next to me, and I heard, in the silence that stretched out, that I really needed to give him some kind of explanation; otherwise, it would just seem like I was a really big fan of a play that had closed years ago. “My, um, parents wrote it.” I figured that was all he needed to know; I didn’t have to tell him that the play had been inspired by my experiences, that Cecily, the lead, was based on me. At least, she was in the beginning of the play. She starts out shy, but over the course of it, she becomes confident and daring and brave, finally engineering the coup and takedown of Camp Greenleaf.
Frank’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?” he asked. “That’s so cool. I’m pretty sure I saw a production of it. I would have been like twelve or something. . . .” I nodded. This wasn’t that surprising. Between the Broadway run and the endless regional and community theater productions, most people had at least some familiarity with the play. I braced myself for the inevitable follow-up question. “Have they written anything else?”
I looked to the road ahead for a moment before answering. This was the problem, I’d learned, with sudden and unexpected success. My parents had been writing plays for ten years before Bug Juice made it to Broadway, and they’d written plays since.
But nothing had been as big a hit. It might have been partially my parents’ fault for following up their crowd-pleaser about kids at summer camp with an incredibly depressing play about a suicidal country-and-western singer. “They’re actually working on something now,” I said, happy that I could answer like this, without having to go into details about their less-successful plays that very few people had heard of.
“Oh yeah?” he asked. He looked over at me, and I could hear that his breath was starting to get labored again.
I nodded. “It’s about Tesla.” Frank nodded, like this meant something to him. “You know who that is?” I asked, so surprised by this I didn’t stop myself.
“Sure,” Frank said, “He was a genius. Responsible for stuff like X-rays and radar. Way before his time.” I nodded, realizing that for a moment I’d forgotten who I was talking to. He might have been red-faced and struggling to talk, but this was still Frank Porter, who was going to be in the running for valedictorian next year. “Can we,” he gasped, and I could hear how ragged his breathing was. “Can we just maybe walk for a bit?”
“Sure,” I said quickly. I had been feeling pretty winded myself, and while I was in better running shape than Frank, I was still struggling. We slowed to a walk, Frank taking in big gulps of air.
“Sorry about that,” he said when he’d gotten his breath back, wiping his sleeve across his face. “I’m probably holding you up. Feel free, if you need to go faster.”
“It’s okay,” I said, then realized a moment later that I could have taken the out he was giving me and gone ahead on my own, with no hard feelings. But I could actually have used some walking time myself, even though I knew from experience how hard it was to start running again if you’ve been walking for too long. But right now, my legs felt like they were made of lead, and I knew it didn’t seem likely I could start running again, not without a break.
Frank lifted up the bottom of his T-shirt and dried his face with it, and I felt my feet tangle. Frank Porter, for some reason, was in incredibly good shape—he was thin, but with really defined stomach muscles, his mesh shorts sitting low on his hips. I swallowed hard and looked away quickly, trying to concentrate on walking in a straight line. The second I got home, I had to tell Sloane—
Except, of course, that I couldn’t. At least, not yet.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” Frank said after we’d been walking for a few minutes. I glanced over at him, trying to see the person he’d been not that long ago, Frank Porter, the nice class president, not the secretly ripped guy walking next to me. I nodded, even though it had been my experience that when someone asks you if they can ask something—instead of just asking—it means it’s going to be a hard question to answer. “The other night, at the Orchard,” he said. He looked away from me and shook his head. “I’m really sorry if this is intruding,” he said. “I just keep thinking about it, for some reason. But when I drove you to get gas . . .” He looked back at me, and I could tell he was trying to figure out how to put this. “Were you by yourself?”
I felt my cheeks flood with heat, and I knew it had nothing to do with the running. So Frank had noticed that I was there, all alone, like a huge loser. “Not that I wasn’t happy to drive you,” he added quickly. “Seriously, I didn’t mind at all. I guess I was just wondering.”
I gave him a tight smile, then looked ahead to the road, trying to figure out what to do, wishing with everything that I had that I’d just forced myself to keep running when he’d given me the opportunity to go. Could I just leave? Did I have to answer this question? What would happen if I just started running home? It wasn’t like we were friends, after all. And then, suddenly, I realized that there was another option—I could tell him the truth.
Maybe it was because we weren’t friends, or because I knew I would probably not see Frank Porter again this summer, but I found myself nodding. “Yeah,” I said. “It was . . .” I let out a breath, trying to figure out how to put this. “Do you know Sloane Williams?”
“Of course I know Sloane,” Frank said, which I’d been expecting. “You two are kind of a package deal, right?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. I realized I hadn’t told anyone about this yet, and didn’t have a practiced explanation. But for whatever reason, I had a feeling that Frank would be willing to wait until I figured it out—maybe because of all the open forums I’d seen him moderate, standing patiently in the auditorium with his microphone while some stoner stumbled through a grievance about the vending machines. “Well . . . she left at the beginning of the summer. I don’t know where she went, or why. But she left me this list. It’s . . .” I stopped again, trying to figure out how to describe it. “It’s this list of thirteen things she wants me to do. And going to the Orchard was one of them.” I glanced back at Frank, expecting him to look confused, or just nod politely before changing the subject. I didn’t not expect him to look thrilled.
“That’s fantastic,” he enthused. “I mean, not that Sloane is gone,” he added quickly. “I’m sorry about that. I just mean that she left you something like this. Do you have it with you?”
“No,” I said, looking over at him, thinking that this should have been obvious, since I was running. “Why is it fantastic?”
“Because there has to be more to it than that, right?” he asked. “It can’t just be the list. There has to be a code, or a secret message . . .”
“I don’t think so,” I said, thinking back to the thirteen items. They had seemed mysterious enough already to me without needing to go looking for extra meanings.
“Will you take a picture and send it to me?” he asked, and I saw he was serious. “If there’s something else in there, I can tell you.”
My first response was to say no—it was incredibly personal, and plus, there were things like Kiss a stranger and Go skinny-dipping on the list, and those seemed much too embarrassing to share with Frank Porter. But what if there was something else? I hadn’t seen anything myself, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t. Rather than telling him yes or no, I just said, “So I guess you really like puzzles.”
Frank smiled, not seeming embarrassed about this. “Kind of obvious, huh?”
I nodded. “And at the gas station, you practically took over that guy’s word search.”
Frank laughed. “James!” he said. “Good man. I know, it’s a little strange. I’ve been into them for years now—codes, puzzles, patterns. It’s how my brain works, I guess.” I nodded, thinking this was the end of it. I’d shared something, he’d shared something, and now we could go back to running. But a moment later, Frank went on, his voice a little hesitant, “I think it started with the Beatles. My cousin was listening to them a lot, and told me that they had secret codes in their lyrics. And I became obsessed.”
“With codes?” I asked, looking over at him. We weren’t even walking fast any longer. Strolling would probably be the word for what we were doing, just taking our time, walking side by side. “Or the Beatles?”
“Well . . . both,” Frank acknowledged with a smile. “And I got Collins into them too. It was our music when we were kids.” He nodded to the road ahead. “What do you think?” he asked. “Should we try running again?”
I nodded, a little surprised that he wanted to do this, since he’d really seemed to be struggling. But this was Frank Porter. He’d probably be training for a marathon by the end of the summer. We started to run, the pace only slightly slower than what it had been before.
“God,” Frank gasped after we’d been running for another mile or so, “why do people do this? It’s awful and it never gets any easier.”
“Well,” I managed, glancing over at him. I was glad to see that he was red-faced and sweaty, since I was sure I looked much the same. “How much have you been running?”
“Too much,” he gasped.
“No,” I said, taking in a breath while laughing, which made me sound, for an embarrassing moment, like I was choking on air. I tried to turn it into a cough, then ask
ed, “I mean, how long?”
“Never this long,” he said. “This—is too long.”
“No, that’s your problem,” I said, wishing that this could have been a shorter explanation, as I was getting a stitch in my side that felt like someone was stabbing me. “Running actually gets easier the longer distances you cover.”
Frank shook his head. “In a well-ordered universe, that would not be the case.” I looked over at him sharply. He’d said the first part of this with a funny accent, and I wondered if maybe we should stop, that maybe he’d pushed himself too hard for one day. Frank glanced back at me. “It’s Curtis Anderson,” he said.
This name meant nothing to me, and I shook my head. But then I remembered the CD that had slid out from under the passenger seat of his car. “Was that the CD you had the other night?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “The comedian. That’s his catchphrase. . . .” Frank drew in a big, gasping breath. He pointed ahead of us, three houses down. “There’s my house. Race you?”
“Ha ha,” I said, sure that Frank was kidding, but to my surprise, a second later, he picked up his pace, clearly finding reserves of energy somewhere. Not wanting to be outdone—especially since I was supposed to be the expert here—I started to run faster as well. Even though every muscle in my body was protesting it, I started to sprint, catching up with Frank and then passing him, but just barely, stumbling to a stop in front of the house Frank had pointed at.
“Good . . . job,” Frank gasped, bent double, his hands on his knees. Not having the breath to speak at the moment, I gave him a thumbs-up, and then realized what I was doing and lowered my hand immediately.
I straightened up, stretching my arms overhead, and got my first look at the house we’d stopped in front of. “This house is amazing,” I said. It looked like something out of a design magazine—pale gray, and done in a modern style that was pretty unique for the area, which tended to favor traditional, especially colonial-style, houses.