Do You Like What I Have Of My Book So Far?
the day Frankie is born isn't a special day, not in the good way. It's a not a time to rejoice, not a time to celebrate and smile and laugh, like most imagine. To cry with joy and think of her name. Instead, it is a day with teeth clenched around a rough, scratchy dish-rag and a nude, misshapen, nasty mother, who Frankie never learns to like.
Her name is Joanna, and she is a huge woman, not fat, but full somehow, tall and wild and dangerous, which is why Frankie's father takes interest in her twenty years ago, lures her into his man cave and taunts her with a tight muscle shirt. Joanna cannot resist, because she is ugly, an ugly woman with beady eyes and a wide mouth and a straight, boring nose, and so when this man, James, takes interest in her, flirts this way, Joanna falls up to her shoulders in love.
In the morning, after they have done the thing that ruins their lives, James slinks out of bed, pulls his pants up and grabs a soda, popping open the cap and awakening the Sleeping Un-Beauty, who lets the sheets slide off and expose her naked shoulders and smiles a wan smile.
"You don't have to go." Joanna says, disguising her pleading as indifference, or exhaustion, rubbing her eyes awake and sweeping a hand through her dirty curls, as if that would make her slightly more appealing, convince him to stay.
James leans against the deep purple wall of Joanna's room and sips his Coke, peering up at whatever there is on the ceiling, or he is just trying to escape talking to Joanna, the Ugly Girlhe now regrets. He was too drunk last night, wasted and blurry and unthinking.
"Don't go." Joanna says it differently this time, not disguising her desperate tone now. She doesn't smile, but watches him closely, her beady eyes smaller because she is tired, her eyes puffy, and red blotches cover parts of her cheeks, because she has a skin condition. James still says nothing, but he crushes the now empty can between his fist with an effortless crunch and moves to the kitchen, which Joanna can still see from her bed, and throws it in the trash, because he is a prick, Joanna later tells Frankie, and doesn't recycle. Joanna is too tired to correct him, too worried of him leaving her, because all an Ugly Girl like her has is a dumb man who will take her flaws and all.
But James is no dumb man, and makes the escape when he can.
"I'll call you later. I'll stop by." He says, his pale duck-fluff hair and blue eyes lying, deceiving, cheating. Though some part of her yells a warning, that her heart is broken and that this is a hopeless lie, Joanna lights up from the inside and smiles her slow smile at him, gives him a quick and still desperate peck on the cheek and watches him leave.
"I love you." She says, but he is already gone.
Frankie is old now, eighteen, and smiling, enjoying the freedoms of adulthood, though she has been on her own since she was twelve, since she could remember, really, because even at home, Frankie, who is me, was always alone, at least in spirit.
In an old house in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Frankie grew older, grew out of the lies her mother told her and grew out of the Mother-Knows-Best stage, grew out of worshiping her black-hearted mother and the precious ground she walked on. She even grew out of despising her father, because he didn't abandon her, he abandoned Joanna, and Frankie has done the same thing, so she can't blame him.
Frankie, me, the girl who is part the Ugly Girl her mother was and part the handsome man her father was. I am tall, a Moose, a Lumberjack, Frankie Quinn, with a boring face but not boring hair, which is long and silky and blonde, not platinum or golden but somewhere in the middle, a darker shade than her fathers feathery tresses, as her mother has reported, but not her mothers pale brown.
Frankie, who is me, is standing in the back of the school building, not smoking like the cool kids and not chatting like the preps, but staring into the grey sky, with deep splotched clouds the color of stopped smoke, dark and ugly and reeking of storm.
I watch a cool kid stomp out a cigarette and look my way, grin and laugh and punch his buddies, look at the tall girl and her friendless state. I don't turn around the corner, don't move, but stand my ground and give the prick a lazy nod and my mothers slow, Devil-May-Care smile and he quickly looks away. Something about me is intimidating. Maybe it is the fact that I can pin them in P.E, or kick their asses at any sport of their choosing. I'm not a pretty girl, I'm not the excessively smart girl, I'm not the overachiever or the social climber. I'm the athlete, and people know this, and when I'm caught doing anything, leaving class I forgot homework for, for anything, the thing they say is, "Oh, Frankie Quinn, the track star. You won state for the school. Keep up the good work, you
young lady!" as if, because I run, I've achieved some level of sainthood, that I'm above the law.
