Nothing Read online

  “Don’t mind me,” Dad says, frowning. He thinks she’s leaving because he came in.

  “Oh no!” Frankie says, trying to sound like she isn’t. “My dad said I had to be home at—whoa!” She’s blinking at her phone. “Five thirty.”

  Dad looks at his watch. “It’s six fifteen.”

  I stand up, too—Frankie gets in trouble if she’s really late, which this is on the brink of being—and help her get her stuff together. Then we hug and she goes tearing out of the house. Usually I go tearing out with her; [first semicolon! I don’t really understand what they do] sometimes I even go all the way to her house, which is only four blocks away but uphill. Today, though, I don’t. It’s because of Nothing. I’m kind of having fun. Plus, I want to write about how I look.

  Frankie Tries to Keep Her Parents Happy and Doesn’t Exactly Succeed

  Frankie was in the doghouse. It wasn’t the worst place to be—it wasn’t, for instance, like being grounded or defunded (that’s what her parents called no allowance) or having her phone taken away. The doghouse was just a place of disapproval. But disapproval, Frankie knew, could grow into something bigger. Disapproval was a building block of trouble. Right now, at the dinner table, her mom and dad were being overly polite to her. It was a bad sign. She would have to start doing her homework the second she finished dinner—that would soften them up.

  “Can I have some more salad?” she asked strategically. Her mom loved her more when she ate vegetables.

  “Sure, honeybun,” her mom replied, scraping back her chair.

  “She can get it,” said her dad in a friendly yet warning voice.

  Frankie took the hint. “Yeah, Mom, I’ll get it.” She took her bowl to the kitchen and filled it with salad.

  “So what were you and Char up to this afternoon?” her mom asked as she returned to the dining room.

  “That took so long,” added her dad. Her mom shot him a don’t-be-a-hardass look and turned back to Frankie.

  “Nothing,” answered Frankie truthfully. She tried to think of something to add. Conversations were the key to parental happiness. For a second, she considered telling them Charlotte’s idea. But no. They’d want to read it. “We did some homework, but I have more. We talked about this dumb book Char read. We looked at some pictures. You know.” This, she could tell from their faces, was not an impressive list. She searched her brainpan for further unclassified information. “Ms. Barbaneri said today that most people in the world think that the United States bombed the two towers itself. You know, the 9/11 towers.”

  “That is the most ridiculous misconception ever,” her dad began.

  “She wasn’t saying she believed it. She was saying that most of the rest of the world does,” explained Frankie hurriedly. She didn’t want him going off on Ms. Barbaneri, who was nice.

  “I know, I know, but it’s a completely skewed vision of the reality of the United States,” her father said, his voice rising. “It’s just that these people have no tradition of democracy or transparency, no government worthy of the name, so this kind of moronic idea gains currency among an uneducated populace.”

  “But, you know, it’s sort of, um, a compliment,” Frankie said. “Because it’s like they think we’re, like, evil magicians or something.”

  “It’s not a compliment!” her dad said. “Not when they use it as an excuse to kill innocent people!”

  “That’s not what I meant,” began Frankie.

  But now her mom interrupted. “Tommy. What I think Frankie meant was that it’s a compliment that they think our government is so powerful that it could sustain a conspiracy like that. Is that what you were saying, honey?”

  Frankie nodded. Forget it.

  There was a silence.

  “How was English?” asked her mom. “Did she control the class today?”

  Frankie winced. “Sort of.”

  “Do you want me to call? I can call.” Her mom looked at her searchingly.

  Frankie shrugged. “It’s okay. It was a little better today.” It had, actually, been a nightmare, with Miss Mathers holding her hands over her ears and squeaking, “Ooh, it’s too noisy, ooh, my head.” What a moron. She should just tell Chris and Chris to shut the hell up. Or send them out of the room or something.

  Still, she didn’t want her mom to call. Frankie was a hundred percent sure—no matter what anyone said—that Miss Mathers would find out it was her mom who complained. And once she found out, Miss Mathers would start making little comments like, “Frankie, isn’t all this noise terrible?” Or, “Chris, you need to apologize to Frankie for disturbing her.” Because underneath the ooh-ooh squeaking, Miss Mathers hated them all. Hated them, as in would love to kill them with her bare hands. Every day, her class was mayhem. Out of control. No one learned anything. Miss Mathers dealt with that by telling herself it wasn’t her fault—her students were animals; they were unteachable. But if she ever had even the slightest chance of turning the mayhem against someone other than herself, she’d take it. In a heartbeat, even if it was the weirdest, saddest kid in class, like OCD Luis or Raven (also known as Raven Nuts) because at least then, it wouldn’t be her.

  Frankie knew she was not a likely candidate for being turned against. She was a little popular, but not so popular that she was secretly resented. Still, even if just a few of them turned against her, it would be bad. Especially if two of the few were Chris and Chris.

  “Really, I’d be glad to call,” her mother said again.

  “No. Thanks. But no,” Frankie said. She smiled at her mother. “Thanks anyway. I’d better do the rest of my stuff.” She stood.

  “What do you have?” her father asked casually.

  “Just a little bit of reading and some notes,” she answered, also casually.

  “Like, how much reading?”

  “Like, a chapter.”

  “Like, how long is this chapter?”

  “Like, sixteen pages.”

  “That’s a lot. Do you really think that spending two-and-a-half hours at Charlotte’s was the best use of your time?”

  “Probably not,” answered Frankie.

  “So?” asked her father.

  “She gets it, hon,” said her mom. “Why don’t we just let her do her work?”

  Thank you, Mom, Frankie said silently, moving toward her computer. And thank you, Dad, for pointing out my total irresponsibility, because otherwise I might have thought I was doing something good by starting my homework now. Jesus Christ. A whispered conversation arose behind her. Her mom was trying to defuse her dad. Good luck with that, Mom, thought Frankie.

  “Are you sure you’re really learning what you’re supposed to be learning with those headphones on?” her dad asked.

  Frankie took the headphones off and continued reading.

  “It was a question,” her dad said. “Not an order.”

  “Okay. I took them off.”

  Her father looked almost helpless for a second. “Okay.” Then he turned and went to sit in front of his own computer, across the room.

  Frankie read. Without governments to keep order, Hobbes believed that there would be a war of every man against every man. Hobbes called the agreement by which people gave up individual rights in exchange for law and order, the social contract. “Hobbes,” she wrote, “invented the social contract.” Invented was the wrong word. Oh well. She knew what she meant.

  Far off, she could hear her mother doing something quiet in the kitchen. From across the room came the dry tapping of keys.

  Otherwise, nothing.

  You want Nothing, Char, come to my house. This house is the capital of Nothing.

  It wasn’t like she wanted other parents, Frankie thought. Her parents were fine—her mom was great, and her dad was kind of neurotic but basically a good guy. You average that out and get fine. But it was so quiet.

  It was like being an only child.

  Frankie was not an only child. Put everyone together, and she was the youngest of five. Putting everyon
e together had been a big problem, though. Frankie’s mother and father had been married to other people when they fell in love. In fact—this part had been completely breezed over when Frankie was little—they had been neighbors. The two families had been close friends: Frankie’s mom, Sharon, and her first husband, Jasper, along with their two daughters, Lucy and Cate, had had barbeques and picnics and birthday parties with their neighbors, Tom and Bix, and their two boys, Leland and Max. Frankie had first gotten wind of this aspect of her parents’ life during a major blowup between Leland and her dad when she was about seven. She couldn’t remember what they’d been arguing about, but she remembered Leland screaming, “You want me to spell it out for you, Dad? Here you go: B-E-T-R-A-Y-A-L! Got that? Betrayal.” Frankie, two rooms away at her little art table, carefully wrote out the letters. Cate, sitting beside her at the table, glanced over at Frankie’s paper.

  “You wanna know what it means, Love Child?” Love Child was something Cate called her when her parents weren’t around.

  “Shut up, Cate,” said Lucy, doing homework at the counter.

  “Shut up yourself,” snapped Cate. “She’s going to find out sometime.”

  Lucy sighed. “Don’t be mean about it, though, okay? It’s not her fault.” Lucy was always nice. Weirdly Christian, but nice.

  “I’ll be a lot nicer about it than Lee would be,” said Cate. Which was almost certainly true. Leland was scary-nervy. Sometimes he was fun, but you could never tell when he’d go too far, laugh too loud, do something too crazy. He said things that everyone pretended he hadn’t.

  “He’s just angry, honey,” Frankie’s mom had said once.

  “But I didn’t do anything,” moaned Frankie, still crying. He’d made fun of her ballerina costume—he’d called her the capitalist fairy Fuckall in the Ballet of the First-World Pigs.

  “No, you didn’t,” her mom agreed. “I did.”

  Everyone was relieved when Leland left for college, and even though he didn’t stay in College #1 or College #2, he didn’t come back home, either. Frankie was glad. But then Lucy went away to college, and Frankie wasn’t glad about that. She missed Lucy’s niceness, the way she did Frankie’s hair in French braids, the way she patiently led her through cat’s cradle and origami and other mysteries. But the main reason Frankie missed Lucy was that she was left alone with Cate, the Queen of Mean, and Silent Max.

  Cate wasn’t like Leland. She didn’t yell or laugh too loud or get wild. She just waited. She waited until you were weak, or you had made a mistake, or you had claimed too much—and then she pounced on you and ripped you apart. Mostly, she pounced on Frankie’s mom. Sometimes on Frankie’s dad. As often as she could, on Frankie. Almost never, on Silent Max.

  When she was younger, Frankie thought Cate left Max alone because she liked him best, but later, she decided it was because there wasn’t enough to pounce on. He never claimed anything, and if he made a mistake, he was so calm about it that Cate was left without any pain to make worse. One time he had been carrying a full pot of hot coffee through the kitchen when Frankie’s aunt Grace had opened the refrigerator door right in front of him. He had tripped over her and broken the coffeepot inside the refrigerator, so that hot coffee flooded over everything. He stood there, dripping coffee and blood (he’d cut himself on the coffeepot), and all he said was, “Whoa. What a mess. Sorry.” Then he’d calmly wrapped up his hand and cleaned the inside of the refrigerator, while everyone else screamed and ran around. When he was done, he unwrapped his hand and said, “Uh. I think I might need stitches.” Twelve, to be exact. And he wasn’t trying to keep calm. He just was calm.

  He’d been the last to go, right when Frankie was about to start high school. She hadn’t really expected to miss him, because he was, after all, Silent Max. He didn’t say much or, as far as she could see, do much. But once she was at Arteaga High, she found out that he’d had a secret life. He wasn’t one of the popular kids, but people had liked him. Of course, they weren’t her crew; they were weirdos and music nerds, but even a few cool kids had acknowledged her because of Max. “You’re McCullough’s sister?” a hot junior had said, first week of her freshman year. He wiggled his eyebrows. “Not bad.” Frankie had practically fainted. He’d never said anything to her again, but it had been a nice ten seconds.

  And at home, at least there had been someone else around, another kid. Sometimes they’d made faces at each other when Dad was freaking, quick little oh-my-god faces. She missed it.

  It was strange, too, how much quieter the house was without Silent Max. For two people who’d been so overwhelmed with passion that they’d destroyed six entire lives to be together, her mom and dad were incredibly dull. It wasn’t that they didn’t love each other anymore—Frankie caught them smooching all the time, which was kind of gross but reassuring. It was more like they had had enough excitement for a lifetime. Frankie snuck a glance at her father, bathed in blue computer light. He seemed mesmerized by the Excel worksheet on his screen. This is what he likes, Frankie thought. This is his big reward for all that craziness: control and quiet and everything being the same all the time.

  Save me.

  She turned back to her textbook and tried to focus. The philosopher John Locke maintained a more positive view of human nature, believing that people could learn from experience and improve themselves. You go, John. Frankie underlined learn from experience and improve themselves. More optimistic than whatsisname. Frankie looked at the previous paragraph—Hobbes. Hey! Calvin and Hobbes! Whoops. Concentration breakdown. Frankie pressed her hands on either side of her head to hold the information in. Hobbes: people are so shitty they shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions. Locke: people can get less shitty, so they should be allowed to make decisions. Got it. She decided she was a Lockean. Lockite? She liked the positive attitude: People can get less shitty. Heck—she thought of school—they’d better get less shitty. Frankie looked down at herself. I’d better get less shitty, too. Change? Gladly. Bring on those learning experiences. Bring on that self-improvement. Yeah, right. She had to bring them on herself. She looked at her textbook without seeing it. Tomorrow, she resolved. Tomorrow I’ll talk to Kellen instead of being a tongue-tied lame-o freak when he’s around. Ta-da! I will be less shitty, starting tomorrow! Pleased with herself, she looked over at her father and his glowing worksheet. Okay, so she’d die of boredom if she were him, but at least he had gone for it once. He and her mom both. They could have stayed married to Jasper and Bix, but they’d taken the nuclear option, and now they had the incredibly boring lives they’d always dreamed of. Maybe not so hot for Jasper and Bix. But for Frankie’s parents, it had been good. They’d taken action and improved their lives. They’d done something.

  So will I.

  Take that, Char. You Nothing-ist.

  “Wow,” murmured her father, staring in fascination at his worksheet.

  NOTHING

  So I never got around to saying what I look like because right after Frankie left, Maia H. got back to me and fuck me, it was the whole page we were supposed to do for math. So I got on that, and I swear to God I’d understand a lot more if I sat somewhere else. I had to call Maia H. halfway through, but like I said, she’s really nice and she didn’t mind.

  “Look,” she says, super-patiently, “look at the formula ABC equals b times h times one-half. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say, but not like I mean it.

  “Do it. While I’m here. Plug in the numbers and tell me what you get.” God, she’s a saint.

  I plug in some numbers. “Six?”

  “Right,” she says. “Now put that in c over 2r equals h over a.”

  Ohhh. Oh, I get it. I say this.

  “Put the numbers in,” she says. “I’ll wait.”

  I put the numbers in. “A equals eighteen?”

  “But you gotta divide it, remember? ’Cause you divided out the two from 2r.”

  “Aah, right. Nine.”

  “Right.”

  “Oh
my god, you’re a saint, Maia. Thank you so much, thank you—”

  She’s such a saint that she doesn’t even want to hear about how great she is. “Call me if you need more help,” she says, and hangs up.

  Maybe she’s religious or something. Maybe she’s helping the meek—that would be me—because god told her to. Whatever. I love you, Maia.

  After that I had to be Dad’s servant while he made dinner. Dad likes cooking, but what he really likes is telling other people to bring him the lemons and chop those onions and wash off this spatula while he stands at the stove and stirs stuff. Am I making him sound like a dick? He’s not. He’s actually kind of noble because he’s a lawyer for juvenile offenders, which means he spends most of his time with complete assholes, trying to save their asshole lives. He doesn’t talk about it much because he’s not allowed to, but every once in a while, he says something like “Do you know a kid named Brendan Scofield?” I say yeah, and he says, “Don’t ever eat anything he gives you.” And then, for the rest of my life, I can’t stop staring at Brendan, wondering, What the hell did you do?

  Dinner was Dad’s famous fart pasta with broccoli and garbanzo beans, which I can’t believe I eat even knowing what happens. My brother, Ollie—twelve, disgusting—eats tons of it on purpose. He starts farting right at the table, which is so gross I can’t even stand it. “Why didn’t you stop after me, Mom?” I moan. “Why didn’t you quit while you were ahead?”

  “I was talked into it,” she says. “Your father dazzled me with his charm, and I lost my mind.”

  My dad farts.

  “Possibly I was gassed,” she says. Ollie farts some more, grinning. “In any case, it was a terrible mistake.”

  My mom is a little bit strange. Actually, I don’t think she’s strange. I think she’s funny, but I realize that most people think she’s weird. People my age, I mean. Even Frankie thinks some of the things she says are awful. Like if I repeated that thing about Ollie being a terrible mistake, Frankie’d freak. She’d think Ollie was going to be scarred for life or something. But Ollie knows Mom’s joking. We all do. I used to try to tell my friends the things my parents say that crack me up, but I don’t anymore. It doesn’t translate.