Nothing

  DEDICATION

  For Esme,

  obviously

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  The Beginning of Nothing

  Nothing

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

  Nothing

  It’s Friday. Let the Excitement Begin

  Nothing

  God Forbid You Should Actually Learn Something

  Nothing

  Frankie Radiates Positive Energy and Nobody Dies as a Result

  Nothing

  Max Bosses Frankie and then Frankie Bosses Max

  Nothing

  Frankie Has Her Own Pre-Party

  Nothing

  Frankie Saves the Day, She Really Does.

  Nothing

  How to Figure Out What Percentage of Your Life You’re about to Ruin

  Nothing

  Funny, It Seems Just Like the Old Year

  Nothing

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE BEGINNING OF NOTHING

  “Nothing,” said Charlotte.

  “A blank book, you mean?” said Frankie. She stuffed her phone between the couch cushions and rolled over on her back. “Hater. We’re not that lame.”

  “No. Not blank. Just, like, boring,” Charlotte said. “If you wrote a book about our real lives, nothing would happen. Ever.” She tossed the book she was reading over the side of the couch and slid down, wedging her feet into Frankie’s armpit.

  “Get out,” Frankie said, slapping her foot halfheartedly.

  “Shut up.” Charlotte dug her feet deeper into Frankie’s armpit and resumed talking. “In there”—she waved at the book on the floor—“the main girl has red ringlets, like, three feet long—”

  “Bitch.”

  “And everyone thinks she’s hot but she doesn’t care, because she has a secret.”

  “Ooh-ooh, a secret,” snickered Frankie. “This is why I don’t read.”

  “Guess what it is.”

  “Get your feet out of my armpit first,” said Frankie.

  “Guess,” commanded Charlotte.

  “Rape, incest,” said Frankie in a bored voice. “Or oh my god, she’s gay.”

  “Oh my god, she’s gay,” said Charlotte. “And then oh my god, there’s a rainstorm and oh my god, she doesn’t have an umbrella, so she runs into a—wait for it—”

  “An AA meeting!” yelled Frankie.

  “No! A sculpture class!” said Charlotte. “Where she sees a gorgeous Iranian girl with oh my god, scars on her wrists, and they exchange stares of attraction.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Frankie. “Where’s the dead mom?”

  “Dead brother. Iranian girl’s.”

  “Her fault?”

  “Duh.”

  “Is there a scene where the main girl runs through a storm to save the Iranian girl from suicide and they touch each other and then have insane sex?”

  Charlotte wrinkled her nose. “No storm. There was already a rainstorm when they met. They can’t have two rainstorms.”

  “But suicide and insane sex?”

  “Yeah. The sex part’s good.” With a grunt, Charlotte propelled herself halfway off the couch to retrieve the book.

  “Oh god! Get your gross feet out of my face!” wailed Frankie.

  Returning to the couch with a thump, Charlotte flipped through the book. “Here. Page two hundred eleven.” She passed it down the couch.

  Frankie read breathily, “‘“No,” I whispered. I meant yes. Yesyesyes. She knew. She knew everything. She knew how to slide her cool hands under me, she knew how to open my legs—’” Frankie fell silent, reading. “Whoo-whoo, that is hot.” After a moment, she looked up at Charlotte with shining eyes. “Why aren’t we gay?”

  “I know,” said Charlotte. “But we’re not. At least, I’m not. I don’t know about you. You seem a little gay to me.”

  “You know what would be really good?” said Frankie dreamily. “If one of us was gay and, like, dying of secret lust for the other. And then there could be a discovery scene. And then insane sex.”

  “Sorry,” said Charlotte. “Not going to happen. ’Cause we’re not gay. We like disgusting smelly guys who don’t like us. Like Kellen and Reed. Fuckers.”

  “Fuckers,” Frankie agreed.

  “And,” continued Charlotte, “even if we were gay, probably no one would like us. Look at Noony. It’s not like she’s having nights of insane sex. She’s having nights of insane homework, same as us.”

  “Nights of homework, days of school, weekends of hanging around wishing that something would happen. And sometimes—yay!—babysitting!” Frankie tossed the book back to the floor. “Now I feel all shitty. Reading sucks.”

  “We suck,” said Charlotte.

  A distant slam. “I’m home!” Heels sounded heavily in the hallway, and Charlotte’s mother thumped into the kitchen. She was much smaller than her footsteps suggested. She looked suspiciously at the girls on the couch. “You haven’t been eating my lettuce, have you?”

  “Hi, Charlotte,” said Charlotte. “How was school?”

  “You look like you might have been eating my lettuce.”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes at Frankie. “Most moms worry that their kids are getting into the liquor cabinet. My mom worries that I ate lettuce.”

  “My lettuce,” her mom clarified. “The liquor’s right up there.” She pointed to a high cupboard. “Oh shit. Sorry.” She glanced worriedly at Frankie. “I shouldn’t say stuff like that. Just kidding! Don’t drink, kids!”

  “Mom!” groaned Charlotte.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll go change,” said her mom. “Don’t do drugs!” She clomped away.

  Charlotte winced. “She’s a weirdo.”

  Frankie nodded. “But still: the eccentric mother. At least you’ve got that.”

  Charlotte laughed. “Nah. Only grandmas get to be eccentric. Moms in books are either dead or drunk.”

  “Nuh-uh. I’ve read ones where the mom is all life-forcey and wacky.”

  “Those ones die,” Charlotte pointed out.

  “Oh yeah. Right.”

  “The thing is, real life isn’t about anything. That’s what I meant,” Charlotte said. Frankie looked a question. “You know, when I said that a book about our lives would be about nothing. There wouldn’t be a plot, because we do the same stuff every day.”

  “No wild sex, either,” said Frankie glumly.

  Charlotte shook her head. “Nobody our age actually has wild sex.”

  “Aaron Shields does. He says.”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes. “No one he’s doing it with says so. You know Lena? She said never again. So, okay: no plot, no sex, and no character development, because everyone’s exactly the same as they’ve always been.”

  “Hey!” Frankie kicked her. “I’ve changed a lot!” She frowned. “Haven’t I?”

  Charlotte snorted. “You wish. I’ve known you since you were eight, and you haven’t changed at all.”

  “You have. You’re more of a bitch.”

  “Shut up.”

  Frankie pulled her phone out from the cushions and looked at it. “Check out my ratio,” she said, holding out her phone.

  Charlotte glanced at the phone. “Groovy.” Then came a long period of silence while Frankie liked photos and Charlotte gazed out the window.

  “Look—” Frankie held out the phone again. “She’s wearing that V neck you almost got. I hate that color.”

  “Yeah.” Charlotte nodded absently. “You know, I’m going to do it.”

  “What? The V neck? I don’t—”

  “No. The book. I’m going to write a book about what our lives are really
like,” said Charlotte. “I’m going to make it my senior project.”

  “You’re only a sophomore,” said Frankie.

  “I’ll get it done early.”

  Frankie screwed up her face. “But nothing ever happens to us.”

  “I know!” said Charlotte excitedly. “That’s the point! It’ll be, like, a searing document of today’s youth and how incredibly boring our lives are!”

  Frankie paused. “Am I going to be in it?”

  “Hello? You’re my best friend. You have to be in it. This is a true story.”

  “Can’t you make something happen to me?”

  “Nuh-uh! Only the truth!”

  Frankie groaned. “Oh my god, I’m bored already.”

  “Too bad, Franklin.”

  “Fuck me,” said Frankie.

  And that was how Nothing began.

  NOTHING

  “Fuck me,” sighed Frankie.

  Frankie is my best friend. People are always saying that they’re best friends or BFFs or mains, and it makes me want to scream because then they turn around and talk shit about each other or say it about someone else or whatever. I hate that.

  I bet you think I’m going to follow that up by saying But not me and Frankie. We’re the real deal. We’ve got each other’s back, through thick and thin, fire and rain, blah blah blah.

  Bullshit.

  I mean, I love Frankie, I really do. She’s been my best friend since we were eight, except for a little while in seventh grade when this bitch Ohndie stole her. I’m still mad about that. But Frankie’s funny and smart and she actually listens to other people and thinks about what they say, but no one besides me really knows that because she doesn’t talk much. She can be intense, though. Maybe I really mean determined. She wants to get on with it. Like one time when we were little, Frankie’s dad took us rock climbing—not serious rock climbing, kid rock climbing. Still, I was scared. I got on this ledge and I wanted to stay there until I wasn’t scared anymore. Frankie stayed there next to me, but it made her crazy. She kept saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll stay with you,” and then she couldn’t stand it anymore, and she just dang jumped off that ledge. I almost had a heart attack and so did her dad. Why am I telling this story? Oh yeah, to show that Frankie’s intense. She used to be, anyway. Now she spends most of her time on the phone. I’m not blaming her, because I do, too. Everyone does. There’s not that much else to do.

  There’s this unspoken—what? Idea, I guess—among all grown-ups that teenagers are bums. That all we care about is social media and it’s giving us brain cancer and making us dumb and we’ll never get jobs and we’ll end up living in our parents’ basements. So we feel guilty every time they see us look at our phones, but the whole thing is fucked up because what else are we supposed to do?

  My dad is all, “You should be helping the less fortunate.”

  But I do! I’m in Social Action Club at school! We fill grocery bags at the food bank and stuff. They won’t let us actually hand out food to homeless people because of their insurance. I suppose I could go to St. Vincent’s and serve dinner, but I don’t know how I’d get there and I guess I would be kind of scared to go alone. I pick up garbage at the beach three times a year, too.

  What else can I do? Get a job? I wish, ’cause I’m broke, but what job? Not even grown-ups can get jobs. Is there a job I can get on Sunday from noon to five? Because that’s all the time I’ve got left over after school and orchestra (which my parents won’t let me quit) and track (which they also won’t let me quit).

  My mom thank god doesn’t say things like I should be helping the less fortunate, but I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking I’m not creative. I know this because every time I happen to mention by mistake that I’m bored, she yells, “Make something! Do something! Be something!”

  And I want to yell back (but I don’t) “Like what?” Because realistically, what can I do? Nothing. I’m not allowed to. I can’t drive. I can’t even start learning to drive until I’m fifteen and a half, and even if I could, I couldn’t go anywhere with my friends (you can only drive with grown-ups until you’ve had your license for a year). My parents would never let me go out into nature by myself. They won’t even let me go to the city, unless I tell them exactly where I’m going and I’m home by six. And no matter what, I have to be at school at eight o’clock every morning, so it’s not like can go out and have adventures. What I’d really like to do? Go on a road trip to see this friend of mine named Sid who lives in Oregon. But is that going to happen? No. It isn’t. Because how could it? (And let me just say right now that I’m not going to explain who Sid is. It’s completely ridiculous.)

  The reality is, my parents are kind of hypocrites. Not in an evil way—they don’t pretend to be religious and then screw teenagers or anything—but in the way that grown-ups almost always are. They say they want me to do things and be creative, but they really don’t. Or they only want me to do things that are totally safe and not too expensive and don’t mess up the house and don’t interfere with homework and don’t cause me to be late for dinner. Which pretty much reduces my options to zero.

  I first noticed this little hypocrisy problem of theirs when I was eight. What happened was, I read this amazing, fantastic book about a kid who spied on all her neighbors, and I was like, Hallelujah! I have found my calling! I’m going to be a spy! I figured I should start training right away, so I got together this whole notebook and special outfit, and I went around my block, spying on people and writing down what they did. Sometimes I even tiptoed down their driveways to see what was happening in their backyards. I found out a bunch of weird stuff, too. Like this old lady neighbor of ours, her house looks fine from the front, but if you go in the backyard—hoarder! But then Totally Uptight Clay caught me in his garage and freaked and told my parents, and they called me into the dining room to have a big Behavior Talk. I was just a little kid, so I cried and promised them I’d never spy again. But the truth is, I got in trouble for being creative.

  This is the kind of stuff that turns you cynical.

  But I love my parents. I love them like crazy. So I’m a good kid, and I do the things they want me to do, and I don’t mention to them that they’re hypocrites, and everyone’s happy. Except when they say, “Make something! Do something! Be something!” and I get pissed.

  But ha! I am realizing right this second that writing a book about Nothing is creative. Take that, Mom! I’m being creative!

  I’m probably not going to tell her, though. She’d want to read it.

  [Break here because I was checking my phone—so kill me, I had to ask Maia H. if we were supposed to do problems one to twenty or the whole page. My geometry teacher is a complete dick and won’t write the homework on the board or put it up on his site because he says we should be paying attention when he says it. Which I would be if I could hear him, but I can’t because I sit between Worried Alex and Dominic. Worried Alex is always talking to himself because he has anxiety, and Dominic is always talking because he’s an asshole. So I have to ask around, which is a lot harder than you’d think since most people don’t give a shit about me getting the homework. Except Maia H., who’s a really nice girl. A little on the dull side, but nice. And after that, I had a bunch of texts from: Noony, Noony, Gaby, Noony, Sid, Alex (not Worried Alex, a different Alex), Johnny Game (not as cool as he sounds), Noony, Sid, Gaby, Eden, Eden, Frankie (even though she’s here), Alex, Alex, Reed (!) (but it was stupid), Kellen, Kellen, Alex, Noony. Noony has an emoji addiction. Then Frankie showed me this picture she’d just gotten from this guy Soren, which was him without a shirt, and she says Are you actually sending me nudes, you creep? And he says Devon stole his phone and sent the picture to her. And then she says Why are you getting naked with Devon? And then he got really mad and she felt bad. I told her not to send it.]

  I don’t know why I put all that in brackets. That’s the Nothing this book is about. I just noticed that I’ve written 1,429 words (yay, Word Co
unt!) and I still haven’t finished what I started to say about Frankie and me.

  So. Frankie and me.

  Frankie and Me: The Friendship.

  Ah, fuck it. You’ll figure it out.

  I think I’ll write about how we look instead.

  Frankie first. Frankie’s gorgeous. [Shut up, Frankie. You are.] Everyone thinks Frankie’s gorgeous because of her hair—it’s long and super-dark, almost black, and way silky—but if you really look at her, you realize that she’s gorgeous because of how her face and her hair look together. Her skin is really pale and her hair is really dark and the contrast is amazing. She looks like a vampire, in a good way. Sometimes we do her makeup to emphasize that—we darken her brows and put on blood-red lipstick and pull her hair back to show she’s got a heart-shaped face. I think it looks great. She thinks she looks like Morticia, at least that’s what she says, but she puts the pictures up and someone always says Suck mine and then, I meant neck!

  I would say—just keeping it real here—that her brows are her worst feature. They’re different shapes. One is kind of weirdly square, and the other is arched. We can make it better, but unlike lashes, you’re really kind of stuck with your brows. Frankie has this friend, Merle—oh my god, I don’t even want to talk about Merle. She’s perfect. Beyond. She has fucking long legs and fucking perfect brows and long curly hair and when I stand next to her, I am a misshapen dwarf.

  Anyway, Frankie would say [I know because I just asked her] that her entire body is her worst feature. She’s insane. She’s tall, which I would kill for, and thin, which I would also kill for [pause for an argument about me not being thin] and she’s built like a model.

  “Also an ironing board,” yells Frankie. “And a guy. Except that I’m taller than most guys, and no one’s ever going to have sex with me. Put that in.”

  And my father walks into the kitchen. “Hi, girls,” he booms.

  “Hi, Dad,” I say. Frankie is busy turning red because he might have heard her say the word sex, so she jumps up from the sofa and starts shuffling around with her papers and folders, which are scattered all over the floor. “I should get going,” she says, still red.