Frannie in Pieces Read Online Free

off the birthday trail, but when I was in the bathroom investigating a new pimple, she knocked on the door. “Doyou think your dad would want you to skip your birthday?”
    It’s an extreme presumption to suggest what a dead person might want. If I had died, I wouldn’t want my dad to celebrate his birthday one week after.

4
    For a week I stayed out of school. Then it was spring vacation, so that was one more week.
    My school’s called Cobweb by everyone except my dad, who always asked, “How are things at Touchy Feely?” You’d think he’d like my school, because it’s into the arts. The brochure says, “We emphasize the arts,” and students get music appreciation and art every year, including pottery in the tenth grade, field trips to every museum in New York City, plus matinees at the ballet and the New York Philharmonic. But my dad said, “Your mom should dumpyou in public school, not namby-pamby land.”
    â€œDad doesn’t like Cobweb,” I once told her.
    She didn’t answer but studied an order form. “‘If possible, lilacs.’ Where am I supposed to get lilacs in winter? Carmen,” she called to her assistant, “Did you tell them we’d send lilacs?” My mom owns a flower shop, and that’s where we were at the time. She started snipping rose stems. “Your father…”
    Whenever she says, “your father,” as opposed to “your dad,” she’s having negative thoughts. Opinion, not fact, but opinion based on years of observation, which practically makes it fact. “He’s not paying for it,” she said at last.
    â€œWhy should he if he doesn’t like it?”
    I’ve been going to Cobweb since kindergarten. Every week the school holds a meeting, its word for assembly, about world awareness. At the last one a doctor spoke about all the orphans in Africa who had lost their parents to AIDS. The purpose of these meetings is to raise more sensitive humanbeings, but all that sensitivity didn’t stop Sukie Jameson from bragging about her breasts or kids from staring at me when I returned to school.
    I stared right back. What I don’t want is pity. What I don’t want is someone checking me out to see if I’m sad or to see what a person with no dad looks like. Perhaps they expected a mark on my forehead, like an outline of a man with a line through him, kind of like a traffic warning sign.
    Jenna was late. I opened my locker and stashed away the books I didn’t need, and gave the glares to anyone who looked my way. I wished Jenna had been here early. I wished I wasn’t the one waiting. We always share an apple before class—we pass it back and forth—and play the game Where’s Waldo?
    Waldo is James Albert Fromsky, DDS. We call him Waldo because we’re always wondering where he is. We added the DDS to his name because he has big front teeth. I know that doesn’t logicallyfollow, but it happened in a fit of giggles at four in the morning after we’d licked an entire package of raw Jell-O off our fingers. Now that he’s kissed Jenna, I suppose she knows where he is because he probably calls her on her cell and tells her. I guess it’s new stuff all around. Correction: Now that he’s kissed Jenna, we both know where he is because, at that very second, he was walking with her to our lockers. They kept bumping into each other accidentally on purpose and laughing about it, until Jenna saw me.
    â€œFrannie, hi.”
    â€œHey,” said James.
    She took the apple from me, took a bite, and passed it to Waldo James. He sank his big front teeth into it.
    â€œI’ll see you at lunch,” said James, returning the apple. He headed off down the hall. He has a very unusual way of ambulating. He lopes. His gait resembles that of a wild animal in Africa. Possibly a gazelle.
    â€œBye-ee,” Jenna called to James as she passed the