Frankie & Bug: List 1

So, after very elaborate negotiations with Phillip and Hedvig, their upstairs and downstairs neighbors who each sometimes watched Danny and Bug, and yet another consultation with Kip, the always-sunburned lifeguard who manned Tower 19, Mama had agreed to let them spend the summers alone.

So when in the waning days of fourth grade, Mama asked what Bug wanted to do for the upcoming summer, the answer was obvious: “I want to go to the beach,” Bug told Mama.

The bad news was this: Bug was being moved out of the biggest bedroom she and Danny had always shared and into a tiny alcove next to the bathroom that Mama had sometimes used as an office.

Y camp was the worst! You spent days inside in a moldy-smelling gymnasium, making lanyards or shaping clay into pots that never kept their shape.

The ocean was just blocks away, but you had to swim in an indoor pool. It was the kind of thing Phillip would call a travesty.

Phillip’s apartment, which took up the top floor of their triplex, was much neater, and Phillip, when he was home, did much more interesting things, like make collages out of old Time magazines with Bug, or play songs on his baby grand piano.

“No, you’re not,” Bug shot back. “Because if you were, you wouldn’t be ruining my summer!” And then she could hold it in no longer. She burst into blubbering, babyish tears.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Mama repeated. “I’ll try to redeem your summer."

Airplanes fascinated Bug. She loved watching the jets take off over the Pacific. Danny had taught her how to follow their trajectory.

When the song ended, the announcer cut in. “We have breaking news. Investigators are now saying that the bludgeoning of an Arcadia woman in her home last night follows a similar pattern of several Southland nighttime home invasion murders that police are now attributing to a serial killer they’re calling the Midnight Marauder.”

When the song ended, the announcer cut in. “We have breaking news. Investigators are now saying that the bludgeoning of an Arcadia woman in her home last night follows a similar pattern of several Southland nighttime home invasion murders that police are now attributing to a serial killer they’re calling the Midnight Marauder.”

When the song ended, the announcer cut in. “We have breaking news. Investigators are now saying that the bludgeoning of an Arcadia woman in her home last night follows a similar pattern of several Southland nighttime home invasion murders that police are now attributing to a serial killer they’re calling the Midnight Marauder.”

The car crested above the wetlands of Playa del Rey. The ocean twinkled in the distance. Even from here, Bug could smell the briny scent, her favorite perfume.

“Welcome to California, Frankie,” Phillip said.
“Thank you. It’s nice to meet you,” Frankie said solemnly.

Frankie looked confused. Bug was dismayed. Surely, someone must have told him that the point of his coming out to Venice for the summer was to keep her company, so she could go to the beach and not be alone.

Bug was already irritated enough about Frankie, who had not even packed a bathing suit, and now it was his fault she was hungry, too. By the time Phillip and Frankie knocked on the door, arms full of platters, she was in a full-on sulk.

“Great. I’m famished,” Mama said, zipping up her jeans—which she always changed into after work—as she came out of her room.

They trekked downstairs, into and through Hedvig’s ground-floor apartment, to the small patch of concrete nestled between the back of the building and the alley with the parking spaces where Mama and Phillip kept their cars.

Stair-frey was when Hedvig tossed whatever was in her fridge—sludgy vegetables, glacially frozen meat, takeout of unknown origin—in a wok and coated it with Taco Bell hot sauce packets, which Hedvig hoarded.

Mama and Phillip both claimed Hedvig had been very glamorous and beautiful when she was younger, but Bug couldn’t quite picture her any way other than how she was now.

She saw the cooler on the counter and went to peek inside.
“Leave that closed,” Phillip admonished, slapping her hand away.

“You’re not going to take off your shoes?” Bug asked incredulously. Even Phillip went barefoot at the beach.

“See here.” Frankie traced a trio of dots on the map. “All these were near each other. But then there’s this one, in Burbank. It’s an outlier.”

“He’s Phillip’s nephew. Here for the summer. This is Bian. She’s from Vietnam,” Bug started to explain. “She came over on a boat. Not a ship like on Love Boat but like a rickety canoe.”

“I suppose they don’t have weird people in Ohio,” she mused.
“They have weird people everywhere,” he replied.