Frankie & Bug: List 3

Mama didn’t say anything. She had a way of using silence as invitation to talk, and that was when Bug often got herself into trouble. The trick was to say something without giving anything away. “We just talk about kid stuff,” Bug said noncommittally.

Bug smelled the cinnamon and the eggs, saw the fruit compote Phillip made to put on top.

Before Phillip left for work, he cut them sprigs of mint from the herb garden for garnish.

Then Rory came by with his dogs. He had five of them that he walked all at once, the leashes wrapped around his wrist, his homemade pooper-scooper contraption in his back pocket.

(Every time Bug asked for a dog, Mama refused, citing Rory and his pooper-scooper as the reason.)

When she got back, Frankie was furiously scrawling in his book. “I saw something,” he said. “In the upstairs window.”

“But we might miss it,” Frankie insisted.
“We’ll go fast. If we just sit here with no lemonade, it’ll be obvious we’re spying,” Bug said. The truth was, she was hungry, and Phillip was making his special tuna salad sandwiches with the baby pickles he called gherkins, which Bug thought was about the funniest word in the world.
Frankie reluctantly agreed.

“It doesn’t rain in L.A. in summer,” Bug said dismissively.

They grabbed Phillip’s pitcher and ran, shrieking, back to Bug’s apartment. Frankie went upstairs to change while Bug counted the money: Six dollars and fifty cents. Not bad. Enough for two matinee movie tickets.

After, they ambled up to the shops at the circle on Pacific to check for the new Echo & the Bunnymen album at the record store.

Danny maneuvered himself and Bug back out of the canals toward the beach again, and they took the crowded boardwalk home.

“I saw something, in the Hermit’s windows,” Frankie whispered, “last night, before the crime.” Bug was torn. On one hand, she was mad at Frankie. On the other hand, this was pertinent information.

And then he started to laugh. It was a knife, straight to Bug’s heart. Her so-called friend, who had slept over at Hedvig’s instead of hers, was now laughing at her.

Bug knew that the Midnight Marauder was a big deal—Mama’s late nights had been a testament to that—but when she got to the bullpen, she understood just how big this story was.

Mama spent the morning on the phone, while Bug sat on an extra chair next to her desk, pretending to read the diary of Anne Frank but really eavesdropping on Mama’s conversations.

As if Mama could read Bug’s thoughts, she looked up. “Hang on a sec,” she said into the phone. She rummaged through her bag for some quarters and instructed Bug to go the vending machine for a soda.

“Trust me, I would never do it on purpose. Because I know how it feels.” His expression looked anguished.

“That’s not true!” Bug countered with a wave of indignation. Frankie was brave and loyal and most definitely not wrong. She suddenly felt ashamed for how she’d treated him just because he didn’t want to sleep over! “You’re not a mistake!”

Frankie shuddered, and not in the jokey ways boys did when they were compared to girls, but like the prospect truly scared him.

Bug told Frankie all she’d overheard at Mama’s office as Frankie took copious notes in the book, nodding every so often and saying, “This is really good stuff.”

Hedvig sang along to all the songs, making up words when she didn’t know them. Phillip sat there expressionless, though Bug saw his mustache twitch and suspected he, too, was stifling laughter.

Bug knew that the Soviet Union was bad and had like a zillion nuclear bombs pointed at America that could blow them all to smithereens.

“We decided to defect,” Hedvig continued.

“The borders were closed. We had to sneak across in darkness.”
“Like The Sound of Music?” Bug asked, enthralled.

Nobody cried when they got to Disneyland, but something happened to Frankie. As soon as the tram from the parking lot pulled up to the front gates, his posture changed.

When Bug had come with Teri, they’d packed lunches—her aunt said the food prices there were exorbitant—but Phillip and Mama let Frankie and Bug eat at a restaurant near the Country Bear Jamboree: fried chicken and French fries, washed down with a large soda each!

On the raft back, Frankie was dancing from side to side, like really fast. Bug might’ve thought he was goofing around were it not for the grimace on his face. And that was when Bug realized he had to pee. Now that she thought about it, she had to go too. She’d drunk a lot of soda with lunch.

Go to Disneyland once a year. The idea planted itself like a warm ember in Bug’s belly as the car rumbled onto the freeway.

“If we hadn’t gone to Disneyland, we could’ve stopped it,” Frankie groused the next morning.

But she wanted to find a solution, because she really did want to go to the beach. And, unwittingly, Danny had just given her an idea that would solve all their problems.

The surf rat moved around, Danny explained, because you weren’t allowed to sleep in your van, but he mostly sold his wares in front of the wooden pier that separated Venice from Marina del Rey, the fancier neighborhood to the south.

Bug had six fifty from the lemonade stand and three dollars from various tooth-fairy visits and almost four dollars in saved allowance money and nearly fifty cents scavenged from the sofa cushions.

“Oh, hey, dude. You here for that suit?”
“Yes,” Danny said. “I have the money.”
“Cool, cool.” He clambered into the back and returned with a Rip Curl.

She hadn’t done anything wrong! She tried to do something nice. Frankie was being dumb! But, like a worm in an apple, there was this niggling feeling pushing up that whispered maybe she had done something wrong.

Mama sighed and took a swig... “Trust me. Sharks are the last thing you have to worry about.”