Franki

Look, I know I’m young. Nineteen. And I know I have a lot to learn, but you know what? Being young doesn’t mean that I know nothing, ok. It’s been nineteen years of learning, of pain, of rejection, of growing. Abuse too. Nineteen years of fending for myself. So, if I make a decision to do something, then I figure that it’s ok, you know?

So I’m going. That’s what I’m doing right now, going. Fucking off. I’m standing in the middle of this room, Bryan’s room in Melville, and I’m looking at it and I am thinking I don’t live here anyway. I’ve been sleeping here for four months but I don’t actually live here. You can tell by the room, I mean just look at it. There’s nothing of mine in it, not really.

I’ve got my backpack on the bed. I keep looking at it and then looking away from it, which is stupid, it is just a backpack with some stuff in it, it doesn’t mean anything. Some clean clothes, a toothbrush, the charger for my phone, the envelope with what’s left of the money from the café job I quit last month. Roughly two thousand rand. Enough to get somewhere and eat until I figure out the next thing.

That’s enough for now, I tell myself. Because if I say enough full stop, no more, I’ll talk myself out of it, and I’m not talking myself out of it. Not today, José.

I pick up the backpack. Put it on. The weight of it settles on my shoulders and I stand there and I think: OK, this is it. This is it, Franki. You’re going. Fucking off for real.

I wonder briefly if Bryan will remember his plant-watering schedule. I think about filling a glass of water and leaving it next to the pot on the windowsill and then I think no, that’s the most nineteen-year-old thing I have ever thought in my life, and so I don’t fill the glass. I leave the keys on the kitchen counter. I close the door behind me, and I leave. That’s it.

I’m nineteen years old and I have a backpack and two thousand rand and I’m going south, anywhere south, Durbs probably, and that’s enough for me. That has to be enough.

It is enough.

He came home at twelve forty-three to the keys on the kitchen counter. He stood there for a moment looking at them. They were Franki’s — the Pick ’n Pay keyring, the one with the broken clasp she’d been meaning to fix since before he knew her. Just sitting there next to the kettle as if it had been specifically placed there rather than dropped.

He lifted his phone and called her. “C- C- Come on. Answer already, Franki. Come on!” No answer. He called again. No answer.

He sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the keyring and thought about the argument last night, which had not been different from other arguments except that it had ended in a silence that he recognised, in retrospect, as the kind that came before a decision rather than after one.

“Bryan, hey. What’s up?”

“Hey Dar, listen, Franki’s gone AWOL again. Been trying to get her all afternoon but she’s not answering.”

“OK, when did you last see her?”

“L- Last night. She was here. We argued. Not badly, just — you know. The usual. She was still here when I left for class this morning, but her keys are here, she is not, and she’s not answering.”

“Hm. I wouldn’t panic. She does this, Bryan. She goes to ground when she’s upset, she always has done. She’ll surface when she’s ready.”

A beat. “Bring wine. The good kind, not that box shit you brought last time.”

“That was one time, Dar.”

“It was an event, Bryan. It left a mark. And a headache.”