Chapter Text
In moments you cannot reprise
Like a soldier or a watch that you can’t wind…
“Frank, what are you doing?”
“Laying on the sidewalk.”
“Get in the car.”
“No. I wanna die. Leave me here to get run over.”
“ … On the sidewalk?”
“If I’m lucky, some lady will come by with a baby stroller.”
Ray starts pulling away from the curb, and he calls out the window, “Fine. Have fun with your death by Graco.” He zooms off in his jalopy at a speed that tells Frank he’s not bullshitting this time, that he will leave him here to get trampled, and Frank, still facedown on the gritty sidewalk next to a trash can that smells like an actual sewer, lets out a groan that makes the owner of the Hallmark store he’s outside of poke her head through the door for the hundredth time to check on him.
He wants to die, but not on the doorstep of a greeting card store. This is just as far away from Rite-Aid as he could get before the misery (and the heat — it’s so fucking hot today) overtook him and he collapsed dramatically for all passersby to see. And then, pathetically, he dialed Ray’s number.
“Fuck me,” Frank says to an ancient wad of gum that just missed the trash can about a million years ago, and peels himself off the scorching concrete, grabbing his guitar case as he does. He really doesn’t want to have to walk.
“Are you finally leaving?” asks Miss Hallmark, an impatient cock to her hip.
Frank waves her off and then wipes sweat from the back of his neck. “Yeah, yeah, I’m no good for business, I know.” She huffs and slips back inside, the bell on the door adding a happy little jingle to Frank’s piss-poor mood.
When he looks up, he sees Ray idling at the end of the block and he sighs, feeling even shittier. Your pity chariot awaits, Iero. He starts off on his walk of shame.
Ray barely looks at him when he drops himself into the passenger seat after stuffing his guitar in the trunk, and with his sunglasses on, Frank feels like he’s getting picked up by the cops. It doesn’t help that he has to go home and face his dad now, who will look at him with that stupid disappointed frown and then disappear back into his office until Mom gets home to do the actual yelling.
“What’d they get you for this time?” Ray asks, turning down his obnoxious jazz. He doesn’t sound particularly pleased to be asking, and Frank wants to just crawl in a dark hole somewhere. Ray wouldn’t have had to be his ride today if he just took his bike or his board, but it was too hot to walk even at 11 a.m., and he really wasn’t expecting to be fired only an hour into his shift. Although he probably should’ve known he was getting canned today; he can usually sense it like a thunderstorm on the horizon.
“Came in late one too many times,” Frank mutters, sticking his face to the vent that’s blowing blessedly cold air. “Same old shit.”
Ray sighs, and Frank really doesn’t want to hear it. He’s already a huge thorn in his parents’ asses, so he doesn’t want to think about how his best friend is probably starting to feel that way about him too. Ray has been his ride-or-die for-fucking-ever and the thought of him finally getting sick of Frank’s shit makes him want to lay out in the road instead of on the sidewalk. “How did your audition go with, uh — ”
“Turnpike Dykes.”
“Turnpike — yeah. Did that go okay, at least?”
Frank slumps down in his seat, hoping one of the little rips in the fabric will open up and swallow him whole. Time for some more disappointment. “Apparently it was a lesbians-only audition. Which wasn’t on the flyer! By the way. They didn’t even tell me until after I played.” Which is just icing on the shit cake, honestly. He can take getting fired, he can even take bombing an audition, but being humiliated by a bunch of lesbians in cargo shorts and fishnet gloves, added with Ray finally losing his patience with him like everyone else in his life, has officially made this a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
(Which has been most days lately.)
Ray, because he’s an actual fucking saint, tries not to show how much he’s losing his patience with Frank’s sorry ass by saying, “I mean, it was kind of in the name, dude. But maybe next time.” Frank appreciates it, but he says that saying way too fucking much.
He looks out the window and realizes they’re not heading for his house. He thinks they’re going the opposite way, but he’s not sure because he doesn’t drive and therefore his sense of direction is shit. “Uh, where are you kidnapping me?”
“I’m on a coffee run, so you’re coming with me,” Ray tells him. “You’re lucky you called on my way out or else I would’ve had to leave you to fry like an egg on the sidewalk.”
Frank unhooks his name tag from his shirt, opens up the window, and drops it outside. He was going to ask if Ray would bring him to Buck’s with him so he can waste time pretending to be working until his shift was supposed to be over, but he figures that’s off the table now. He’d probably be better off decomposing alone in his bedroom anyway.
They pull up to a Dunkin’ Donuts. Ray says, “Stay here, I’ll be right out,” and turns the jazz music back up a couple of notches.
Frank wrinkles his nose, already reaching his hand out towards the radio. “Can I ch — ”
Ray gives him a severe look over his sunglasses and gets out of the car. Frank claps his hands over his ears and slumps back. He hates jazz, and all music older than him. Some guy who might be Frank Sinatra but probably not is singing, “It’s not my watch you’re holding / it’s my heart”, and Frank figures he deserves this, too.
Ray comes back a couple minutes later with a tray of coffee and wedges it on the center console since he probably doesn’t trust Frank to hold it, and stares past him out the passenger window instead of getting back in. Frank looks too but all he sees is a hole-in-the-wall antique store across the street with a mannequin outside the door holding one of those red-white-and-blue OPEN flags.
“Let’s go check that place out,” Ray says decisively, and Frank frowns. He doesn’t want to go home, but he also doesn’t feel like antiquing.
“Aren’t you gonna be late?”
Ray glances at the time on the dash and pulls his keys out of the ignition. “Chipped Tooth isn’t having their album signing for like another hour, I’ve got some time.”
Chipped Tooth. Frank auditioned for those assholes last year when their guitarist bailed on them, but they said they didn’t like his sound. Whatever. Assholes.
“But the coffee,” Frank whines as he gets out. He hates Chipped Tooth and secretly wishes Ray misses the signing so they don’t get any nice fancy pictures to promo themselves with, but he hates going into these musty old places with Ray even more. Yet something else he deserves. Why not, universe. Bring on all the suffering.
They cross the street and Ray tucks his sunglasses in the front of his shirt. The humidity is doing wonders for his hair, and he pats uselessly at his head as he squints through the window of the antique store, looking like a hungry lion.
“Are you doing this to make me feel better, or to punish me?” Frank says.
Ray looks at him and sighs again, but this time it’s not so exasperated. He claps Frank on the shoulder, the wrinkle in his forehead that Frank was taking to heart finally smoothing away. “Depends on if you find anything cool or not. Come on, I gotta be back soon.” He pulls open the door and goes inside.
The sign above the door says Marjorie’s Specialty Shop, but the place doesn’t seem all that special when Frank goes in after him. It just looks like any old triple D junk shop, the three Ds being Dark, Dank, and Dusty. And it’s cluttered as fuck; it looks even worse than Frank’s bedroom. Maybe he should add another D to the list: Daunting. The aisles are approximately Flat-Stanley-sized, and he has to stare at his feet wherever he walks so he doesn’t trip on anything. There’s huge paintings and empty picture frames leaning up against the walls, shelves of antique dishware jutting out at lethal angles, and Frank almost gets his eye poked out when he turns a corner too fast and comes face-to-face with a mannequin pointing its finger that looks like it might be related to the one outside.
He doesn’t really find anything cool in the ten minutes he spends half-exploring, half-moping, unless he counts that purse he found hanging from a coat rack that was made out of an armadillo shell. Too bad it was going for almost two hundred bucks, though. Cool or macabre or something else, it wasn’t worth that much.
If Frank could hold a job then maybe he could afford to buy the stupid armadillo purse. Or that knockoff Fabergé egg he saw up front in the case. Or this fancy antique couch that definitely has a huge bloodstain on it. But, no, he can’t. Because he’s always getting fired from stupid jobs like Rite-Aid. And he’s always getting fired from said stupid jobs because he’s always auditioning for stupid bands that don’t want him and either coming into work late or leaving early because of them. And of course he can’t make things go any quicker by driving places because he failed the written test once in high school and two more times after graduating and he’s too lazy to try again — and his parents can’t afford to get him a car anyway. Fuck.
He tells all this to Ray, who’s heard it a million times before and is just trying to peacefully flip through some records at the back of the store before he has to be back at work.
“I’m twenty-one-years-old and my life has already hit rock bottom, you believe that? Not to mention girls don’t want to date a guy that can’t get his shit together.” Or boys, for that matter, but Ray knows that. He doesn’t need to say it out loud.
“Frank — ”
“How the fuck am I supposed to become a famous guitarist at this rate?” It’s got to be because he hasn’t given his guitar a name yet like every other musician he knows. Isn’t that, like, bad luck, or something? When Ray still played, his secondhand Fender was called The Tramp because he was going through a Charlie Chaplin phase at the time and he was landing gig after gig. (Now it’s collecting dust somewhere in his parents’ house, but that’s beside the point.)
“I — ”
“And you have to deal with me! I know you’re getting sick of it. I can tell.”
Ray stands and looks at Frank in a way that almost makes him want to cry. “You’re my best friend. I don’t think I could ever get sick of you.”
“I’m sick of me,” Frank pouts.
Ray rolls his eyes good-naturedly and pulls him in for a hug by the front of his sweaty shirt. “You annoy the shit out of me sometimes, but I probably annoy the shit out of you, too.”
Frank snorts into his shoulder. He is not going to cry in this antique store. “You got that right.” Ray punches him lightly in the kidney and pulls back. “You’re not mad at me?”
He ruffles Frank’s hair. “No. Work is just kicking my ass. Someone trashed the green room last night and busted one of my lenses.”
“Oh. That sucks, sorry,” Frank says, but he’s beyond relieved. Seems like Ray’s keeping him around at least for a little while longer.
Ray shrugs, and Frank wishes he was more like him. Responsible. Hard-working. Able to take on shit with poise and grace, or whatever. “You’ll get your break.” Frank is about to call him out on his stupid clichè-ness when he continues. “Why don’t you just talk to Bob already? His band’s still got an opening, you know.”
“Ugh, I’m not talking to Bob. I can’t stand that guy.”
Ray laughs and turns back to the crates of records on the floor he was looking through, crouching down. “Me neither, but I heard him on the radio like three times this week. I’m just saying, man.”
Frank picks up a book from a nearby bookshelf and fans the musty-smelling pages with his thumb. “And I’m refusing. I don’t know why you won’t just start a band with me, dude.”
“Because I don’t play anymore,” Ray tells him for what has to be the gazillionth time since he put his guitar down for the last time, which was almost four years ago now.
“Yeah, it wasn’t your calling, whatever. I’m still not talking to Bob, though. If I was in a band with a guy whose vocab mainly consisted of variations of faggot, I would actually off myself. Like, seriously. I still don’t know why you live with him.”
Ray shrugs again, holding a record up to the light that he’d slipped out of its sleeve. “He makes more money than I do. Hey — isn’t your dad’s birthday coming up soon?”
Frank puts down the book when the dust makes his nose tingle. “Yeah? Are you suggesting I get Bob’s band to perform for him? What do they even call themselves now, the Jerk-Offs?”
Ray reaches over and slaps the back of his leg through his jeans. “Beat Machine. No, I just remembered ‘cause I found a Glenn Miller album in here.”
Frank stares at the back of his head.
Sensing him, Ray turns and says, like it’s obvious, “The composer? Went MIA during the war?”
He groans. “World War Two?”
“Well it wasn’t World War One.”
Frank groans again. World War fucking Two. That’s all he’s been hearing from his dad for the last year, since he’s writing a book about it. Which he quit his nice IT job to do. Which his mom is uber supportive of for some reason, even though she’s pretty much the family breadwinner now. It’s not even going to be a book about the war. It’s about life during the war. Boring as hell, if you ask Frank. And kind of annoying, too, since his dad has basically adopted Ray’s nerdy ass and dubbed him the favorite son. He’s so sick of anything World-War-Two-related.
“You should get him something here,” Ray suggests, like the good son he is. “I saw an oil lamp that would look really cool in his office.”
Frank waves in his direction. “I’ll just get him the Glenn Miller record.”
“He already has that one. I gave it to him for Christmas since I had doubles.”
Oh, yeah, Frank remembers that. He got his dad another wallet for Christmas that he’s pretty sure he has yet to use. “Uh, okay.” He picks the book back up. He can’t make out the title or the author, but it’s old and therefore looks like something his dad might like. Maybe. Or he’ll just get that lamp and pretend it was his idea.
Frank turns to scan the jam-packed room to see what else he can grab for his dad’s birthday and comes face to face with Professor fucking Trelawney herself. He drops the book with a thwack! and almost trips over another crate of records behind him in his haste to step away.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” the old lady says in a velvety voice, and she doesn’t look sorry at all. She’s got a hell of a poker face as she stands there under the shitty lights looking like an actual ghost. Or a witch, with her long white hair and flowing hippie outfit. She doesn’t have huge glasses like Professor Trelawney, but she does have an assload of jewelry jingling from every inch of her and an air of mystique that gives Frank the creeps. She’s also holding a small black box delicately in her decrepit hands. “I couldn’t help but overhear you were looking for something for your father?”
Frank glances back at Ray, who’s standing again and looking at the lady with a polite smile. Frank inches his way over to him. “Uh, yeah, I’m just gonna get this.” He picks up the book from the floor, which he keeps an iron grip on. Where did she even come from? And how did she overhear them? Can you have a heart attack at twenty-one?
The old lady holds out the black box and opens it up like it’s an oyster with a pearl inside. “What about this?” Frank leans forward on his toes to see, holding the book against his chest like a shield. Inside the box is a watch. An old one, he thinks, with big numbers and a thick olive-colored strap.
“Is that an army watch?” Ray asks, peeking around Frank. He sounds way too curious for Frank’s liking. One of these days he’s going to walk into the wrong junk shop and get himself baked into a pie. Which might just be this junk shop, honestly. Why hasn’t this lady smiled yet?
The woman nods serenely, huge earrings swinging past her chin. “I don’t know much about it, but I do know it’s by a company called Elgin. And it’s in very good condition, since it’s army-issued.”
“Yeah, they could hold up against anything, even sixty years,” Ray marvels. God, he’s such a nerd Frank could puke all over this lady’s loafers. Do witches wear loafers? “This looks like one of the A-11 models. I’m pretty sure they were produced for the Air Force.” He elbows Frank in the ribs. “Radium made the numbers and the hands glow in the dark. Isn’t that sick?”
“Sick is definitely the word I’d use,” Frank says. This lady is giving him the heebie jeebies; he wants to leave, like, now. “How much is it?”
She turns the box around so she can look at the watch herself. Her expression doesn’t really change, but now she looks kind of contemplative. “I have it going for one-twenty-five, but … ” She snaps the box shut, making Frank jump. “I’ll give it to you for a hundred, since it’s a present. And since I like you.”
A chill goes down Frank’s spine, and Ray elbows him again. “That’s a steal. It looks like it has all its original components, too — it must not have seen any action. You should totally get it, dude. When’s it from?”
“1943, I believe,” the lady tells them. “Unfortunately, the family I bought it from didn’t know its history.”
“Oh, cool! Where did you get it?”
Frank expects her to say something like “A magician never reveals his secrets” , but she just says simply, “Estate sale.”
“Maybe your dad can find out who owned it,” Ray says excitedly in his ear. “Do you have a hundred bucks on you?”
Frank looks over his shoulder at him. “Do I look like I have a hundred bucks on me?” Ray raises a single eyebrow and he sighs, pulling out his wallet. He does have a hundred bucks on him, but it was his last paycheck from Rite-Aid and he sort of wanted to save it for a new case for his guitar and just use pocket change for his dad’s birthday present. He takes out the hundred dollar bill anyway.
“Dude!” Ray says in that high chastising voice of his. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s dangerous to walk around with big bills, he knows, but it was only on him for like an hour. Frank hands the money to the lady, who takes it with her painted talons and swiftly turns and starts heading for the front of the store. Him and Ray glance at each other, put down the book and record they were holding, and follow after her.
The glass cases up front are arranged in a square that act like a wrap-around counter, and the lady is in the open middle putting Frank’s money in an ancient-looking cash register. The watch is sitting next to it in a plastic bag that looks like it’s been recycled from the dollar store. “Would you like a receipt?” she asks, shutting the drawer of the register.
“Yes, please,” Ray says for him, and she rips off the receipt and stuffs it in the wrinkled bag.
“I’m guessing that will be all you’ll need?”
“Yeah,” Frank says immediately, before it hits him how weird and presumptuous that statement was. This lady’s vibes are wack. It’d be too soon if he never had to come back here, actually.
She pushes the bag across the glass with a single wrinkled hand and finally gives the two of them what could almost be considered a smile. That or her crows feet just got a little bigger. “Enjoy your find. I’ve been Marjorie.”
Is it just Frank or did that sound like a threat? How much could you enjoy a watch?
He snatches the bag off the counter, almost knocking over a glass bowl of complimentary Hershey’s kisses. “Well, it’s not for me,” he muses as they turn away.
The lady hears him, though, of course, and she calls behind them, “I’m sure you’ll benefit from it as well.”
Ray catches his eye and shrugs when Frank wrinkles his nose.
He hopes the stupid thing isn’t haunted. That would be just his luck.