Archive of Our Own

Despite the oddness of the last time he was here in North Carolina, Frankie still loves Kitty Hawk.

Uncle Ben's — not just mine, all of ours, Frankie can practically see his uncle saying — beach house is still the perfect getaway that Frankie knows, deep down, that he needs. It's nearing the end of summer; school is only weeks away (and he's going to be a fucking sophomore this year, like, what the fuck) and when his father and stepfather had said that everyone was planning to get back together again, he'd practically been counting down the days.

Even if the last time he was here all the way back in January, it'd been...weird.

When Uncle Ben and Aunt Bev’s dog, Roscoe, had gotten hurt. When Frankie ran after him in the woods, got lost, and saw-

Well. Frankie still doesn’t really know what he saw. The memory of that night, being lost in the woods and desperate to find the dog, of thinking he did see Roscoe, watching him, mouthing the words come here, come here, come here on loop, feels like a dream. Like something that happened to someone else, and Frankie had just been a simple observer.

It’s been six months, and Roscoe’s definitely feeling better; as soon as he saw Frankie, the German Shepherd bolted towards him, tail wagging so fast that Frankie had been afraid he might actually break it. Roscoe’s fur is a little patchy from where it had to be shaved the last time-

wounds so deep that they had become swollen, the stitches painful-looking, roscoe staring up at frankie with those sad, golden-brown eyes: it had to be a black bear. there’s no other logical explanation. nothing else makes sense, frankie kept thinking, kept praying to be true.

-but other than that, the dog is fine. He’s better.

(am i?)

Frankie tries to push those memories away into a recess in the back of his mind. He’s good at that, which maybe isn’t necessarily something to brag about, but, well.

It’s not so bad being in Kitty Hawk again, despite the memories. Even if Frankie can feel his father watching him like a hawk every time he so much as takes a step outside, even if it’s just to help his aunts and uncles unload their rental cars. Even if, every time Frankie looks towards the woods, there’s a flash of apprehension, a moment where he’s almost afraid that he’ll see something-

antlers, dark eyes staring back. unmoving and watching me.

-but he tries to remind himself that he’s on vacation. That he doesn’t know what he saw, really, and that he’s here to have a good time.

Which, with them finally being in Kitty Hawk during the summer, meaning that it’s finally warm enough to swim, is no trouble.

Frankie lets his father smatter sunscreen on him, waving off Dad’s hands when his father notices the patches of reddish, rough skin on his hips and the backs of his knuckles — his eczema flaring up again — and fixing his father with a long stare when Dad starts to remind him about not going out too far.

“Dad, I’m almost sixteen,” he reminds his father with a huff, “I’m pretty much a grown man.”

"Wait, I don't think I caught that right," Shay randomly says as she comes to Frankie's side, peering at his chin. "Did you just say man?"

Frankie narrows his eyes at his sister. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Shay's grin is practically ear to ear as she squints, leaning forward. "What, 'cus you got like, two chin hairs you think you're all grown up?"

"I'm like twice your size."

Shay rolls her eyes and, when Dad turns to grab some sunscreen for her, reaches over and twists Frankie's arm behind his back.

Right before Frankie moves to shove her, Dad turns around and goes, "Hey! Knock it off!"

"She literally just bent my arm back-"

"-Eddie, I swear, he's always lying-"

"Enough," Dad physically inserts himself between the pair of them, narrowing his eyes and pointing towards the water when Frankie makes a face at Shay behind his back. "Go."

Shay flips Frankie off from behind Dad's back, grinning when Frankie rolls his eyes and marches off. One thing Frankie has come to realize very quickly about having a sister only a year younger than him is that oftentimes, it feels physically impossible to ever truly win or get ahead of her. Shay's sneaky, and much stronger than she looks.

But with a parting fuck you in sign, Frankie bolts to the ocean.

He loves swimming; he doesn't get the chance to do it often in Manhattan. Neither of his parents really love the public pool system in New York — his mother had practically threatened to ground him when he let it slip that oftentimes, during the summers back home, he and his friends would go to the public pool to cool off, and his father hadn't exactly jumped in to defend him, either — but Frankie's gone swimming in Lake Superior and other big bodies of water, and he loves it. There's something he likes about the fact that, when his head is dunked underwater, he can truly be wrapped up in silence.

He doesn't waste any time before he dunks his head in; he's the first one to do so, since even his cousins, Wren and Quinn, are still standing close to the shore, making faces whenever the semi-cool water laps at their knees.

His father doesn't like him to go out very far when he's swimming; Frankie can't wear his implants in water, obviously, and he's had to sit through countless reminders over the years about the fact that the ocean can be dangerous, that Frankie needs to be within eyesight and make sure to check to see if anyone's calling him, blah blah blah. But right now, he submerges himself beneath the waves, loving the sting of salt against his skin and the sand beneath his toes.

Richie comes out to meet him; his stepfather has to keep squinting at him, and at first, when Frankie asks him if he's seen any fish yet, Richie just stops and stares at him for a moment before saying: "Huh?"

Frankie repeats it; Richie swims closer to him, shaking his head and asking for him to repeat it.

Frankie and his stepfather stare at each other for a good minute until Frankie grins and busts out laughing.

"Dude, cut me some slack!" Richie signs, reaching over to shove Frankie's shoulder. "You know I can barely see without my glasses!"

"You can't see and I can't hear," Frankie retorts, snorting. "What are we gonna do if a shark comes up and attacks us?"

"Did you just say shark?" Quinn randomly says, floating past Frankie and Richie; Frankie hadn't even felt him there, but he watches as his cousin drifts by, an oddly wide grin on his face despite the subject. "Where?!"

"No shark," Richie signs back, staring at Quinn in confusion as Stan's son slaps the water and goes dammit!

Richie looks back at the shore, and then back at Frankie and goes, "Stan just yelled at him for cursing."

"Damn isn't a bad word, Dad!" Frankie sees Quinn shout, rolling his eyes and swimming off as Uncle Stan most likely gives one of the snappy retorts that Frankie knows and has been on the receiving end of quite a few times. 

"So," Richie says, floating next to Frankie as a small wave slaps against their backs, "Having fun yet, little man?"

Frankie narrows his eyes. "I'm not that much shorter than you now, Rich," he points out, groaning when his stepfather's lip wobbles with emotion. "Dude. I'm gonna be sixteen in like, three months."

"Stop reminding me," Richie bemoans, and when his stepfather thinks he can't see, Frankie sees him murmur, "My boy's growing up," under his breath.

Frankie looks away, shy. Even after all the time that Richie's been in their family, Frankie still finds that he doesn't quite know what to do whenever Richie shows such broad displays of affection for him like this.

"I'm having fun," Frankie signs to his stepfather quickly, looking back towards the shore.

Beverly has her daughter in her arms, knee deep in the water and talking to Mike; Rosie keeps twisting in her mother's grip, and when Bev takes a few steps back to gently ease the little girl into the water — barely coming up to her ankles — Rosie looks like she squeals in delight, holding onto Bev's fingers tightly and jumping up and down. Shay and Wren are hanging out a few yards away from Frankie and Richie, talking animatedly to one another and laughing, up until Quinn swims by them and splashes water into his sisters hair, ducking expertly away from his older sister when Wren tries to tackle him. Bill looks like he's trying to get the stick back from the dogs; Roscoe keeps trying to hand it back to him, but every time he gets close, Blue grabs it from him and darts away, splashing into the waves and play-bowing.

Dad is with the twins and Ben — it looks like Frankie's sisters want to come out with Frankie and Richie, but they definitely seem a little frightened of the waves: Phoebe, in particular, keeps leaping back every time one laps up against her toes, hiding behind Dad's leg and hugging it close. Frankie sees Stan and Patty still up on the sand, next to their youngest, Caleb — from what Frankie has been able to gather, Caleb doesn't seem to know whether he likes to ocean or not, alternating between periods of brief interest, and then twisting his face in discontent and curling into himself when he seems unsure.

Frankie's definitely having fun, he supposes. The summer wasn't bad at all, especially not like last summer, when they were all in lockdown due to Covid — he got to see his friends and hang out with them a little bit, and take a major break from the heavy coursework of school.

Salt water slaps him in the face; he splutters and wipes his eyes, cringing when even more salt gets into them and staring at Richie, who's got a shit-eating grin on his face.

"You suck," Frankie snaps, trying to splash him back; Richie turns away and swims off, still cackling and grinning when Frankie goes after him.

After a little while, Frankie swims a bit with his cousins and teaches Mike a few new signs — turtle, seaweed, and starfish — and watches as Uncle Stan finally enters the water, crossing his arms over his chest and going back and forth with Richie for a moment.

Richie subtly moves so that Stan's back is facing Frankie and Richie's standing in front of Stan; Richie meets Frankie's eyes quickly over Stan's shoulder and he grins, swimming up slowly behind his uncle.

"Yeah," Frankie can see Richie saying, bobbing his head. "Oh yeah, man. Definitely. But you know what else is funny, Stanthony?"

Frankie leaps up behind his uncle, wrapping his arms around Stan's bare torso and lifting his uncle off of his feet, launching both of them backward and into the water.

Frankie's already sloshing through the saltwater away from his uncle by the time he guesses Stan resurfaces; he doesn't even look back, laughing and heading towards the shore where he's sure to outrun Stan.

"Go, Frankie, go!" Patty signs quickly to him, laughing; Frankie bolts across the shore, only sparing one very quick look over his shoulder and hauling ass when he sees Uncle Stan tearing after him.

Frankie doubles back towards his family, skidding to a quick stop in the sand and scooping up Charlie, holding his four year-old sister in front of him as a shield.

"Uncle Stan," Frankie warns, gesturing to the little girl, "I have precious cargo."

"I'm not going to do anything," Stan says. "I just wanted to come and give my favorite nephew a hug."

"I'm your only nephew."

Frankie eventually dodges his uncle long enough to set his sister down and run back into the water, where he spends a little while swimming. By the time his feet start to prune up uncomfortably, Uncle Stan manages to get his revenge by throwing a wad of seaweed on top of Frankie's head.

"It's on now bro," Frankie warns his uncle, dunking his head back into the water to get rid of any stray pieces of seaweed.

Frankie settles on the shore, sitting down on one of the big beach blankets and drying his hair off with a towel; he barely notices someone coming to sit next to him until he looks over to see Caleb sitting next to him, staring up at Frankie with big, hazel-brown eyes.

"Hey there," Frankie says, nodding at his little cousin.

Caleb crosses his legs and sits at Frankie's side, keeping his toes far away from the sand.

"You don't like how it feels, huh?" Wren and Quinn have mentioned that Caleb can get sensory overload a lot; Frankie's always been to relate to that somewhat — oftentimes, especially after a long school day or when he's had to be around large groups of hearing people for a long time, he finds that by the end of the day, he's more than ready to take off his cochlears and relish in the silence, to give himself a break.

Caleb doesn't acknowledge that he heard Frankie say anything, but his little shuffle onto the towel makes Frankie believe that that's his way of saying yes.

Frankie checks his phone, answering a few texts from his friends and one from his mother, reminding her once again that he's perfectly safe.

Frankie feels a touch on his elbow; he looks over to see his cousin staring up at him again, tugging at his skin and rocking back and forth a little.

Caleb pulls at Frankie's elbow, seeming to try and tug him closer; Frankie furrows his brow in confusion, watching as Caleb winces and draws back when droplets from Frankie's hair fall on his arm.

"What's up, bud?" he asks his cousin, tilting his head. "You gotta use the bathroom or something?"

Caleb shakes his head fiercely, looking annoyed when Frankie just sits there, and once again, Frankie feels himself overly empathetic towards his nonverbal cousin: he sees himself, a few years older than Caleb, trying to articulate to everyone around him what he's thinking but not knowing how to get the words out. Having his family members stare at him with a mixture of confusion and pity. It's a very lonely feeling.

"Sorry, bud," Frankie murmurs, "Here, I can-"

In less than a second, Caleb leaps to his feet and bolts off in the opposite direction.

"Eloping!" Frankie shouts, scrambling in the sand to get to his feet. "We got a runner!"

Frankie's only heard secondhand accounts of Caleb eloping from his cousins, but he's never actually seen it before; for a three year-old, Caleb is fucking fast.

Thankfully, Ben's not too far and manages to scoop Caleb up right before the little boy takes off in the direction of the woods.

Frankie gives his uncle a high-five as he passes; Caleb's squirming in Ben's arms, face a little reddish as Ben passes Caleb off to Patty.

Frankie half-expects Patty and Stan to set Caleb down and reprimand him for taking off like that, for Frankie to have to turn away in embarrassment as he watches his autistic cousin be scolded — but neither of them do that. Patty just bounces her youngest in her arms, murmuring something to him and setting him back down in the sand.

"Now run that way," Frankie sees her tell the little boy, turning him around gently when Caleb tries to run back towards the direction of the woods. "No. Back to your toys."

Frankie's not jealous or anything. That's childish. But there's a split second when he gets a flashback to his own childhood, when he'd get so frustrated at no one understanding him and would throw tantrums — nothing was safe in his path. He'd throw things, run away from his parents and shout at them. Dad, although clearly exasperated, would always be the one who calmed him down, taking Frankie into a secluded area and trying to communicate with him with the home signs that they'd developed before Frankie had learned ASL.

Mom, though, would always rise to meet Frankie. Their screaming matches started very, very early on.

Caleb doesn’t seem to want to go easy; he keeps twisting in his mother’s grasp, so Frankie jogs over and helps her out, furrowing his brow when Caleb seems to calm just slightly at Frankie’s presence, grabbing his hand and forcing him to follow.

Sitting back on the towel with his younger cousin, he watches Caleb fidget, the little boy constantly looking over towards where he’d taken off.

Frankie rests his chin on top of his knees, watching him.

“What’s up with you?” he asks the little boy, frowning. “Dude, there’s…”

The rest of their family are busy; Richie seems to want to get a game of beach soccer ready, which Frankie’s down for, and everyone else is preoccupied, so there’s no one else around but him and Caleb to verify if Frankie’s seeing things or not as Frankie follows Caleb’s gaze and sees, down the beach where it starts to curve inland slightly near the grove of trees, something standing there, just out of reach of the waves.

Frankie’s shoulders stiffen; shielding his eyes from the sun, he stares, eyes locked on the figure in the distance.

He can’t tell what he’s looking at — the figure is dark, vaguely canine in shape if he had to guess, but just like the deer from all those years ago in Thanksgiving, it’s just-

watching.

Frankie doesn’t want to look away, but he cuts his gaze down to glance at his cousin; Caleb simply rocks back and forth, looking up to check if Frankie’s looking and then, to Frankie’s surprise, smiles up at him.

Frankie nearly leaps out of his skin when he feels something touching his side; he brackets Caleb protectively, swinging his head around to lock eyes with a very confused Richie.

His stepfather blinks. “You good, dude?”

“I-” Frankie looks back behind him, but the figure is gone, all in the span of less than three seconds. “I thought I…”

Richie peers at him in the midst of toweling off his hair, frowning at him. “Everything okay?”

“I just,” Frankie shakes his head, looking back down the beach. Towards the woods. There’s nothing there, nothing… “I thought I saw something.”

Richie furrows his brows, making a show out of bending over to look past Frankie and Caleb, down the shoreline.

“It’s gone,” Frankie says when his stepfather looks back at him. “It kinda looked like-” dark figure, watching me, watching all of us, “I dunno, a dog or something.”

“Well, there’s a lot of wildlife around,” Richie points out, and when his stepfather grimaces a little, Frankie has to force himself to look away. 

He remembers the bear from January, the one that everyone had assumed must’ve attacked Roscoe. Must’ve. Had to. There’s no other logical explanation.

Richie glances over to where Frankie’s father is, and Frankie feels a surge of panic — Dad will freak the fuck out if Frankie makes any mention of a wild animal, will probably make them pack up and leave Kitty Hawk all together if Frankie shares any of his unease.

Not that he’s actually afraid or anything. It was just some dumb animal.

“We gonna play soccer?” Frankie finally asks his stepfather, nudging Richie, needing to distract himself.

“So I can win?” Richie counters, grinning.

Frankie rolls his eyes, thankful when Patty comes over to take Caleb and relieve Frankie of his babysitting duties.

“I call dibs on Mike,” Frankie says immediately, tugging his uncle towards him.

“Well, I get Ben,” Richie leans down to wrap his arms around Uncle Ben’s neck from behind; Ben doesn’t even turn around, reaching over to pat Richie’s shoulder from where he’s sitting with Rosie.

“Aunt Bev,” Frankie says, grinning and saluting to his aunt, who laughs and salutes back.

“No way,” Richie huffs.

“Yes way.”

“You can have Wren and Shay if I get Bev.”

Frankie considers it, and then shakes his head. “Nah. I get Bev, and you can have my dad and Stan,” and when Richie doesn’t look at all appeased, Frankie adds: “I’ll even let you take Quinn, too.”

“Not playing,” Quinn says, and Frankie notices that his cousin has a turtle in his hands. “Busy.”

Frankie smirks when Richie tries to bargain to get Bev, but in the end, Frankie manages to snag Mike, Bev, Shay, and Bill for his team; Stan hardly wants to play, Richie having to drag him over to the game at least four or five times.

It’s fun, though. It’s good.

Frankie pointedly ignores the feeling of eyes on him after they start trudging back up to the beach house after a few hours, even when he sees the dogs beginning to stir, throwing glances towards the direction of the woods.

There’s wildlife everywhere, Frankie forces himself to remember. You’re almost sixteen. Grow the hell up.

—

Since they're in Kitty Hawk for August, not only is it a chance to get together before the school year starts, but it's also a combined belated birthday party for Uncle Mike, Uncle Stan, Caleb, and Rosie.

Frankie had no clue what to get his uncles — his cousins were much easier, since Rosie apparently just wanted Barbie dolls (and Frankie had watched the emotion glimmering in Beverly's eyes when Rosie, holding the Barbie high in the air, ran up to her and asked her to play with her. A little while later, Dad had quickly told Frankie, "Your aunt wasn't allowed to have dolls when she was a little girl," and Frankie had realized that that was why his father and Richie were so adamant on Frankie buying two of each) and Caleb wanted a very specific type of serving spoon, one that he's been staring at every time they come inside, not allowing anyone else to touch.

Mike had simply said Frankie's presence was enough, but Frankie still made sure to give his uncles a card, groaning when Mike teared up and having to hide his face when Uncle Stan even became a little emotional — Frankie guesses that the part of his card towards the end, where, despite the teasing, Frankie had written: thank you and Aunt Patty for always being people I can turn to, and for becoming my bonus parents, was what got him.

Ben wants to make a big birthday dinner for everyone, designating almost everyone to particular kitchen duties until, quite predictably, Richie and Bill forgot to grab some ingredients.

"I'll go," Frankie immediately says, desperate to get out of peeling potatoes. "Uncle Stan offered to cover for me."

Stan just stares at him, bewildered.

"Oh, you don't have to," Dad says quickly, shrugging. "I can go."

"You're on mashing duty though," Frankie says with a grin, snickering when his father grumbles a bit. "And it's like, less than a mile."

"You can't ditch me," Richie says to Dad, nudging him with his knee. "And besides, Frankie can just take..." Richie trails off, eyes briefly flickering to Roscoe, where the German Shepherd is sitting next to Blue by the kids, waiting for Bev to wait until Ben's back is turned so she can pass the dogs some chicken.

Frankie glances down at the dog, where the large scar on Roscoe's side — healed by now, but still raised, the fur on his side not grown in properly due to being shaved — is still very visible. He feels a flash of guilt all over again, even though he knows that Ben and Beverly were never upset with him in the first place.

Frankie sees his father look down at the dog and then up at Frankie, meeting his eyes for a brief moment before looking away.

Shay looks between the three of them. "I mean, I could..."

"Frankie's got it," Richie finally says, glancing at Dad and — in a moment of nonverbal communication that Frankie can't even begin to decipher — giving Dad a brief smile, jerking his head towards Frankie. "Besides, he sucks at peeling potatoes, and Stan's can do it."

"I didn't even volunteer," Stan mutters from Frankie's side, making a face at the potatoes.

Ben doesn't even hesitate before telling Frankie to bring the dog with him; Blue's still a little too rowdy to go off leash like that, and Roscoe doesn't show any trace of anxiety when Frankie calls him, coming to his side and nosing his hands.

There's still a while before it gets dark; the sun is high in the sky, and so Frankie and Roscoe trek to the grocery store together, the dog faithfully trotting at Frankie's side. Every so often, Roscoe will glance towards the woods — but never for too long, and he isn't growling or barking like he had six months ago.

They're a little bit away from the grocery store when Frankie sees a side street and remembers, with a pang of longing, one of the friends he had made the last time he was here: Carrie, the older woman who found him and Roscoe in the woods that night.

They still have a while of sunlight, and his phone is charged a reasonable amount; he's been dying to see her again, and Carrie — not the name she introduced herself as, Pearl, she'd confided in him right before they left in January — had told him that her door was always open for him.

Roscoe trots at his side as they turn down the side street, eventually coming to Carrie's cozy bungalow; it looks the exact same as it did six months ago, with only one noticeable change: there's another car in the driveway, and Frankie hangs back, resting the palm of his hand between Roscoe's ears as he hesitates, not wanting to intrude if Carrie has someone else over.

He only has to wait all of two seconds before the front door to the house opens, and a woman — not Carrie — comes out; this woman looks like she's around the same age as Carrie, hair curly and tied back in a small bun, and as the woman turns to face the street, she locks eyes with him, expression unreadable.

After a heartbeat, Frankie sees Carrie pop up behind the woman's shoulder; Carrie smiles when she sees him, stepping around the other woman and walking down the steps to meet him on the sidewalk.

"Frankie," Carrie uses his name sign, and Frankie smiles: she remembered. "How are you?"

"Eh," He does a so-so motion with his hand, laughing.

Carrie leans down to pet Roscoe, smoothing the dogs ears back and laughing when Roscoe reaches up to give her chin a lick.

When she stands back up, they both pause, seeming unsure if they should hug; Carrie had seemed a little off put when Frankie's parents had hugged her six months ago, and even though she'd allowed it, Frankie gets the feeling that the pair of them are a lot alike: they don't know what to do with physical affection sometimes.

"Hi," he says, glancing behind Carrie's shoulder at the woman standing on the porch, watching the pair of them with an expression that Frankie still can't decipher. Carrie had told Frankie when she told him her name to keep it between the two of them: it's a really, really long story, Carrie had told him, her expression distant, but i don't use that name publicly anymore.

Carrie glances behind her and laughs, jerking her head at the woman behind her before looking back at Frankie and saying, "It's alright. Me and Sue go back a very, very long time."

Frankie looks up at the woman — Sue — and a faint sense of recognition dawns on him: he's seen her before, in the pictures in Carrie's house.

"Oh," Frankie nods, giving Sue a wave. "Hi. I'm Frankie."

Sue nods, stepping down and meeting him in the driveway; she extends a hand to Frankie for him to shake. "I've heard a lot about you," she murmurs, giving Frankie a smile.

"Cool," Frankie says a little awkwardly, glancing at Carrie; Carrie shakes her head and touches Sue's shoulder briefly.

"Frankie's a friend," Carrie tells her, giving Frankie a meaningful look as she smiles.

Sue just nods again. "Well, I'll be back tomorrow," she tells Carrie, and the pair of them do a similar, nonverbal exchange that Dad and Richie did — making Frankie wonder if Sue's a friend, or maybe.... — before Sue waves to Frankie, getting in her car and driving off.

"She's very protective," Carrie tells Frankie when Sue leaves. "It takes her awhile to warm up to people."

"I'm kinda the same," Frankie admits with a shrug. "People say I can be kind of cold sometimes."

Carrie looks at him, head titled to the side. "I don't think that at all," she tells him, blue eyes locking with his, "I find that you're a very warm person."

Frankie shrugs, looking away; Carrie touches his elbow.

"How have you been?"

He shrugs again. "Fine, I guess. School's gonna start up in a few weeks."

"And you're going into your sophomore year, right?"

He nods.

Frankie watches as Carrie's eyes go a little distant again, the woman nodding to herself. "High school was so long ago," she murmurs, and there's a brief moment where Frankie thinks that she's going to say something to him, maybe reveal something, until Carrie shakes her head and continues, "So. You're all back in Kitty Hawk?"

"Just for a few days."

"And everything's been...."

Frankie wonders if he should tell her about the moment where he saw - or thought he saw - something on the beach earlier. But he remembers Richie's words — there's a lot of wildlife around here — and how it contrasts with what Carrie told him months before, how Kitty Hawk is normally safe, but that it'd be best for him to stay away from the woods, especially at night.

Carrie looks at him, waiting.

"I don't know," Frankie tells her, shrugging. "I just- I think I'm still a little on edge from January or something."

"Right."

"I'm not a crazy person who believes in like, ghosts and stuff," Frankie adds, rolling his eyes. "So — you know, don't think I'm..."

Carrie gives him a bizarre look, head tilting to the side.

"You really don't?"

Frankie frowns. "Don't what?"

"Believe in anything."

Frankie believes in logic: he wasn't a child raised with the notion of ghosts being real or urban legends being anything other than something kids told to prank or frighten each other. His mother has told him countless times about when her sister had pranked her as a little girl with the Blood Mary legend, holding the door shut from the other side while Mom cried and screamed for her older sister to let her out.

"Not really," Frankie says, pushing away the memory of the thing in the woods, the one that looked a lot like Roscoe but wasn't. Frankie was just scared and seeing things, out of his element in the woods - he had to be. Nothing else makes sense.

Carrie just gives him another long look, petting Roscoe's head and asking him a few questions about school and life; he finds that he likes talking to her a lot. It's easy, in a way that Frankie's only found that he has with Richie, Bev, and Wren: that feeling of someone knowing what you're going to say before you say it, of an ease of conversation that he wishes he had with everyone else.

After a few minutes, Frankie has to bid her a goodbye; he promises to come back with Wren, Quinn, and Shay when they have free time, and Roscoe trots faithfully at Frankie's side as always, even though it'd taken the dog a full minute to be led away from Carrie's house.

The grocery store is small, so it doesn't take Frankie very long at all to find the bread crumbs and extra butter. He even grabs a piece of beef jerky for Roscoe, the German Shepherd happily munching on half of it while Frankie pays.

The store has been relatively quiet the whole time they've been here, with only a few other shoppers, but even so, Frankie's noticed that one person in particular — a man, older, and shorter than Frankie — has been looking at him the entire time, a strange, almost hostile expression on his face. At first, Frankie thought maybe it was because Roscoe was with him, but that theory went out the window when Frankie realized that the man had been watching him, not the dog.

Frankie finishes paying, waving goodbye to the cashier and starting to head out the door; before he does, though, Frankie feels eyes on him, and turns to see the man behind him.

Frankie stares down at him, waiting; the man doesn't say anything, just staring at him, until Frankie finally barks out, "Did I do something wrong?"

The man doesn't say anything; Frankie rolls his eyes.

"Okay, whatever," he snaps out, turning and walking out the sliding doors; Roscoe hesitates, watching the man silently for a moment before trailing after Frankie, ears back and head low.

Frankie's about to step into the parking lot when he feels a hand gripping his wrist tightly; Frankie whirls around to see the man holding onto his wrist much tighter than Frankie thought he was capable of, to the point where Frankie can feel the tendons in his wrist shifting around and popping.

"Dude, what the fuck?!" Frankie snarls out, eyes flashing. "I didn't steal anything, so-"

"IT watched you when you were little," the man says; Frankie's positively certain, both from what he picks up through his auditory aides and from lip-reading, that that's what the man just said.

"Ex-fucking-cuse me?" Frankie tries to pull his wrist away, to no avail. He doesn't want to necessarily hurt an older individual, but Frankie doesn't let people touch him like this, ever. "Let me go."

The man tugs him closer to the point where they're only inches away from each other. Frankie's aware of Roscoe coming to his side, the dog stiff and most likely growling at the stranger.

"IT came into your room almost every night," the man continues, and Frankie feels so disturbed, a sick twist in his gut as he tries to tear his wrist away. The man is holding it tighter, to the point where Frankie's fingers start to ache. "And now, something is asking you to follow — can't you hear it?" The man grins then, taunting and wild. "Don't you hear it?"

"Let me the fuck go," Frankie finally snarls, and it's as he wretches his wrist away from the man that Roscoe puts himself in between them, the dog barking and at the other man — Frankie has never seen the dog look at a human like that, snapping his jaws in the air as the man finally backs up. 

"You fucking freak," Frankie snaps, reaching down to grab Roscoe's collar. "Stay the hell away from me. Roscoe, come."

Roscoe doesn't budge for a moment, still barking at the man; Frankie gives him a rough tug, and Roscoe follows after him, pressed close against Frankie's legs as Frankie nurses his wrist against his chest, throwing a glance behind him at the man.

The man doesn't follow; he's simply staring at Frankie, an odd, distant smile on his face as he watches Frankie and Roscoe retreat down the road.

—

Frankie will not, under any circumstance, tell Dad or Richie about what just happened; Frankie's used to strange people (living in Manhattan and all), so it's not like he's never encountered someone who was clearly having a rough go at life before, but he knows his father insanely well: Dad is overprotective to a fault, and Frankie knows that Kitty Hawk already has one strike against it — he doesn't intend for it to become two, for his father to decide not to let Frankie come back here and for Frankie to have another privilege taken from him.

By the time he gets back to the beach house, his wrist is still aching, but it's a little duller; he hides his pain well, so no one notices him wincing slightly as he tosses the plastic bag onto the island.

"You were gone for a little bit," Dad comments innocently; it seems like dinner's nearing completion, and Frankie can see a bit of mashed potato on his father's cheek. Frankie feels a flash of fondness despite how on edge he feels after the encounter — and he doesn't know why, since this isn't his first rodeo. 

"I ran into Pearl," Frankie says, forcing himself to remember to use Carrie's alias. "We talked for a bit."

"Seriously?" Wren says, frowning. "Ugh, you should've texted me!"

"Well, I was busy," Frankie mutters a little harsher than he usually is with his cousin, save for when they're mad at each other.

Wren rolls her eyes at him, deciding not to engage.

"And you remembered the list?" Dad asks.

Frankie nods quickly; he can feel his wrist throbbing.

IT came into your room almost every night, the man had rambled — what the fuck did that mean?

Dad and Richie look at each other; normally, Frankie would find that endearing, but right now, he's a little freaked out, and his wrist fucking hurts, so he's just irritated at the fact that they won't say what they're thinking to him.

"Everything okay at the store?" Dad finally asks again, and Frankie feels his temper flare.

"Yes, I remembered everything on the list," Frankie snaps out, using oral English rather than sign; he can feel his family members staring at him, clearly taken aback. "I'm not a little kid."

"Did I say you were?" Dad asks, bewildered.

"You treat me like one sometimes," Frankie fires back.

"Yeah, you can go upstairs and calm down, man," Richie says, blinking at Frankie in alarm. "'Cus I don't know what's up with you, but the attitude isn't cute."

"Whatever," Frankie growls, turning around and stomping up the stairs.

He's not even angry at his father — not really — but he can't stop thinking about the parking lot. The man gripping his wrist and saying those fucking creepy things to him, refusing to let him go. Taunting Frankie for being Deaf, for not being able to hear something calling him.

A cold discomfort washes over him as he lays in bed, gripping his Switch tight. The memory of the woods, of the thing asking him to come over again and again. How did some random...

No, Frankie thinks, shutting his eyes. Shut up and stop going there. Man up and tell Dad sorry, blame it on puberty again or something. That's not real.

A little while later, Richie texts and asks him if they can talk; Frankie opens the door and sits next to his stepfather, their shoulders brushing.

"So what the hell was that about, man?" Richie asks, staring at him. "You and Eddie fight, sure, but that was totally unprovoked."

"Yeah."

Richie waits; Frankie doesn't budge.

Finally, Frankie sighs through his nose and signs, "I'm just stressed about school, Rich," he lies easily; Frankie considers himself to be an honest person, but he's learned very quickly that his parents and him have a better relationship when he lies about little things. "And Dad just- I'm not mad at him, but he was just there and..." Frankie shrugs.

Frankie half-expects his stepfather to make a joke; Richie looks surprisingly annoyed as he says, very calmly, "You're not allowed to take things out on your father just because you're unhappy, Frank. That's not cool."

"I didn't mean-"

"You tend to do that to him a lot," his stepfather continues, expression firm, "And I'm asking you to cut it out. When you're eleven or twelve, I can understand that you have a harder time controlling your emotions and understanding the effect that you have on people, but you're turning sixteen in the fall. Eddie doesn't deserve to have someone he loves taking everything out on him for no reason; he went through that for over eleven years, Frankie."

Frankie feels a tightness grip his chest: Frankie's mother.

"Richie, I didn't..."

Richie shuts his eyes, breathing in and out through his nose. "I'm not trying to hurt your feelings," he continues honestly, "And I love you more than anything, kid. But I have to stick up for my husband, just as much as I stick up for my son. Do you understand?"

Frankie lowers his gaze; Richie nudges him to get his attention.

"I just don't want to see you treat him like that," Richie continues. "I made a promise to both of you to love and support you."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not the one you owe an apology too, man," Richie reminds him.

"I know."

Richie gives him a hug and ruffles his hair; when Frankie still sits there, unmoving, his stepfather frowns in concern.

"Is everything okay, Frank? Was everything okay at the store?"

For a moment, Frankie entertains telling his stepfather about the man. But then he remembers the celebration downstairs. He thinks about how his father's side of the family has done so much for him already — starting learning sign language for him, having to hear about what a difficult child he is, having to support Frankie's father in the divorce. How Frankie already ruined a vacation the last time they were here; he doesn't want to do that all over again, for his family to regret having him here at all.

Frankie's already the black sheep of the family in his eyes: he's not really a Kaspbrak-Tozier, and he knows that he's more or less extra baggage for his father, really.

No one's ever said anything to him like that before or implied it, but Frankie feels like it's true: everyone has to walk on eggshells around him.

"Yeah," Frankie finally says, giving Richie a shrug. "Everything's fine."

—

"I think I want to name that one Pebbles," Quinn tells Frankie, tossing the crow another blueberry.

"Pebbles?"

"It's either that or Amethyst," Quinn continues, and when Frankie looks at him, his cousin rolls his eyes. "Steven Universe. You still watch it, right?"

Wren and Quinn had told him to watch it back when they first met years before; Frankie likes it, sure, but he found himself so frustrated with certain plot points and the weird episode scheduling that he got frustrated with the show and has been putting it off for years.

Quinn rolls his eyes.

"I'd name that one Shadowfeather," Frankie says, tossing a bit of peanuts to the other crow; the crow happily pecks them up.

At Quinn's look, he elaborates, "Warrior cats."

"Nerd."

"Dweeb."

It's the following day, and Frankie and Quinn decided to feed the crows outside while they waited for Wren and Shay to finish getting ready. Uncle Stan's always told Frankie that crows remember faces, and that it pays to be nice to them — already during this visit, they've been left a few gifts by the crows who remembered them from the last time they were here. Shiny rocks, a random Pokemon figure that Quinn called dibs on before Frankie could even open his mouth.

"I can't wait until I turn sixteen," Quinn randomly says, and when Frankie looks at him, his cousin elaborates, "I can start HRT then."

"Oh," Frankie grins. "Dude, that's gonna be so cool."

"Yeah," Quinn shrugs. "My mom and dad said they want to throw me a belated bat mitzvah when I officially start." Quinn rolls his eyes, but it's fond; there's a smile on his face as he talks about his mother and father, and Frankie feels a flash of envy for him, for the fact that it always seems so easy for the Uris family.

"What's gonna change?" Frankie can't help but ask. "I know your voice will."

"Yeah. I'll get some facial hair and more muscles," Quinn flexes his arm. "I mean, more than I already have."

To be a shit, Frankie moves his flannel off of one shoulder to flex his arm next to him; Quinn gives him puppy eyes.

"I have such gender envy for you," he says; Frankie blinks, taken aback.

"Really?"

"What, did that mean something to you?" Quinn grins.

"Asshole."

Wren and Shay finally emerge; when Shay asks Frankie how she looks, he looks his sister up and down as she does a little twirl.

"Definitely not a model."

"I look better than you."

"You wish."

"She does look better than you," Wren interjects, high-fiving Shay.

The four of them walk in the direction of town; Shay looks at his long-sleeved flannel, brow furrowed.

"Isn't it like, way too hot for that?"

"Nah." It is, but Frankie doesn't want anyone to spot the growing bruise on his wrist.

"Boys," Shay mutters with an eyeroll.

They stop by a coffee shop and a few stores when they get into town, and it's as they're getting ready to pass near the grocery store that Wren goes, "Hey, I kinda wanted to grab something; you guys mind?"

Frankie feels on edge again; he doesn't see the man from yesterday, but the memory — and the ache in his wrist — is still fresh.

"Do you have to?" Frankie asks his cousin, frowning when she looks at him.

"I'd like to," Wren tells him, frowning when Frankie doesn't budge. "Dude, what's up with you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You've been weird since yesterday."

"I haven't been weird."

"You kinda sorta have," Quinn says, shrugging when Frankie looks at him.

"I hate it when you two gang up on me," Frankie mutters, rolling his eyes.

"No one's ganging up on you," Wren huffs, shaking her head as she signs, "You're being dramatic."

"I'm not dramatic," Frankie snaps harshly, and there's a moment, his shoulders stiff, when he realizes that at this point, he's a head taller than all of his cousins and Shay. He shamefully steps back, looking at the ground. "Sorry."

He feels a touch on his shoulder; he looks over to see Shay, his sister's eyes concerned.

"Frankie, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Frankie looks away. "Look, just...yesterday, something weird happened when I was here, and I don't want to run into that person."

"Weird?" Wren asks, her eyes widened slightly. "What do you mean weird? Who was it?"

"No one," Frankie shakes his head. "Look, I'm fine. I can take care of myself."

"You don't look okay," Shay points out, her expression becoming fierce. "Frankie, you can tell us anything, you know that."

He doesn't want to freak out Shay or his cousins, for Shay to run and tell Dad and Richie anything. No one in this family is good at keeping secrets; Frankie's been on the brunt of it more times than he can fucking count.

"It's fine," Frankie mutters, and it's at that moment that they see someone walking towards them — another teenager, only an inch or two shorter than Frankie, with blond hair and blue eyes: Tanner, the local kid that they met in January. A little rough around the edges, but Frankie has a good feeling about him.

"I thought I recognized you guys," Tanner says with a wave as he comes over. He stops a few paces away from them, brow raised. "Uh. Y'all okay?"

"Fine," Frankie mutters, glancing at Shay before he walks over to give Tanner a low-five. "Hey, man."

Even though Shay, Wren, and Quinn had been a little more skeptical of Tanner the last time they saw him, they all wave and seem to be semi-relieved to have him over — Frankie's been told for his entire life that it's incredibly frustrating to try and get any information out of him when he doesn't want to offer it.

Wren still needs to run her errand, so Frankie waits down the street with Tanner as Wren, Quinn, and Shay go into the store without them; Tanner sits on the curb next to Frankie.

"How's everything been?" Tanner asks, hesitating. "You can understand me, right?"

"Yeah," Frankie tells him, gesturing to the cochlear on that side. "They can pick up a lot." That's not necessarily true - to be quite honest, Frankie finds his cochlear implants to be incredibly overstimulating most of the time. He's glad that he has the option to choose how he wants to navigate his day, but there's times when all he wants is to leave them off for weeks, to relish in total silence.

After a moment, Frankie answers, "And it's been alright, I guess."

Tanner nods, watching the quiet road in front of them for a while.

Neither of them say anything until Tanner turns to him and goes, "Can I be honest with you, man?"

Frankie blinks.

"You look like crap. You look freaked out."

Frankie clenches his jaw, about ready to argue, until Tanner continues, "Look, you're a stubborn fuck — I don't know ya super well, sure, but you look like you don't like talking. I get it," Tanner frowns, his blue eyes a little distant as he says, "But listen. No one can help you if you don't talk — and you can use your mouth and your hands, so you ain't got an excuse."

Frankie has a feeling that he can tell Tanner; Tanner was the only person, other than Carrie, who even guessed that Frankie saw some....thing out in the woods that night. That the woods around Kitty Hawk are not as peaceful as they seem.

Frankie rolls up his sleeve; Tanner stares at the bruise that's beginning to form in the shape of a hand.

"Who did that?" Tanner asks, oddly protective.

"I don't know," Frankie admits. "I haven't seen him before, but there was some guy here yesterday. He kept staring at me, and when I left, he followed me out and grabbed my wrist and-" He looks away. "He said some crazy shit. I don't know. But I got away from him and..."

Tanner listens to him, brows knitted together in concern as Frankie finishes explaining.

"What kinda crazy shit?"

IT watched me when I was little, Frankie thinks, feeling a prickle of unease going down his spine. IT came into my room almost every night.

(A memory, long buried: his nightmares, the feeling of something watching him. Sometimes, it was his grandmother. But other times, it was-

DON’T LOOK AT THE WINDOW.

-the memory crumbles away, leaving a vacant hole.)

"I don't know. He probably wasn't...you know. All there."

"Still, he left a fuckin' bruise," Tanner says, frowning. "You tell your folks? Your dad and his uh..." He scratches the back of his neck. "You know."

Frankie blinks. "Husband."

"I wasn't sure," Tanner admits, and Frankie doesn't see any trace of disgust or hostility. "But you tell 'em?"

"No," Frankie says quickly, and notices his cousins and Shay coming out of the store. "And they don't know, either — don't say anything, man."

Tanner nods.

No one talks about Frankie's offness; everyone continues walking, Shay offering Frankie some of her soda and staying faithfully at his side like always.

"So," Tanner says as they decide to stop at a park, sitting on the slide house and sharing snacks from the grocery store, "Can I ask how y'all are all related? If that's- you know, cool."

"We're brother and sister," Wren says, touching Quinn's shoulder lightly.

Tanner cocks his head to the side as he regards Quinn, gaze curious, and when Wren stares at him, brown eyes slightly narrowed, Tanner says, "I've just- um, sorry. I've never met anyone who's..."

"It's okay," Quinn nudges his sister, giving her a little smile and looking at Tanner. "She's really protective is all. I promise she's not as tough as she acts."

"I sure am," Wren says with a huff, but she looks more than a little relieved when Tanner seems not to have any hostility. Frankie wonders if maybe they're all being a little too judgmental of him, but as Shay's commented more than once, they're lowkey in Trump territory, so.

"I think it's cool," Tanner adds. "I just haven't actually met someone who was uh- what's..."

"Trans."

"Oh, okay. Yeah, trans. Okay, continue."

"We're also brother and sister," Shay gestures to Frankie, hooking an arm around his neck and, making sure Frankie can see her lips, goes, "We look a lot alike, huh?"

She does a wide, toothy smile; Frankie subconsciously does it back, the pair of them laughing. It's funny — Richie's said before that Shay and Frankie do have incredibly similar smiles to one another.

Wren does her best to explain to Tanner their complex family tree: Stan and Patty are their parents, Caleb is their younger brother; Ben and Beverly have a daughter and are Roscoe's owners; Bill and Mike are married and thinking of adopting, but don't have children at the moment — minus Blue; and Dad and Richie have Frankie, Shay, and the twins, and Frankie is his father's biological son from his previous marriage.

Tanner listens and shakes his head. "Okay. Kinda still lost, but..."

"It's complicated," Shay laughs. "But I love it."

Frankie smiles at her; he's happy that she's come to love their family so much. He knows that he needed the Losers himself.

"What about you?" Frankie asks Tanner. "You have an older brother — uh, Cooper, right?"

Tanner nods, munching on a sour gummy worm. "Yep. Just me, Daddy, my ma, and Coop."

Frankie vaguely remembers Tanner mentioning an uncle the last time he was here — he'd said it with a forlorn look, and more than that, Frankie remembers the other teen saying that Frankie had been similar to his own uncle: he hadn't wanted to say what he saw.

Tanner catches Frankie's eye; the other teen glances away, shifting in his seat.

"So you've lived here your entire life?"

"Sorta. We used to live more inland, in a town called Hot Springs," Tanner hesitates, "It's right near the Appalachian trail, actually."

Shay brings her knees close to her chest. "Isn't it true that Appalachia is like, kinda haunted?"

Tanner frowns. "Uh."

"I've heard that," Wren says, and she keeps looking over at Frankie, eyes boring onto the side of his head - she knows about his nightmares, and she's always tried to insinuate that they mean something. "Like, you're not supposed to go outside at night or listen to things calling your name."

Quinn rolls his eyes. "Wren, don't even start."

"Just because you don't think that stuff is real-"

"You believe in all 'o that?" Tanner asks Wren directly, expression unreadable.

"Sure I do," Wren says, and when Quinn rolls his eyes again, Wren looks annoyed. "My brother here says I'm crazy, but I do. The otherworldly and spirits — I think they're real," and, taking a look at all of them, his cousin straightens her shoulders and says, "I've seen ghosts before."

Frankie stares at her, eyes narrowed. "What?"

"I have."

"No, she hasn't,” Quinn mutters.

"I did," Wren says harshly, and then a sudden emotion crosses her face as she says, using simcom as she looks at Frankie, "My grandmother. My dad's mom, Bubbie."

She's never told Frankie that before.

Wren notices everyone looking at her; she wipes at her face, shrugging. "She came and visited me after she passed away, before we had Shiva."

Quinn looks down, picking at his shoelaces.

"It's fine if you don't believe me," Wren says, sounding a little defensive. "But I saw her."

"I believe you," Tanner says instantly; Frankie looks at him. "I, uh...well, let's just say I've seen some shit, dude."

"Dude?" Wren laughs.

"Girl? Ma'am? I don't know." But Tanner doesn't elaborate on his comment, and even though Frankie is curious, the look on the other teenagers face doesn't leave room for many questions.

The conversation turns to television shows and media, but Frankie can't stop thinking of Wren, her assurance that she'd seen her grandmother, the fact that his cousin believes — and claims to have seen — ghosts. She's made vague references to it in the past, sure, but there's always been a wall on Frankie's end when they've come close to the conversation; he realizes that he's been shutting it down without realizing it, changing the topic.

After a while, with Frankie reminding everyone to reapply their sunscreen, and rolling his eyes when Shay and his cousins call him Eddie Jr. ("That's my least favorite nickname of all time, and you know it."), they get up to walk around some more, when Tanner makes a comment about a cabin that he and his family own.

"No one really goes there," Tanner says, shrugging. "Well, me 'n my brother will camp out there when we're tryin' to get away, and we'll have friends go over, but it's real nice. Quiet."

"I love the beach house," Shay begins, before making a face, "But it's so packed. We're practically on top of each other in there."

"I have to share a room with my little brother," Quinn shivers. "He gets up all throughout the night. Last night he kept waking me up because he was putting the glass of water near the door."

"Again?" Frankie asks; Caleb's been doing that this visit, leaving his plates of half-eaten food and glasses of water on the floor, especially near the doors. Uncle Stan and Aunt Patty have had to remind everyone to watch their step when they come into new rooms — no one really knows why he's doing it, but Frankie nearly busted his ass after almost tripping on a glass of water just this morning.

"I mean," Tanner hesitates, "Don't know how your folks are, but if y'all are interested, maybe you can hang out there for tonight. At the cabin, I mean. We got a television 'n Xbox in there."

As soon as Tanner says Xbox, Frankie's fucking down.

But...

"My dad's a helicopter parent," Frankie rolls his eyes. "Highly doubt he'll let me and Shay do that." Especially not Frankie, considering Dad probably doesn't trust him in Kitty Hawk, anyways.

Quinn looks at Frankie, brow raised. "Your dad's really cool, Frankie," his cousin states adamantly.

Frankie stares at his cousin. “My dad?”

Quinn frowns. “I think Uncle Eddie would be fine with it, if we’re all together.”

“Would your folks be okay with y’all…you know,” Tanner asks Wren and Quinn, gesturing to Wren in particular. “With guys, I mean.”

Wren looks like she’s about to fall over with laughter; when Tanner looks at her, confused, she goes, “Considering I’m a massive lesbian — I think my parents will be chill,” Wren looks at Frankie, and then, her eyes soft, adds, “And my mom and dad know Frankie wouldn’t let anything happen to us, ever. They trust him.”

Uncle Stan and Aunt Patty have never told Frankie that directly; it’s simultaneously a lot to have on his shoulders, and reassuring to know that they care about him and trust him so much, especially with their two oldest children — with both Wren and Quinn being LGBT, Frankie knows that he’s taken on a protective role with the pair of them, much in the way he has with his father and Richie.

“Look, I’m all for the idea of having some space to chill out and like, play music and talk as loud as we want for as late as we want,” Shay says, holding her hands up. “I love the kids, but it’s lowkey annoying having our bedtime be like, max ten at night ‘cus of all the younger kids.”

“It’s pretty safe,” Tanner assures them, and Frankie feels like the other teenager is speaking to him directly as he adds, “I haven’t seen anything lurkin’ around.”

—

Dad, to no one’s surprise, isn’t too eager for any of them to go out to a cabin; even Patty and Stan seem slightly apprehensive, but Richie’s the one who puts them all at ease by saying, “They’re teenagers. Wren’s turning seventeen soon, Frankie’s about to turn sixteen, and Quinn and Shay are almost fifteen. We can’t pretend like we didn’t stay out overnight or do dumb shit when they were their age, with far less supervision.”

And even though Frankie had wanted to ask Richie what that meant, since it seems like Frankie’s paternal grandmother would never have allowed Dad to do anything even slightly risky, his words seem to hold weight for the adults; even Dad finally relents, sighing deeply.

“Phones on the entire time,” Dad reminds them all, gaze lingering on Frankie. “If someone calls or texts any of you, and you don’t answer in thirty minutes-”

“What about thirty-one minutes,” Quinn randomly asks, oddly serious.

“-someone’s coming over to check.”

“Maybe that’s a little extreme,” Ben laughs, giving Dad’s shoulder a pat. “They’re all trustworthy, Eddie, you know that.”

“Of course I do,” Dad says, huffing.

“He’s just overprotective,” Frankie mutters, and before Dad can snip back at him, Frankie feels the throb of his wrist under his sleeve and adds, “But fine, Dad. I promise.”

“I think Tanner’s family has a gun,” Quinn pipes up; Frankie, Shay, and Wren stare at him.

“I don’t think that made him feel better,” Shay jerks her head towards Dad, who looks like he might have another anxiety attack.

They still have a little bit to go until they're gonna walk over to grab some snacks at the gas station and meet Tanner; in the meantime, Frankie finds himself babysitting Rosie while Bev and Ben go out for a walk and most of the adults are otherwise occupied.

Ben and Bev's daughter is already talkative at two years-old; she reminds Frankie a lot of Phoebe and Charlie, constantly eager and excited to explore the world around her.

Rosie's ginger hair — practically the same shade as her mother's — is tied up in little pigtails as she hands Frankie her new Barbie doll, sitting back and watching with massive brown eyes as Frankie looks down at it.

"What do I do with this?"

Rosie babbles; it's difficult for Frankie to see, so after he waits for her to finish, he just points to his ears.

It always shocks him how intelligent kids are, even as toddlers: Rosie seems to understand Frankie right away, using a few gestures — making the Barbie walk, pointing to hers and then Frankie's — to try and let him know what she wants him to do.

He plays with Rosie for a while, helping her get to her feet when she suddenly clambers up, and watches as Rosie's eyes light up and she does a full-toddler run over to Aunt Beverly, latching onto her mother's legs.

Bev pets her hair. "Was she any trouble?"

"She's definitely easier than my sisters," Frankie mutters, shaking his head. "Wanna trade?"

"Nope," Bev's eyes are full of an insane amount of fondness as she scoops Rosie up. "I don't think I can ever be apart from her."

After a little bit, Bev hands Rosie her phone so she can get washed up, promising that she'll be back in just a little bit, and that he’ll have more than enough time to finish getting his things together for the night to go to the cabin.

It's while Rosie's in the middle of watching cartoons that she tugs on Frankie's sleeve, handing the phone over to him; Rosie's managed somehow to get from Youtube to what looks like Beverly's messages. Frankie's pretty accustomed to this as well; it's why he stopped giving his sisters his phone a long time ago, since they loved to send texts to random contacts in Frankie's phone — some of Frankie's friends found it hilarious, while the rest of his friends genuinely thought that Frankie had lost his mind.

Frankie would like to let it be known that he is not, under any circumstances, a nosy person. He does not like to snoop onto other people's privacy — he's had it done to him quite frequently in his life, after all, and it's not fun being on the receiving end of it.

The only reason why Frankie notices anything is because of the fact that Rosie, most likely in an attempt to try and get back to her cartoons, scrolled down Beverly's large message history, all the way back to January of this year. And the only reason why Frankie stops in his tracks and really looks is because he recognizes the number — it’s not saved, but he knows this number by heart: it's his mothers.

The last text is from January of this year. All Frankie can see is: Well, since I had your number, Eddie told me to let you know that Frankie is....

Frankie is not nosy, and he does not like to snoop. However.

However, however.

He doesn't even think as he hands Rosie his Switch; the little girl immediately stops making grabby hands for the phone in favor of the gaming system, eyes wide as she taps her fingers all along the touchscreen.

Frankie taps the message history, fingers trembling; he knows he shouldn't do this. He knows this is a massive invasion of his aunt's privacy.

But that guilt and apprehension lasts for only a heartbeat as he begins to read the messages.

Beverly had texted Frankie's mother back in January — when he lost his phone, when he was in the woods.

Eddie's a little busy right now, but he wanted me to let you know that Frankie is okay. They're going to go to the Apple store to grab another phone today.

Frankie stares at his mother's reply: Why are you texting me, and not Frankie's father? Is Eddie really that caught up that he can't be bothered to let me know how my son is doing?

Beverly had sent the last message, the one that Frankie only got a snippet of: Well, since I had your number, Eddie told me to let you know that Frankie is alright. He's busy right now, and even though we're dealing with my dog getting injured, along with making sure that the kids are safe, he still wanted to make sure that someone checked in with you. But right, attack Eddie again, Myra. Have a great day!

Mom didn't answer that; she read it as soon as Beverly sent it, but oddly enough, never replied.

There's more before January; Frankie can see the scrollbar, much smaller than he’d like to see — suggesting that there's a lot more.

Frankie doesn't know how much time he has before someone catches him, so, making sure to face the door, he scrolls up.

There's massive block text after block text; Frankie can see that the last time that Mom and Aunt Bev talked was years ago — 2016, to be exact. When his parents divorced, when...

Frankie finds the very first text that Beverly ever sent his mother, dating back in September of 2016. Not long after Dad went on that vacation to Derry.

Look, Beverly starts, I know you and I have never met, and I know that I can’t begin to understand how difficult some things have been for you in the past few weeks. But Eddie is one of my best friends, and Richie is the best friend I've ever had — this smear campaign that you're trying to conduct against the pair of them, against the rest of us, is so out of line. You can hate Eddie and Richie as much as you want, but for you to start blasting him socially, and then calling my work to try and tell me off is crossing a line.

Frankie stares at the text, his heart hammering in his chest.

Not knowing what to think, he reads his mother's text back to Beverly:

Who do you think you are? I'm sorry, right, you're another one of his friends that Eddie apparently loves more than me or our child. My mistake. You have some serious nerve texting me to try and confront me when you have NO idea the first thing about our marriage. Do you even actually know Eddie??? You knew him for five seconds when you guys were children. I've been married to him for over ten years and have a child with him. But since you're best friends with him, why don't you tell Eddie that a simple "I'm sorry" will NEVER be able to undo the trauma he's already done to our child because of this. If you had kids yourself, you would understand that.

Frankie reads the text two, three, four times over, before going onto the next one.

Aunt Bev: How dare you accuse Eddie of traumatizing Frankie. What kind of person are you? Eddie spent his ENTIRE fucking life being manipulated and abused by his mother and has been an AMAZING father to his child. I don't give a shit how hurt you are that Eddie cheated on you.

Mom: Oh, right, because YOU knew Sonia Kaspbrak so well. I had to let that woman walk all over me and treat me like dogshit, because Eddie allowed her into our lives — you don't know the FIRST thing about my life or Eddie's. How dare you come in here all high and mighty, accusing me of whatever you want because you feel some need to protect Eddie when he's a grown, forty year-old man who should answer for his mistakes and how he hurt me. Next time you see him, tell him not to send his attack dogs after me and face me like a man.

Frankie's blood boils as he reads text after text between his mother and Aunt Bev. Aunt Bev is defending Dad and Richie, and even Frankie — even though at the time, Frankie didn't know she existed.

But what really makes Frankie burn is reading his mother's texts. He doesn't even recognize his mother in these messages at all. He knows his mother can be difficult, that she can be stubborn, and that she can be harsh — he feels like he's often gotten aspects of his personality from her in this regard.

But his mother is being so fucking mean in these messages. The shit she's saying about his father in particular — calling Dad weak, saying that Dad is hiding behind the Losers. That Dad is manipulative and, in probably the worst thing, that he ruined Frankie's life.

If Eddie really wanted a divorce, okay, fine, Mom had texted, but for him to come home after this random, so-called reunion — after telling me he was in the HOSPITAL, but that I didn't need to come all the way to Maine to see him since it wasn't that bad, that he didn't need me, his WIFE, at his side — and to tell me that he's not in love with me, never has been, that he's in another relationship but he's oh so sorry to hurt me — what the hell do you think that does to an 11 year-old child? Frankie has spent the past few weeks wondering why his father isn't coming back home to be with us, his REAL family — not a group of random people that Eddie claims to care about so much. I had to tell my child that his father and I are getting a divorce, and that his father is in love with another man, who neither of us even knew existed. And I'm the manipulative, homophobic bitch for telling Eddie that his actions have traumatized and ruined Frankie's life. You're goddamn fucking right I want full custody of my child. Eddie is a poison on anyone who's ever met him — you just wait until it happens to you, or to that man who he loves more than me or Frankie, who he CHOSE over us. Don't ever text me again.

Frankie has never known his mother to be this nasty, this...this...

He can't read anymore; he leaves the chat and scrolls back up to Bev's most recent texts, going back onto Youtube and handing his cousin back the phone — once Rosie sees Bluey, she eagerly grabs it from him, cooing over the screen.

Frankie doesn't know what he's thinking right now, really.

He's so, so fucking angry — at his mother, and for his father’s sake. He knows that he has a penchant to be defensive of his father, especially when it comes to his mother — but this desire to call her, to demand for her to apologize to Dad, to tell her off and curse her out for ever saying that kind of shit about Dad, is so strong that he has to restrain himself with every bit of force he can muster.

Thank god Dad had Richie and the Losers back then. No fucking wonder Richie hates Mom so goddamn much — and this is just what Mom was telling Bev, so what did she say to Dad or Richie directly?

More than that, Frankie thinks as he watches Rosie giggle over her cartoons, he feels a deep, sudden sense of self-loathing that's so strong, he realizes he's blinking back tears only when his eyes begin to burn.

Dad has had to keep facing Mom over and over again, talking to her and keeping up a cool front, because of Frankie. Frankie has had to make Dad be involved in her life like everything is fucking peachy, just because nearly sixteen years-ago, Mom and Dad were bored or Dad forgot to wear a condom or Mom skipped her birth control pill or something, and by accident — because Frankie knows he was was, that neither of his parents had really wanted to have kids with the other — Frankie was born, and now Dad is stuck with her forever.

It's all my fault, Frankie thinks before he can stop himself, swallowing. If...if I'd never been....

Beverly comes down the stairs in comfortable clothes; Frankie's mostly presentable by then, but she still pauses when she takes account of his flushed cheeks.

"You okay, dude?"

"Yeah," he answers quickly, bobbing his head. "I'm gonna go and get ready, though — Tan texted me and let me know that he's almost ready, so."

"Thanks for watching Rose," Bev smiles, touching his cheek as he passes; he lets his hand linger on hers for a moment, feeling a rush of gratitude for Bev despite his anguish.

Frankie's numb as he grabs his pajamas and a few of the stuff he wants to bring; he doesn't even smile when Phoebe and Charlie grab onto his legs like they tend to do when he's going somewhere, only prying them off gently and patting their heads as he goes.

Wren, Quinn, and Shay are already waiting and chatting with everyone, and it's then that Frankie locks eyes with his father.

Frankie has never loved anyone in his life as much as he loves his father. No matter how fucking angry Dad makes him sometimes, no matter how frustrated they get with each other — he has always loved him. He owes his father everything: his dad probably didn't even want Frankie, especially not with Mom, but he decided to change his entire life around after Frankie lost his hearing, just to accommodate him.

(Frankie's old therapist told him that he shouldn't look at it that way; Frankie is not a burden, and never has been. His father learned sign language for him because he loves him, and that's what you do for someone you love — it's not a matter of owing anyone anything.

And even though Dr. Novik is Deaf herself, Frankie finds it difficult to explain to another person — especially to his able-bodied family members and friends — what it feels like to be one of the only disabled people in his family. Knowing that people do these things because they love you, and also having to realize that it's not the life that his father — or mother, even though Frankie's so fucking pissed at her right now — envisioned for him or themselves.)

Frankie sees Richie laughing with Shay, and he realizes that there's a reason why Dad probably leaped into Richie's arms the second he could — it’s no fucking wonder Dad was desperate to get away from Mom. No wonder why Richie's always so annoying protective of Dad.

Frankie says his goodbyes to his family members, pretending to laugh along as they remind him to keep his phone charged, but right before he steps off the porch, he walks over and gives his father a long, tight hug; he's taller than Dad now by two inches, but he still tucks his nose into Dad's neck like he would as a kid. Dad's short, but he's always been Frankie's protector.

Even when I was being such a dick to him, Frankie thinks, swallowing back emotion.

"Because you're freaked out about me spending a night in a cabin less than three miles away," Frankie tells him when Dad looks bewildered.

Dad rolls his eyes, but he still smiles and gives Frankie's shoulder a squeeze; Frankie feels his wrist throb.

—

They meet Tanner outside of the gas station, and the five of them decide to pick up a few things before they head over to his cabin.

Frankie walks to the front counter, nodding at the guy behind it as he sets down a few wine coolers and a beer on it; the man doesn't even hesitate before ringing them up, and when Frankie walks over to everyone else, Wren stares at the plastic bag, eyes wide.

"He didn't even...?"

"You just have to act confident," Frankie tells her, shrugging.

They're about halfway through the parking lot when Frankie says he thinks he forgot something; he jogs back, going up to the counter again.

"Can I get a box of Newports?"

The man looks Frankie up and down; he's probably in his early twenties, and Frankie thinks he's about to tell him no, that alcohol is one thing, but the guy just shrugs and grabs the box.

"It's a stupid habit," the man says to Frankie right before he leaves; Frankie doesn't say anything as he pockets the box, heading back out to everyone else and stuffing his hands in the front pocket of his hoodie.

"It's not too far," Tanner says right before they begin walking off the road and down one of the foot trails into the woods.

Frankie feels the wind blowing through his hair as they begin walking down the foot path; he feels leaves crunching under his sneakers, and even though it's still about an hour or two of daylight, he gets a sudden rush of deja-vu as he begins to realize all over again how easy it is for it to feel so far away from the world as he treks into the woods.

Frankie finds that he keeps looking around him; there's no Roscoe this time, which Frankie's both grateful and a little nervous about — he can't bear to have anything else happen to the dog, but he's also not exactly excited anymore to be out here again.

He's not alone this time, he reminds himself; he has four other people with him, and Tanner knows these woods like the back of his hand.

Frankie watches them all talk to one another as he heads up the back of the group; he feels his phone buzz in his pocket, and pulls it out to see a text from his mother.

He feels a burning flash of anger all over again as he stuffs the phone back in his pocket, deciding to ignore it for now. He doesn't want to read anymore texts from Mom.

They reach the cabin soon; it's nice, and Frankie's all too eager to set his stuff down into one of the rooms and begin relaxing and unwinding from the shit few days he's had. The cabin has three bedrooms, so Frankie and Tanner are going to share a room, Quinn and Wren are going to get the other, and Shay called dibs on the room for herself, even though it's the smallest by far. For a while, they eat some snacks and Frankie cracks open his beer; Shay watches him down it, brow furrowed.

"What?" he asks, frowning.

"Nothing," Shay mutters, shaking her head. "Just- you know, slow down, dude. You don't wanna get wasted."

Frankie would usually snip back that he has a pretty high-tolerance; he's been drinking since he was twelve, after all, but to tell Shay that would lead to an entire can of worms that Frankie has no interest in opening up, so he just shrugs and stays quiet.

"I saw a barbeque pit out there," Quinn mentions, holding up the banana he bought. "You think a grilled banana would taste good?"

"It's fire," Frankie tells his cousin with a grin, glancing at Tanner — Tanner's equally as eager, leaping to his feet.

"I think we got some brats in the fridge-"

"We're Jewish," Wren intones.

"-nevermind 'bout those, then. But I think we got some lettuce."

"Grilled lettuce," Shay says, sharing an unamused glance with Wren, but Tanner, Quinn, and Frankie are already looking for things to grill, Quinn bringing out his banana and holding it above his head as Tanner gets the fire pit started.

"Should we worry about animals?" Wren asks a bit later, munching on the bit of grilled banana that Quinn offered her; Frankie shuffles in his seat, tearing off pieces of the grilled lettuce and flicking it to the ground. 

Tanner thinks for a moment; it's not dark yet — they still have about an hour of daylight Tanner had told them, and Frankie assumes that he probably knows what he's talking about — but Frankie looks around them. They're in a clearing; it's not too thick here, not like the woods that Frankie had been lost in six months before, but he still feels oddly uneasy as he realizes that the five of them are still very much alone out here.

"If it were raw meat I'd be more nervous," Tanner admits, "But we should be fine. The worst we got is bobcats."

"What about the bear that your dad killed in January?" Wren points out, furrowing her brows.

Tanner glances away. "That was…," He shifts in his seat, looks over at Frankie. Looks away just as quickly. "Usually, they don't bother people like that. Wouldn't really even go after a dog, either, 'specially not a shepherd."

"Well, something attacked Roscoe," Shay pipes up, glancing at Frankie.

"Yeah," Frankie mutters, taking a long stick and poking the fire. "Can we talk about something else, though?"

They chitchat aimlessly about the upcoming school year for a little bit until Quinn talks about wanting to stretch his legs; Tanner offers to go with him, but Quinn waves him off and says he's just going to do a quick loop around the clearing and come back — he’ll be three minutes tops.

By two minutes, Frankie feels a creeping feeling on the back of his neck; after five, Wren's looking towards the woods, brown eyes clouded with concern.

After ten minutes, Tanner gets up and offers to go and bring him back; Frankie stands up immediately, Shay and Wren following.

"He's probably just a few yards away," Shay says, but when Wren calls her brother, Frankie watches his cousin's expression cloud with worry — he assumes there's no response back.

Wren seems antsy, much more than Frankie's ever seen her; his cousin begins jogging down the trail after her brother.

"He's probably just-" Tanner starts, before Wren whirls around and yells something that Frankie can't understand; Tanner looks bewildered, glancing around their surroundings with a sense of worry until, after Frankie shoves his shoulder to get his attention — he fucking hates missing shit — Tanner says, "She said that she has a bad feeling. Like we're bein'..."

Watched.

Frankie doesn't see anything, of course. There's no deer or bears or anything, but there's a strong sense of apprehension that he feels: something is off. The air feels thick and odd; he's struggling to get a full breath in, and there's a split second where Frankie feels like he can see Quinn, laying somewhere in a pool of his own blood. A creature-

blue eyes, a ring of brown around one pupil.

-standing over him, Uncle Stan and Aunt Patty looking at Frankie with hatred, knowing it's his fault-

Frankie takes off, running ahead of Wren, his heart pounding.

He calls Quinn's name frantically, searching everywhere for his cousin, and it's as they're not just yards, but maybe a whole half-mile, from the cabin that Frankie walks around an oak tree and sees Quinn, standing off in a clearing and looking the other direction, spinning around when he must hear Frankie crashing through the undergrowth and staring at him with a confused expression on his face.

"Frankie?" Quinn says, blinking when Frankie runs at him. "What's-"

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Frankie demands, running up to his cousin and hugging him tightly. When he pulls away, Frankie starts shouting: "We were fucking calling for you, man — you're so fucking far from the cabin! What the actual fuck were you thinking, do you-"

"What are you talking about?" Quinn says, ripping out of Frankie's grip and stepping back. He's staring at Frankie like he's insane. "I was- you-" Quinn stares at Frankie, and then at Wren, Shay, and Tanner; Wren slaps her brother's shoulder and goes in on him, and it's as Quinn waves her off that he says something that makes Frankie's blood run cold: "Frankie, I heard you calling for me out here. I was following you to make sure you didn't get lost again."

Frankie stares down at his cousin, perplexed. "What are you talking about?"

Quinn looks even more confused, rubbing his bicep as he says, "Frankie, you were- I went for a walk, and I heard you calling for me all the way out here."

If it were at any other time, Frankie would assume that Quinn was pulling a prank on him: Quinn loves pranks, and it's hard to distinguish at times if he's joking — his sense of humor is just as dry and bizarre as Stan's.

But Quinn is one-hundred percent serious. Frankie knows this look well: it's the look of someone who, without a shadow of a doubt in their mind, believes in what they're saying.

"Frankie's been with us the whole time," Shay says as she steps forward, looking from Frankie, to Quinn, to Frankie again. "He only called your name like, once."

"Are you fucking with us?" Wren asks her brother, stepping back. "Because that's not… Quinn, you just walked off-"

"Frankie was calling me," Quinn says, looking between Frankie and Wren. "Are you two fucking with me?"

"We're not-"

"I heard you," Quinn tells Frankie, looking angry. "Frankie, I know your voice — that was you," He looks around, arms crossed over his chest. "You weren't...are you sure...?"

"Let's get back over to the cabin," It's the first time Tanner's said anything this whole time; he looks to the sky, and then back at the rest of them. "If y'all wanna keep arguin', we can do it there — but let's just get back."

Tanner looks freaked out; they all do, but Frankie watches the other teenager walk off, not even waiting for them. Shay follows him, and Quinn stares at Frankie, bewildered and terrified, before following after them, Wren and Frankie taking up the rear.

Wren touches Frankie's elbow; he stares at her.

"I have a bad feeling," his cousin signs. "I don't like this at all."

"Do you wanna go back to the beach house?"

"I'm not walking through the woods at night," Wren says adamantly, shaking her head. "I'm probably just being fucking crazy, but it's like-" She swallows thickly; he can see that she's trembling. "Please tell me you feel it too. That something's...off."

He does. Now more than ever.

"It'll be fine once we're back," he tries to assure her, because the last thing they all need is for everyone to be running around and freaked out. Someone has to keep a cool head. "Maybe you just don't like the dark."

They get back to the cabin; the fire is still going, albeit a little more tame than it had been when they left, so Tanner helps get it going again while Frankie sits, trying to shake off the discomfort and unease.

His cousins and sister seem just as off put as he does; Quinn seems like he can’t decide where he thinks that everyone’s playing a prank on him or not, and Frankie’s still not sure what to make of it himself. He can tell that Quinn believes, without a shadow of a doubt, that he heard Frankie’s voice. And Frankie believes his cousin, but, despite that, Frankie doesn’t (want to) believe that there actually was a voice — whether it was just a random person who sounded a lot like Frankie, or some…thing out there — calling for Quinn.

It’s confusing. He feels a buzz in his pocket, and when he pulls out his phone, he makes a face when he sees another text from his mother. 

He doesn’t want to deal with that right now, either.

“So that was weird,” Shay finally says after a long beat of silence between the teenagers; everyone nods.

“I swear,” Quinn looks at them each in turn, brown eyes wide behind his glasses, “I swear I heard Frankie. I’m not lying.”

No one says anything to that, but Shay reaches into the cooler and grabs a wine cooler and passes it to Quinn; Quinn gratefully takes it and pops it open, taking a long sip.

And with that, everyone decides to take a drink; Frankie takes another beer, the Newports burning a hole into his pocket — the desire to take a drag is strong, but he’s not going off on his own in the woods. No fucking way.

Frankie feels another incoming text, and he audibly groans when he sees it’s from Mom — she just wants to check in with him, mentioning that she and Darren picked up a few things for him when he gets back, but he’s still so fucking pissed at her.

“Hey,” Shay says, leaning over and catching his eye, “Who are you angry at?”

Frankie stares at her; his sister’s gaze is calm. Drinking and chatting has helped ease some of the unease from what happened a bit ago — even if Frankie notices all of them turning to look into the woods every so often.

“What are you talking about?”

“You look like you wanna throw your phone every time you check it,” Wren points out, hiccupping behind a hand; even though she’s only had half a wine cooler, she seems to be a little tipsy. “And your forehead is wrinkling up.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Right there,” Shay agrees, reaching over to touch her finger onto his forehead. “A big one.”

Frankie moves his head away and rolls his eyes, staring down at his lap, where his phone is faced down on his shorts.

He hates talking about this shit with people. He knows he can trust his cousins and Shay — and even Tanner, despite the fact that they don’t know each other very well — but it’s still uncomfortable for him to open up to anyone, to express vulnerability.

They’re looking at him expectantly, and Frankie knows that Shay, in particular, will not drop it.

Frankie clenches his jaw and, feeling the anger begin to simmer underneath his skin all over again, mutters, “When I was watching Rosie before we left, she’d gone off of Youtube and into Aunt Bev’s chat history, and I’m not nosy, you guys know I’m not-”

“Debatable,” Shay interjects.

“-but I saw some texts between Aunt Bev and my mom.”

No one says anything to that; Tanner looks like he wants to say something, probably to get caught up on why that’s making his cousins and Shay look so wide-eyed, but he wisely decides to keep silent, watching the four of them.

Frankie looks at the fire; he knows if he focuses on that instead of everyone else, he won’t be able to pick up on much of what they say — but for once, he doesn’t want to.

The desire to say something, to get it out, is rising up; it’s probably the alcohol.

“My parents are divorced,” he finally says, queuing Tanner into the history, “Long story short, my dad and Wren and Quinn’s dad, Stan, went on this…I don’t fucking know, reunion trip?” He finally looks up at Wren and Quinn, who nod, “And met back up with the rest of our uncles and aunt, and during that trip, my dad cheated on my mom with Richie.”

Frankie swallows. “I thought my dad was straight for my whole life. I think he did, too — I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter,” He shuts his eyes, “That came out wrong. I guess it does really matter, especially to him, obviously. But he cheated on my mom and- I mean, to be fair, he told her when he came home from the trip. He had to go to the hospital for a bit, so we didn’t…I didn’t really get to see him right away.”

He can still remember his mother’s expression, the state of panic Mom was in when Dad finally, finally called back: your father is in the hospital, frankie. 

“He was okay, or…at least he said he was. But he told her when he got back. That he was in love with someone else, a man, and wanted a divorce, so. You know. It was kinda…”

“That’s…,” Tanner shifts in his lawn chair. “I dunno, man. That’s like something out of a tv show or somethin’.”

“Yeah,” Frankie laughs weakly, bitter. “I love my dad. I do. People used to call me a Daddy’s Boy when I was little, but- I guess I still am. He’s done a lot to piss me off, sure, but we’re really close. He’s…”

Saying that Dad is all he has sounds desperate and pathetic, and he knows that that’s not true anymore: he has Richie, his sisters, Wren and Quinn, the Losers, his friends. He has people.

But Dad has always been there, right from the beginning. Even when he didn’t want to be.

“You know. My mom and I don’t really get along, though.”

Don’t really get along feels like an understatement. He loves her, and he’ll always care about her. But she’s the one who’s pushed him away for as long as he can remember.

“I wasn’t born Deaf — I got sick when I was little and it damaged the hairs inside both of my ears, and I lost my hearing. My dad learned ASL for me and everything — he used to work all the time, but he still took lessons and learned because he felt bad for me. I wasn’t really what he planned, or anything, and he’s really neurotic and worries about me all the time, so I know it wasn’t easy for him when I became Deaf.”

“Frankie,” He can very faintly hear Wren say; he ignores her.

“My mom doesn’t speak sign language. She knows most of the alphabet and how to say hello and goodbye, yeah, but she can’t actually speak it at all. I don’t know why she didn’t learn,” The pain, long buried, comes in a sudden rush that almost threatens to overtake him — he swallows thickly, forcing it down. “But we just- I don’t know. We don’t get along. I think we’re too similar and too different at the same time, and she just doesn’t…”

Like me.

She loves Frankie, he knows she does. But loving your child and liking your child are not the same thing.

He started this conversation about Aunt Bev and the texts. That’s what’s important, what everyone was asking about, not about Frankie and his mommy issues.

“So, my aunt. Aunt Bev. She texted my mom like, all the way back in 2016, when my parents were in the process of getting a divorce, and they were just going back and forth about how my aunt was tired of my mom bashing my dad.”

He can tell that Wren and Quinn don’t seem too surprised by this; he’s often wondered if his cousins have been told more about his parent’s relationship than Frankie has been. He knows that Uncle Stan seems to have no love for Frankie’s mother — none of the Losers do, but Stan’s often left the room or become visibly agitated when she’s brought up for long lengths of time and the conversation teeters in this territory.

“My mom was calling my dad weak and pathetic,” Frankie says, his voice becoming heavy with anger. “About how he traumatized me and ruined my life because he wanted to divorce her. About how- how my dad was this bad person because he left. And maybe it was fucked up for him to cheat on her, but my aunt told my mom that she was toxic and manipulative, that my dad needed to leave her for his own mental health and…”

Frankie looks down at his hands.

“I’ve always known that everyone hates my mom,” he finally says, “But I guess I just didn’t realize how deep it went, or…that, you know. My mom hated my dad so much and wanted to like, I don’t know, hurt him for leaving her. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was just hurt, but…”

Frankie feels a hand coming to rest on his leg; he looks to see Shay, her eyes soft and brimming with sympathy.

“You don’t need to feel bad for me,” Frankie says automatically, defensively. “You guys were the ones who asked.”

“Sure,” Shay says offhandedly, scooting her chair closer to his side. She waits for a brief moment before saying, “You know it’s okay that you’re mad at her, right?”

“Is it?”

Shay furrows her brows.

“I mean, I kind of,” Frankie looks away. “It’s sort of my fault, you know.”

“How, man?” Tanner asks, blue eyes wide. “Dude, it ain’t like you were the one who was married.”

“Yeah.”

“So how is it your fault?”

Frankie stays quiet.

“Frankie,” Wren finally says, a fiercely protective look on her face as she leans towards him, “I don’t know a lot about your mom, but you do know it’s okay for you to be pissed off at the way she treated your dad, right?”

“Sure.”

“Okay,” Wren points at him. “Stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“You’re shutting down ‘cus you’re embarrassed that you let us in,” Wren says, crossing her arms over her chest. “So say what you meant.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Frankie flares his nostrils, cheeks burning as he snaps, “It’s my fault that my dad has to be around her, it’s my fault that she and I aren’t even close in the first place. I look just like my dad, and every time she looks at me, that’s who she sees. The man that she hates, and- and,” Frankie runs his hand through his hair. God, he shouldn't have drank so much. “And if I never got meningitis, if- if I never lost my hearing- my dad changed his whole life around because of me, and so did everyone else, and it wasn’t what he wanted or planned. And I just- I know it’s not easy to be around me, to accommodate me, so…”

Frankie knows that he’s not making much sense; his voice becomes a little harder to understand the more emotional he gets, but there’s so many things going through his mind — the anger at his mother, the defensiveness for his father. Frankie’s guilt for being alive in the first place, when it’s made everything so hard for both of his parents, and for Richie. For the Losers.

He’s on the edge of one of the first panic attacks that he’s ever had (at least, and he doesn’t realize this at the time, that he can remember having) when Quinn, folding his hands in his lap and speaking loud and clear for Frankie to hear, goes: “Have you ever heard of Shanidar 1?”

Frankie stares at his cousin, perplexed. “What?”

“Shanidar 1. A Neanderthal specimen that was found- I can’t remember the date now, but in the Shanidar caves in Iraq.”

Frankie looks at Wren, Shay, and Tanner; they seem perplexed, shaking their heads at Quinn.

“So,” Quinn actually smiles, shifting in his chair. “It was this Neanderthal — a very early humanoid, before homo sapiens, us, ever came around — who they found in these caves. There were a few more skeletons in the same cave, too; there seemed like there’d been a cave-in or something that killed them, but this one skeleton had a lot of trauma.”

“Okay,” Frankie says, not following at all.

“This Neanderthal — Shanidar 1 — lived tens of thousands of years ago, Frankie. And when they started to examine his skeleton, they found that he was missing one of his hands, that his skull had a blow on one side that would have left him blind on that side. He had deformities in his ear canals that would have made him Deaf, and the state that his leg bones were in would suggest that he had a limp.”

“Didn’t you say there was a cave-in?” Frankie asks his cousin bluntly, blinking.

“Well, the thing is,” Quinn’s smile is still intact, and his eyes are fond as he continues, “Everything I just told you were very old injuries. They all showed signs of healing, meaning they happened throughout the course of his life. Shanidar 1 was maybe about thirty or forty years-old, which, for a Neanderthal, is pretty much an old man. So this Neanderthal was old, Deaf, mostly blind, and had a bad limp. He couldn’t hunt or gather or fight. But he died with other Neanderthals in a cave, with a much longer lifespan than you would expect for someone with his disabilities during that time period. Do you know why?”

Frankie stares at him. The point that Quinn’s making doesn’t hit home until his cousin gently says: “Frankie, they kept Shanidar 1 alive because they loved him. They saw someone who was disabled and needed extra help, and they didn’t hesitate to do that, because that’s what you do for someone you love. They buried him along with the rest of the Neanderthals who died in the cave-in with respect and care because they loved him enough to honor him in life and death.

“Uncle Eddie learned an entire language for you not because he felt bad for you, but because he loves you, and he’s your father — I don’t think you realize how much Uncle Eddie loves you, Frankie. We all — and Tanner too, if you’ve noticed, even though we just met him — make sure you can see us when we’re talking because we care about making sure you’re included. Wren’s going into her third year of ASL at our school because she wants to use the language you’re most comfortable in; she and I use it all the time at home, despite the fact that you’re thousands of miles away. We’re even teaching Caleb it to help him since he’s nonverbal. And I don’t want to embarrass Shay, but I think you two needed each other more than you realize.”

Frankie doesn’t say anything, not trusting himself to speak.

“I don’t like it when you talk about yourself like you’re a burden,” Quinn continues, shaking his head. “I don’t know why your mom didn’t learn sign language, and I’m not saying she doesn’t love you. That’s not really my business. But I’m going to throw this grilled banana right at your stupid head if you sit there and pretend like you’re a waste of space or a burden onto anyone for being born and being who you are. So,” Quinn finally sits back, folding his hands over his lap again. “I don’t know if that helped you, or if it gave you peace of mind. I can’t understand what you go through being Deaf, but I have a bit of experience of feeling like you’re asking too much of people by asking them to change the way they speak, or to- you know, make room for you, if that makes sense. But you’re one of my favorite people, and I just wish that you could see yourself the way we all do.”

Frankie stares at his hands, not knowing what to say in either language that he knows. All he can do is just nod.

“Damn,” Tanner finally says, wiping his face. He takes off his ballcap and shakes his head, pulling his shirt up to wipe his tears. “I’m fuckin’ drunk as hell, but that’s- you’re real damn eloquent, man. That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever fuckin’ heard.”

Quinn shrugs and bites into his banana.

“You okay?” Shay asks Frankie quietly, touching his shoulder.

Frankie nods. Not really, but, well.

Wren gets up to give him a hug, her arms tight around his shoulders; she murmurs something against his ear, and at first he doesn’t think he hears it, until she sits down and he realizes that she told him that he’s her third brother and best friend.

“I need a fuckin’ drink,” Frankie laughs wetly, grabbing the wine cooler. “And, um…” He looks around at everyone. “Thanks, I guess. I really- I love you guys. I hope you know that.”

Tanner gives him a thumbs up; Frankie laughs and toasts to him.

—

When it starts to get really dark, everyone is eager to head inside the cabin, probably— although no one necessarily comes out and says it, too nervous to voice it, Frankie suspects — out of a desire to be safe and indoors, away from the eerie silence.

They play a few games on the Xbox and turn on Youtube to watch music videos; Frankie’s not sure why every single time he hangs out with his cousins it somehow ends in them doing that, but he snickers when he sees Tanner trying his best to follow along with the artists that Wren keeps putting on.

“She’s so hot,” Wren says, gesturing to the singer on the screen; Frankie tilts his head and nods, agreeing, while Tanner goes hell yeah and high-fives Wren.

Over all, the mood definitely picks up as the five of them unwind; Frankie doesn’t necessarily feel better, not by a long shot. He gave his mother a quick thanks response, knowing that if he doesn’t respond to her soon, she’ll attempt to call him, and he just can’t talk to her right now. He doesn’t know what to think about everything, and he keeps reminding himself that this vacation — and this trip to Tanner’s cabin in particular — is supposed to be a getaway from everything, and before school starts back up.

It starts to get late; Frankie excuses himself to go onto the back porch, pulling one of the cigarettes out of his pocket and lighting it, and he finds himself instantly relaxing as he takes a long drag. He left his vape pen back in Manhattan — his parents would probably ground him for a minimum of five years if they ever found it — and even though it’s been a while since he’s had an actual cigarette, he finds that he misses the feeling of it in his hand, watching the smoke curl and disappear into the night air.

With his back pressed against the wall, Frankie can feel the door open; he doesn’t have time to think about putting it out or hiding it as he watches Wren poke her head out, locking eyes with him.

She doesn’t say anything as she steps onto the porch and closes the door behind her. He say or do anything.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” is all she finally says, leaning back next to him up against the wall of the cabin.

“You shouldn’t…” Frankie begins to say, gesturing to the cigarette.

She rolls her eyes but doesn’t budge.

“How long?” she asks, jerking her head towards it.

Frankie shifts from foot to foot. “A few years.”

“Frankie…”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Wren. Leave it.”

Wren narrows her eyes. “Leave it. Like I’m a fucking dog or something.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

Wren shakes her head and looks out into the forest; her gaze flickers with discomfort, but she doesn’t comment on it in favor of turning back to him to give him a hard look.

“Uncle Eddie would hate seeing you do that,” she says, and before Frankie can snip that it’s fucked up to try and use his dad against him, Wren’s brown eyes go a little distant as she adds, “But maybe that’s why you’re doing it. I get that part of it, at least.”

Frankie stares at her.

Wren looks back to the forest; their shoulders are touching, and she brushes back a dark curl behind her ear, sighing heavily.

“Are you okay?” he finally asks, concerned; Wren’s usually not so quiet.

“I don’t know,” she admits, shutting her eyes and shrugging.

“Is it school? Stuff back home?”

Wren is quiet, her jaw clenching a little as she looks away; from this angle, the porchlight makes her features sharp and defined.

Finally, his cousin speaks: “It’s kind of everything. I’m going into my junior year of high school, and I feel like I have no idea where I’m going in life. My dad keeps telling me how next year, we can go on a road trip to a bunch of universities so that I can see them in person and see which one I like the best, and I don’t know how to tell him that I have no fucking clue if I’ll even get in to any of those schools or anything.”

Frankie frowns. “But you do alright in school. You get good grades.”

“My grades were shit in my sophomore year,” Wren admits, shrugging. “It’s like- I can barely focus half of the time, Frankie. I feel like I’ve just been in a weird daydream for the past few years, like time isn’t even real anymore.”

Frankie knows what she means, but the way she’s talking, how sad she looks, makes him stand up a little straighter.

“Are you okay, dude?”

“I’m fine,” she says quickly in the way that he tends to do: the not really, but i can’t explain why, and if i try, you’ll probably be freaked out and worried about me and i don’t want that I’m fine. “I just…” She shakes her head and looks down at her shoes again before looking back up and signing, “Can I tell you something, Frankie?”

He nods.

“I haven’t told Quinn this,” she says, and then rolls her eyes, “I mean, I tried to a few months ago, but he’s so logical and blunt sometimes that it’s like trying to talk to a brick wall.”

He waits.

“Sometimes,” Wren looks troubled, her eyes deeply troubled, “Sometimes I feel like something happened when I was younger, and I just can’t remember it.”

Frankie stares at her, quiet.

“I just get this feeling that I saw something or heard something once, and that my mind just blocked it out,” Wren continues, frowning. “I don’t- I don’t think anyone did anything to me, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not- it’s not like that. But it’s like I…,” His cousin looks frustrated as she tries to work through how to say what she means. “It’s like I saw something happen to someone else once or something. Like I was a bystander, and- and then it’s like every time I try to work through it, I feel like I’m back in the guest room at my aunt’s house, waiting for my dad to come home from that trip, feeling like something is really wrong but not knowing what, only that when he does come home, he’s…different.”

“Different?”

“Me and my dad are really close,” Wren says, and Frankie knows that: Wren is close to both of her parents. She’s lucky in that way. “I mean, I still call him Daddy sometimes — and yeah, I know, I’m going to be seventeen next year. But it’s like…even though we’re close, I feel like there’s always been this wall between us. You know how he has scars on his face, right?”

Frankie’s seen them before; he’s never asked Uncle Stan how he got them, knowing that that’d be rude, and that he probably would not get a direct answer.

“My dad would let me ride on his shoulders, give me and Quinn piggyback rides, and let us climb all over him when we were kids. But when I was like…I dunno, four or five, I remember one time, I tried to touch one of the scars on his face, and he jumped back like- I don’t know, like I was going to hurt him or something. I guess I realized to leave it alone after that, but it was just-”

Weird. Unusual. Frankie thinks back on his own father, and even Richie; they have their moments where it seems like they’re almost afraid to have him be too close to them.

Dad especially.

“And it was so weird between my mom and dad for a while after, too. Like…my dad came home, and my mom was acting like he came home from war or something. That whole time period between the trip and meeting you guys was so fucking weird, man.”

“Yeah,” Frankie says, flicking the bud onto the ground and stamping it out with his shoe; he turns to face Wren, the knob of one shoulder pressed against the wall. “What do you remember about that day, though? The day that your dad said he was going away.”

Wren tilts her head, thinking; her brows knit together as she sifts through the memories, before she finally murmurs: “Not a lot. I remember being at home, and my dad helping us with our homework. I remember him getting a phone call, and…” Wren shifts.

“What?”

She glances up at him, and then back down at the floor. “He just looked really uncomfortable. He kept stuttering and walked away from us; I asked him who it was when he sat down, and then he just told me it was an old friend. He was really weird after it, too. Like he just didn’t want to talk about it, and he went into his study afterwards and…”

Wren seems really uncomfortable; Frankie watches her twitch, brushing her hair back and away from her face.

“Are you okay?” he asks her, more than a little concerned. “You look freaked out.”

“I just,” Wren shakes her head, “I don’t really remember much else, except- my mom’s sister came to pick up me and Quinn and said we’d stay at her house for a bit. My mom came over the next night and looked really freaked out, and told us that my dad would be away for a little bit, that he was on a trip.”

“Did your parents fight about it or something?” Frankie asks; to him, with the way his parents operated, that’s the most logical conclusion — but Wren looks unsure, and deeply upset.

“I can’t remember,” she says, shaking her head. “This is what I’m talking about. It’s like it’s a blur, or something — I feel like I’m supposed to remember something really important here. Like, oh, that’s why you feel so fucked up all the time, Wren! That’s why you’re so depressed! But bam, nothing. When I was a kid, I’d wake up halfway across the house and not even know how I got there; my parents thought I was sleepwalking, but maybe even back then, I was already forgetting things and shit. I don’t know. I’m just rambling at this point.”

But Frankie doesn’t think she’s rambling; he watches her speak, feeling like he understands everything that she’s saying — that he’s lived it himself.

“I used to have trouble sleeping, too,” Wren knows that; they’ve talked about their nightmares every now and then. “Do you really think you’re depressed?”

“I think I’ve had depression my whole life,” Wren admits with a weak laugh. “It’s kind of my baseline emotion.”

“Have you talked to your parents about it?” Frankie’s the last person to ask that, really, but he can’t bear to see Wren so upset.

“I tried once a little while ago,” Wren says. “Maybe two or three years ago. I tried telling my mom and she got really freaked out. Like, my mom is super chill, she lets me and Quinn vent to her about anything, but that really upset her. She was asking me if I wanted to go into counseling and everything and for her, it was really, really out of character. She was watching me like a hawk for like, a whole month.”

Frankie knows how that feels; trying to open up to your parents, and for their reaction to be so much that you instantly feel bad for even saying anything at all, for worrying them with your problems.

“You can talk to me,” Frankie tells her.

Wren’s eyes are soft. “I know. And you can talk to me too, Frankie,” Her gaze flicks down to the bud on the ground. “I don’t like that you’re smoking. I mean, I know we all smoke weed, but nicotine freaks me out.”

“I know.”

“I’m a year older than you,” she reminds him, even though it’s more like six months. “I’m the oldest out of all the kids, so it’s kinda my job to take care of you.”

Frankie rolls his eyes; he’s taller than her now and much stronger, but there’s a moment where he thinks that there’s nothing he’d like more than to have someone else his age looking out for him for once. To not always feel like he has to be the protector, even if it’s a role he’s fit into naturally.

“I feel like we understand each other,” Wren continues. “Especially about- I mean, all of this,” She gestures vaguely, and when he furrows his brows, she stares at him. “About the woods, about it feeling really weird around here. I like Kitty Hawk, don’t get me wrong, but I know you’re on edge, too.”

Frankie follows her gaze into the dark; he can’t see anything from here, obviously, but everything still feels a little strange. His shoulders have been stiff the entire time he’s out here.

“Sometimes, I feel like you and I can see and feel things that no one else can,” Wren randomly says, and even though she gives his shoulder a pat as they start heading inside, he can see his cousin looking behind them, staring into the dark with an odd look on her face.

—

Frankie doesn’t know what wakes him that night, but he suddenly sits upright, the air mattress sagging underneath his weight as he shifts, turning and looking around the room, wide-eyed.

For a split second, he thinks that he’s all the way back home — not his fathers townhouse or his mothers apartment, but his childhood bedroom: he thinks he sees his old toys and posters up on the wall, and for a very brief second, Frankie feels like a little kid again, lost and confused.

He doesn’t know why he wakes up so suddenly, or why he feels like his heart is about to beat out of his chest; it takes him a few minutes to be aware of his surroundings and to ground himself. To realize that he’s in Kitty Hawk, at Tanner’s cabin.

Frankie shifts in the air mattress, and it’s then that he feels a hand laying against his arm.

He doesn’t make a sound, turning and locking eyes with Tanner, leaning over the side of the bed to face Frankie.

Tanner puts a finger to his lips. Frankie nods, staring up at the other boy with wide eyes. The teenager beckons him to follow, motioning for him to be quiet; Frankie slowly slides his legs around the air mattress and onto the floor, easing himself up. As he follows Tanner out of the room and into the hallway, Frankie makes sure to grab his cochlears, sticking the transmitters to both sides of his head and, as he always does first thing when he puts them back on after waking, grimaces when he begins hearing the hum of the auditory aides in his ear drums.

He doesn’t really know how hearing people do it — listening to every single thing, every moment of the day, sounds fucking draining.

Tanner leads him out into the living room, and when he notices Frankie’s cochlear implants on, he says: “There’s something outside.”

Frankie stares at the other teen, glancing behind him in the direction of the hallway.

“It’s just you ‘n me,” Tanner tells him; the other boy’s eyes are wide and shiny. He looks scared.

“What’s…”

Frankie is very, very good at detecting vibrations; he relies on it more than most people think. When he was little, he used to use it in order to tell when his parents were coming down the hall so that he could hide his snacks or put his video games away before they opened the bedroom door. He knows the feeling of his father’s footsteps, and can differentiate between him and Richie’s — Dad is light and quick, while Richie’s are usually longer and harder.

But right now, Frankie’s bare feet against the wooden floors, he can feel something walking back and forth on the other side of the front door. Up and down the porch.

He looks at Tanner; Tanner is staring back at him, mouthing something that Frankie can’t pick up and running his hand through his blond locks.

“Maybe it’s an animal,” Frankie whispers, but even as he says it, he knows — and he doesn’t know how he knows, he just knows — that it’s not an animal. It’s not a person.

It’s something else. Something that Frankie can’t put into a box or explain, despite how much he knows he’ll try to later on.

Tanner looks like he wants to believe Frankie, but they both know that he doesn’t.

“Did you look outside?”

Tanner looks at Frankie like he’s crazy, shaking his head furiously.

Frankie takes a step forward; Tanner touches his arm, shaking his head.

“Maybe it’s…”

Tanner puts his fingers to his lips; the boy looks like he’s on the verge of tears, gesturing for Frankie to stay away from the door.

Frankie’s right up against the front door and window; the blinds are drawn, and Frankie watches as a shadow moves back and forth in time with the footsteps.

Not feet, Frankie realizes. Hooves.

Clack-click. Click-clack.

Frankie watches as the shadow stops in front of him. Whatever it is, it’s inches away from him.

Frankie’s hand is trembling; he can't open the blinds to see what’s on the other side.

There’s deer all over this place, Frankie thinks, remembering the deer he saw watching them during Thanksgiving years before. The deer that he saw six months ago, that Uncle Ben’s dog ran after. Maybe it’s just- it could be fucking rabid or something, maybe that’s why…

“Frankie,” Tanner whispers right next to him; the teenager is trembling, and Frankie turns to lock eyes with him as the other boy says: “It’s saying your name.”

Frankie stares at the other boy, wishing he could tell him that he’s hearing shit, that Tanner’s pulling some big fucking prank on all of them.

But right as he’s about to, he thinks that he can hear it.

Fraaaaaankieeeeee, something says on the other side of the window; the shadow is there, growing darker and darker as whatever it is leans closer, right up against the glass. Fraaaaankieeeeee….

Frankie can’t tell if the thing is yelling, or if it’s somehow speaking directly into Frankie’s ear. Through the damaged hair cells in his cochlea and the metal implant winding through his ear canal, speaking right into his brain.

Frankie takes a step back; the noise is softer now, lending more towards the first theory, but Frankie can faintly pick up frantic, hushed whispering:

I can smell you in there. I know you’re right there. Come outside and follow me. All I want is your light. I need to have you and your little cousin. Come outside. Come outside. I can smell you and your sweet blood and your-

Frankie steps back, nearly falling over the fucking coffee table as he and Tanner hold onto each other. He’s shaking, Tanner practically crying as the pair of them back up, far away from the window.

“It’s just a dream,” Frankie whispers to himself, and suddenly, he feels like a six year-old again: he feels like he’s in his childhood bedroom, hiding under the covers, whispering that to himself over and over again because something, someTHING, IT, is standing over him, waiting for him to look and telling him to come back HOME-

“This is a fuckin’ nightmare,” Tanner says, hiding his face in Frankie’s shoulder. “It keeps talkin’, man, it won’t fuckin’ go away.”

Frankie can see the shadow moving back and forth rapidly; it’s almost like a little kid hiding behind a tree, peeking out from one side, and then the other.

Peek-a-boo. Peek-a-boo.

“It’s just a dream,” Frankie reminds himself, shutting his eyes. “It’s just a dream, and in the morning, you’ll be gone. You’ll be gone and you’ll never come back again.”

When he opens his eyes, Tanner is staring at him. “What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

Frankie doesn’t have any answer then, and won’t for some time later; right now, he’s staring at the window.

The shadow slowly moves from the window and towards the door, and Frankie watches as the doorknob twists back and forth slowly.

Thank god Wren remembered to check it.

Tanner disappears from his side to go and check the back door and the windows; Frankie’s frozen in place, watching as the thing leaves the door and goes back to the window, the shadow almost black.

When Tanner comes back, they watch as the shadow — only a few feet tall, probably coming up to Frankie’s sternum — begins to grow taller and taller. Skinnier and skinnier, until they can see a defined shape, tall and imposing, and long, hooked fingers trailing against the other side of the glass.

The figure goes between forms for what feels like hours; Frankie watches it fold into one shape, pacing back and forth on four legs, and then go back on two. He’s never been more thankful for being Deaf in his life; this far away, he can’t hear anything, but from the look on Tanner’s face, and the way that Tanner puts his hands over his ears and shuts his eyes, Frankie knows that it hasn’t stopped talking.

It’s a long, long time until the figure finally disappears. Frankie watches it stand on two legs, both hands(? Hooves? Talons?) pressed on the glass. It looks like it’s heaving, its body moving towards the glass and then away quickly, before it stills completely and drops back down to four legs, and leaves.

Tanner and Frankie don’t want to go and check to see. They simply stand there, frozen in place, watching the window.

“What the fuck was that,” Frankie finally says, his voice hoarse.

“It’s real,” is all he hears Tanner say; when he looks at the teen, Tanner’s crying. “He was fuckin’ right. He was fuckin’ right all along, and…”

“Tan?”

Tanner just shakes his head and runs his hand through his hair, breathing in and out heavily. He looks at Frankie and wonders, “How in the hell are we gonna get back to sleep?”

Frankie just shakes his head and looks back at the window. He doesn’t see or feel anything — and the latter, the feeling, is what frightens him the most: it’s almost like he can sense the thing leaving. Moving off of the porch and across the clearing. Away from him.

“It’s gone,” Tanner says, unaware of Frankie’s inner crisis. He looks like he’s going to throw up as he says, blue eyes round, “It said: see you soon.”

—

He and Tanner do not go back to sleep that night. They spend hours watching the window until the sun begins to slowly rise, and since it’ll be a long time until the other three wake up, Frankie and Tanner — armed with a machete (Frankie) and a hunting rifle (Tanner) — slowly open the front door.

There’s nothing outside, of course. Morning light seeps through the trees and dapples the clearing, and outside of a few birds and some really cute rabbits, there’s no other animal outside.

Tanner and Frankie creep around the perimeter of the clearing, every shadow making them jump — which, armed with a fucking machete and rifle, maybe isn’t the smartest thing, but they’re both fifteen and stupid as hell — but after a sweep, there’s nothing there.

Tanner sets the rifle down against the porch after Frankie puts his machete on the top of the deck.

The pair of them don’t say anything for a long time, until Tanner finally croaks out: “You wanna tell the others?”

What would he say? That he and Tanner in the middle of the night, after drinking and smoking some weed, saw some shadow outside of the cabin that they thought was talking to them?

He’s already shoving the reality of the situation away, tucking himself into the neat, logical part of his brain where most things make sense.

Wren would believe Frankie; Quinn and Shay wouldn’t. Quinn would think that Frankie and Tanner were pranking them, and a thought creeps into his brain: the three of them would absolutely want to go and find it. He knows they would, because it’s what he would do.

Frankie doesn’t know what he saw, and he doesn’t know if it was real, but if, and this is a massive if, it was, he has a feeling, deep and absolute, that any of them would be torn to shreds if they went looking for something that was waiting for them to stumble upon it.

I’ll see you soon.

“They wouldn’t believe me,” Frankie finally says.

“Wren would.”

“She’d go looking for it,” Frankie mutters, shaking his head.

Tanner stares at him, expression unreadable. “Are you already tryin’ to explain it away?”

Frankie turns to look at him.

“You do know that really just happened, right? That…”

“We were drinking,” Frankie says, shaking his head. “We were drinking, and-”

“Dammit, Frank, that thing said your fuckin’ name and babbled about wantin’ to rip you and your family open.”

Frankie clamps his mouth shut.

“Yeah. There was a lotta shit it rambled about. Don’t take this in a weird way, but I’m fuckin’ jealous you didn’t have to hear it.”

Frankie shakes his head. “I can’t- Tan, that thing wasn’t normal.”

“Thanks, Captain Obvious.”

“I don’t-”

“Look, man,” Tanner crosses his arms over his chest, glaring at Frankie as he says, “You saw somethin’ out there when you got lost in the woods. You wouldn’t talk about it, but I know you did. And then you had a weird interaction with some guy at the store-”

“That’s not even related.”

“-and even after all that, you’re still tryin’ to pretend like shit’s normal and peachy.”

Frankie needs to believe that the world has order and makes sense. His life has been turbulent and confusing for so long; he has had to take blow after blow after fucking blow, and Frankie doesn’t even know how to begin to explain to Tanner what it feels like to have even that, the sense of logic and order, being taken from him, too.

But Frankie isn’t stupid; he’s stubborn, frustratingly so. But he’s perceptive and in tune with the world around him, so that’s also why he knows, even if it pains him to admit it, that it wasn’t a matter of seeing or hearing anything last night.

The connection he felt — albeit brief. Something looking through him, into his very being, and holding on for a moment, stretching the connection as far as it could go until it snapped across the clearing, and whatever was on the porch disappeared into the night.

It’s the connection he feels with Wren. With Caleb. With Carrie.

Your light.

Finally, Frankie sits down on the porch step; Tanner sits next to him.

“Even if they believe me,” Frankie tells Tanner, “They’re going to go after it. Quinn would joke about running some science experiments on it and Shay would just want to prove me wrong, and…”

Tanner understands immediately; there’s nothing more chaotic and stupid than teenagers desperate to prove that their friend is pulling a prank on them.

“Wren would believe you,” Tanner repeats, looking out into the woods. “But I just- man, why you?”

Frankie stares at his friend, uncomprehending.

“Why does it seem to like you so much?”

Frankie follows Tanner’s gaze, watching as a fox trots through the clearing; right before it enters the undergrowth on the other side, it stops and looks over at the pair of them. Frankie watches as it twitches its ear before disappearing into the leaves.

—

From Frankie’s perspective, the rest of the morning goes by normally.

When the other three wake up, Tanner and Frankie decide not to say anything for now. He trusts his cousins and Shay, of course he does, but the longer the morning drags on, the sun rising higher and higher in the sky, the more dream-like everything from the nighttime feels. It’s as if it happened to someone else, and Frankie was just a bystander — and he doesn’t know if he’s borrowing Wren’s words, or if they were his own first.

“You guys look like shit,” Shay says when she comes out of her room, smirking. “You two up all night together, or…?”

Frankie looks at Tanner. They’re both exhausted, eyes red-rimmed and hair disheveled.

“Yeah,” Frankie finally grumbles. “Lots of fun.”

Wren doesn’t look much better; when she finally emerges from the room, she sits at the table, curls in disarray.

“Didn’t sleep good,” is all she says, rubbing at her eyes and munching on a bit of a frozen waffle that’s half-thawed.

After a bit, they’re pretty much set to go back to the beach house, and Tanner offers to lock up everything — Frankie comes with him, and they do a mini sweep of the cabin, checking to make sure everything is tidy and in order.

As they lock up and start heading down the porch, everything seems back to normal, almost as if it never happened, up until Frankie walks down the last step and sees, right in front of the WELCOME mat, two hoof prints stamped deep in the dirt.

—

Frankie is quiet as they go back to the beach house, but manages to smile and act as if everything’s fine by the time the adults realize they’re back.

When Aunt Patty comes down, Frankie can see her eyes look just as tired as theirs do; when she notices, she laughs weakly and goes, “Well, not to be an ass, but it makes me feel better to know you guys didn’t get any sleep, either.”

“I slept fine,” Quinn intones as Wren looks at her mother and frowns.

“Your brother kept us up all night,” Patty yawns, and Frankie watches as Caleb rounds the corner, running up to Wren and Quinn at full speed.

He latches onto Wren’s leg and holds on tight, cheek mashed against his big sister’s thigh as Wren pats his dark blond curls.

“I think he missed you guys,” Frankie’s moving away from his aunt, determined to set his stuff down and take a moment to relax and think, but he still manages to catch Aunt Patty saying: “He kept running up to the window in our room and trying to open it up, and when we showed him your pictures, he kept pointing at the window.”

Frankie goes up the stairs and sets his things down; Shay hovers in the doorway, brow raised.

“Everything okay?”

Frankie looks at her and nods. He’s exhausted, and he really just needs some fucking sleep. The exhaustion from last night combined with the smoking and drinking is giving him the worst headache in the world, and he can barely think straight, let alone process what happened.

Shay doesn’t look convinced, but she leans against the doorframe, smiling at something down the hall; Dad appears a moment later, giving her a little hug as he turns to look at Frankie.

As Dad signs a good morning to Frankie, Frankie watches as his father’s expression freezes, his eyes widening. Shay follows his gaze, her mouth falling open and her brows shooting up with alarm.

Frankie looks down and realizes that his sleeve has rolled up, showing off the nasty blue and yellowish bruise from nearly two days ago. The shape of it is undeniable: Frankie can see the finger marks where the man had curled his hand around Frankie’s arm.

“Where did that come from?” Frankie knows his father extremely well; he knows all of Dad’s tones and expressions, but he’s never seen this one before.

“I…”

“Frankie,” Dad steps into the room, crossing the space between them and taking Frankie’s hand; when Frankie tries to pull his arm away, his father looks at him and continues, “Frankie, when did this happen?”

Frankie tugs his hand out of his father’s grasp, rougher than he’s ever been with Dad before; it hits Frankie for a brief, frightening moment that he’s stronger than Dad is.

“Dad, it’s fine,” Frankie says automatically. “Chill out.”

“It’s fine?” Dad says, his tone thunderous; Frankie stares at him, shocked. “Is this fine to you?”

“Hey,” Frankie looks over his father’s head as Richie pops up in the doorway, clearly drawn to the noise. Richie looks at Shay, and then to the back of Dad’s head. “What’s goin’...?” Frankie sees the exact moment that Richie sees the bruise, the way his stepfather’s face freezes and becomes steely.

Dad turns and looks at Shay. “Did you know about this?”

Shay shakes her head mutely, looking up at Frankie and then back at Dad.

“Who did that?” Richie asks, stepping away from the door and coming into the room. “Frankie, what happened?”

“Nothing,” Frankie repeats, attempting to hide his wrist. “Guys, it’s fine, I-”

“That is not fine,” Dad repeats, his voice becoming shrill. “That bruise looks at least a day or two old — don’t you dare try and tell me it was you guys rough housing last night.”

Damn. That was gonna be his lie.

“Franklin Kaspbrak, I need to know what happened right now. I need to know who grabbed you- was it at Pearl’s house?”

“What?!” Frankie says, aghast. “No!”

“Then who was it?”

Frankie looks over at Richie, pleading for his stepfather to intervene, but Richie looks even more pissed off then Dad does.

“The grocery store,” Frankie looks up in the doorway, where Wren is standing next to Shay. Wren looks angry, crossing her arms over her chest as she nods to Dad. “Frankie said there was a weird guy there.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Dad asks Frankie, storming out of the room.

“Mind your business,” Frankie snarls to his cousin as he passes; Wren actually shoves his shoulder, pushing him into the doorway.

“Oh, so I’m the bad guy?”

“Cut it out,” Stan randomly comes between them, glaring down at Wren. “You’re not helping.”

Frankie ignores them both and follows his father and Richie; Dad is barking something at Frankie’s other family members, and when Bev comes around the corner, Frankie watches the dark look that crosses her face when she sees the bruise on Frankie’s wrist.

Fuck, he thinks. Aunt Bev is the last person — minus Dad — who he wanted to have seen this.

“Where are you going?” Frankie jumps in his father’s path, blocking him from going into the kitchen.

“Down to that fucking grocery store so I can tell that son of a bitch that no one touches my child,” Dad snarls, moving past Frankie.

“Richie, tell him to chill out,” Frankie pleads with his stepfather.

Richie looks at him like he’s insane. “Why on Earth should we just chill out, man? Some fucking creep grabbed you-”

“It wasn’t- it wasn’t like that,” Frankie says, desperate to stop the chaos. Although most of the family has been in different areas of the house, word travels fast: pretty much everyone is caught up to speed, and he can see Aunt Bev putting on Stan’s crocs, her lips moving too fast for Frankie to understand. “The guy wasn’t all there or something. You guys know how that is.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Dad says, ignoring Frankie. “What excuse could there possibly be for a grown man to put his hands on a teenager?”

“I think he thought I was stealing or something, I don’t know.” IT watched you when you were sleeping. IT came into your room almost every night.

I’ll see you soon.

“That’s definitely not a reason,” Bill inputs, shaking his head. “I don’t care if you were stealing, no one should do that.”

I’ll see you soon.

“Guys-”

“Man, we need a fucking bat or something,” Richie snaps. “What did he look like?”

“I-”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Wren asks when she comes around the corner.

Everyone’s talking. Everyone’s talking and moving too much and Frankie is so, so tired. He’s exhausted. He needs to sleep.

“Can-”

“That looks really bad,” Quinn winces. “Does it hurt?”

“It’s just a dream, and in the morning, you’ll be gone. You’ll be gone and you’ll never come back again," the man from the grocery store says. When did he get here?

Dad and Richie are still fuming.

“And when your mother sees that-” Dad says, looking slightly panicked.

“I-”

In the window, there’s a dark figure pushing its face against the glass. It looks like a mixture between a deer and a man, its teeth humanoid as it grins ear to ear, a pink tongue lulling out of its mouth as it pants, eager, and its blue eyes, one with a ring of brown around the pupil, meeting Frankie’s.

I’ll see you soon.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Frankie picks up the closest thing — Uncle Bill’s plate of breakfast, a bit of egg still on it — and hurls it across the room and towards the window, where the only thing Frankie can see on the other side now is the open, beautiful backyard.

The plate hits the side of the counter and explodes.

“Just stop talking!” Frankie screams, picking up the glass of water and tossing it into the kitchen. “Everyone just fucking stop! I just want it all to stop!”

Frankie heaves, his breath coming out ragged and in puffs.

His family is staring at him, finally quiet, as if he’s gone fucking insane.

Quinn looks at the mess of glass and water, then back to Frankie, and is the first to speak: “Uncle Ben, do you know where the mop is?”

Wordlessly, Uncle Ben points to the pantry in the back where he keeps his cleaning surprise and where, just two days before, he had hidden all of Mike, Stan, Caleb, and Rosie’s presents.

—

Despite his breakdown, Dad and Richie still leave to go and find the man at the grocery store; Uncle Bill goes with them, lingering in front of Frankie before he leaves and telling him that everything will be okay.

Frankie pushes Uncle Ben’s hands off of the mop and takes it from him, sniffling as he wipes up the mess.

“Frank,” Ben says as he touches his shoulder; Frankie shrugs him off.

“I’m sorry for my behavior,” he replies robotically, mutely. The apology is well-rehearsed from his childhood tantrums when he’d destroy everything in his path. “I know I need to control my temper.”

“Can you let me do it?” Ben sighs when Frankie bends down to pick up the glass. Frankie winces when he cuts his finger on the rough edge of the ceramic plate, but he doesn’t stop picking up the pieces.

Aunt Patty comes up with a napkin, grabbing Frankie’s hand and holding it against the wound; he stares at her.

“I need to clean.”

“No, you need to go and put some ice on that bruise,” Aunt Patty tells him, her tone firm. “And then you need to shower and go to sleep. We can clean this up.”

“I did it, though. I broke the plate and glass, and- I need to control my temper, and…”

“You need to rest,” Patty tells him again. “Ben will clean this up, and then in a few hours, Mike and I are going to make your favorite blueberry pancakes and let you pick the movie later tonight. Does that sound good?”

Frankie’s lip wobbles, and he nods, sniffing. “I’m really sorry, Uncle Ben.”

“I don’t need an apology,” Ben tells him kindly. “I just need to make sure you’re okay.”

Frankie doesn’t say that he is, because they all know he’s not. His aunt and uncle silently clean up the mess Frankie made, and when he turns, Aunt Bev is there, wrapping an arm around him and leading him past everyone else, telling the kids to stop staring and to go back to their rooms.

Frankie lets Aunt Bev lead him up the stairs and into the bathroom, where she has him sit on the toilet while she gets the bag of ice from Mike.

Bev presses the ice on his bruise; neither of them say anything for a long time.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Frankie says to his aunt.

Bev just stares at him. “Why?”

“Because…”

“Why are you thinking about me when you should be thinking of yourself?”

It’s what he always does, or- well, at least he thinks he does. His mother’s side of the family have called him selfish before. He doesn’t really know what he is.

Beverly’s eyes are empathetic; his aunt has him hold the ice pack as she sits on the edge of the bathtub, crossing her arms over her lap.

“You remind me so much of myself, Frankie.”

A lot of people have said that to him over the course of his life. Sometimes, Frankie feels like a reflection of whoever he loves rather than his own person.

“So I know what you need to be told right now is that no one is angry at you. No one thinks any less of you, or is upset with you.”

“I’m embarrassed,” he tells his aunt, frowning. “Everyone saw…”

“To be fair, we drove you there,” Bev points out. “If everyone had just shut up for two seconds and let you talk, you wouldn’t have done that.”

Frankie thinks of the figure in the window. Maybe he really does need some sleep.

“I didn’t want you to see it,” Frankie tells his aunt. “The bruise or…”

“Sweetheart,” Bev murmurs, touching his knee. “I’m okay.”

“You can’t even look at it without getting angry.”

“Of course I’m angry,” Bev says automatically, frowning. “Not at you, but that a person thought he could do that to you. I don’t care the reason, you don’t grab a child hard enough to leave a bruise and hold them there.”

Frankie nods. He doesn’t even care about it at all anymore; part of him wishes he could just cut the wrist off completely so no one could see it anymore.

“I’m not…,” Frankie shakes his head. “I just- my dad and Richie don’t need to do that. I don’t need them to protect me.”

“Frankie, for once in your life,” Bev says, her tone both fond and exasperated, “stop being so stubborn and listen.”

Frankie meets her gaze.

“We all definitely should have chilled out and let you talk — it was too chaotic. No one’s angry at you for throwing anything — we’ve all been there, kiddo. But if you think for a second that any of us in this house won’t fuck someone up for hurting you, then you have another thing coming. No one is ever allowed to hurt you.”

“Is that why you hate my mom?”

Bev looks confused; she blinks once, twice, a little owl-eyed.

It comes out before he can think twice: “I didn’t snoop or anything. I swear. But yesterday, when Rosie was watching cartoons, she went into your chat history, and when I tried to get back to Youtube for her, I saw my moms number and I just…”

Bev is quiet; she looks down at the floor before slowly nodding. “Yeah, that’s how Ben ruined his birthday surprise, too.”

“I’m sorry for invading-”

“Frankie, let’s make a deal: no more i’m sorrys.”

He’s okay with that.

Bev rests her chin in the palm of her hand. “What did you see?”

“Everything that was there.”

Bev shuts her eyes, sighing through her nose. She doesn’t seem angry — at least not at him.

“What do you want to know?”

He’s exhausted, and he knows he needs sleep. But god, he needs someone to actually fucking talk to him like an adult for once, and if he doesn’t take this chance now, he never will.

“What happened between all of you guys? Why does she…”

“I think your mom has a right to be upset that Eddie cheated on her,” Beverly begins, her gaze distant. “I think it’s fine if she hates Richie’s guts and doesn’t want to look Eddie’s way ever again. But what wasn’t okay, and I will never forgive her for, is for the way she treated Eddie. Eddie has been through a lot, Frankie. Your dad has had a hard life, and your grandmother treated him like shit — she abused and manipulated Eddie for his entire life. You wanna know why your dad wasn’t out, why he didn’t know he was gay? Your grandmother told him that he’d get AIDS and would die. That being gay was unclean and a sin. That shit does things to people, Frankie.”

Frankie’s never heard the whole story; he’s always assumed that that was what it was, but…

“Your mom wanted full custody of you. She cited a bunch of things in Richie’s past, and attempted to claim that Eddie didn’t have your best priorities in mind. That Eddie would attempt to flee across the country and take you with him, even though Eddie was the one who proposed a fifty/fifty custody arrangement to keep you with your mom for as much as he could.

“I’ve loved Eddie for a very long time,” Bev tells him, eyes locked onto Frankie. “We all have. I remember back when Eddie was younger than you — a lot shorter and more high-pitched and squeaky — and then I saw him again at forty. The seven of us have been through more than your siblings and cousins can ever imagine. So I need you to know right here and now, Frankie, that the only thing that got your father up in the morning from the age of twenty-nine through forty was you.”

Frankie stares at her.

“Your mother knows that you’re all Eddie has. Eddie doesn’t have any siblings, both of his parents are dead. He didn’t have any friends or close relatives. It was just you. For your mother to try and separate the two of you is something I can’t look past. And I can’t forgive her for making your father feel like the only thing in his life that he’s ever been proud of was going to be taken from him for no fucking reason, other than he realized who he was and what he wanted.

“So,” Bev leans back, helping to press the ice to his wrist again. “Yeah, I’m not your mother’s biggest fan. I respect the fact that she’s your mother, and I do think that if you want to be in her life, that it’s your right, and our job as your family to support that. But I’ll never let Eddie or Richie feel like that ever again.”

Frankie nods slowly.

“What are you thinking?”

“Why didn’t he tell me any of that?” Frankie finally asks, eyes damp. “Why…”

“The number one thing you can’t do in a divorce where kids are present is involve them in the adult side of relationships,” Bev recites, and when Frankie groans, she taps his knee sharply. “At your age, I get how that sounds frustrating — believe me, Frank, I wish Eddie could have told you everything right away. You do have a right to know. But you’re only fifteen. I want you to believe that the world is safe and that your family gets along for as long as you possibly can, even if it’s a pipedream.”

That’s an understatement.

Frankie feels numb. Tired and vacant. There’s a part of him, the part that’s half-asleep and exhausted, who wishes that he really could be Shanidar 1: to be in early human history, where nothing else matters except being cared for by the people he loves.

Bev takes the ice away. “It’ll go away in a few days.” She sounds so certain that it breaks his heart.

“Your husband and dad really sucked,” Frankie blurts without thinking; Beverly nods. “Was…when you told me it was bad, was it really bad, Aunt Bev?”

Aunt Bev looks so sad. And, slowly, she begins to tell him a little more as she helps him put on some cream and roll down his sleeve.

By the end of it, Frankie’s nearly in tears. Some people have bad childhoods. Really, really bad childhoods.

He hugs her and lets her lead him into his room; Shay is there, hesitating briefly before handing him pajamas.

“I…”

Shay just shakes her head and leaves the room for him to get changed. When he opens the door back up, she’s still waiting on the other side.

“Can you stay with me until I fall asleep?” he asks his sister, voice hoarse.

Shay nods and sits on the foot of his bed. She pulls out her phone and plays some games, glancing up every now and then, waiting for him to fall asleep.

Blissfully, peacefully, he finally does.

—

Frankie doesn’t exactly see when Dad, Richie, and Uncle Bill come back from the grocery store, but later on, when he catches glimpses of them talking amongst the Losers from the top of the stairs, his cousins and Shay at his side, he has bits of the following conversation translated for him:

Dad: “He just kept saying he had no idea what we were talking about, even though the cashier working at the time said he saw him talking to Frankie.”

Richie: “Fucking bizarre, man. Kept babbling about how he just wanted to talk to him.”

Stan: “Talk to him about what?"

Dad: “Wouldn’t say, but I told him that if he ever touched any of my children again, that I’ll fucking-”

Bill: “Something was just off about him. But I definitely think he got the message.”

This bit, Wren seemed a bit sad to translate; it’s only when Shay, sighing deeply, takes over that Frankie got to learn this last bit:

Dad: “I don’t know what I’m going to say to Myra — Richie, she’ll see it. She’ll see it and- in her shoes, I’d lose my mind, too. I don’t know what to do. I didn’t want to be thinking about her right now, but- maybe it’s for the better.”

Frankie leans towards Shay, whispering, “What’s for the better?”

Shay shuts her eyes, sighing.

Dad: “Did you see the way he looked earlier? I didn’t even recognize him. I was- I know, I know. I’ve never seen him act like that before. I’m terrified that something is really wrong. I think he needs help.”

Frankie gets to his feet and pads back into his room, shutting the door.

—

There’s a small dock a little bit down the ways from the beach house; when they here in Kitty Hawk, it’s become a place that the adults and teens alike have gone to for a breather and privacy.

Dad and Richie find him there, his father sitting on one side of him, Richie on the other. The very first time they came to Kitty Hawk, Frankie had attempted to push his dad into the water when they sat in these very same positions — Richie had snorted and laughed, even though Dad was spluttering and reminding Frankie that the water was cold and they had no idea what animals were right under their feet.

Frankie watches the waves, his feet dangling over the side of the dock. Since it’s summertime, the water is much warmer than it had been in that memory, but Frankie’s not thinking of pushing his father in there — he’s thinking of jumping in himself, immersing himself in the waves. The total silence.

Dad leans against him; Frankie doesn’t push him away, but he doesn’t lean into his touch. The nap helped, but he’s still so, so tired and drained.

Richie’s finally the one who breaks the ice. “You know it’s nothing you did, right, Frank?”

Frankie nods slowly. He’s heard that a lot.

“Do you want to start going back to therapy?” his father asks, his tone surprisingly gentle. Earlier, he’d never seen his father look so angry — the change is jarring.

Frankie shrugs. The shit with his parents and family is easy for him to talk about, sure, but how would he even begin to explain to Dr. Novik, to anyone, what happened last night in the woods? The figure he thinks he saw this morning?

You were exhausted both times, Frankie reminds himself, but his assurances feel weak, pathetic. You needed sleep. People see things when they’re tired.

But mostly, Frankie thinks he’d feel…embarrassed, going back to Dr. Novik. He likes her and she helped him a lot, but how embarrassing would it be to go back to her now, at nearly sixteen, and tell her that nothing really improved?

He knows he shouldn’t be embarrassed. There’s no shame in therapy, and there’s no shame in needing it more than once. But it’s hard for him to accept that about himself, rather than someone else.

“Frankie,” Dad tries, gently touching Frankie’s hand, “Please talk to me. Are you okay?”

Frankie thinks of the conversation he had with Aunt Beverly. Of the fact that, in Dad and Richie’s point of view, they see Frankie acting out, tired and exhausted, and all Dad can think is that this could be a way for Mom to get what she’s always wanted: full custody of Frankie, even if Frankie doesn’t know why she’d want that — they can barely get along with the arrangement they do have.

The only thing that got your father up in the morning from the age of twenty-nine through forty was you.

Finally, Frankie looks up at his father. “Did Bev tell you about the texts?”

Dad sighs, looking away; of course she did. Frankie loves the Losers, but he’s reminded that nothing is kept secret between them, especially when the kids are involved — in this instance, he’s glad that someone else told Dad, but in the past, it’s been quite annoying.

“Is that…,” Dad looks at Frankie, worried. “Is that what’s been going on?”

Yes. Not exactly. Maybe. He doesn’t know.

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?” Frankie asks, searching his father’s gaze. He can feel Richie next to him; he can practically feel the other man having to restrain himself from talking. “I deserve to know that.”

“You do,” Dad murmurs, but it looks like something he’s only saying because he knows he has to.

Frankie waits for his father to start talking, and, even though it takes a bit of encouraging from Richie, Dad finally begins:

“Frankie, I’m trying so hard,” Dad confesses, looking ashamed. “But I just- every time I think that we’re at a good place, that everything is going smoothly…”

Frankie waits for his father to talk; his father lets his legs hang over the side of the dock, staring off somewhere in the shoreline as he begins, very slowly: "Your mother said a lot of things back then because she was hurt. I'm not excusing it or acting like it doesn't matter, or...," Dad sighs. "I don't think your mother is a bad, evil person. I like to think that, if she were to look back on everything that happened when we were getting divorced, she'd probably be embarrassed about it."

Richie shifts; Frankie can see his stepfather roll his eyes, looking the other direction. He wonders if this is something that Dad and Richie can't see eye to eye on.

"I hurt your mother when I told her I wanted a divorce," Dad continues. "It doesn't excuse anything she did, but I know I hurt her more than I ever thought I...was capable of doing."

Frankie raises his hands to speak; Dad shakes his head.

"Frankie, the reason why I didn't want you to know about any of this isn't because I don't trust you, or because I don't think you're capable of understanding it," he continues, looking at him seriously. "But it's because my job as your father isn't to use you to get back at your mother, or to vent to you about my personal relationships and trauma — it's to support you and raise you into the best person you can be. I know you've had to grow up fast," Dad adds when Frankie raises his hands again. "I know you have had to take blow after blow after blow during your life. You've had to adapt to so much change, and, buddy, you don't know how much I wish I could go back and change things. I would have done everything before and during the divorce differently. But I want you to be yourself for once. To stop worrying about me and wanting to protect me, and to just be a teenager," His father looks like he's seconds from crying; instinctively, Frankie reaches over to touch his side.

Frankie is still very much a Daddy's Boy, he realizes as he watches his father. His instinct to protect his father has been present for as long as Frankie can remember — it's an instinct he has with his mother and Richie as well, of course, but he's spent his entire life feeling as though he needed to protect Dad.

It isn't a role that anyone assigned to him. He knows his father is capable of handling himself, and that he has Richie and the Losers now to help him, too.

But once upon a time, it was just Eddie and Frankie Kaspbrak against the world. Dad leading Frankie through Central Park and holding his hand; Dad staying up with him a little bit past his bedtime to show Frankie the new signs he learned that day. Frankie giving Dad his name sign.

Richie is there now, though, and Richie helps Dad get a bit more out, a little bit more about the bits of that time period that he's comfortable sharing — and it burns deep inside Frankie, every word that forces Frankie to realize that there's a reason why Richie and the Losers don't like his mother. Dad tells him a bit about Grandma Sonia, too — and Frankie, although not having to say it, feels like some of the stories between Grandma and Mom, not a lot, and perhaps not noticeable to someone who is not as perceptive as Frankie is, overlap just a little — and Frankie feels the anger, the guilt, and the shame begin to build within him gradually.

"Frankie, I just want you to be a kid," Dad tells him; at this point, the conversation somehow has become a little less heavy. Richie's been there to be a buffer, to keep Dad grounded in a way that Frankie thinks no one else can. "I just..."

Frankie looks down the shoreline; Richie's moved to sit on Dad's other side, so Frankie has a full, unobstructed view finally.

He can faintly pick up bits and pieces of Richie and Dad's conversation. Frankie watches a dark spot, yards away, shuffling from the grove of trees and near the water. He can't tell if it's a dog or a cat.

Dad touches Frankie's shoulder; Frankie looks at him.

"That man at the grocery store," Dad says seriously. "He seemed a little...off."

Frankie nods.

"Did he threaten you or anything?" Dad asks, gaze dropping down to look at the bruise on Frankie's arm. "Say anything that made you uncomfortable?"

IT came into your room almost every night.

An image of Dad, after a meeting with an attorney during the divorce, having to listen to Mom try and petition to have full custody of Frankie, to separate them.

"He was weird," Richie says, shaking his head. "Fuckin' understatement of the century, but..."

The dark shape on the shoreline gets a little bigger, still low to the ground. Shuffling back and forth, always out of reach of the waves. Do dogs crawl on their bellies?

"Frankie, he didn't-?"

"No," Frankie finally says, looking towards his father. "He was just...you know, weird. Off. I just knew you guys would freak out, and..."

"No one is allowed to put their hands on you," Dad repeats, his expression turning stony. "I don't care what was going on, that's unacceptable."

"I know," Frankie frowns. "But, um..."

Dad blinks.

"You're always sticking up for me, even when I'm... So, you know. Thanks."

Dad furrows his brows. "We can go back to Dr. Novik if you want, Frankie. I just- in the kitchen, earlier," Frankie blinks, "You don't ever act like that. I've never seen you-"

Snap. Like the connection between Frankie and that thing, as he felt it stepping back from the porch and all the way into the clearing, watching the cabin from the undergrowth for hours until it decided to 

crawl

back to wherever it came from.

An image of Dad, much younger, staring up at his own mother, terrified. Of Richie, head down as boys in school leered after him and called him slurs, shoving him into lockers and-

Richie Tozier sucks flamer cock.

-Frankie jolts. He doesn't know where that came from.

"I think I was just tired," Frankie finally says. A wave laps at the bottom of his feet. "I didn't sleep well last night."

"No one did," Richie admits with a shake of his head. "The dogs were keeping everyone up all night; Caleb, too."

Frankie looks back down the shoreline. The dark spot is gone, replaced by an older couple walking down the beach, hand in hand.

"I'm okay," Frankie finally says. Their relationship works best when Frankie tells little white lies every now and then.

—

A little while later, Frankie decides to go see Carrie again.

Wren, Quinn, and Shay are eager to go with him; he has to remind himself to continue to say Pearl around them, but by the time they get to her house, Frankie's practically jogging to get to her door, needing to see her. He doesn't know why, exactly — maybe it's that connection. The pull.

Sue's car isn't here; maybe she's left, or is out somewhere, but Carrie's the only one inside her cozy home, opening up the door and welcoming them inside.

Frankie doesn't miss the way her blue eyes linger on his, sweeping him up and down, nor the hint of relief he sees in her gaze when she sees him.

"I was wondering when you guys would pop back up," Carrie says, offering them some strawberry lemon. "Fresh. I have a little garden outside." A little is an understatement — Carrie's backyard is lush with plants and flowers, a greenhouse near the edge of her property.

Carrie asks them about school, nodding along and asking them questions; the general are you excited to be going back, what's your favorite subject kind of questions.

Wren wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, setting her glass down on the table and going, "I just feel like we've met before. I can't explain it."

Frankie doesn't think he can, either; Carrie just nods, tucking a long strand of silvery-blonde hair behind her ear. "I know what you mean."

"Well, it's probably 'cus she's so cool," Quinn points out, grinning when Carrie laughs.

Wren yawns, hiding it behind her fist; she shakes her head. "Sorry," she murmurs, frowning. "We didn't get a lot of sleep last night."

"I slept like a baby," Quinn huffs.

Carrie meets Frankie's eyes; he looks down, shifting in his seat.

"Yeah," Carrie finally says, nodding. "I didn't sleep too well, either."

—

Richie floats with him in the waves; it's going to get dark soon, and Dad had told them that they have five minutes until he comes to drag them out — you two do realize that this is when sharks begin to feed, right? Richie, great whites migrate in North Carolina! Yes, I do my research! — but Frankie wanted to enjoy the ocean for a little bit longer. Richie told him that the two of them could fight off a great white together; Richie would take the eyes, Frankie would take the gills.

"I'm sorry that I said that to you the other day," Richie randomly says; Frankie thinks he might've misunderstood, until Richie glances at him, frowning. "About...you know, when you snapped at your dad after the grocery store. If I'd known, man..."

Frankie had forgotten about that, to be honest.

"Rich, it's not a big deal."

"It is," Richie tells him quickly, firmly. "It is a big deal. Especially to me."

Frankie watches his stepfather, the pair of them bobbing on top of a small wave. The water is still decently warm — August is the hottest month, and Frankie wonders offhandedly what sea life are swimming around them. Everything in the world, the universe, that they're completely unaware of.

"I wasn't...," Richie starts, biting his lip before signing, "I wasn't trying to compare you to her in a bad way. At the moment, I felt like I needed to stand up for Eddie, but- I should've asked you more questions, man. Maybe..."

Frankie wouldn't have told Richie about the man in the grocery store parking lot no matter what Richie told him. He won't tell him or Dad or anyone about the thing that he saw — or thinks he saw — at the cabin. Frankie just needs to finish this vacation, and go back home, and then...

Seeing Mom brings a sense of dread and annoyance all over again. 

"Richie, I legit forgot about it," Frankie says honestly. "But- thanks, man. For saying sorry, and..." He swallows. "For caring. About me and about my dad."

Before Richie can say anything, Frankie goes, "I don't think my dad could have made it through the divorce without you. So thanks for having his back, and...you know, being there for him for all this time. I'm really happy he has you."

Richie had helped Dad through that time, and probably a shit ton of other things that Frankie doesn't know about.

Richie looks emotional, nodding and smiling. "I really do love you, kiddo. And you know I'm always here for you, no matter what?"

"Even if I'm pissed at you?"

"Luckily for you, angry Kaspbrak men don't scare me in the slightest."

Frankie laughs, looking towards the shore. Dad keeps looking over at them and throwing up his hands, but he seems to be much better from earlier.

Dad's lucky to have this life now. He's lucky to have Richie.

So many people go through their lives never finding someone who loves them like how Richie Tozier loves Eddie Kaspbrak.

Frankie knows that their time limit is reaching an end; Dad makes a show of looking at his watch and then pointing to the sky, to which both Frankie and Richie cackle.

"Frank?"

Frankie waits for Richie to say something.

"Was everything okay at the cabin?"

He stares at his stepfather.

"You just seem," Richie blinks, his dark curls plastered on his forehead. "I dunno. You seem a little..."

Off.

Frankie entertains the idea of telling everyone everything. Sitting them around the campfire and going into it as if it's a ghost story: watching their eyes widen and them ooh and ahh at all of the major scares, until, finally, either Dad or Uncle Stan or someone else just goes, "Yeah, right. You're making it up so you can get out of being in trouble for throwing plates and smashing glasses."

I want your light, the thing had whispered. You and your family, I want something from each of you. I'm hungry, Frankie, I'm very hungry.

"Puberty," Frankie jokes; Richie doesn't laugh, but grimaces and nods, glancing back towards the beach.

Frankie dunks his head beneath the waves, and stays underwater for a little while.

He feels the warmth of the water around him, the total silence. It feels like home.

—

Frankie is sitting on the roof that night when Wren climbs up and sits next to him; she's like a spider monkey, crawling up the drain pipe and plopping herself right there.

Frankie pulls out a cigarette from his pocket; she looks but doesn't say anything, her knees drawn up to her chest as she looks up at the night sky.

There are so many stares in Kitty Hawk, more than Frankie's ever seen in his entire life. In Manhattan, the only stars you see are helicopters. He didn't know that he'd ever be so lucky to see more than four or five at one time.

"When I was little," Wren signs when he looks at her, "My dad took me and Quinn to a campground, back when I first started the Girl Scout's. He wanted me to get the full experience."

Uncle Stan always seems so neat and tidy; Frankie still can't believe that he actually was a Boy Scout, and a prodigy, according to his children and Dad and Richie.

"The sky looked a lot like this," Wren murmurs. "Quinn used to get really nervous about being in the woods — he kept saying that he was afraid of bears and wildcats and zombies, back when he caught an episode of Walking Dead on TV," She rolls her eyes affectionately. "But my dad told us that all we had to do was to remember that he was always going to be there, no matter what. That even if he wasn't right next to us, that he'd never, ever be too far away — he'd come and rescue us from the zombies or bears or whatever else."

Frankie watches her sign, nodding when she finishes.

"You said you saw your grandmother when you were little, after she died."

"I did."

"How did you know that was real?"

Wren frowns, glancing up at the stars and shrugging. "I just know it was. I know she was coming to tell me goodbye."

"Were you...," Frankie thinks of last night, the terror he felt that was so strong, it rooted him to the spot. The fear he felt when he saw the thing in the woods six months ago. When he was little, and he'd have nightmares. "Were you scared?"

"No," Wren says at once, smiling. "I felt comforted. I felt like Bubbie was letting me know that she was going to be okay."

Frankie thinks of his own grandfather, his father's father. He had a dream about Frank Kaspbrak once, a few months ago, but that's all it was: a dream.

Frankie looks up at the sky. "Do you think she's okay?" When he looks over, his cousin is watching him, her expression thoughtful. "I don't know if you... I mean, do you believe in something after death?"

"I do," Wren tells him. "In Judaism, we believe that it's about what you do when you're here, rather than thinking constantly of where you'll go after you die. I don't know if there's a heaven, or something equivalent, but I like to think that the people we love are all around us."

Frankie hasn't been close to anyone who's died. Both of his grandfathers died before he was born, and his paternal grandmother — well. He's never had to think about it much, but sometimes, he wonders if his grandfather, the man he's named after, is watching over him and his father, wherever Frank Kaspbrak ended up. If it's like Wren says: energy, something all around them.

A few months ago, his father's paternal aunt had come over to visit; his Great-Aunt Sara had been nice, yet a little strange, but she'd told Frankie more than once that she believes that Frank would have liked Frankie.

He's not so sure about that. Frankie's not an easy person to get along with, but the thought is nice.

"What was it like, when you saw her?" Frankie asks, watching as Wren smiles.

"I woke up in the middle of the night, and she was in my room," Frankie remembers the night terrors he'd have as a kid, of his own grandmother. "She came over to sit on my bed like she'd always do, and told me that everything was going to be okay." Wren's eyes are shiny; she wipes at them with the back of her hand. "I miss her a lot. I've always been close with her and my grandfather. My dad's always told me that me and Quinn are closer to his dad than he ever has been."

Frankie looks back in front of them. From the roof, he can see the ocean and the dark line of the horizon. The warm, summer breeze ruffles his hair, and he takes a deep breath, sighing as he tastes the salt from the ocean.

"Frankie?"

Frankie looks at his cousin.

"What are you not telling me?"

He stares at her, mouth falling open just slightly.

Before he can begin signing, Wren glares at him. "Please don't lie to me. I can't, like physically cannot, handle you continuing to lie to me and push me away. I love Kitty Hawk, and I love all of you, but I'm about three seconds from having a mental breakdown if another person just smiles and pretends like shit's cool when it's clearly not."

Frankie blinks, unable to form the words.

"Frankie, you're clearly not okay," she continues, "And I knew...I fucking knew that something was wrong with you when you came back from the grocery store, and when you didn't want to go inside. I knew something was fucking off, and-" She shakes her head. "And look, I get it. There's a lot that I don't tell my parents or Quinn or you because it's like, why burden anyone else, right?"

"Wren-"

"But I feel like something is really, really wrong. I feel like there's something going on, or that's been going on, and I can feel it. I can feel your fear, Frankie; I know that sounds creepy, but I feel it. I can tell that you're jittery and anxious, and you're just- you're off. And you-"

"Wren," Frankie says, touching her shoulder. "Shut up for three seconds."

His cousin makes a face, but otherwise remains quiet.

Frankie stares at the horizon for a moment.

He tells her about getting lost in the woods back in January. About how, when he was sat against a tree, he saw something in the woods that he thought was Roscoe at first — it looked just like him, after all. But then it started talking-

come here, come here, come here.

-and Frankie took off running. That's when he found Roscoe, the real Roscoe, and the dog had been attacked, but thankfully survived. How last night, when Shay, Wren, and Quinn were sleeping, he and Tanner woke up in the middle of the night and there was something outside of the cabin, trying to get in. Saying Frankie's name and how it wanted him to follow.

I'll see you soon.

By the end of it, Wren is staring at him, her expression unreadable. Part of him wants her to laugh and call him a fucking idiot, to tell him he's a liar. He wants her to tell him that this has been an elaborate prank by everyone, to see how far Frankie can bend before he breaks.

Wren doesn't do that. Of course she doesn't.

She sits there for a long time, until she says: "I believe you."

He knew she would, which is why he didn't want to tell her.

"Wren..."

She glares at him. "What excuse are you going to come up with now, Frankie?"

"I-"

"Frankie, you are not a liar," she tells him adamantly. "You don't make shit up. Everyone who has ever met you knows that about you. If this was my brother, or the twins, I'd believe that it was a total bunch of horseshit. But you?"

"Wren, there's..." He shakes his head. "There's no such thing as Bigfoot or cryptids or ghosts or anything."

"Why not?"

"Because there's not, dude."

Wren narrows her eyes. "So, explain it to me."

"What?"

"What you saw out there, Frankie. Give me a logical, earthly reason for what you experienced."

"I was exhausted," Frankie begins, clenching his jaw. "I was exhausted, and sleep-deprived, and..."

"Tanner, too?"

"Tan, just-" Frankie shakes his head. "I don't know. I mean, maybe-"

"Go on, keep reaching."

"I'm not reaching."

"Frankie," Wren says seriously, meeting his eyes. "I normally admire your ability to be stubborn even when it makes no logical sense, but right now, you need to be serious."

Frankie wants to tell her to cut it out, that this is why he didn't want to say anything.

But the memory of last night. The thing in the window.

"If it's not some hallucination that I've been having from a lack of sleep or because I'm scared," Frankie admits, his hands trembling, "then what is it, Wren?"

Wren looks at him, shutting her eyes briefly before shrugging. "I don't know, Frankie."

"Please don't tell anyone else," he tells her, but even before he does, he knows that she won't. "I just- you know how everyone else is. Quinn and Shay are gonna want to go and find it, and- god if my dad hears this, he's going to ship me off somewhere far away. He'll never let me come back here, and if he tells my mom..."

"I'm not going to," Wren confirms. "My parents have enough to deal with, between me and Quinn, and everything going on with Caleb. The last thing my parents need is for me to run and babble to them about-" She shakes her head, "-this." After a pause, she adds: "I doubt they'd believe me, anyways."

Wren leans into his side; he lets her put her head on his shoulder.

"Frankie?"

"Hm."

"I really don't like that you smoke."

"I know."

"But does it...you know, help?"

"Not really. I don't know. Maybe."

Neither of them say anything for a bit, until Frankie murmurs: "When I was little and I'd wake up from a nightmare, I'd repeat: it’s just a dream, and in the morning, you’ll be gone, you’ll be gone and you’ll never come back again over and over again until I fell asleep."

Wren looks up at him, head still pressed against his shoulder.

"When Tan and I saw that...thing last night, I started repeating it again," Frankie blinks. "I forgot all about it. About the fact that I'd say that. You remember when you said you feel like something happened, and you just...you can't remember it?"

She nods.

"I feel like that, too. I feel like something really bad happened when I was little, and I can't remember it. Whether I blocked it out or...I don't know. But it's like..."

"A wall," Wren says softly. "A big wall."

"Yeah."

"Did it work?" He looks at her, frowning. "When you said it last night. When you told it to go away. Did it...go away?"

"No," Frankie murmurs; eventually, sure, but not for hours and hours. Frankie had repeated his mantra three hundred times, and it didn't move away until it wanted to. "I guess it doesn't really work."

—

That night, when Frankie dreams, he's in the middle of the forest.

The grass is cold beneath his feet; he wiggles his toes, realizing that he's still clad in the pajamas he wore to bed that night — a pair of flannel pajama pants and an oversized shirt. Frankie looks around the forest, and, with a pause, realizes that he's been here before. He can't remember when — this isn't the forest in Kitty Hawk. He's a city kid, sure, and not much of a Boy Scout, but he knows that these aren't the woods of North Carolina. Somewhere up higher, up...

A figure, half-hidden in shadow. Taller than Frankie, than Uncle Mike. Eyes shining in the dark as it stands yards from him, completely still.

Frankie stares at it. He moves his foot to take a step back; the figure moves one leg forward to follow.

This is a dream, Frankie reminds himself, trying to calm down. It's a dream, and soon...when I wake up...

The figure stands, eyes locked on his.

Frankie.

Deep, somehow a faint whisper despite the fact that it carries over to him despite the distance between them.

Frankie takes a step back.

Don't run from me. If I chase you, I won't be able to stop.

Frankie furrows his brow. Frankie isn't very good at being able to distinguish sounds — his cochlear implants can only do so much, and he doesn't remember much from before he lost his hearing. But even so, Frankie realizes this: the way this thing speaks is...odd. The language sounds borrowed, copied.

Stolen.

"What are you?" Frankie finally croaks out. "Are you real?"

Yes. I am real. I am more real than you are.

"Sure," Frankie bites back before he can stop himself. "And this is a dream, and-"

It’s just a dream, and in the morning, you’ll be gone, you’ll be gone and you’ll never come back again. When the thing speaks, Frankie feels like he can hear his own voice — his accent, his infliction and tone of voice.

Frankie swallows. "What do you want?"

The creature takes one step forward, and then another. Another, until it begins to draw out of the darkness — Frankie can't look up at it's face, won't, and he's back at five years-old, under his covers — and, taking a long, clawed hand, reaches inside the dark, cavernous space where it's chest and stomach should be, and slowly pulls out a rotting, gray human heart.

Yours beats so fast.

Frankie takes a step back and-

Immediately, he's awake, practically knocking the lamp off of the bedside table as he falls onto the floor. He's heaving, his breaths coming out rapidly; drawing his knees up to his chest, Frankie hugs himself.

The door to the room flies open, and Frankie watches as Uncle Ben runs in with a baseball bat.

"Dude!"

Ben looks around, putting his hand to his chest; Dad pops in after him, looking at him on the floor and sighing.

"I thought the ceiling had caved in," Dad says.

"I'm not that heavy," Frankie replies weakly, easing himself back onto the bed. "I'm fine, by the way."

Richie comes in to say something, but before he can joke, Frankie watches as his brow furrows in confusion, staring at something from behind Frankie.

Frankie follows his gaze, looking over to see his cousin, Caleb, sitting on the top of the bedframe, his legs dangling down over the pillows, and smiling at Frankie.

—

Frankie hasn't seen Tanner since the previous day, but in the morning, Richie tells Frankie that the other teen is waiting for him outside; Frankie goes out the front door of the beach house, waving to him and meeting him in the driveway.

"Hey," Frankie says with a wave, and Tanner doesn't say anything as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small object, handing it over and putting it in Frankie's hands.

Frankie looks down at it. His cellphone, the one he lost six months ago.

"Dude, how did..." You were all the way out there, man, Tanner had told him months before. "Tan, did you go out there?"

Tanner looks like shit; his hair is a mess, and he has bags under his eyes. Tanner crosses his arms over his chest.

"Why..."

"I had ta know, man," Tanner says, shaking his head. "I had to fuckin' see, man. I had to know."

"Had to know..." Frankie glances behind him; thankfully, none of his family members are outside, but you literally never know with the Losers. "Over here."

They walk to the side of the house, and when they sit down, Tanner begins.

"I had to know what it was," Tanner says slowly, his hands trembling. "I had to go and look for it, man. I went out yesterday, where you thought you were last time, and..." Tanner shakily takes a breath, running his hand through his hair. "I didn't see the- you know, the thing. Maybe it was watchin' me the whole time, I dunno. Found your phone, though."

Frankie looks down at the phone; it's cracked and weathered, sure, but definitely not in bad shape for something that was in the middle of the woods for six whole months, in all kinds of weather.

Something feels off about that. Something feels off about everything.

Frankie looks at his friend; Tanner's normally so cool-headed and calm. But he looks like a mess, shaking and afraid.

"Tan," Frankie says, remembering bits of what he saw Tanner saying that night in the cabin. "You kept saying he was right. Who were you talking about?"

Tanner looks at him. "My uncle," he murmurs, frowning. "He, uh...fuck, man. Fuck."

Frankie stares at him. "You know what it is, then? This...thing. You knew-"

"I didn't know, man, not for sure," Tanner shuts his eyes. "Look, my uncle- he used ta live in the mountains. For a long time. One day, he calls my dad and asks to move in with us here. Said he needed somethin' different," He swallows, picking at his jeans. "My uncle, he was nice, but he was kinda strange — not in a bad way or nothin', but he used to say he saw things. Felt things."

Frankie keeps quiet.

"Me 'n him were real close. I was happy when he moved in, even though Daddy kept askin' him when he'd be leavin' and goin' back home. One day they were arguin', and my uncle stormed out 'n I asked him what happened, why he was so freaked out, 'n he told me about," Tanner shakes his head. "About somethin'. Said that he saw somethin' in the mountains he weren't supposed to, and it started followin' him around. That it knew he was special. And he moved here ta get away from it, ‘n then he thought it followed him. The mountains are like, four hours by car, Frank. Nothin' can just walk after ya like that."

Frankie draws his knees up to his chest.

"Daddy thought he was crazy. I thought he was funny. But my uncle, he just- he couldn't go outside anymore, kept saying it wanted something from him. Over and over again, he'd say that."

"Tanner," Frankie says, looking at his friend. Tanner is not lying — he believes what he's saying, and Frankie can't call him a liar, especially after the past few days. "What is it?”

"My uncle said it had all kinds of faces," Tanner continues, "But that it needed to copy livin' things in order to keep alive."

"I..."

"Frank, I don’t know what this shit means,” Tanner admits. “All I know is that this thing is fuckin’ evil, man. And for some reason, it likes you.”

Frankie shifts his back up against the beach house. He can see Tanner jolting and glancing around — probably at every noise, every twig snap and bird call.

“Are you going to be okay?” Frankie asks, even though it’s probably a stupid question.

Tanner laughs weakly; definitely a dumb question.

Frankie has his number; he doesn’t know what he can do from so far away, but he tells Tanner that Carrie isn’t too far.

“I dunno,” Tanner shakes his head. “I mean, I trust your judgement, Frank, but I never thought I’d see Scary Pearl make friends with anyone ‘round here.”

Tanner doesn’t look judgemental or annoyed; but still, Frankie’s curious.

“Why?”

“Lotta people say weird things happen ‘round her,” Tanner says, shrugging. “I’ve never had a personal problem with her or nothin’. But some of the kids I go to school with, they say that she can like, make shit happen with her mind. That she knocked this one kid off his bike, just by lookin’ at ‘em ‘cus he tried fuckin’ with her mail box.”

“Well, sounds like he deserves it, if that’s true,” Frankie says with a shrug. He’s never gotten a bad vibe from Carrie; despite the fact that they don’t know each other very well yet, he trusts her.

Tanner shrugs, looking away.

“Tan, you can call me or my cousins if you need anything, man,” Frankie tells him seriously. “Wren and Quinn are in Atlanta, so they’re not as far away as me and Shay, but…”

“Yeah,” Tanner says weakly, giving him a side look. “I’m more worried about y’all than I am about me, though,” and when Frankie raises his brows, his friend says, “Man, that thing knew your fuckin’ name. Once somethin’ like that knows your name and starts followin’ you, you can’t get rid of it that easily.”

—

Looking back, Frankie will wonder how he managed to go through the days back then without being in a constant state of anxiety and fear. Maybe it’s the grace that being fifteen (going on sixteen) and still not knowing much of anything at all in the world.

But somehow, Frankie manages to enjoy the rest of his vacation; there’s no more weird sightings or frightening moments. Even though he talks to Wren a little bit about everything, they both decide that it’s for the best if, for now, they don’t say anything to anyone — including Quinn and Shay. It’s killing Frankie to not say anything to Shay in particular; he likes talking to her and sharing things with her. But he knows that Shay doesn’t really understand this, not in the way that Frankie realizes he and Wren do.

(Not that Frankie is really enthusiastic about any of it. He still doesn’t know with a hundred percent certainty what’s real and what’s not real, only that he saw something that he can’t explain, and that he’s not too sad to be leaving Kitty Hawk.)

In a true, melodramatic fashion, what upsets Frankie isn’t what he experienced this time in Kitty Hawk. It’s not the (very minor) sunburn that he got on his shoulders, nor that school is only two weeks away, and he’ll be in his sophomore year. It’s not even the feeling that he has, even after landing back in New York, that there’s something just over his shoulder — fleeting, but still there.

It’s the fact that their flight gets back on a Sunday morning, he’s tired from waking up early, and his mother is picking him up at the airport.

Frankie didn’t want her to. Even though she has the right to — it being Sunday after all, and the start of her week — Frankie does not want to spend an hour in LaGuardia traffic with her. He doesn’t want to sit in the passenger seat as she finds something about him to nitpick. He doesn’t want to say goodbye to his father and Richie, knowing that they’re sending him away to be with the person who hurt Dad.

Dad told Frankie a dozen times to not let anything that happened on the trip impact the relationship with his mother. Frankie had to bite his tongue and restrain his hands, wanting to snap that Frankie is allowed to feel however the fuck he wants.

He says goodbye to his fathers and sisters; the twins hug him, waving goodbye and making him promise to call them later. Dad and Richie give him a long look, Dad reminding him that if he needs anything, to please call them whenever. Richie ruffles his hair and tells him to have a good week, but Frankie can see the concern on his stepfather’s face — Frankie knows that Dad and Richie aren’t going to drop anything. They’re probably going to try and force Frankie into therapy, to talk.

Shay smirks at him and gives him a light shove with her hand, but when he smiles back at her weakly, she frowns. “You okay, dude?”

“Yeah,” he murmurs, and then, seeing that Dad and Richie’s backs are turned, goes, “I just don’t want to…”

Shay touches his elbow; he knows that she cares about him. That for as much as Dad and Richie worry about him, that Shay’s begun to, too — and Frankie feels guilty all over again: Shay should be enjoying her vacation and having fun, being a normal almost-fifteen year-old. Not worrying about her moody, strange brother.

“See you online later?”

“Sure. If my warden lets me,” Frankie deadpans, rolling his eyes.

He gives Shay a hug goodbye before she can say anything else, and Frankie treks through the departure area and out into the parking garage. He sees his mother right away; Mom waves and double-checks for oncoming traffic before crossing over to meet him.

“Hi there,” Mom says, giving him a smile. “I missed you.”

Frankie nods.

Mom furrows her brows. “Is everything okay? What happened?”

“I had to wake up at three in the morning to get to the airport,” Frankie tells her, a little harsher than he knows it warrants; his mother just stares at him.

“Well, it’s great seeing you, too,” Mom retorts, shaking her head. “Okay. Nice to see you too, Frankie.”

Frankie tugs the strap of his carry-on higher up on his shoulder, walking side by side with his mother towards her car.

“Was your vacation nice, at least?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Yeah.”

Mom purses her lips. “Do you know how to say anything else other than ‘yeah’?”

Frankie turns to his mother and, in ASL, says: “I do.”

Mom narrows her eyes. “Really cute, Frankie.”

Frankie turns back in his seat to look out the window; he can feel his mother’s annoyance coming off of her in waves. He knows he’s being childish, and there’s a brief moment where Frankie thinks that maybe he’s being too harsh on her.

The moment dies when his mother goes, “If you and your father had a fight, don’t take it out on me.”

Frankie’s nostrils flare, and he reaches up to take his cochlear’s off. His mother absolutely hates when he does that, but he’s able to ignore her, looking out the window at the cars passing them by.

—

It takes Frankie awhile to get his old phone started back up.

When he lost it, he’d forgotten his iCloud password and didn’t have the latest software, and it’d fucked over his contacts and photos; he hasn’t had access to any of them for the past six months. His new phone is a newer model and has more storage, but Frankie watches the incoming notifications on his phone for a while, sitting back and playing a little bit of Subnautica while he waits for it to charge and update.

That night, days after Kitty Hawk, Frankie lays in his bed at his mother’s house and spends a bit looking through his old apps and contacts before finally going to his photo album. He’s happy to have his old photos back; he’s had this phone since he was in middle school, and Frankie does an autoscroll to the very first photos in his history, of all his friends in middle school, some of him and his father. There’s very early selfies of him and Richie, and it’s strange, really, to see his eleven year-old face and realize that so much has happened over the course of five years.

Frankie goes back to the bottom of his photo history to see the last photos he took. He sees snippets of the ones he took in Kitty Hawk in that vacation in January — he has a ton with Wren, Quinn, and Shay, and a lot of him and the Losers.

There’s a cluster of photos that are completely dark, nearly black; Frankie goes to select them and delete them, but, on a last second whim, decides to go through them just to see.

The first two are completely black; he remembers when he took these. Blue, Bill and Mike’s dog, had accidentally jumped into him when she and Roscoe had been barking in the backyard that night, and he pressed the volume button on the side of the phone.

But it’s the third one that, at first, seems like it’s going to be the same, until Frankie stares at it for a second too long and sees something.

He wouldn’t have noticed it at first, and he didn’t see anything at first glance, but now that he notices it, he can’t stop staring at it: it looks mostly like a deer, except — and Frankie realizes this with a cold, horrible shiver going down his spine — its eyes are facing forward, not on the side of its head.

Like a person's, he thinks, his heart hammering in his chest as he stares down at it.

The deer-thing in the photo is obscured, and it’s not just the forward facing eyes that are wrong with the picture: there’s a reason why that night, Frankie had seen two, little lights so high up and above the ground.

The deer-thing in the photo is standing upright on two legs. It’s skinny, it’s middle dark and gaping, but that’s what had been in the fucking woods behind their house last night. That’s what Roscoe and Blue had been snarl-barking at. That’s what had been standing there, yards from Frankie and his family members, waiting in the treeline for them.

I’ll see you soon.

Seconds later, Frankie feels his new phone buzz against his leg; he clicks his old phone off, refusing to look at that picture for a second longer, and sees a text from Wren.

Wrenley Urine

i hid this from my mom and my dad as soon as i found it but can you tell me that i’m fucking crazy

he just drew this and came into my room to show me it

Wren sends him a photo — god, no more fucking photos, please — of a drawing done in crayon; definitely by Caleb, who Wren and Quinn have said is quite the artist.

In it, Caleb drew a sunny hillside, with blocky flowers and a sun in the corner, and in the middle, is a tall, black figure with sharp antlers growing out of the top of its head. It has long arms with what looks like long talons for fingers, and in one hand, the figure is holding hands with what looks like Caleb — small, with blond spiral curls — and in the other, the figure is holding hands with a taller person that Frankie instantly recognizes as himself.