It was like Frank had vanished. I thought I saw him once, between the shelves of the fiction section in the drafty, dusty library, but it wound up being the guy who swings from the back of the garbage truck every Tuesday and Thursday on our street. I've seen him so often that the only things I recognize him by are his tattoos. When I was still in elementary school, my mom would make me run out to hand him a Christmas card, unsigned, with a twenty folded once inside it. He had the number nine tattooed on his wrist and we'd play a little game�I'd ask why there was a nine on his wrist and he'd look at it, confused.
"I don't see a nine," he'd say.
"It's right there!" I would shout, shaking with suppressed laughter.
He'd flip his wrist. "What if it's a six?"
I'd be laughing by that point. "Or a little-g! What if it�s a little-g?" I knew all of the lines.
The garbageman was one of those entities that I'd felt safe with since childhood, the kind of person that you think of when someone says, "Well, this is a safe town." I smiled at him with seventeen embarrassment at my own history and he smiled into the paperback in his hands.
I don't think I was looking for Frank, not a conscious search like how I started looking for my keys. I did want to thank him, maybe, for driving me home. In my head I picked him up from walking the long way to his house and we talked about�anything.
In the meantime, Gretchen and I crashed parties and grew into ourselves as seniors. It got easy to forget the embarrassment with blackberry brandy and the gin-and-tonics that we mistook for class. More and more often I found myself laughing on kyle�leaning against him or squashed on top of him with too many people in my too-small car, dependable Rob driving everyone home and eating pancakes with me in the diner until I was good to drive him home. We'd see jesse sometimes, watched as he started shaking us off like snakeskin. Soon we heard that he was in California for school.
None of us knew where Frank was going.
Molly, when we saw her at the movies, shrugged against her slouchy boyfriend. They both wore slouchy hats. "I dunno, we never really talked about college," she said. The boyfriend looked surprised.
"You're going to college?" he asked.