time for bed. It was a warm night, but Mae felt a familiar chill as she walked out the front door and let it shut behind her. There was a shitload of ghosts in here, and most of them weren’t even dead.
AMANDA
Amanda woke up to the sound of Frankie in her closet.
Her head was pounding. She’d slept poorly, which was typical, and her last memories were of a dream with Frank in it, dark hair freshly trimmed and wearing the khaki pants and button-down he wore to teach, frying chicken at Mimi’s and telling her to go back to Frannie’s, never once turning so that she could just see his face. What she wanted was Pickle, whose heavily panting presence was the lullaby that kept her sleeping. But Pickle was gone, and Amanda still wasn’t used to it.
Yesterday had not ended well, and everything she’d gone to sleep trying not to think about was still there today. Mae showing up in Merinac after Amanda had convinced herself that she wouldn’t, and then sending that text, summoning Amanda to the royal presence. Where the hell had Mae been that she’d been spying on Amanda without Amanda seeing her? What business was it of hers? Sabrina, who had been so nice but still left Amanda feeling a little like everyone felt sorry for her, and then the stupid impromptu haircut, which had attracted far too much attention last night at Frannie’s. Her kids and Nancy all said it looked good, but they were probably just trying to be nice. She put a hand to her hair, which felt shorn on the sides, and pulled angrily at the springy curls that at least remained on top. How fast could this grow back? She’d have to find a baseball cap. There was probably one in the closet. With Frankie.
“What do you want in there? At least let me find it for you.” Frankie in her tiny walk-in closet was a shortcut to catastrophe; she had no respect for Amanda’s system, with the handful of things she actually wore in the front on the right, winter clothes jammed into the front left, and the piles of things she needed to sort and maybe give away pushed up carefully under the older hanging stuff in back.
“I’m not looking for me,” Frankie said, and turned to dump an armful of hangers and unfolded items onto Amanda’s bed. Amanda winced. System destroyed, plus now all of this would be on the floor next to her bed for the next month or more.
“We have to figure out what you’re wearing today.” Frankie riffled through her choices. “This does not look good on you anymore; you need to either get a waist or get rid of it. This isn’t bad, but the pattern will look awful on a screen. This”—she threw a three-quarter-sleeve T-shirt with a crisscrossed neck in a bright blue at her mother—“this is pretty good. It’s a good color for you. Do you have any clean jeans that are decent?” She pulled out a pair from her pile. “There is really no way you can still wear these. Why don’t you go through here and get rid of the stuff you don’t want?”
Honestly, she sounded like Mae, and it had never been more horrifying. “I like those jeans,” Amanda protested.
“They make you look like you’re wearing a sack on each leg.” Frankie walked around to the side of Amanda’s bed and looked down at the pile of clothes on the floor. “Wear the ones you had on yesterday; they’re not awful. With sandals.”
“I’m not wearing sandals to work! And I can’t wear any of that, anyway. I’m wearing the Frannie’s shirt, and so are you.”
“You can wear this for the first part,” Frankie said. “Make it look like you’ve just come to work from the rest of your great life. And if there’s a part where you talk to the camera, you can ask to change. The Frannie’s shirt makes you look like you’ve been sick for a week. Your hair is awesome, at least. You can’t mess that up.”
Frankie disappeared in the direction of breakfast and the school bus, where she would no doubt bask in the reflected glory of the first day’s Food Wars filming, whereas Amanda, who had not very much enjoyed being told that she was shapeless and pale, got up slowly, avoiding the mirror on the closet door, which told her that Frankie was right. At least Frankie was being nice about