Fickle Reticence

The days pass by slowly, but they do still go by, and it gets to be Friday. What feels like centuries was actually just four days, but Frank tends to be a drama queen. He’d seen a lot more of Mikey’s brother, nearly every evening except for Wednesday where he mysteriously got sick according to Mikey. He seemed fine the next day, but Frank doesn’t question it.

He’s pretty sure that Gerard is a nice guy, though he’s very awkward, and secretive. Mikey’s just as secretive when the topic is centered around Gerard.

The thing is that Frank’s pretty sure he finds Gerard attractive. He’s not certain, because Frank only barely knows Gerard, but at least aesthetically, he likes Gerard. Frank decides not to mention it to Mikey though, because that’s weird. Mikey is his roommate, and best friend, so he’ll leave the topic alone for now.

On Friday morning, Frank almost falls asleep in class. Almost. He probably would have fallen asleep completely if his professor’s voice wasn’t driven by some sort of high-power helium. Seriously did the lady stuff a bunch of beans in her nose in her childhood and they got stuck?

Luckily though he only has two lectures on Fridays so Frank gets out of class a little before noon. The weather outside is brisk though, so he doesn’t want to walk all the way back to his dorm. The closest building is the library so he shrugs and makes his way to the building, but its freezing and he wishes he’d worn a coat, but he didn’t think that far ahead.

He checks his watch to see what time it is, and groans because part of him wants to go get himself some food, but the rest of him is lazy and broke. Actually most of him is lazy and broke. He frowns, but decides he’ll just wait. Or maybe he’ll hit up a vending machine, but there are none in the library building. They really keep up appearances in this place, because the librarians actually do scold people for talking too loud like they do in old cartoons. They also kick you out if you bring food in, which doesn’t seem exactly fair. A lot of people like to eat while they’re studying.

He might duck out a little later if his hunger gets unbearable, or he might just go back to his dorm. He’s not positive what Mikey’s schedule looks like, but he shouldn’t be back until sometime after two, which gives Frank three hours. The library is still quiet though, so Frank walks along the bookshelves trying to stall the time until he has to get started on his work. Three more chapters of The Iliad need translating, and he’d better get started on it sooner rather than later. He would rather throw his textbook in a well though. He doesn’t have that much other work though because he’d gotten it done as it was assigned this week. Frank is learning! He is very proud of himself. He doesn’t really have much to compare this triumph to though, so honestly, getting his work done in advance is a hell of an accomplishment for Frank.

Frank walks over to his usual table in the corner, and sees someone else bent over a book. He doesn’t pay them any mind, but grabs a chair and collapses into it, before remembering he forgot to ask if he could.

“Shit, do you mind if I sit here?” Frank asks, already grabbing his laptop from his computer.

The person looks up, and Frank vaguely sees their head pop up out of the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t pay much attention. The person makes a squeaking noise and then looks back down at their book, so Frank looks up wondering whether that was an affirmative or negative answer.

It’s a girl, he can tell that much from her clothes, but she’s pulled her black hair to cover her face, and she’s leaning over her book at such an angle that Frank can’t see any of her features. He’s pretty sure it’s the same girl that had stared at him at this exact table a little while ago. He can’t remember how long ago that was, but it had struck him as weird, so he remembers the encounter. For the life of him though, Frank can’t remember what that girl had looked like. He remembers hazel eyes, and he’s pretty sure she’d had black hair, but he could be totally flubbing the details.

She brings a hand up to her face, obscuring Frank’s view of her even more, and he just decides that she said yes. His feet are tired and they aren’t keen about carrying him to a different table so he makes the choice that her squeal was an assent that he can indeed sit here.

Frank turns his computer on, and then finds himself staring at the bright screen for what feels like forever. All he can do is just look at his keyboard and try to form the courage to actually press something. His hands experiment against the track pad mindlessly, and his eyes follow the cursor around the desktop like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. Frank’s running on like four hours of sleep though, so watching the cursor move around is actually entertaining him quite a bit.

He groans, snapping out of his reverie when his brain gives him a newsflash that he’s been staring blankly at the screen for almost ten minutes now without doing anything. He tenses up at the thought of writing or reading anything, but he grabs his copy of The Iliad which he may or may not have thrown at a few walls. The book is still in fair condition, though the corners are frayed from being flicked and stuffed into bags. He would rather do anything then read the damn thing, but he just sighs, and pulls it to the page where he left off. He’d rather stop on that page and never read the rest of it, but that is out of the question. Every moment of every day, Frank has regretted taking Greek.

Luckily for Frank he’s nearly completed the book, but his eyelids are still rooting against him, as they keep drifting off the page. Every now and then Frank writes a few notes on the computer to keep his thoughts in track, but his reading rate is slowing down by the second. He only makes it through three pages before he’s already too bored to function.

Frank looks up to see that the girl in front of him as eased her posture, and he evaluates her a little more closely.

Her face is perfect, far too perfect for it to be natural, so she’s probably wearing makeup. Frank’s not against makeup, because it doesn’t really concern him. If a girl wants to wear makeup, that’s her choice and he has no place to say anything of it. He assumes that whosoever it is wearing the makeup wears it to make themselves feel better about the way they look, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good for yourself or anyone else. The purpose in most cases is to make a person look better, and he’d be lying if he said that makeup doesn’t make people look better. Everyone looks better with it, and that’s kind of the point. That doesn’t mean a person looks bad without makeup, because they do, but still, the point is to feel comfortable with the way you look. Objectively, Frank couldn’t give a shit how much of a person’s face comes from a bottle, as long as that person is happy with it.

The thing about this girl’s makeup is that it doesn’t conceal her face from recognition, and Frank definitely recognizes her, though he thinks his mind is playing a trick on him. She’s looking down so she doesn’t notice Frank gawking, but he can’t help it, because there is something exceedingly familiar about that face.

It’s probably the lack of sleep talking but she looks just like...

“Gerard?” Frank asks, bewildered. The girl looks just like Mikey’s brother though.

The girl looks up at him, shocked, and she does look familiar, but he’s not quite sure if he’s right about where. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at Frank with wide eyes for a long moment. They hold each other’s gaze for what feels like hours. Hazel meets brown, and there’s nothing else, but their tacit staring contest at all in this moment.

All of a sudden, in a flash, she bolts up and grabs her jacket. Then she’s running. Her skirt billows behind her, catching its own breeze from how fast she speeds away.

Frank sits back in his chair trying to figure out what he just saw. The girl vanishes behind a bookshelf a few seconds after she gets up, and it doesn’t make any sense. She just inexplicably ran away from Frank.

Was that Gerard? That wasn’t Gerard. It looked like Gerard. Maybe that was just a girl who happened to look like a female version of Gerard. If she was just a girl who looked like Gerard though, wouldn’t she have been confused by Frank calling her by that name? If that was just another random girl isn’t it unlikely that she’d have had that reaction? It was just mistaken identity if that’s the case, so running away is pretty bizarre.

So what if that was Gerard then? Why would Gerard have been dressed as a chick? Why did she, or he, or they, or whatever, run away from Frank instead of acknowledging him? Frank’s sleep deprived brain can’t come up with a clear answer no matter how hard he tries to think about it.

“What the hell just happened?” he whispers to himself.

Frank’s decided that that girl either knows Gerard, or was Gerard. How could that be Gerard though?

Maybe Gerard has a twin sister? No, that makes no sense, why wouldn’t Mikey have told Frank that he had two siblings? Unless one of them was in Witness Security, but he highly doubts that. Why on earth would witsec put one of their charges in the same exact place as their family? It wouldn’t make sense, so Frank banishes that theory.

Maybe Gerard is just a cross-dresser and Frank scared him. Maybe Gerard is transgender or something. Why did he run away then? Or they. Or she. Now Frank doesn’t know what word to use.

That person looked like Gerard though, and Frank thinks it’s far more likely that she was Gerard over just looking like him. He’s heard of doppelgangers, but in the case of that girl, it would be more like cloning. No one can look that much like Gerard. Frank highly doubts that he’s stumbled across a real live version of Orphan Black, so that has to have been Gerard.

Why did they run away then! It’s pissing Frank off because he can’t seem to come to a conclusion.

The thought crosses his mind that Gerard was embarrassed about it though, and he hopes that’s not the case, because he had thought that Gerard was becoming a friend of his. Frank’s never thought of himself as distrustful, but maybe he really did scare them.

That could be the secret then that the Way’s are keeping from him, and if that’s the case, then maybe that’s why Gerard makes intermittent disappearances, like on Wednesday.

Whatever the case, Frank really needs to talk to Gerard about it. Or Mikey, though he’d prefer it was Gerard, because he’s downright perplexed.

Why did she run away though? Frank’s almost offended, but he’ll suspend judgment until he has a discussion with Gerard about it. Frank is way too tired for this shit, but now his brain just won’t shut up.

Was that really Gerard Way?