Ruby Unscripted by Cindy Martinusen Coloma Page A

compliments. Some of the regulars know my name, which makes me try harder to remember theirs. I look for Natasha, but she doesn’t come in today. When someone orders the pumpkin bread, I think of Frankie. What color am I? Who asks questions like that? He’s one of the most unusual people I’ve ever met—and I love him for that.
    ME: I think I'm purple.
    I write to Frankie when I get home, once again so tired that it’s hard to walk up the stairs to my room. I have homework and I’m hungry, but I know I need to talk to Kate before I sleep.
    ME TO KATE: Can you talk?
    KATE: So you don't like Nick now?
    ME: Yeah. I do.
    Something’s up with Kate, though her words make me realize that I haven’t so much as asked about Nick in two days. And I never called him like I said I would. There was something Kate was going to tell me about him, and I never even asked.
    ME TO KATE: It's not easy fitting in here and keeping up with the old.
    FRANKIE: Purple huh? Like Prince or Barney the dinosaur.
    ME TO FRANKIE: Purple like me.
    FRANKIE: Hmmm. You know purple is sometimes considered the gay color.
    ME: Well, not that purple either.
    FRANKIE: Is there something wrong with gay purple?
    ME: Uh, I didn't mean anything by that.
    FRANKIE: LOL Kidding. So what are you up to, Purple? You're going to have to explain that by the way.
    ME: Unpacking my room, starting homework, and talking to friends online.
    FRANKIE: Busy busy.
    I take a drink of Diet Pepsi and accidentally push a book and school papers that fall behind the desk. It takes wedging my feet against the wall and pulling to budge the heavy desk from the wall. As I pick up the papers, I notice that a board on the back of the desk is loose, with an edge of something sticking out of the bottom of the board. I carefully pull out an old photograph. It shows a woman sitting on a stone fence with the sea in the background.
    I write to Frankie and forward to Kate:
    ME: I just found a really old photograph behind my aunt's desk.
    KATE: Cool. So you aren't going to say anything about what I said?
    ME: What did you say?
    RE-SENT FROM KATE: So we're the old? All of us in Cottonwood are the old and it's too hard keeping up with us?
    ME: Oh! I didn't mean that. Knock it off. You know I didn't mean it that way.
    FRANKIE: An old photograph in your aunt's desk? Maybe auntie has a dirty little secret.
    ME TO FRANKIE: It's an old photograph, like at least fifty years. And don't talk about my aunt that way.
    FRANKIE: Oh, a mystery for Nancy Drew. Hey, you could be Nancy Drew, that's a good title for you.
    ME TO KATE & FRANKIE: On the back it says To my beloved Beatrice. This one photograph I release from my collection to you. Thank you for coming to the shoot that day by the sea. May the future hold such wonder as our days in France. Yours always, E
    KATE: Cool.
    That’s about all the interest those two have in the photograph. As if they are the same person. I smile to myself as I consider that.
    Kate and Frankie have to go at the same time. I’m distracted over the picture, staring at the woman’s face—she’s quite beautiful in that old-fashioned way—and wondering who she is.
    I realize after she says good-bye just how strange Kate has been acting during our conversations. She must be mad at me, and I’ll need to address that soon. Though usually she’ll outright tell me she’s angry. Quick and unexplained good-byes aren’t like her.
    I try to focus on my WWI workbook questions while only occasionally talking to one friend or another. Mostly it’s the same catching up on the same details of Cottonwood: someone was in a fight and it’s the big scandal, Randy is going to enter a snowboarding competition, Alisha’s boyfriend is cheating on her but she doesn’t believe it, Nikki picked out a yellow dress and Nick refuses to get a yellow tie for prom (and he still wants to talk to me, but I’ve been avoiding that