Francine & Earl

Do

Francine didn't talk to Earl for two more weeks.

There were the occasional rushed hellos and absent looks that were meant for strangers, and the few sentence chats about the weather that should not even be defined as a conversation. She had come to the conclusion that he wasn't ready to give up his newly found acceptance, and as much as it pained her, there was nothing she could do about it. All she could do was watch from a distance as the mask he put on to fit in slowly became another layer of his skin, a permanent smirk curved into a mouth that once only smiled.

She would enter the school building in the morning, teasing Jonathon while scanning the students for a tiny boy that stole the very little focus she had. She thought of the different excuses she could use to speak to him, because showing up at his house was out of the question and it seemed as though they were closer to being acquaintances than friends these days. Then, at the moment she would give up, she would hear the loud chants of the football team. Earl would be there, almost unrecognizable, his newly built ego making up the height difference he had with the other players. Francine was almost jealous at how the team accepted him so quickly; she went through months of not being taken seriously until she was semi-involved in player politics, and even then, she wasn't invited to the parties Earl had already become accustomed to in this short period of time.

Scratch that, she was definitely jealous.

Jonathon would notice that her attention was elsewhere, and narrow his eyes at the the boy that began it all in the midst of the team. He saw how Earl's absence affected Francine, and she would try to clear the stressed expression from her face and worry in her eyes, eyes that were bloodshot and surrounded by the bruised skin that came from sleep deprivation. She pretended that she was fine, giving him her fake, closed mouth smiles while blaming it all on stress for college when they both knew that it wasn't applications plaguing her at night.

She never wanted to talk about the fact that her mother still hadn't come back home, or that her father would stay at work all day only to stumble into the house later with the smell of cigarette smoke and stale beer clinging to his wrinkled white button up. She didn't want to tell him how she couldn't close her eyes because the guilt of helping Earl believe he wasn't good enough and breaking her family apart single-handedly was suffocating, of how she was drowning in her thoughts while her father was drowning in his tears across the hall. 

Her father would then wake up with the rings under his eyes darker than hers, only to attempt to joke about it and make her happy for a fleeting moment while he was dying inside because the woman he loved was searching for reasons to hate him and their child. He wouldn't bring up the tearful pep-talks he would have with himself to call his wife, only to reach her voicemail or the woman that made sure to break him down completely by bringing up how he would turn into his abusive and abrasive father before hanging up abruptly. Yet, he still put a broken smile on his face and hoped his daughter wouldn't see the cracks. Francine would try to ignore it, ignore the way he was fading away in front of her eyes because he used his heart more than his brain, and give him an equally fragmented smile right back.

It was the same shattered grin she was giving her best-friend at that moment, casually brushing off his probing questions to see if she was okay, because she didn't know that he had the adhesive to make it whole again.

* * *

Francine was sitting in the library when Mae made her entrance. After quitting the dance team last week, she was still surprised that Mae stuck around. Earl sure hadn't.

Okay, that was sort of mean.

Francine didn't want to start blaming him when she had a hand in this whole plan as well. She believed that she needed to please others until she finally figured out what she was doing to herself, and Earl needed to come to that same conclusion himself.