Then, as I hit puberty, a growing presence of aches and stiffness creeped into my life. For my seventeenth birthday, I got another diagnosis: rheumatoid arthritis. Over the span of one summer, I went from a daily runner and highly active person to someone whose knees and hips were so stiff, I couldn’t get out of bed. A teenager whose hands couldn’t open water bottles or use can openers.
And that’s when I became a problem, not a person. Perhaps if it had just been autism or arthritis, I’d have been allowed to be an independent, empowered young woman. But with my mother’s fear and anxiety after my dad’s death, she easily tipped into oppressive, infantilizing hovering. Frankie was fragile, broken, and weak. It was suffocating.
No noisy places, Frankie doesn’t like them.
Not that ball game, those seats are too hard for her to walk to.
Frankie can’t be left alone. Who knows what would happen?
I was an impediment to fun activities and locations, a source of worry and exhaustion, a burden. Wet blanket. Party pooper. Eeyore.
Until I moved away. My family got to have fun again. And I got a shot at proving to myself I was capable of living on my own, strong and safe and independent.
And I have proven myself, and then some. Even so, I can admit there are days my life is hard. Autism is a lifelong reality that you’ll never quite catch the cues, follow the timing, see the world like a lot of people do. And sometimes that has isolating, frustrating, depressing reverberations.
And then there’s rheumatoid arthritis, a bitch of an autoimmune disease for which there’s no cure, only damage control. The sooner you slow chronic inflammation created by the body attacking itself, the better. Because I was quickly diagnosed, medication largely spared my joints permanent damage. But even with good medication and care, flare-ups happen.
Each time, each flare, my left hip hurts the worst, a favorite hub for my immune system’s overenthusiasm. Three years ago, I developed enough chronic pain and weakness in the joint that a cane was necessary. My family fretted—shocker—that it was a sign of my frailty, being twenty-three and needing a cane.
But I embraced it. Perhaps because of my autistic brain and its analytical practicality, I didn’t have feelings about the cane. I simply saw its functional advantage. It helped. I was steadier with it. My leg didn’t give out. I didn’t fall on my face. What the hell was bad about that?
Didn’t hurt that I found a cane that made me feel like a badass Hogwarts witch, either. Do you know how much mileage you can get out of owning an ersatz wand and a stunning memory of charms and hexes? A lot, that’s your answer.
No, life isn’t always easy or pain-free, but I have a few friends who know and love the real me, and I’ve found comfort and stability with the Elder Wand. I also go to counseling, do physical therapy, ride my stationary bike, practice yoga, swim. I take my meds and find my discomfort and challenges survivable most of the time.
In short, I have my life managed for the most part. And when it feels less managed, when my immune system and autistic brain sabotage me, I have my trump card: cannabis, which provides a much-needed break from chronic pain and anxiety.
That’s right. Sometimes, to cope with this wild ride that is my life, I get high. Sometimes, my guy Carter at the medical marijuana dispensary convinces me to try this new “perfect strain,” and after I smoke up, I fly so high, I’m in the stratosphere, and that’s when I know it’s time for Frankie to go to bed. But first she must order Chinese. After sticking a pizza in the oven.
I’m so hungry. I just polished off the pizza and have moved on to inhaling gummies while I wait for my moo shoo pork, egg rolls, and wonton soup, when the doorbell rings. Pretty fast turnaround for the Chinese, but I’m not complaining. Slowly, I shuffle over to answer it.
Struggling with the bolt, I eventually manage to unlock the door. After I throw it open, I extend a hand to receive my Chinese feast when I realize who I’m seeing.
I knew I shouldn’t have had that last hit on the doobie. I’m imagining things.
A mirage of Ren Bergman stands on my stoop, smiling as always, with a blazer thrown over his arm and a small paper-wrapped package in his hands. Tousled, half-wet hair. A sky-blue long-sleeved shirt that makes his eyes pop. Worn jeans and a pair of beat-up Nikes. Goddamn, the man can wear clothes.
His gaze quickly travels my body as a tomato-red blush stains his cheeks.
Ah, yes. There’s reality, punching me in the face: Attention, Frankie, you’re in only a pair of boy short undies emblazoned with the Deathly Hallows, barely covered by an oversized Kings hoodie.
I tug down the sweatshirt, wishing it was long enough to reach the tops of my neon green compression socks, which stop just above my kneecaps. I wear them because they give my joints a sensory-friendly, pain-relieving squeeze.
My cheeks burn as heat more intense than any flare roars from my toes to the crown of my head. Just staring at Phantom Ren stirs a heavy ache low in my belly.
As I take stock of my raging-to-life libido and the less sexually appealing aspects of my outfit—which would be all of them—I begin to have a crisis of sorts. I am aroused by the sight of Ren Bergman. Again. First in the locker room, then at Louie’s, then in the training room today. And now, here, at my front door. I’ve always thought him striking—because duh, he is—but I just tried to ignore it. And now, it seems I can’t anymore. I saw an enticing side of him when he threw down with Matt, and now I can’t unsee it. I can’t stop thinking about it, honestly.
He’s not real. That’s what I need to focus on. The real Ren has no reason to be here, looking like sex on a cinnamon stick. Meaning it won’t hurt anything if I allow myself to ogle this figment of my high-as-a-kite imagination.
I stare at him, falling headlong into those wintry irises. I stare. And stare. And stare.
But like all fantasies, my indulgence in it has to end. Taking a deep breath, I slam the door on the mirage. Otherwise, I might get imaginatively carried away and invite Fictitious Ren in, then fantasize about undressing him with a ferocious need to know if the carpet matches the gorgeous ginger curtains.
And that, I simply can’t afford to do.
I’m not sure how long the door’s been closed. How long I’ve been panting for air, my back against its smooth surface as I wait for my body to cool off from my hallucinations. I am never smoking that weed again, seeing as it’s clearly laced with something else. Carter at the dispensary has some answering to do.
But then Ren’s voice dashes all hope that this is a drug-induced fantasy. “Frankie?”
I yelp, jumping away from the door as nimbly as I can.
“Y-yes?” I peer through the peephole.
Mary Mother of Jesus Riding on a Donkey, that hair. In moonlight, it’s the precise color of a faded copper penny.
I must have been a real asshole in a past life, because karma seems bent on punishing me this round. Namely, my inability to moderate myself with those prohibitively expensive root beer gummies that I can only buy from extortionist third-party sellers, and being a total freak for the ginger man-candy of this world, who are of course the most statistically rare of male species.
In retribution for whatever I did as some remorseless cat in a former life, cosmic forces placed the United States’ finest redhead specimen in my sphere and made him entirely off-limits. He’s a team member. I’m staff. Ren and I are forbidden. Verboten. Impossibile. Interdit. Not. Allowed. I can’t be attracted to a player on the team. I can’t even think about being attracted to him.