Franny B

FRANNY B

By Sarah Banning

A brown, canvas bag sat heavily on Franny’s shaking lap. Her entire body quaked with fear and happiness. She’d done it. And now, here she sat, in Paul’s hunting cabin, just across the Canadian border, $20,000 richer than when she woke up and ate an English muffin twelve hours ago.

In her five years as a Speedy 97 clerk, she’d never physically held this much money before. It felt like the flour sack baby she’d been forced to parent in high school. Once, a band’s touring manager gave her $1000 after the band had nearly bought out all the liquor. He’d paid mostly in $100 and $50 bills, so it wasn’t all that much. That manager had even let her keep the change, which she used to buy a bottle of Jack Daniels and some cheese puffs.

The Speedy 97’s money was routinely picked up for deposit by a Brinks armored truck twice a week at 3 p.m. Mr. and Mrs Hoffman, the owners, time-locked the safe to open 10 minutes prior to the truck arrival so only they had the privilege of counting and handling the money. It was odd that the Hoffman’s had not arrived this particular Sunday in advance of the Brinks pickup. They enjoyed triple counting their cash before handing it over for deposit.

The two men – actually, Franny would call them grown-up boys - didn’t think she’d do it. The tall, skinny one even said, “Bitch, you ain’t gonna, so get down on the floor.” She showed them. She showed all of them.

Frances Jean Baker - known to the 1,621 residents of Oroville, Washington, as Franny B - had been a cross-country running star at Oroville High School and was on her way to a scholarship at Washington State University. She was a quiet honor student and well put together (at least that’s what she’d heard boys say). She was invited to the parties her schoolmates threw when their parents were gone for the weekend. With 275 kids in the entire high school, no one was really left off those guest lists. Franny never talked about any of it. They spread their stories as if Franny was the greatest conquest in the adolescent world. In actuality, they didn’t conquer anything. Franny was willing. She was figuring out her body like everyone else. She just had the common decency to keep her mouth shut.

If a therapist analyzed Franny’s demise her senior year, they’d have chalked it up to losing her beloved parents in a fire when she was twelve. She’d been forced to live with her mom’s sister, Aunt Tracy, and her husband Paul, who made it clear to her every day that they hadn’t wanted any children. “Franny’s looking to fill a void. She’s craving the love and intimacy that was robbed from her at such a formidable time,” the therapist would’ve said. If anyone would’ve bothered to ask Franny B, she would have told them why, boredom. It was boredom that convinced her to get in the car with Chris McCreedy, who broke his promise not to tell anyone it was her first time. Boredom made her go with Peter Barker, who’d left her on a dirt road afterward, as she went pee behind a bush. Boredom made her trust Chrissy Mayfield, who said she’d never talk to anyone about their afternoon laying together in the back of her Uncle Paul’s Westfalia van.

Word got around. Her cross-country scholarship failed to materialize. The insurance money ran out. Tracy and Paul weren’t about to put her through college, and Franny had no personal savings. After graduation, Franny got a job at Frontier Foods. She was fired when the owners heard the rumor that she was the one who had come between their son, the quarterback of the Oroville Tigers, and Lacy Henkle, class valedictorian. Their son failed to mention he was the one calling Franny at all hours of the night. This experience, which wasn’t as pleasing to Franny as it was to the star quarterback, plagued her. No one wanted the girl that wrecked the town sweethearts on their payroll. Besides, they’d all heard about Franny B. The Hoffman’s took pity and hired her at the Speedy 97 on Highway 97. She agreed to work whatever shift they needed, which gave her an advantage over the other applicant.

It started innocently enough. In order to not hate her job, her life, her everything, she dreamed of how to leave it all behind. This daily dream pushed her through the monotony of an eight-hour shift at a convenient store frequented by people passing through on their way from Washington to Canada and vice versa or picking up beer and snacks for a day at Osoyoos Lake in the summer. She wrote down all her ideas in the small, black notebook she’d bought at a bookstore the only time she’d ever visited Vancouver. At first, they were pretty vague. She wrote about sneaking into the back of a beverage delivery truck, tucking behind the tall boxes of soda, and making it north an hour and a half to Kelowna, BC, where she’d blend into the lakeside resort town. She wrote about trying to spark a conversation with an interesting-looking person and hitching to Seattle, Spokane, anywhere.

It wasn’t until she heard the news of the gas station robbery in Okanogan that she focused her plan. One day, one beautiful sunny day, a man would forcefully push open the sticker-covered, hand-print smudged glass door of the Speedy 97 and point a gun in her face and demand all the money in the register and the safe. She would flip the situation, turn the gun on him, take the money for herself and flee north, across the border. It was the perfect escape plan. She loved the danger in it. The thrill of planning each and every detail kept her mind busy and her pulse detectable during her shifts. For five years, Franny played the situation over and over in her head, five days per week, eight hours a day. Her notebook carried every last detail of her escape plan. Sketches, lists, charts and notes filled the pages.

It was a Sunday in late August. The temperature was 75 when she clocked in at 8:00 a.m., relieving Allison, the overnight clerk. She drank a paper cup of awful, burnt-tasting coffee with cream while leafing through the entire Sunday New York Times. She reassembled it neatly before anyone came in to purchase it. She took delivery of two dozen donuts from town and placed them on a tray under a protective, hard-plastic covering. Few customers ever came through on Sunday mornings. Truckers, mostly. She tidied the shelves, restocked the beverage fridge, the cigarettes, then positioned herself behind the counter and glanced at her watch, 11 a.m.

Franny leafed through her notebook. It was like vitamins, a daily dose of nutrition for her brain. A reminder that she had created a way out. She stopped on the page with a sketch of her with short, reddish hair, a stark contrast to her long, light brown, straight hair. She glanced at her backpack and shook her head. She’d taken her daydream a step further by purchasing supplies and keeping them in the backpack she brought with her to work – scissors, a pocketknife, packets of instant soup, hair dye, protein powder, a sterilization pen, Dr. Bronner’s soap. A girl can dream.

At exactly 2:50 p.m. the door jingled. Two males wearing sunglasses walked in, looking around cautiously. One was tall, wearing a Mariners ball cap over scruffy, black hair. The other was shorter, with dark brown hair shaved to his head. They both had their hands in the pockets of their sweat jackets. Franny’s eyebrows furrowed in annoyance as they made their way towards her, heads swiveling.

“Listen up, bitch,” the tall one whispered loudly as he bent over the counter. “We have guns. We want all the money. We know the safe is open and Brinks comes in 10 minutes. Don’t do anything stupid and you’ll live.”

Franny’s mouth dropped open. Her stomach dropped to her feet. Her eyes lit up. Her mouth curled upward.

“Wipe that smile off your face or I’ll shoot it off,” the shorter one growled, pulling a gun out of his jacket pocket and pointing it at her sideways.

Franny’s hand quickly went for the emergency gun attached to the underside of the counter. She held it with both hands, pointing at the two of them. Evil, condescending laughs fell out of their mouths. The tall one shook his head and tossed a canvas bag across the counter.

“Bitch, you ain’t gonna, so just get down on the floor. Open the damn safe and clean it out.”

They were alone in the store, the three of them, as she did what she was told. How they knew about the time-locked safe, the Brinks arrival and the Hoffman’s absence was beyond her. She didn’t actually care. This was it. Crouched on floor, Franny looked at her backpack and without a second thought, stuffed the canvas bag full of money inside, grabbed the pepper spray from the front pocket, and hoisted the pack on her back. She shot up from the floor, dropped the gun and unleashed the spray on the two of them. As they doubled over in pain, she fled around the counter and out the front door, securing the bag clips across her chest. Running, she reached into the side pocket of her pack and grabbed a canvas ballcap and pulled it on, thankful her hair was already in a rubber band at the base of her neck. Around the back of the store, through the brush and tall pine trees. Running, pacing herself, breathing. Thorn bushes scraped at her bare legs. She jumped over downed logs, ducked under branches. The muscle memory was there. It was the six-minute mile she’d owned in high school. She crossed Loomis Road, careful not to look up. She saw the river and followed it north. Sweat trickled down her face.

After a mile, the river bent westward, signaling to Franny to keep pushing north. Just three miles until the Canadian border, then two miles to the cabin. She ran across scorched dirt before taking refuge in the pines that would protect her the rest of her journey. Her feet never stopped. Her pace never let up. Her mind went into autopilot. She came to the dry creek bed and grinned. It was exactly like the map she’d sketched in her notebook. She followed it for another two miles and in the distance, she saw the outline of the old cabin through the trees.

Franny pulled off her backpack and grabbed the key she’d made for the cabin and jammed it in the lock. Once inside, she fell to the floor and opened the backpack. With a shaking hand, she pulled out the canvas bag and dropped it in her lap. There must be $20,000 inside. It was enough. It was more than enough. She could be free. She could re-start. She had done it.

Breathe, she reminded herself. No time to pause. She pulled a temporary tattoo of a sun and a cloth from her pack. She moved to the sink and applied it to her outer left arm. Next, scissors sliced off 10 inches of hair, and cut the arms from her t-shirt. A box of red hair dye was messily applied. While she waited, she separated the money and stashed it in various pockets. Hair rinsed, fake glasses, baseball cap, tattoo, she was reborn. 8:30 p.m. She put her headlamp around her head and stepped outside. Franny froze at the distance crunch of tires on gravel and knew that it was Paul and Tracy or the police. No one ever came to this cabin. It didn’t matter. She had no fear. She knew exactly what to do next.