Title: Double Blind
Author: Lisek16 (lisek16@yahoo.com)
Summary: Francie isn’t blind, she has noticed.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: If you think Alias is mine you need to get your head checked.
Archive: Just let me Know.
(Francie POV)
Sophomore year I met her. Short brown hair, on the shy side and fascinated by the written word. We met in Marketing class. It was a prerequisite for her Economics course load, and it was the only business class that didn’t infer with my soap opera schedule. I think I was also enticed because some hottie I met at a party a few weeks prior was supposed to be in the class as well. So I enrolled and justified the class to my parents as helping me acquire skills in order to run my own business someday.
It was a decent class, a little boring but that had something to do with the hot guy having a girlfriend. So I was left in a class of unfamiliar faces and of course I couldn’t drop the class because then my parent’s would have given me the “Francie, quitters don’t win and winners don’t quit” speech. I hated that speech, so I decided to stick it out.
During the second or third class I learned that our professor was a really nasty you-know-what. He picked on several of the students and it just didn’t seem right. Before class one day one of the girls dropped her books after tripping over someone’s backpack. The professor laughed and the girl looked up with her doe eyes and stoic face and began to pick up her books. I walked over and helped her. When I handed her one of the text books she looked at me and muttered “thank you.” I smiled at her and introduced myself, “I’m Francie Calfo.” She looked like she wasn’t sure what to do or say so I continued, “It’s nice to meet you, but it would be even nicer if I knew your name.” She smiled because I had broken the ice. “I’m Sydney. Sydney Bristow. Nice to meet you too…” she extended her hand and the books almost fell again.
“I should really get a backpack for all of these.” She said. “How many do you got there?” I asked her, glancing at some of the books, several which I was sure weren’t even in English.
“Too many.” She answered.
We both laughed, and since then we’ve been friends.
We’d chat about movies, and classes and the future. She was working her way up the corporate ladder to be a banker at one of the larger banks downtown, Credit Dauphine. I was planning on opening a trendy restaurant. Back then it never seemed suspicious. I never questioned her job or her obsession learning every language offered by UCLA. It never seemed strange or unusual. I never thought much of it. Even when we both elected to take a Statistics course and she was constantly being paged by that bank of hers. “What could be so important that Mr. Sloane is paging you out of class?” I asked her once. “Bank Stuff. Clients. It’s always something” she grumbled.
Even after we graduated, and became roommates for a year, until she met Danny and I met Charlie, it never once seemed off. She worked at a bank and went on a few business trips, she always brought back those little complementary shampoos and soaps and I never questioned it.
Then Danny and She were engaged, she was the happiest I had ever seen her. But then he was killed, in his bathtub none the less and Sydney was crushed. She took a leave of absence at work and sorted some stuff out. She moved into my house but she wasn’t the Sydney I remembered in College. We may have grown apart but she looked so much more mature. I guess loosing Danny really brought her back to reality. I hated to see her in so much pain but there was nothing I could do. But then one day out of the blue she came home with red hair and a swollen jaw and said “it’s nothing”. She locked the bathroom door and came out with brown tresses. I asked her where she had been, she had just disappeared for three days, no note on the fridge, no message on the machine, and she hadn’t even taken her cell phone; She just told me to let it be and I didn’t ask her anything more. I just let her go to work, to school (she was working towards her masters in English, she wanted to be an English professor like her mother had been) and on her business trips. I cleaned up and cooked meals because she was hardly home. It was hard seeing her grow so distant. I used to remind her that she could quit at any time. Even our friend Will told her she should. She shouldn’t be jet setting around the world on business when she could be partying or hanging out with her friends. She just didn’t listen and it began to dawn on me.
It’s like when you’re seven and you find out Santa Claus was never real. It’s like learning everything you once swore was true was really a farce. It’s like that when you learn your best friend is hiding secrets. Sydney Bristow was a lie. She was a meander from the truth. Sydney Bristow might not even be her real name. I’ve seen the Kate Jones tickets from foreign countries. I never knew she had a passport and yet she had visited places I couldn’t even pronounce.
I began to doubt that she was really a banker at Credit Dauphine. I doubted those pages were from the bank. I didn’t even believe she was the same girl I befriended in College. I think that lying has become second nature for her. She lies about it all. Where she was, how she got a bruise even why she was late.
I have two eyes. I have two ears. I have all 5 senses intact and I have a sixth sense as well. I can’t see dead people but I can see through lies. I can listen to something, anything and know if someone is bluffing. I can know if anyone is bluffing; anyone but Sydney. There isn’t a poker face I have encountered that I couldn’t read, except hers. Maybe If I was less observant or disinterested than I wouldn’t see the constant faults in Sydney’s explanations.
***
A few nights ago I heard her crying. I heard her weeping into her pillow trying not to make a sound but failing miserably. So I just barged into her room; no knock or slow creek of the door. I was checking in on her like a mother does for a small child; I just came in. I sat on her bed and asked “Syd, What’s wrong?” I asked the question pretending she was asleep. I guess I wasn’t really looking for an answer; I just wanted her to know I was here. “What’s wrong Sydney?” I tried again, it was almost as if by asking the question I’d be enlightened with another answer, but there was no enlightenment from a supreme being with a better answer than the one I had previously concocted.
She was probably hoping I wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t really sleeping. I knew she didn’t want to lie to my face again and come up with some lie about talking in her sleep. It was muffled tears and gasps into her well worn pillow. That was the truth.
This was the fifth night this month she had spent a night at home, and it was almost the end of the month. I continued to sit on her bed; I looked at her helplessly because even she knew there was nothing I could do to save her. I stood up abruptly and took a place next to the window and glanced out at the vacant street. There’s a car parked across the street. There are two men inside. I think to myself. I glanced back over to her, pretending that I am satisfied that she’s deep in slumber and leave. I think, whenever you’re home I look out the window and there is always someone outside, it’s like they are watching us. I know they are; I know why too.
G-d. I can’t believe she thought she could hide it. At first I didn’t see it, I refused to, but the bank trips, the bruises, the secrecy, it doesn’t take Nancy Drew to be able to read between the lines…She’s a spy. Her bank trips, her meetings they are covert missions and I bet she has no idea that I know the truth…
I’ve followed her. Last year when I thought Charlie was cheating on me she helped me spy on him… It clicked. She knew how to track a car, and knew just how long to wait so no one would notice. So I knew I had to follow her. To the warehouse… to the airport. She never saw me. She never knew. She told Will Though. We were best friends long before she met Will and she confided in him rather than me.
I mean Charlie and I followed her to Las Vegas. I saw the Silver heels under her black trench coat. Who wears a trench coat in Las Vegas other than hookers and other than hotel employees who wears Silver stilettos? Other than prostitutes. That’s what I thought a first. I thought she was a call girl. The pager goes off, and so does she…
In many ways she is a call girl, several times a week when Syd is home we get wrong numbers directed to Joey’s Pizza. Bizarrely enough I checked the phone book. There is no Joey’s pizza; it’s not even unlisted. I had a friend of mine who works at the phone company check. There has never been a Joey’s pizza. The phone calls come from an undisclosed phone line located within the LA CIA building downtown. Why would the CIA be placing wrong numbers to our house? Even though this was long after I figured out that my best friend was a secret agent girl it confirmed it, because I doubted the CIA was trying to order pizza from a nonexistent pizza parlor.
***
I called her on it. She was walking out the door on her way to the airport to go to “Cincinnati.”, but I was sure she was going to Bangladesh or Oslo. She was going somewhere where English wasn’t the native language and dollars weren’t the currency. She was just lying to my face again.
“I’ll call you when I get in.” she said as she was packing her carry-on into the trunk of her car. And she gave me a hug before she prepared to leave. “I’ll miss you.” She said, and as she pulled away I whispered, “Do you think I’m stupid?” She pulled away and looked at me like I had 3 eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I know.” I hissed.
“What exactly do you know…” and then she stopped herself, “Not here.” She said. “Come with me for a ride.”
I had nothing left to lose so I climbed in. She opened lipstick and placed it in the cup holder. Neither of us said anything about it. “What are you talking about?” she asked me gaining some composure. “I know what’s going on Sydney.” She looked fear stricken and I knew I couldn’t tell her. “What do you… how could you…”
“You don’t really want to go to Cincinnati when you have your dissertation due in a month. They are really overworking you at work. You should ask Mr. Sloane for a break.” She looked relieved. “You caught, I don’t want to go, and your right I have a lot of work, but I will miss you. I should have known you knew I was dreading this trip. I’ll miss my plane if I don’t leave now.” I noticed we hadn’t gone for a drive. Her hands had been firmly planted on ten and two but the car wasn’t running. I said my goodbye, and went back inside.
I don’t know how I could have approached that in a more inappropriate fashion. She had told Will during his disappearing act which he attributed to his addiction to Heroin. How was he gone almost a week due to Heroin. I knew he wasn’t a drug addict; it had to be something else. But I couldn’t probe it with a 10 foot stick because I knew it would only complicate things. I can handle being lied to, but I can’t handle being blind.
I remembered from Statistics that a double blind experiment is an experiment in which neither subject nor people who have contact with them know which treatment the subject receives. That was the technical definition but I always thought of it as the perfect phrase to explain my relationship with Syd. I turn a blind eye to her suspicious lifestyle, and she turns a blind eye to my suspicions. A double blind relationship seemed fitting for the girl who has a trunk load of identities and even more excuses. But she was my friend and I’d take spending time with her anyway I could, even if I it had to be double blind.
-The end-
Author: Lisek16 (lisek16@yahoo.com)
Summary: Francie isn’t blind, she has noticed.
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: If you think Alias is mine you need to get your head checked.
Archive: Just let me Know.
(Francie POV)
Sophomore year I met her. Short brown hair, on the shy side and fascinated by the written word. We met in Marketing class. It was a prerequisite for her Economics course load, and it was the only business class that didn’t infer with my soap opera schedule. I think I was also enticed because some hottie I met at a party a few weeks prior was supposed to be in the class as well. So I enrolled and justified the class to my parents as helping me acquire skills in order to run my own business someday.
It was a decent class, a little boring but that had something to do with the hot guy having a girlfriend. So I was left in a class of unfamiliar faces and of course I couldn’t drop the class because then my parent’s would have given me the “Francie, quitters don’t win and winners don’t quit” speech. I hated that speech, so I decided to stick it out.
During the second or third class I learned that our professor was a really nasty you-know-what. He picked on several of the students and it just didn’t seem right. Before class one day one of the girls dropped her books after tripping over someone’s backpack. The professor laughed and the girl looked up with her doe eyes and stoic face and began to pick up her books. I walked over and helped her. When I handed her one of the text books she looked at me and muttered “thank you.” I smiled at her and introduced myself, “I’m Francie Calfo.” She looked like she wasn’t sure what to do or say so I continued, “It’s nice to meet you, but it would be even nicer if I knew your name.” She smiled because I had broken the ice. “I’m Sydney. Sydney Bristow. Nice to meet you too…” she extended her hand and the books almost fell again.
“I should really get a backpack for all of these.” She said. “How many do you got there?” I asked her, glancing at some of the books, several which I was sure weren’t even in English.
“Too many.” She answered.
We both laughed, and since then we’ve been friends.
We’d chat about movies, and classes and the future. She was working her way up the corporate ladder to be a banker at one of the larger banks downtown, Credit Dauphine. I was planning on opening a trendy restaurant. Back then it never seemed suspicious. I never questioned her job or her obsession learning every language offered by UCLA. It never seemed strange or unusual. I never thought much of it. Even when we both elected to take a Statistics course and she was constantly being paged by that bank of hers. “What could be so important that Mr. Sloane is paging you out of class?” I asked her once. “Bank Stuff. Clients. It’s always something” she grumbled.
Even after we graduated, and became roommates for a year, until she met Danny and I met Charlie, it never once seemed off. She worked at a bank and went on a few business trips, she always brought back those little complementary shampoos and soaps and I never questioned it.
Then Danny and She were engaged, she was the happiest I had ever seen her. But then he was killed, in his bathtub none the less and Sydney was crushed. She took a leave of absence at work and sorted some stuff out. She moved into my house but she wasn’t the Sydney I remembered in College. We may have grown apart but she looked so much more mature. I guess loosing Danny really brought her back to reality. I hated to see her in so much pain but there was nothing I could do. But then one day out of the blue she came home with red hair and a swollen jaw and said “it’s nothing”. She locked the bathroom door and came out with brown tresses. I asked her where she had been, she had just disappeared for three days, no note on the fridge, no message on the machine, and she hadn’t even taken her cell phone; She just told me to let it be and I didn’t ask her anything more. I just let her go to work, to school (she was working towards her masters in English, she wanted to be an English professor like her mother had been) and on her business trips. I cleaned up and cooked meals because she was hardly home. It was hard seeing her grow so distant. I used to remind her that she could quit at any time. Even our friend Will told her she should. She shouldn’t be jet setting around the world on business when she could be partying or hanging out with her friends. She just didn’t listen and it began to dawn on me.
It’s like when you’re seven and you find out Santa Claus was never real. It’s like learning everything you once swore was true was really a farce. It’s like that when you learn your best friend is hiding secrets. Sydney Bristow was a lie. She was a meander from the truth. Sydney Bristow might not even be her real name. I’ve seen the Kate Jones tickets from foreign countries. I never knew she had a passport and yet she had visited places I couldn’t even pronounce.
I began to doubt that she was really a banker at Credit Dauphine. I doubted those pages were from the bank. I didn’t even believe she was the same girl I befriended in College. I think that lying has become second nature for her. She lies about it all. Where she was, how she got a bruise even why she was late.
I have two eyes. I have two ears. I have all 5 senses intact and I have a sixth sense as well. I can’t see dead people but I can see through lies. I can listen to something, anything and know if someone is bluffing. I can know if anyone is bluffing; anyone but Sydney. There isn’t a poker face I have encountered that I couldn’t read, except hers. Maybe If I was less observant or disinterested than I wouldn’t see the constant faults in Sydney’s explanations.
***
A few nights ago I heard her crying. I heard her weeping into her pillow trying not to make a sound but failing miserably. So I just barged into her room; no knock or slow creek of the door. I was checking in on her like a mother does for a small child; I just came in. I sat on her bed and asked “Syd, What’s wrong?” I asked the question pretending she was asleep. I guess I wasn’t really looking for an answer; I just wanted her to know I was here. “What’s wrong Sydney?” I tried again, it was almost as if by asking the question I’d be enlightened with another answer, but there was no enlightenment from a supreme being with a better answer than the one I had previously concocted.
She was probably hoping I wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t really sleeping. I knew she didn’t want to lie to my face again and come up with some lie about talking in her sleep. It was muffled tears and gasps into her well worn pillow. That was the truth.
This was the fifth night this month she had spent a night at home, and it was almost the end of the month. I continued to sit on her bed; I looked at her helplessly because even she knew there was nothing I could do to save her. I stood up abruptly and took a place next to the window and glanced out at the vacant street. There’s a car parked across the street. There are two men inside. I think to myself. I glanced back over to her, pretending that I am satisfied that she’s deep in slumber and leave. I think, whenever you’re home I look out the window and there is always someone outside, it’s like they are watching us. I know they are; I know why too.
G-d. I can’t believe she thought she could hide it. At first I didn’t see it, I refused to, but the bank trips, the bruises, the secrecy, it doesn’t take Nancy Drew to be able to read between the lines…She’s a spy. Her bank trips, her meetings they are covert missions and I bet she has no idea that I know the truth…
I’ve followed her. Last year when I thought Charlie was cheating on me she helped me spy on him… It clicked. She knew how to track a car, and knew just how long to wait so no one would notice. So I knew I had to follow her. To the warehouse… to the airport. She never saw me. She never knew. She told Will Though. We were best friends long before she met Will and she confided in him rather than me.
I mean Charlie and I followed her to Las Vegas. I saw the Silver heels under her black trench coat. Who wears a trench coat in Las Vegas other than hookers and other than hotel employees who wears Silver stilettos? Other than prostitutes. That’s what I thought a first. I thought she was a call girl. The pager goes off, and so does she…
In many ways she is a call girl, several times a week when Syd is home we get wrong numbers directed to Joey’s Pizza. Bizarrely enough I checked the phone book. There is no Joey’s pizza; it’s not even unlisted. I had a friend of mine who works at the phone company check. There has never been a Joey’s pizza. The phone calls come from an undisclosed phone line located within the LA CIA building downtown. Why would the CIA be placing wrong numbers to our house? Even though this was long after I figured out that my best friend was a secret agent girl it confirmed it, because I doubted the CIA was trying to order pizza from a nonexistent pizza parlor.
***
I called her on it. She was walking out the door on her way to the airport to go to “Cincinnati.”, but I was sure she was going to Bangladesh or Oslo. She was going somewhere where English wasn’t the native language and dollars weren’t the currency. She was just lying to my face again.
“I’ll call you when I get in.” she said as she was packing her carry-on into the trunk of her car. And she gave me a hug before she prepared to leave. “I’ll miss you.” She said, and as she pulled away I whispered, “Do you think I’m stupid?” She pulled away and looked at me like I had 3 eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I know.” I hissed.
“What exactly do you know…” and then she stopped herself, “Not here.” She said. “Come with me for a ride.”
I had nothing left to lose so I climbed in. She opened lipstick and placed it in the cup holder. Neither of us said anything about it. “What are you talking about?” she asked me gaining some composure. “I know what’s going on Sydney.” She looked fear stricken and I knew I couldn’t tell her. “What do you… how could you…”
“You don’t really want to go to Cincinnati when you have your dissertation due in a month. They are really overworking you at work. You should ask Mr. Sloane for a break.” She looked relieved. “You caught, I don’t want to go, and your right I have a lot of work, but I will miss you. I should have known you knew I was dreading this trip. I’ll miss my plane if I don’t leave now.” I noticed we hadn’t gone for a drive. Her hands had been firmly planted on ten and two but the car wasn’t running. I said my goodbye, and went back inside.
I don’t know how I could have approached that in a more inappropriate fashion. She had told Will during his disappearing act which he attributed to his addiction to Heroin. How was he gone almost a week due to Heroin. I knew he wasn’t a drug addict; it had to be something else. But I couldn’t probe it with a 10 foot stick because I knew it would only complicate things. I can handle being lied to, but I can’t handle being blind.
I remembered from Statistics that a double blind experiment is an experiment in which neither subject nor people who have contact with them know which treatment the subject receives. That was the technical definition but I always thought of it as the perfect phrase to explain my relationship with Syd. I turn a blind eye to her suspicious lifestyle, and she turns a blind eye to my suspicions. A double blind relationship seemed fitting for the girl who has a trunk load of identities and even more excuses. But she was my friend and I’d take spending time with her anyway I could, even if I it had to be double blind.
-The end-
