Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by Caroline Zancan

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Zancan, Caroline.

  Local girls : a novel / Caroline Zancan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-18421-3

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Coming of age—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3626.A6293L63 2015 2014042225

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Mom, Dad, Sara, Wally, Emma, and Ben.

  When I count my blessings, I always count you twice.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Acknowledgments

  Let us all be from somewhere.

  Let us tell each other everything we can.

  —BOB HICOK, “A Primer”

  All of them had restlessness in common.

  —JOHN STEINBECK, East of Eden

  The last summer we were teenagers was as hot as every other summer in Florida, but we spent it in the Shamrock, probably the only bar in the state without air-conditioning. It was the summer Nina got a ticket for public urination and Lindsey lost her virginity, although she wouldn’t admit it until later. She had always told us that she lost it at seventeen to someone named Chad—no last name—a friend of one of her brothers, which should have tipped us off. Her brothers would have murdered anyone who came near her, never mind that there was no one any of us knew that the other two didn’t. I got my own apartment that summer—the first one of us to do it—but when we weren’t drinking or working, we hung out at Nina’s mom’s house like always.

  “Blistering Love” was the number-one song on iTunes, and the only song we all liked. We sang it in Nina’s car at the top of our lungs like maniacs—windows down, driving too fast, the city neon before us. Nina told us to put the third line of the first verse on her tombstone.

  Despite all the singing, and the trips to the city, and the small freedom my apartment afforded us the few times we were all there, we were miserable that entire summer, and furious at one another, though we didn’t know it at the time. If someone had pointed it out to us, we wouldn’t have been able to say why.

  That summer was the summer we met Sam Decker on the last night of his life, a fact so strange we barely believe it ourselves, so we don’t expect anyone else to, either.

  There’s a picture proving that we met him, though. It’s still hanging in the Shamrock, or was the last time any of us checked—we haven’t been back much, which is another thing we wouldn’t have believed, had you told us back then. Sam Decker surrounded by three girls with faces still baby-fat round, smiles bigger than our disbelief at what was happening in that moment, skin shiny from humidity, the oppressive magnitude of which you could imagine only if you’ve been to Florida between the months of May and September. There is no sign indicating the date, so there would be no way for you to calculate what happened a few hours later. And you probably wouldn’t be likely to guess, because in the picture, Sam Decker looks happy.

  But then, so do we.

  One

  These are the things we knew about Sam Decker: Tacos were his favorite food. He had a collie-poodle mix named Rickie. He was a Sagittarius, and the first thing he noticed about a woman was her laugh. We knew that Flight Opus was his best movie but that Sender Unknown was the one he looked most handsome in, and that he fell in love with Abby Madison when they were filming Dancing on Thursdays. We knew he was the co-owner of cocktail bars in Manhattan and London, which made it even more surprising that he would come to a dive like the Shamrock, or even that he would be in Orlando at all. Lindsey was the first one to spot him across the room, and though none of us had any idea what he might be doing there, we intended to find out.

  We took copies of the magazines that had taught us these things everywhere we went that summer. We read them at one another’s houses, on car rides to and from the city, at swimming pools and beaches and barbecues. We exchanged facts we had uncovered about perfect strangers the way most people exchanged pleasantries. We delivered them as greetings, mid-sentence, and halfway through conversations about totally unrelated subjects, as one of us sat idly flipping through a worn, dog-eared copy of Blush or Kiss, half listening to the others. We managed never to pay for them, taking them instead from doctors’ offices and the gym where Nina worked. We picked up the copies tourists left on the beach like they were seashells.

  While the tourists would’ve had to turn these magazines aside halfway through them to close their eyes from the Florida light our own eyes had grown used to long ago, we could continue to worry and wonder and bask in the things we most wanted to know, even as the sun did its work: the cut and color of the dress Joni Parsons wore for her dinner out with which Hollywood director, and the name of Corey Jones’s fourth-grade teacher, who he had recently thanked in an acceptance speech for an award that no one had heard of but that everyone got dressed up for—the pictures flew around the Internet, and bloomed from the pages of both Rumor and Kiss, even though they tried never to cover the same events. We cared less about how we would fill the empty nights that followed vast but indistinct days at the beach than we did the brand of toilet paper February Mathis was seen carrying out of the Whole Foods in Beverly Hills.

  Until the night we met Sam Decker, it had been too hot for even the beach, even for us, because it was August in central Florida. August came to Florida every year, but it felt like the end of the world every time if only because of how empty the streets and sidewalks became—everyone stayed inside. It got so bad that you started to blame the heat on other things—the palm trees and the beach and the sunsets and the sand—because heat that unpleasant had to be blamed on something. It surely wasn’t benign. And for all its unpleasantness, it went unseen, measured instead by the size of people’s pit stains and just how far out of their mouths the tongues of panting dogs hung.

  There was always a day, usually during the second or third week of the month, when the heat broke. It was an unofficial holiday in the state. On the morning of the night we met Sam Decker no one would have braved the sand too hot to stand on without flip-flops, or the lukewarm water that offered no relief from the invisible palm the air held over your nose and mouth. But it dropped five degrees between noon and three, and we followed the temperature like it was the Super Bowl score in the fourth quarter. By the time we hit the outskirts of Orlando that night, it felt like something had been released, like someone had changed the radio from a somber symphony to a rock song, and change of any sort felt promising to us back then, because we were young, a
nd lived almost a full hour from even Orlando.

  That we could enjoy the coral-orange colors of the sunset without indicting them for their association with the sun was the first sign that it was going to be a good night. The second was that, after parking our car in the overnight garage and walking up and down the same drag we walked up and down every Saturday night, we had seen Lindsey’s secret boyfriend’s actual girlfriend, Carine, walk into the Shamrock. If she had been a color she would definitely have been a pastel, which was only the first of several reasons we hated her. Her equally horrible friends—reasons two and three—were with her. We had promised we were going to try a new bar that night, but it was late August, which meant Carine and Paisley and Polka Dot, whose real names we could not be bothered to learn, would be returning to out-of-state colleges in only a few weeks, and tormenting them was pretty much our favorite thing to do that summer. So we went to the Shamrock as always.

  Carine and the patterns were Golden Creek girls, but wouldn’t be for long. The whole point of attending the sort of colleges they were on summer vacation from was to move away from home for one sort of important career or another—in fields so competitive that you had to go wherever the work took you, which usually happened to be somewhere you wouldn’t mind moving. Though we knew the distinction of having been from Golden Creek would never fully leave them—it would keep their postures straight, and it would always be one of the first things they told people upon meeting them. We knew they’d be precise—it would always be Golden Creek, never just Florida or outside Orlando.

  Golden Creek was the home of the largest collection of saltwater pearls anywhere in the country, and a liberal-arts college that was just as expensive as the ones they had left home to attend. It was a land of golf courses and manicured greenery. It had Florida’s vacation climate, but the houses there would’ve been extraordinary anywhere, with touches of character—a widow’s walk on one, a two-story bay window in another—that seemed missing from the identical units in the condo parks and gated vacation-home communities Florida is known for. These houses weren’t designed to look like tropical getaways, they were sturdy, stately, and dignified structures that sat among majestic courthouses and schools instead of seafood restaurants and T-shirt shops. Golden Creek had cobblestone streets and more nonfunctioning lighthouses and designer stores than any other stretch in Florida. It was the kind of place presidents came to visit. Four American presidents had been to Golden Creek and publicly fawned over its beauty, including Obama.

  I suppose they had their own reasons for hating us. Golden Creek was closer to Orlando than our neighborhood and a series of nameless towns just like it, and people like us regularly passed through Golden Creek to get to the city. It was more scenic than the highway, and faster. We weren’t always sober and we didn’t always follow the speed limit, and the people of Golden Creek were the sort who had the time and money to do something about this. In the last two years, extra speed patrols had been added at the Golden Creek community’s urging, resulting in a speeding ticket apiece for me and Lindsey, and a whopping three for Nina.

  That night, our plan of attack on Carine and the patterns quickly turned into a plan of descent on Decker when Lindsey, literally stunned into openmouthed silence, gestured at him with her giant head.

  The Shamrock smelled like the inside of a beer bottle, or like a beer had spilled just a second ago, an illusion the always-sticky tables complemented. It smelled like hops and yeast and, because we were in Florida, salty, water-heavy air. It was that smell more than anything that made me doubt, before he turned to face us head-on, that it was really him. That made me think it was a trick of the light, or even wishful thinking. That the resemblance was uncanny, but not exact, and that standing twenty feet away was only a handsome but otherwise average man, a banker or even a bartender, who had been pulling girls out of his league for years. They couldn’t put their finger on it, but something about him just made them feel like they already knew him. The real Sam Decker couldn’t possibly be in a bar the smell of which promised such a cheap, soggy Saturday night.

  “Holy. Shit,” Nina said, apparently not sharing any of my doubts. “We’re definitely getting shitty with him tonight.”

  He turned then, and looked at us for just an instant, an empty, dazed half-smile on his face that we basked in until he turned back to the bar a quarter of a millisecond later.

  There was no mistaking that smile, even at half-mast.

  “Holy shit,” I said, not able to think of anything to say other than what Nina already had. “It’s really him.”

  Nina turned to look at me with her Um, YEAH, if we’re gonna pull this off you’re gonna need to get your shit together look.

  “I’m just going to be a human and tell him that I like his movies,” I said, edging one butt length closer to the end of the booth. I was bluffing, mostly on account of the look she had given me. I had no intention of being the first one to talk to him.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Maggie,” said Nina. “Once you establish yourself as a fan you’ve declared yourself on a different level. Like, a level below him. He’ll ask you if you want an autograph and move on to people who drool with their mouths closed.”

  “Okay,” said Lindsey. “So why don’t you practice whatever opening line you’re going to stun him with on us.”

  Lindsey was constantly backing me up against Nina. Not because she liked me more, but because Nina never needed any help.

  “That’s just it,” Nina said. “I’m not going to use a line. I’m going to ask him what he’s drinking.”

  “What, like you don’t know who he is and he just happens to be somebody standing there when you want a drink recommendation?” I asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Um, because you want him to think you’re from Mars? Or, like, homeschooled?” Lindsey asked. “Everybody knows who he is.”

  Ironically, Carine was the one to save Nina, by picking that moment to walk across the bar to our table—Paisley and Polka Dot behind her—saving us the trouble of having to do something like send her a glass of milk with our compliments later.

  “This is strange,” Carine said. “Fred said he was going to be in Sanibel this weekend. I assumed he was with you.”

  She had the pouty, unhappy droop of the blonde girls in tampon commercials before they discover Tampax’s otherworldly leak protection. Period Barbie, we called them.

  “Whoah, Whoah, Whoah,” said Nina merrily. “Carine, are you wearing a romper? Is that one giant piece of neon-green fun? Is there even a pee hole in that thing? And do you think you should be drinking in an outfit that’s gonna make it that hard to break the seal? You gotta get outta here, man. It’s just not safe in that outfit.”

  “I know, Nina, it’s crazy, isn’t it, that they sell pieces of clothing for more than twenty dollars?”

  “What’s crazy, Courtney,” said Nina, emphasis on the far-less-exotic name Carine had been born with, a fact Nina had done considerable sleuthing to uncover, “is that you date a man under the age of forty named Fred.”

  “You know,” Carine said, turning back to Lindsey. “You’d probably be less inclined to do trashy things like sleep with other people’s boyfriends if you didn’t hang out with such trashy people.”

  She tilted her high side ponytail in Nina’s direction.

  “Oh, wow,” Nina said, showing no signs of ruffle, her voice all innocence and light. “I didn’t realize the Brownies had started giving out patches for being a total cunt to strangers in bars. You’ll be good at that one.”

  “Stay out of it, Scarfio,” said Paisley, or maybe Polka Dot—we could never remember who was which.

  “I’d love to,” Nina said, nodding at her like she was a small child. “But your camel toe is precluding my enjoyment of this adult beverage.”

  Carine tried to knock Nina’s drink off the table and into her lap, but she was not a gi
rl versed in bar fights, and was too slow. Nina caught the glass mid-tilt with a lone extended index finger. She let it balance there for a minute, maintaining eye contact with Carine the whole time, before she picked it up and finished the drink without taking a breath.

  “Anything else?”

  They blew back over to their table in one triangle of evil, and before we even had time to do a Fuck-you shot, Sam Decker was at our table.

  “Dude, what the fuck?” he said. “That was some ice-queen shit. I didn’t know people actually behaved like that outside of, I don’t know, Carrie.”

  “I just happen to not believe in wasting alcohol,” said Nina coolly. “Is that from War Addict?” she asked, nodding at his bomber jacket.

  He looked down to check what he was wearing, a move none of his characters ever would’ve pulled. They had an answer ready for everything.

  “Oh. No. It was my grandfather’s.”

  It hadn’t occurred to us until then that Sam Decker had a grandfather.

  “But who cares about that? Seriously, what just happened? Did you guys even know each other? Is that, like, normal for this part of town?”

  “Sit down,” Nina said.

  None of us so much as shifted the angle at which our legs hung from the booth during the one second he hesitated, looking at the door and then back at us.

  “Why not?” he finally said. “I love a good story.”

  • • •

  We were burnouts in a burnout town. It took half the length of a Sam Decker movie to get to Orlando from where we lived, and even the city was a four-year-old’s dream, not a nineteen-year-old’s. The high school that we had gone to was not the type whose graduates went on to Ivy Leagues, or first- or second- or even third-tier liberal-arts colleges. There was a community college in town where some of our classmates floundered and delayed having to look for jobs that paid by the hour, and the valedictorians usually made it to Florida State or the University of, but that was about it. By not bothering with these consolation prizes, we felt like we were making a point, though I’m not sure we could’ve told you what it was.