Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  We were the only ones who ever heard her play.

  Nina’s imagination was a beast the likes of which only she could’ve created, even if she just showed you the tip of it. She told stories better than anyone else I knew. And not just recaps of the absurd things she actually did. She used to make up wild stories to captivate the school psychologist when our high school principal threatened to expel her if she didn’t go, after she was caught miming fellatio to the baseball team with the erasers she was supposed to be cleaning as punishment for talking back to the school’s least popular teacher. Mrs. Horvath had stopped her in the hall and asked to see her hall pass and when Nina said she forgot where she put it, Mrs. Horvath asked her where in the world it could’ve gone during the short walk from Nina’s seventh-period math class to the stretch of hallway Mrs. Horvath’s classroom was on. Nina told her it might very well be caught somewhere between Mrs. Horvath’s second and third chins. She never had any trouble coming up with a line like that, when the rest of us would’ve just surrendered with an apology. And while the totally over-the-top sagas she created for her therapy sessions were amusing to her and to us, on whom she tested each story she had planned for the next appointment, she claimed she was doing it for the school psychologist—an eager, unimaginative woman just out of grad school who had moved away from her family and friends in order to fix our problems, whose eyes just went so deep when Nina painted her mountains of pain. She gave that psychologist a purpose, and made sure she never knew that Nina had been making the focuses of their sessions up, even when Nina stopped having to go see her. She wasn’t making a fool of her, Nina swore, but fulfilling all the expectations that had drawn her to the job. People who felt fulfilled by their jobs were probably better at them, she said, which meant she was doing it for all the screwed-up kids who came after her, who would probably need a good therapist. One who had heard it all.

  Someone might have noticed this cleverness, and the ease with which she told complicated, gripping stories, and helped her do something with it other than make us laugh, if Nina ever bothered to attend an English class. But she skipped as many of those as she did all of her other classes.

  I was their audience, a generous one, the witness to their lives. Whenever one of them came alive with fury at the mistreatment they perceived from one party or another, I showed them a kinder, more generous version of what might have happened. I reinterpreted their lives in a way they could stand. I was patient with them when they lost patience with each other, and tried to distract them from the flaws they couldn’t change. They said that I was gifted at doing this because I had come from a stable home where the curtains matched the rugs and I wasn’t allowed to eat Fruit Roll-Ups for dinner, but I think I did it because one of us had to.

  We loved one another purely, without the complications teenage girls so often bring to everything. But I wouldn’t be telling it right if I didn’t also tell you that it felt, by that night, that a sense of uneasy anticipation filled any room the three of us were in. It felt like someone had just farted in a very formal setting, and there was no pretending that it hadn’t happened, but nobody wanted to be the one to acknowledge it and move things along. Nina hadn’t even taken that much pleasure out of calling Carine a cunt, which normally would’ve had the power to turn a Wednesday afternoon into a Saturday night. It felt like we were running out of things to say, and in the silences we let settle, resentment had time to mount. At the fact that we had all reconfirmed for each other that our collective aimlessness was a good idea. That none of us would have been bold enough to forgo any investment in our future without the other two, and that we wouldn’t be sitting where we were, in seats becoming worse by the minute—obstructed view, with no padding, and at the back of the house—if it weren’t for the others. We were starting to panic, and when we looked around for something to pin our regret on, all we found was one another. Sam Decker being at the Shamrock was a miracle, our miracle, and my first thought when I saw him was that he might be miracle enough to give us back to each other.

  • • •

  So, man, this is like a real bar, huh?” Decker said.

  He tapped his fingers on the table as he looked around. We would measure the number of drinks he had across the night by the pace of those manic taps. Like the rest of him, they mellowed with every round. They had no rhythm or beat, which made their sound feel frantic, more caged animal than I have this tune in my head. He looked expectant, like he was waiting for someone who was supposed to meet him there, even though he had already told us he was alone.

  “As opposed to what?” Nina asked.

  “I mean, these are people who come in here just to drink.”

  “Um, yeah, it’s a bar,” Lindsey said. “Were you hoping to have your taxes done or something? There’s an accountant’s office next door, but they don’t sell booze. They probably wouldn’t mind if you brought your own, though.”

  “Didn’t that guy go to jail for fraud?” Nina asked.

  “Probably,” Lindsey said. “I guess you’ll have to stay here,” she said to Decker.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Decker. “I just meant it’s not somewhere you come to see or be seen or meet up with people. Like those old guys over there.” He nodded at Bob and Jax, two of the most dependable regulars. “They look like they’ve been here awhile.”

  “Yeah, probably,” I said. “I’ve never been here when they weren’t.”

  “And they’d keep on drinking even if they were the only ones here,” he said.

  “I’m pretty sure they think they are,” I said.

  “And this music,” Decker said.

  Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” was playing. The oldies were pretty much the elevator music of Florida, not least because the stereotypes about the number of old people here are true. While Nina, Lindsey, and I normally preferred the Katy Perry/Lady Gaga fare that most girls our age did, we had grown used to the oldies that Sal made his patrons listen to, and maybe even liked them a little by the night we met Sam Decker. Sal told us it was good for us to get to know these older musicians—they told whole stories in three minutes, while our generation tried only to shock, he said. But we knew that at least part of the reason for the limited selection was that he didn’t have the time or desire to listen to any of the new music he claimed to hate so much, and would never let any foreign influences find their way into the Shamrock.

  “You could live a 1950s childhood in this bar. It’s like a time capsule.”

  “I mean, if that’s your thing . . .” said Lindsey.

  “That’s awesome. I love that. It reminds me of this bar I used to go to in Anchorage,” he said. “The décor was pretty much the same, too.”

  None of us made any indication that we had known he was from Anchorage, even though this, too, was in our catalog of facts. We couldn’t figure out what he meant by décor—the kitsch and posters and random collection of garage-sale rubbage that covered the walls of so many bars like this one had been outlawed along with pop music. There was wood, and there were beer taps, bottles of liquor, and glasses to put them in, and that was pretty much it. In that way, Decker was right. It really was just a bar.

  “There just seem to be so many fewer assholes here than in your average bar,” he said.

  “Eh, I think you’d be surprised,” said Lindsey. “Assholes look different in different places.”

  “Yeah, and what constitutes an asshole?” I asked.

  “People who see bad movies.”

  “I’m so sorry not all movies are as good as yours,” said Nina, warming up for her A-grade flirting.

  “Oh, no, I was counting my movies in that category. Well, most of them.”

  We had not seen this coming. Self-deprecation was not a trait we associated with Sam Decker. He was one of the few actors of his generation whose career wasn’t built at least partly on irony.

  “I bet half the pe
ople in here have never heard of me,” he said. “And I love them for it.”

  • • •

  Our favorite section of our favorite celebrity magazine that year was “10 Things You Don’t Know About Me.” It was exactly what it sounds like: Each week a different celebrity listed ten facts about him- or herself, ranging in gravity from their favorite TV show or their favorite nail-polish color to their ethnicity, or the person they were named after, or how old their Sicilian grandmother lived to be. You might read that someone’s splurge food was truffled macaroni and cheese right after you discovered that they raised money for and participated in the AIDS Walk every year because they had an Uncle Tony who died from the disease. We loved the pictures of stars in action, going about their daily lives, unaware of the trailing camera, that ran before and after these lists, but it was the lists that gave the photos their power. As intimate as those pictures were, there was a distance to them, too. The subjects rarely looked right at the camera, and there was a danger of feeling like you were spying on them, no matter how little you pretended to care. But with these lists, our most beloved stars—the ones most worth watching even when they didn’t know we were—were inviting us in. You could argue that Chelsea Pauly might not have worn so short a skirt if she had known there were going to be photographers outside her brunch, or that Bobby Lobo might’ve held the door for the old woman walking into Barneys after him—that they never meant to subject us to such bad behavior—but with the lists there was a sort of willing participation that gave credibility to everything around them. It felt as close as we would ever get to these people we loved.

  We spent a fair amount of the time we spent drinking in the Shamrock lauding what some celebrities chose to divulge about themselves in this section of the magazine, and lambasting others. What people chose to reveal about themselves changed how much we liked them, and the degree to which a celebrity came off as profound and thoughtful or shallow and douchy didn’t necessarily correspond with the impressiveness of his or her career. It was a risk, we learned over weeks of reading the column, to show your hand like that. It was like going on a first date with all of America at once, only you got to the restaurant first, so they had a chance to study you from afar before approaching the table, and even bail if they needed to.

  Sometimes there was a particularly disastrous week of “10 Things,” or one that inspired us to give a flailing career a second chance, or to try at least one episode of a show that had never captured our imagination because the second lead proved he was quirkier and less predictable than we ever would’ve guessed. Then it became clear to us again how important it was to be able to present yourself neatly and colorfully to the world. To spin the facts of your life. Those weeks, we debated the ten most noteworthy or surprising things about each of us, and how we’d word them in the magazine. We never discussed how or why we might become famous—why anyone might care that Lindsey had broken seven bones or that Nina had pet hermit crabs as a kid—but we took discussions of the list as seriously as if we had an actual plan, or at least a talent, to reach a point in our non-careers at which people would demand access to this trivia. The night Sam Decker walked into the Shamrock, my list might have gone something like this:

  I was eight weeks pregnant by Jay, my boyfriend of four years, who I loved, but was no longer in love with.

  My favorite drink was called a fire engine, which was just a Shirley Temple with vodka in it. It never occurred to me that the fact that I still liked grenadine might be an indication that I was too young to be drinking.

  I had assumed since junior year, when I tried to break up with Jay and he started crying and then said “no” just once, that I would have his babies, but now, not even showing yet, this baby felt like an actual person, and it felt far crueler to let another person waste away in a town with one bar for every ten churches than it ever would have been to tell Jay that I was sorry but he would find somebody better if he would stop crying long enough to try.

  My rent was due in nine days, and I had less than half the amount I needed, and my next paycheck was eleven days away.

  I knew that Jay would be a good father—he was a good, kind person who was both reliable and hardworking, and was unbothered by the limits to his charisma and intelligence. I knew he would do all the right things, like whisper to my stomach—I couldn’t stand to call it a belly even then, which is maybe the first sign I wasn’t ready for motherhood—and hold my hair back when my morning sickness got a jump start in the middle of the night. But also that all those things and others would be wasted on me, and that our child would grow up having no conception of love except for one she formed from movies like those Sam Decker was in.

  I had never seen snow, and when asked to think about my ideal vacation spot—a popular topic for the “10 Things You Don’t Know About Me” column—names of places never came to mind, but I always pictured a big open field covered in an untouched layer of snow.

  I had started looking online to see if at that point in a pregnancy a baby had fingers and toes yet, and when it would start to grow eyelashes or be able to feel pain. If it was the size of a walnut or a fist or a piece of fruit, and I had Planned Parenthood’s price list memorized, but also the numbers in my bank account.

  I used to live two blocks away from a girl named Becca Voigt, who I played with when I was in a fight with Nina or Lindsey, or when they were grounded or on vacation. When we were in the tenth grade she got knocked up, and a few days after the news broke, she was sent to live with her grandma in Idaho before she had a chance to say good-bye to any of us. Her grandma had come to visit once when we were nine, and we had spent a full week after she left talking about how bad she smelled. Becca told me that one time, when her grandmother was napping on the couch—she was always napping on the couch—she was so still that Becca thought she was dead, and it was only when she started sucking on her dentures that Becca realized this wasn’t the case. She imitated what that sounded like and, accurate or not, thinking about it still makes me shiver and then brush my teeth. Even all these years later, her having to go and live with a person who had horrified her to such a degree still felt like punishment for going past third base. Even if it was meant to protect her.

  Lindsey and Nina had proven to be my most reliable and creative allies in outsmarting the conundrums I’d found my way into since the second grade, when the peanut butter I had put on the earpiece of our telephone after watching the movie Little Monsters broke my own grandmother’s hearing aid, but I hadn’t even tried to tell them yet.

  I had not stopped drinking—had, in fact, started drinking more—in the weeks after marking my menstrual cycle on a calendar with cats posing in different Halloween costumes each month, confirming for certain that I was either going through menopause at the age of nineteen or pregnant. I knew from those late-night online searches how bad that was for whatever project my body had started against my will, and also that this decision seemed to imply that another one had been made.

  Two

  We were finally starting to feel comfortable with Sam Decker—our hearts had returned to a semi-normal, sustainable pace, and we stopped having to sit on our hands to keep them from shaking, and we had a millisecond or two to think about the things we were saying instead of just blurting them out, relieved every time that what we said sounded casual and conversational even to us—when Lila Tucker walked into the bar and we all froze. Lindsey and I immediately looked over at Nina, causing Sam to do the same. When Nina didn’t say anything, he looked back at the table where Lila had joined Carine and Paisley and Polka Dot and greeted them with a round of kisses, and then back at us with a smirk. We had enough reasons to hate Lila without this reminder that Carine and the patterns never would’ve been on our radar if it wasn’t for her. They would have blended in with all the other little blonde girls Golden Creek was known for growing, the way the rest of Florida was known for growing oranges. They hadn’t come after us
until Lindsey and Fred met at the dance club in the stretch of Orlando where all the under-21s hung out at the start of the summer, but we had been wary of them since Lila had taken up with them years ago.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right,” Decker said, turning back to the table. “I believe I was promised a story.”

  “Well, that’s simple,” said Nina. “Lindsey over here is fucking the frigid one with the lazy eye’s boyfriend, and in the long tradition of shitty things that happen to women, Lindsey’s the one taking the shit for it even though she’s not the one who made any promises to that lizard.”

  “I mean, she is fucking her boyfriend,” Decker said, like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. Nina laughed.

  “True,” she said.

  “Jesus,” I said, trying to motion with my eyes at Lindsey.

  “I mean, obviously I’m not saying Lindsey’s the one to blame. There’s no dealing rationally with a woman who dry-cleans her jeans,” said Nina.

  We all looked into our drinks. Apparently even Decker didn’t know how to hijack a conversation back from Nina once she had taken it to weird or awkward places.

  “She does! I’ve seen her at Ace dry cleaners.”

  “But who’s the other one?” he asked, studying Nina. “The one who just walked in.”

  Lindsey and I opened our mouths to speak at the same time.

  “No one,” Nina said, cutting us both off.

  “That’s one way to put it,” said Lindsey.

  “Lila Tucker’s worse than the rest of them,” I said. “But she knows better than to come over here.”

  “Man, you girls are intense.”

  None of us said anything.

  “I mean, no, I love it, but you realize this isn’t normal, right?”

  “Please,” Lindsey said. “You live in L.A. Aren’t people just as brutal to each other out there?”