I think that, for all his trouble with social graces and reading people, he understood that his small family relied on our neighborhood for things he could not give them.
• • •
So what about the rest of you?” Decker asked. “Are you all spoken for? I mean, if that’s what you want to call it,” he said, looking at Lindsey. “At what age do people sign their lives away around here?”
“That’s romantic,” Nina said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I guess I’m kind of seeing someone,” I said.
“Ha! You’ve been wearing his promise ring since sophomore year,” said Nina. “Kind of seeing someone. I would love to see Jay’s face if he heard you say that.” She turned to Decker. “They finish each other’s sentences more than twins and old married couples combined. It’s actually kind of sweet, if that’s your thing.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever finished one of Jay’s sentences,” I said.
“Does Jay even speak in sentences?” Lindsey asked. “I mean, no offense. You know I love the guy like a brother, but he’s more of a word-here-or-there kind of guy.”
“Yeah, like you need any more brothers,” said Nina.
“That’s cool,” said Decker. “So where is he tonight? Do couples not, like, go on dates around here?”
“We do. I mean, sometimes we do. He just started working as a salesman for his uncle’s company. They’re on some sort of corporate bonding retreat.”
That was a lie, kind of. He sold refrigerators from his uncle’s store, which was in a strip mall. They were stainless steel, state-of-the-art, but still, they were refrigerators. The corporate retreat was him drinking in his uncle’s basement with two of his cousins. He wanted to meet up later in the night, but this was becoming increasingly unlikely.
“Got it. So what’s his deal? Other than the sales thing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s just a guy who lives in Florida.”
“Okay, I know I made fun of him before,” said Lindsey. “But c’mon. Jay’s the best. You know that better than anyone.”
She turned to Decker.
“He once drove an Egg McMuffin sixty miles to her apartment from his grandmother’s house on a Sunday morning because she complained she never got up in time for McDonald’s breakfast, which everyone knows is the best.”
“I feel you on that,” said Decker.
“Yeah,” said Nina. “And his dick would, like, knock you over if it hit you in the face. He’s a bull.”
I wasn’t sure if she said it for the shock effect or to return the focus to the table’s sexuality, but Decker was the only one flustered by the nature of this statement.
“Uh, that’s cool,” said Decker. “But how have you seen her boyfriend’s dick? Is that, like, a Florida thing?”
Nina hesitated for exactly zero seconds.
“Oh. He’s my brother.”
He looked genuinely horrified.
“She’s kidding!” said Lindsey.
He exhaled loudly the breath he’d been holding, and laughed wearily, without his heart in it. We were relieved that he was beginning to understand how inappropriate Nina could get, and that while she may have been joking, she was also measuring what, exactly, it would take to get a new person to squirm. Having hung out with Nina in mixed company dozens of times, Lindsey and I knew intimately how awkward it usually was before this moment was reached.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
“Oh, c’mon, it’s Florida,” said Nina, “not a cult in, like, Nevada or something. All the appropriate sex taboos are upheld. I did date her brother once, though, which was actually pretty incestuous.”
She nodded at Lindsey when she said this, whose rare agitation was already showing itself in red splotches on her neck and cheeks. Nina had dated her youngest brother, John, for two weeks in response to Lindsey’s insistence that none of her brothers were sexually attracted to Nina. It had ended badly. Not because of bad behavior from either half of the couple, but because Lindsey totally lost her shit.
Nina’s favorite game to play that year was a hypothetical scenario in which nuclear apocalypse wiped out everyone on the planet except for the people living on five specific blocks, and to preserve the species we had to do it with someone who lived on them. It was a different five blocks every time we played. This was her way, of course, of getting us to admit feelings for people we saw every day and whose presence we could be made uncomfortable by, but she could never do something as simple and orthodox as just asking us. Lindsey and I found all kinds of ways to get out of this trap, and I suspect that Lindsey’s insistence that Nina’s own answer that day—John—would only result in the end of humankind since John would never do it with her, was only a way of distracting us from her impending turn, but Nina pounced on it. I don’t think Lindsey would have cared so much if her father, not realizing that the relationship was anything but sincere, hadn’t been so excited about it. All of the men in her family generally avoided us when we congregated at Lindsey’s house, heard, in basements and garages and everywhere else that had troubled engines and pipes that needed tightening, but not seen. But once John gravitated into our circle by pairing up with Nina, Lindsey’s dad took it as a sign that we were all one big happy group. He started inviting us to dinner, or to watch TV after, which only reminded all of us how lonely he probably was.
Nina must have been pretty desperate to get the controversial nature of her love life across if she was willing to bring it up. She and Lindsey stared at each other without saying anything, and Decker kept looking from one to the other.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “But what about now? Can anybody around here keep up with you?”
“Yeah, right,” said Lindsey, who was still the color of a jellyfish bite.
Decker didn’t say anything to this, but kept his eyes on Nina, waiting for her answer. She was suddenly captivated by the beads of condensation gathering on her glass. She kept sliding them together with all the concentration she might’ve applied if she was in a class perfecting that very skill.
“If it requires this much thought, I feel bad for whomever you’re seeing,” he said. “You’re either taken or you’re free.”
She looked up all Who, me? as if she hadn’t realized that it was her dating status he was after. It was too convincing to be entirely coy. Lindsey and I were the only two people on the planet who could see through her every time.
“Free as a bird,” she finally said.
• • •
I guess you could trace the start of the trouble to the ninth grade, when Lila transferred to the Orlando Country Day School in Golden Creek. Not because she ditched us when she made new friends, but because that’s where she met Max.
We had been worried when Lila finally confessed that she wouldn’t be moving with us from the junior high in the middle of our neighborhood to Culver High School, which was a full ten-minute bike ride away. We thought that we had finally lost her. She only told us because we were discussing first-day-of-school outfits, and what the seniors would be wearing, forcing her to mumble something about the uniform she’d be confined to. We’d thought people wore uniforms only in movies. The fact that she had waited until the days had already started growing noticeably shorter, cutting down the hours we spent at the pools we had come to think of as ours, didn’t exactly make us confident that she would be keeping the lines of communication open. Nina, of course, already knew. Lindsey was halfway through her description of the fluorescent green shorts with stars on them that she was trying to find the right shirt for when Nina turned to Lila, who had been suspiciously interested in the surface of the diving board we were sitting on, and said, “Just tell them.” When Lila did, Nina looked like a disappointed parent who was listening to her child confess a crime that she was already privy to, to the other parent. Stoic, resigned to it
, but still not unaffected.
The day school started a full week earlier than Culver did, so Nina, Lindsey, and I were free to go over to her house that first morning and vote on how she should wear her hair, and if she should use both straps of her backpack, or let it hang off one shoulder casually. We laughed along with Lila when she made fun of how fascist her blazer was, but later we all agreed that it reminded us of Sarah Jessica’s blazer in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, and we got depressed about Lila being gone all over again. We cheered ourselves up with how funny it would be to be sitting on her porch when she got back from her first day, as if we had never left the spots from which we had seen her off, even though we’d each had a Slurpee and a half and two corn dogs from the 7-Eleven, and had rescued two baby frogs from the pool by the time she was due back. It was a flimsy conceit because we knew she’d be able to measure our day from our skin—skin just abandoned by the sun looks different than a tan even a day old. We’re girls from Florida, we know.
She got to be the one to surprise us, though, because she didn’t come back alone. She walked ahead of him, either to lead the way or because her backpack, which was slung over his left shoulder, was slowing him down. She was a girl by then used to turns of good fortune and generosity, and had probably accepted the offer easily, gracefully. Without having to think about it. We assumed she would have lost the blazer by then—it was over a hundred degrees—but she still had it on. The only difference was that she had rolled her plaid skirt so that it fell an inch higher on her late-August thighs. Her porch was western-facing and the sun had already started its descent, so as she approached us her backlighting was about as flattering as a person can hope for. It was stunning, supernatural light that almost made the heat that held us all hostage worth it. It obscured her features, but we wouldn’t have recognized her anyway.
We had all prepared ourselves for some distance to open up between us and her—silently, to ourselves—but even in our worst prognosticating, we hadn’t foreseen a take-home friend on the first day. It was like learning that someone you loved with a slow-moving but terminal cancer had been hit by a bus. We braced ourselves for her to wonder out loud what we were doing there, or to make some thin excuse about how she and Max had to study. But instead she threw her head back in relief and said, “Oh, yay, you’re here. I thought I was going to have to round you up. Max is dying to meet you.”
“I’ve heard so much about all of you,” he said, as if they had been on a long trip somewhere together.
So we gained a fifth instead of losing our fourth. We never figured out when she had time to catch him up on our shared history, but he knew all our inside jokes, and all the million ways in which we were connected, or liked to think that we were. When they weren’t with us they were in school, and he was two years older, so it’s not like they were passing notes in class. He insisted on coming to pick her up every morning even though she was forty minutes out of his way, round-trip, which we thought might have explained it, but she once confessed to us that she usually spent the ride cramming for the tests teachers were regularly springing at the day school or, in a confession that horrified us, given her inability to breathe through her nose and her habit of drooling, sleeping.
It’s not what you’re thinking. It didn’t escalate into a competition for his affection. He always loved Nina the most. From that first afternoon, when she was the only one to stand up to shake his hand, you could see how much of a kick he got out of her. He was careful never to take his eyes off her, and not only in admiration or attraction, but because he knew if he did he’d miss something—he realized quickly that she was the one who made the plans, that she was always moving toward something that she just knew you’d like and wanted to share with you. He had a formality about him, an antiquated set of manners that made it feel like he was wearing a button-down, tucked in, even when he was wearing a T-shirt, which he almost never did. We couldn’t picture him at any social gathering attended by anyone other than us, and he managed to put an end to all the fun we had with irony—he took everything at face value—but he was kind, and he was smart, and he was beautiful. For all the turns Sam Decker had made in high school movies at the beginning of his career, he could never have played Max Thompson, because Decker, with his scruff and his jawline and his build, which managed to be fantastically chiseled but lithe at once, was always a man, and Max Thompson was a boy, in the very best way possible—flushed and curious and eager. And Nina was the source toward which all of his energy flowed.
Max was never embarrassed when he didn’t get the pop-culture references that cluttered our conversations, and when he stood up once after a big meal and farted audibly he didn’t get flustered or start blushing, he just said “Excuse me” and kept talking about whatever he had been. Someone he loved once told him that you should never be embarrassed unless what you were doing was wrong or dishonest, and it had taken. Watching him with Nina, you could practically see his neural pathways grow, and his synapses fire at different angles and speeds—she was the only thing he was a quick study in. There was a blank look that his face fell into right before whatever fact or phenomenon Nina was trying to explain to him took root.
For all the time he spent with Lila, there was a sibling quality to their relationship that was surprising mainly because Lila was so clearly a girl without a brother. She was always the most surprised and horrified at the penis myths that girls begin to circulate sometime in the sixth or seventh grade, and was more polite and careful than the rest of us in our interactions with the boys in our neighborhood. She was generally averse to plots that might end in grass stains or muddy shoes. She was at ease with Max in a way she didn’t seem to be with even her own father, and because we were fourteen-year-old girls acquainted with how you acted, sometimes against your will, when you were “into a guy,” we understood without ever talking about it that there was no sexual or even playful, mischievous element to her relationship with Max. We never teased her about the amount of time she spent with him.
There was such little natural energy between Lila and Max that it occurs to me to wonder how they became friends in the first place. I can’t help but suspect that in Lila, Max saw an opportunity. A person who didn’t yet know where in the hierarchy Max fell, which I can’t imagine was terribly high—he was a sixteen-year-old who wore cuff links and knew the middle names and birth and death dates of all the presidents. He might’ve worried about impressing her, or fooling her—afraid of her discovering how benignly but completely alienated from the rest of his classmates he was—but there was no need to. She had no more interest, when they met, in making new friends than we had in her making them. In Max she found someone to walk the halls with and sit with at lunch who was totally free and willing to spend every minute outside of class with someone else’s friends. Someone without any friends of his own.
I’m sure all of this was terribly obvious even then, but we were so worried about Max liking us enough so that Lila wouldn’t have to choose between old and new, we didn’t stop to think that there might’ve been something in it for him, too. The thing that makes me wince now, looking back, is that I don’t think he wanted friends in order to feel better about his social standing, or to have a less embarrassing amount of free time. I mean it when I say he was benignly set apart from his classmates—he was too beautiful a physical specimen to be teased on that front, and too busy studying to draw any other sort of attention. Plus the day school was a place where it wasn’t a crime to be smart.
I think he was lonely. I think he was an outcast by virtue of being overlooked, not realizing until it was too late that you had to scramble to make friends. I think he wanted someone to talk to. And there we were.
The first year we knew Max was the last year that we used our neighborhood as one giant playground. We still played games like capture the flag and flashlight tag and, in the unlikely event that there was a ball around inflated enough to play with, kickball. Max seemed happy
enough to join us, but there was a stiffness to even the way he played that we laughed about when he wasn’t around. He played games of chase with us the way a butler would have when the nanny was out sick—enthusiastically, but like he was playing in a foreign country where there was a barrier in even the body language. One night, when we had known Max just long enough to know the name of every pet he’d ever had, we were playing a game of hide-and-seek. Max, as usual, was it. He didn’t understand that it was a role you were supposed to try to get out of.
I had found a spot I was pretty confident in underneath the tarp Mr. Miller kept over his grill, but a mosquito bite I had been clawing at all day finally broke, and I started bleeding all over my new white shorts. I could see it even in the dark, which meant it would be disastrous by day. So I started walking toward Lila’s house, the giant tree in front of which we always used as base, in an unannounced time-out. As I approached, I saw that Nina was hiding in the hole in Lila’s father’s bushes on the side of the house—a spot we were all very well acquainted with, but that Max still hadn’t caught on to. I was about to call out and blow her cover when I saw him coming from the other side of the house. Instead of tagging her, he crawled into the hole with her. He sat with his knees tucked under his chin and his arms wrapped around them. As soon as he was settled, it looked like he’d been there all day, watching television or lounging in a circle of friends. She didn’t show any signs of surprise at his arrival. She just turned and looked at him without saying anything. They both seemed utterly relaxed and at ease, though I couldn’t see their faces. After a few moments, he handed her a note. She accepted it, slipped it into her pocket, and dashed out of the hole and toward the tree. She screamed in delighted panic as he followed right behind, just grazing the back of her T-shirt, a handful of which would have made her “it.” I never heard them talk about whatever half-event I’d witnessed, that night or anytime after, and they were never alone, so I don’t know when else they would have. I can only imagine now that he handed it to her when the risk was the lowest. Even if she welcomed whatever he said in the note, she would have had to run away from him immediately after he handed it to her.
Local Girls: A Novel Page 5