Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  I just couldn’t let go of the other lives.

  • • •

  You know your friend over there,” Decker said, nodding at Lila. “Her name might actually work. Lila Tucker could be a screen name.”

  “She isn’t our friend,” said Lindsey.

  “Yeah,” said Nina, ignoring her. “You might be right. She’s got a good name.”

  • • •

  I will save you the suspense—suspense not being our genre, simply because it was not Sam Decker’s genre, and his were the only movies we would shell out ten dollars to go see. In his movies there was usually a girl in trouble—because she either had too much money or not enough, or either was too beloved by men who ended up getting her in trouble or couldn’t get anyone to notice her. Something usually blew up, but you always saw it coming.

  So I will tell you now that this is not the night when Sam Decker swept us away to Hollywood or even to a better bar. This is not the night he taught us some valuable lesson, or that we began long, meaningful friendships with him, because this is the night that Sam Decker died from a mix of alcohol, heroin, and prescription antidepressants in a hotel room in a city where he had nobody to drink with and had to settle for us.

  We should have known from the red of his eyes. From the fact that a man who had the money for daily manicures, and lived in a place where he would have felt no shame in getting them, had nails bitten down to the quick, into jagged little promises of disaster. Of bad things to come. But we were too busy loving him, and not just because he was a movie star, and one we happened to like. We loved him because he was buying our drinks. We loved him because from the coy manner in which he set out making Abby Madison’s life miserable, we saw in him every boy who had ever ignored a call or text, and this made him seem less alien to us. We understood what he was doing, at least as much as we had when it was done to us. We loved him because he didn’t recognize all the things that distinguished us from Carine and Lila and the patterns. To him we were all just young, prettyish girls in a bar in Florida, which, had it been true, would have solved all of our problems. We loved him because no matter how many times we laughed during parts of his movies not meant to be funny, we felt something in those darkened theaters that we sometimes called upon after we had left them, and because he didn’t seem to approach our conversation as one big practical joke, the way we did, with knowing smiles and loaded eye contact. He talked to us like people. Like girls he met in a bar that reminded him of his hometown. I’m not sure what we were expecting—an entourage, maybe, a trail of screaming fans or a publicist monitoring every word he said—but not that.

  Three

  The Shamrock was owned by a man named Sal Pisatori. Yes, he was Italian. He weighed at least two-fifty, but he had a dainty, elegant mustache just starting to gray that called to mind men in top hats and made him seem much smaller, and though he spoke with the lilt of a Long Islander, he wasn’t the bumbling, clueless wise guy you might be imagining. He was keenly aware of most of what happened in his bar, and able to participate competently in most of the conversations conducted there on an endless number of topics—bait options for deep-sea fishing, and which excuses wives generally swallowed and which ones they saw through—and he had interests that your stereotypes might not take into account: gardening and classical music. We knew without having to ask that he had less education than us, but he knew that Russia shared a border with Kazakhstan and Mongolia—countries most people we knew couldn’t have given you a continent for, or had forgotten about altogether—and the exact date that the Second World War ended and which languages they spoke in which countries, even when it wasn’t an easy match, like Portuguese in Brazil, and other facts that you didn’t used to have to go to school to know. He was always moving, confusing everyone as to how he stayed so fat, and whenever he stopped at our table while making his rounds he started with, “Did you girls know . . . ,” trying to impress us with his most mind-blowing pieces of trivia: the length of the largest bird’s wingspan, the country with the smallest population. He also knew we were not twenty-one, and gave us his You’re gonna get me in trouble eyes every time we walked in, but the first round was always on the house. Sal was a man who respected loyalty more than he did the law.

  We asked him, once, why he didn’t open an Italian bar. Wine Time, maybe. Or Mozzarellas.

  “Italians, we’re known for our food,” he told us. “I give it a name like Mozzarellas, people are gonna start expectin’ to be fed. Mozzarella sticks, fried calamari. That kinda thing. What are you gonna eat at an Irish bar? Potatoes? Cabbage? If they come in thinkin’ we’re an Irish institution, they’ll feel spoiled—taken care of, you know—by just the option of the burger. I put it in the name, so right away people know what they’re gonna get. Simple. Everybody’s happy.”

  We knew this was a dig at his Irish counterparts and their cuisine—he was, after all, an Italian, even if he did own a bar called the Shamrock—but he was right. No one ever asked for a menu at the Shamrock.

  Sal came waddling over to our table just after we had finished processing how uneasy Sam Decker’s real name sat on the tongue.

  “Sal!” we cheered in unison, realizing, as we said it, how cinematic his real name was, and then wondering if that’s what we called him by. A shady past that needed erasing didn’t feel like a stretch for a man like Sal.

  “Let me ask you girls a question,” he said.

  “Sure, but whatever it was we didn’t do it,” said Lindsey, referring to his obvious agitation. He was normally much happier to see us.

  “What do you girls know about a movie star being here in the bar?”

  “Why, Sal?” Nina asked, not looking at Decker.

  “Jax over there,” he said, nodding at the bar where Bob and Jax sat not talking to each other, fisherman caps pulled low, “said he heard something about some big shot’s here, havin’ drinks.”

  We were impressed at the possibility that Jax—who we had never heard speak—might know who Sam Decker was at the same time we were embarrassed for Sal for not knowing.

  “Well, what are you gonna do if you find him?” I asked.

  “Take a picture!” he said with all the incredulity he would have if I’d asked him how many noses I had. “You know, for the wall.”

  The wall had exactly four photos—two soap-opera stars, a child actor a good twenty years after the only sitcom he was ever on ended, and the guy from a series of beer commercials who was famous for saying “It’s Saturday night where I live” as he held up the beer he was advertising in the middle of settings that got increasingly more inappropriate as the commercial series went on: boardroom meetings, parent-teacher conferences, and finally the delivery room where his wife was giving birth. “I don’t know about movie star,” said Lindsey, “but this guy used to be on The New Mickey Mouse Club.”

  “This guy?” he said, nodding at Decker skeptically.

  “That’s the one,” said Lindsey.

  “How long ago?” he asked.

  “I mean, it was a while ago,” said Nina, “but he was a big enough deal on the show that they asked him back for the reunion.”

  “Yeah, and we all watched it all the time,” I said.

  “I’m on billboards for vodka in Asia,” Decker offered.

  “Well, we are a bar . . .” Sal said.

  “Look, I’ll take as many pictures as you want,” said Decker, realizing that as funny as the gag was, whatever he posed for would be on the wall for years—the beer guy had allegedly been dead for a decade. “But I don’t want to be in it alone. Get one of all four of us.”

  I could feel the others trying not to squirm at the thought of being in a publicly displayed picture of Sam Decker, one that people we actually knew would see, but the air at the table was suddenly full of manic, juvenile expectation, like that moment when the person you’re all pranking walks into the room you’ve rigged, unaware of
the trap waiting for him.

  “The pictures are normally taken with me,” Sal said.

  “You seem like a nice guy,” said Decker, “but c’mon, given the choice, who would you rather be photographed with—yourself, or these girls?”

  “Well, I see what you mean, but—”

  “C’mon, Sal, we’re here every weekend. We count as bar representatives.”

  “And maybe if the other patrons see the wall celebrities mingling with the customers, they’ll be even more inclined to come back. Like, they’ll actually see the celebrities, they don’t hole away in some VIP section.”

  The absurdity of a VIP section in the Shamrock should have tipped Sal off to the joke, but he caved.

  “All right, all right,” he said, pulling a silver camera smaller than his palm out of his shirt pocket. “Smile big.”

  So we did.

  • • •

  Though there were many bonuses to having a new member in the group, and a male one at that, it was clear pretty early on that the perk Nina took the most pleasure in was that it expanded the geography across which the prank war could be conducted. The prank war had started innocently enough the spring before we met Max, and grew from the same seed that I now know most bad ideas do: boredom. We were having a sleepover at Nina’s, and she was the first one to fall asleep, which almost never happened. She had trouble sleeping, and normally went to great lengths to keep me and Lindsey up for some company, resorting to both flattery and a strange sort of bribery in which she started confessing things she swore she’d never told anyone before, in the hopes that curiosity would function as a substitute for caffeine. Lila always managed to fall asleep just minutes before Lindsey and I remembered that by going to sleep early we’d be exempting ourselves from late-night Nina duty later.

  Lindsey and I were both so shocked when we heard Nina’s steady breathing join Lila’s light, trademark snore in the middle of the first movie we put on that we tore our eyes away from the lead-up to the sex scene we’d been waiting for—both of us too shy to suggest we just fast-forward to it—and looked at each other at the same time, baffled. We both agreed that waking her up would be too mean, given how rarely she enjoyed the pleasure of sleep, but that we couldn’t let this go unremarked upon. She could be ruthless in her campaigns to keep us up, outlining the many things one could miss out on with an early bedtime. So we spent an hour and a half swapping the entire contents of her sock and underwear drawers with the kitchen cabinets.

  I’m pretty sure that I speak for both Lindsey and myself when I say that, had I known how far Nina was going to take what was meant to be a onetime amusement—a nod to our past, and the silly escapades of earlier sleepovers, rather than our future—we would have left the bras and the tomato soup where they were.

  She loved it. The next morning, after the thirty seconds it took her to process what we had done when she opened the pantry where her mother normally kept the cereal, she laughed like Chris Rock was performing stand-up in her kitchen.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “That’s funny. I can’t believe you guys came up with something like this without me. Whose idea was it, seriously? And, man, how long did it take you? I have a lot of underwear.”

  To be honest, by the time the red-and-white-checkered bikini briefs landed on Nina’s bed head, Lindsey and I had forgotten all about it. We were anticipating the Lucky Charms on the other side of the fake wood door as hotly as Nina was. I’m pretty sure, looking back, that the only reason we spent all the time the move required was that neither of us knew how to conduct a sleepover not punctuated by Nina’s insomniac rumblings.

  The event had considerably more staying power with Nina. The next weekend, she convinced me to help steal all of Lindsey’s jeans from her bedroom and replace them with jeans a size smaller. It wasn’t difficult to do—like all her other clothes, Lindsey’s jeans came from the Target by our house.

  That she was not the mastermind behind the prank war’s first move is probably hard to believe for anyone who has seen Nina’s face bloom the moment a new idea for a prank occurs to her. But it would surprise exactly no one who has spent more than an hour with her that she was the one to raise its stakes. Her big jeans plan had a bite that was missing from the underwear swap Lindsey and I came up with.

  Lindsey showered only when she broke a sweat, and brushed her hair before she went to bed but not when she got up, and wore her brothers’ hand-me-downs because her beauty was totally unconnected to and independent from any effort she made. It was in the proportions of her figure and the glow of her freckly skin, and the beautiful chaos of the hair that really could’ve used a second brushing. And you could smell it on her in the exact moment the button on the too-skinny jeans popped—horror at the possibility that she might have to start trying. Not to mention what effect this new weight would have on the many athletic fields she dove and charged and dribbled across.

  It was two weeks before she realized what we had done. Motivated to eat less during those fourteen days—during which she wore sweatpants, since she didn’t have the money to buy new jeans—we got all the good snacks from her lunch. The pudding cups and the Oreos. Because she never gained back the five pounds she lost, you could say that she was the only winner in the prank war.

  I didn’t think to worry once—not while I was smashing the green ceramic alligator bank that I’d kept next to my bed for the last two years to help pay for the smaller jeans, or pricking my fingers trying to sew the old jeans’ tags into them—that by helping Nina prank Lindsey a week after Lindsey and I had pranked Nina, I was declaring myself prey. But I saw it in Lindsey’s eyes in the same moment that the truth behind the push of her waistband registered—I was next.

  And I was. And in this plot, too, was a brand of humiliation tailored just for me—this time in the fact that the prank I was the victim of was the first one to be conducted publicly, where anyone other than the four of us could see it. Lindsey, Lila, and of course Nina had heard me stutter enough times when called upon without having raised my hand to know that I hated attention of any sort, never mind that they knew intimately the silences and wooden good behavior that my mother’s household was run with.

  They convinced me that I was being stalked by the register guy at the new McDonald’s that opened down the street, proven by the free McFlurry he had waiting for me there every day—a ritual he engaged in only after they convinced him I was their “special” cousin, whose temper tantrums (which often entailed rogue bowel movements, they later confessed) were soothed only by ice cream. On the fifth day of the McFlurry stretch, when I screamed that I would never sleep with him, we were banned from the premises.

  Though I hated that my pulse grew loud and violent enough that you could see it pumping through the skin on my wrist and my squealing laughter was less hearty than the other girls’ as we plowed through the new glass doors still miraculously unfingerprinted by high school kids in search of sodium and sugar, I understood that I was always going to have to take a turn, and tried to convince myself to be grateful that it was over, for now.

  That was the thing about the prank war—allegiances were fluid. They had to be. It prevented them from creating small cracks in the group that opened into abysses over time, dividing any portion of us against any other. It kept us from being just another group of catty girls who claimed to be friends but caused just as much anxiety and heartache in each other’s lives as every other asshole they had to deal with. By constantly mixing up who was on the receiving end of the prank, and who had teamed up to deliver it, the pranks stayed random. Who was on what end and with whom didn’t mean much, because everyone would be there at some point, and every possible two- and threesome would mastermind how they ended up there. It kept the prank war pure—a source of fun and creativity rather than malice and exclusion—but it was also the thing that totally baffled Max about it.

  Max was a boy of logic, of military strate
gy and algebraic equations. He relied on and took comfort in the unchanging nature of the facts in the books he dipped into while the rest of us were sunning ourselves, or playing games, or conducting bike races. He was loyal to a fault. All of which countered the logic of the prank war, which was actually devoid of any sort of logic at all. He first encountered the prank war—it didn’t really feel like something you could explain—when Lila had her meltdown at the frozen yogurt place they went to every day after school. When you bought nine frozen yogurts—measured with a tiny paper card and an adorable little frozen yogurt stamp—you got the tenth one free. Lila had been one punch away for the last three trips, because Nina kept replacing her card with nine stamps with cards that had eight stamps, which she purchased from the teenage acne victim who ran the store after school.

  The point of this one was so clear it should have been apparent even to Max, who was still struggling with the prank war’s tenets by then: Lila had enough money, now, that she had no business fussing over free cones.

  On her third eight-stamp trip, Lila apparently lost it, though Max was the only one to see it. She told the guy behind the counter that if he didn’t learn to count he was gonna be “left behind,” and kept trying to explain why it was “literally impossible” for her not to have earned her free cone. She cited the fact that she and Max never came in without the other, and pointed out that he had scored his free cone two trips ago. When this didn’t work she knocked the tip jar on the counter—whether this had been accidental or intentional was unclear.

  It was the first prank we didn’t all laugh about together, after. Lila had the good sense not to make it a thing, but she said she was too busy with her science fair project to make enchiladas at Elaine’s house with the rest of us. It’s not that we thought she was lying about the project. But she normally spread her science or English or history homework around her in a paper circle while the details of our day buzzed drolly past her.