Nina wasn’t trying to be cruel. It was a control thing, to be sure—she knew all of us well enough to know the Achilles’ heels to aim for with her pranks, and she wanted us to know that she recognized those weak spots. But Nina took the time to get to know people that well only when she really liked them. That much attention from Nina was a gift. And while some people might have found these jabs at our tenderest parts unforgivable, I think Nina saw them as well-timed jokes, and everyone knew that being able to laugh at something was the first step to moving on. If you could laugh at some silly little fault of yours, it was less likely to trip you up. And while I am maybe being overly generous to Nina in this assessment, I think these pranks were her way of saying that she loved us in spite of the weaknesses they exposed. That we were fine as we were. And that the things that worried us most were laughing matters.
Regardless of her motives, after the free-cone debacle, the prank war was the only subject Max didn’t seem to have an opinion on. He fell silent every time it was mentioned, or said only “I’ve never seen her act that way,” more to himself than to any of us, making me feel bad for both him and Lila, because if it was as bad as he made it sound, I wouldn’t have wanted to see it, either. Because I had been on the receiving end of these things, I couldn’t fault Lila entirely for her behavior, extreme as it sounded. I was familiar with how involuntarily your entire muscle system could clench when you encountered the evidence of things you knew couldn’t be true, which was a big part of the sport. After marveling quietly about how unrecognizable the spirit of the game had made Lila, Max would stay silent while the rest of us continued planning or recapping the latest prank, as if it were a pretty girl he didn’t know what to say around, which it kind of was, because at some point Nina and her prank war had become indecipherable from each other.
Unfortunately for Max, his discomfort was mounting at the exact wrong moment. We were not the only ones who had noticed the rising stakes of the prank war. So had our parents and teachers. Nina had been strenuously warned against “any further nonsense” by both our principal—who lost a teacher to the vodka Nina poured in his coffee, not realizing he was a recovering alcoholic, before stashing the bottle in my locker—and our parents, whose laundry loads had doubled over the past months on account of the pranks that left stains, the ones that relied on desk chairs coated in honey and milk cartons that had been filled with vinegar. In Max she saw fast-food joints and parents and teachers and school corridors that would never see her coming.
He had to be broken.
Nina decided that the best way to change his mind about the game was to involve him in one of the pranks. Not only that, but to make him central to the prank’s going off smoothly. Until then he had seen only the effects of the pranks—the mess left to be cleaned up and the embarrassed, flush-faced girl who happened to be a friend of his who stood there trying to convince herself and everyone watching her that she was a good sport. That she thought it was funny that her pants had ripped, or that a small dog had just dry-humped her in front of a large group of people; the extent to which she actually wanted to lie down and cry evident in varying degrees, depending on the prank and the girl. If he experienced the triumph of having been the one to place the awkward, puberty-has-just-begun photo over the face of the mascot in the school lobby, or plant the pot seeds in the garden, Nina was convinced he would know what it was all about. He would be ready to play.
She drafted a plan that she needed his help with. That, while he wouldn’t have to be the one to pull the trigger on, he would have to provide the bullets for. This, of course, meant a prank pulled on Lila in the school that only Max would be able to help her navigate. What she needed, in the end, was to know where to find Lila’s locker.
The plan was simple. Nina would cut the lock on Lila’s locker and replace it with a new lock with a different combination, one unknown to Lila. After several failed attempts to get into her locker, Lila, who was always the first of us to turn an unopenable jar over to a parent, or seek parental intercession into sibling battles that had gone physical, would go to the principal’s office or a trusted teacher for help. Whenever she and her adult aide forced the locker open, they would find the pornography that Nina would have plastered all over the inside of the locker before securing the new lock. She had admitted almost all of this to Max, omitting only the exact nature of the “surprise” that would be waiting for Lila when she opened her locker.
This would have been a brutal prank on any one of us, but for Lila, who wasn’t much more comfortable with those penis myths than she had been when they first started circulating, and unquestionably the most sexually prudish among us, it was unthinkable. She couldn’t get through a PG-13 movie without making excuses to leave the room half a dozen times during sexually loaded scenes.
Nina was excited enough about this plan that she decided it was worth not only her but also Lindsey and me taking a sick day from school, so we could all take the bus—an indignity Nina normally avoided at all costs, bribing the older boys in the neighborhood to either escort her or lend her their car so she could drive herself illegally—to the day school.
The bus ride was uncomfortable, and not just because the bus was full of strange adults and we were all a little nervous about cutting class. It was a long drive. With every inch of scenery that glided across the windows we looked out of without talking, it registered a little more—how far Lila went from us every day, the exact distance between her old school and new.
We liked, back then, to measure the distance from one point to another by the number of McDonald’s franchises between them. It was virtually impossible to find any franchise in our part of the state not in walking distance to the closest sister store, so it was a measuring system of fine gradations. To get to the day school, we had to be on the highway at one point, and I kept seeing whispers of the golden arches just far enough to the right and left of our course that I wasn’t sure if they could be counted. I realized it was a distance that couldn’t be measured in franchises—it wasn’t a straight enough line—and it bothered me more than I would have guessed before we set out.
Lindsey and I kept turning to look at Nina every few minutes, searching her for signs that she, too, was picking up on how long we had been riding, but there were none. Nina, of course, had realized it long ago. It was a huge part of why we were there, making the trip in the first place.
Max was waiting for us at the front of the school when we walked up, as planned, and I realized only then that the plan required him to skip class in the middle of the day, and how much he must’ve hated that. As uncomfortable as he looked, and even though the tie he had normally shed by the time he got to us each day made his uniform look even more stuffy, he smiled when he saw Nina.
“Let me show you around,” he said, eager both to be the one to get to show her things and to delay the inevitable. Even though Nina’s eyes were greedy, blinking twice with disbelief at everything from the vending machines our school didn’t have, where Lila and Max presumably met to get the name-brand candy we didn’t have access to, to the buoyant, bright blue rubber track that sat just to the left of the school, where we had only a balding patch of grass that needed watering, she didn’t want to linger.
“After,” she said. “We’ve got to get going, or this is never going to happen.” She was so sure that we all understood how tragic it would be if this didn’t happen that she let it go unsaid.
I was feeling as uneasy about this as I ever had when I looked out at the field of wildflowers that separated the campus’s main buildings—magnificently large and stately, all of them—from a thick, untouched tangle of foliage that I would later learn had running trails for the cross-country team and a zip line the day school kids used in their gym classes while the rest of us made our way through wilted, half-games of dodgeball and kickball.
Little Marie Tucker was there, sunning herself, her plaid skirt pulled up to give the most amoun
t of skin possible to the sky, her face turned to the sun. She couldn’t have been there more than twenty minutes, given that it was a school day, but the fact that there were flowers growing all around her, except for the exact patch she was sitting on, made it seem like she had been there forever. Like they had grown up around her. Though I spent more time with Marie than almost anyone else in my neighborhood, I had always secretly found her as strange as everybody else did, her silences as unsettling. And seeing her there like that was one of the first times I could remember when she looked perfectly at ease.
As if she could hear my thoughts, she looked down from the sky and opened her eyes. She looked right at me, even though I had to be at least two hundred yards away. She smiled and waved, a small, girlish wave I wouldn’t have thought her capable of. Like my being there was the most normal thing in the world. And it felt, in that moment, seeing her there, like everything was going to be fine.
And it was. At least that day. It went off as planned. Lila smiled when she came out to greet us at Max’s car, where Nina sat smoking and flipping music stations in the front seat. Lila didn’t even get mad when she told us that it was the creepy male eighty-something-year-old janitor who ended up cracking her locker, and that he whistled when he saw the magazine cutouts, instead of politely ignoring them. Nina almost peed her pants, and Lila only rolled her eyes, smirking vacantly.
Max took it less well. In a turn that surprised only Nina, his vital role in one of the most daring, humiliating pranks yet left him unconvinced of the game’s merits.
“Listen, Nina,” he said when he was driving us to the frozen yogurt place twenty minutes away from the school, since he and Lila were still banned from the one where she had made her scene about the free cone she could have afforded twenty times over. “This was fun. I mean, I see how much you like doing this. How much fun it is for you, and I’m glad you have that.”
He didn’t look at her while he was talking, and I might have assumed that it was because he was embarrassed about what he was trying to say, to ask of her, really, but based on the rigid ten-and-two position his hands made on the steering wheel, I suspect it was also partly because he was a cautious, serious driver.
“Yeah,” she said, her brown, newly non-awkward legs hanging out the open window, as if to give the unrelenting sun a fresh target to hunt. She blew confident lines of smoke that traveled away from her mouth with a purpose, like they were chasing something. “I’m glad I have it, too. You’ll be glad to have it once you start coming up with ideas. Once you put your mind on that setting, they come easier than you think.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, his voice just shaky enough to be perceptible. “You’re good with things like this. Things that draw attention. I’m not as good with surprises. I like to think about things for a while before I do them, or even react to them.”
“It’s just fun,” she said in a voice that might have sounded, if I didn’t know her any better, like she was pleading. “It’s just for fun.”
“I know in your own way it’s announcing you like someone. I know you would never prank someone you don’t like. And I guess in a weird way it’s sort of like being in a club or something,” he said, his remarkable talent for stating things the rest of us were happy to know without comment striking again, “but maybe there are other ways to show that, you know? Just where I’m concerned.”
“Don’t be silly. Where I live, it’s the highest form of flattery,” she said. “And I happen to like you a lot.”
• • •
Just then, Veronica Beecher came walking into the bar, and we knew it must be ten after. Veronica’s shift started at ten, and she had never once been on time. It was one of a million reasons we couldn’t understand why Sal didn’t fire her. Technically she was a waitress at the Shamrock, but we hadn’t seen her lift more than a dozen glasses since we’d been going there, never mind filling them and bringing them out to people. The real reason she bothered to show up at all, we were pretty sure even Sal knew, was that she was determined to hook a man. What she expected to do with a man she hooked at the Shamrock was less certain. Her silicone valley, as we called the deep line of cleavage that she consistently showcased between the V-frame of her soft-looking, colorful T-shirts designed to draw even more attention, was wasted on the eyes of men like Bob and Jax, who had seen too much in this life to appreciate the simple goodness of a rack like Veronica’s. To her credit, she made sure each seat in the house afforded patrons an equal view of the show, bending low even in front of the bar stools occupied by men too drunk to remember where they parked the car or too poor to have one. Her eight-year-old son, Bobby, came in ten steps behind her, as he always did. We were never sure if she orchestrated this delay so that potential suitors would have already fallen for her before they realized she came with offspring or because he was pouting about having to spend another summer night inside, among adults, and waited in the car to lodge another formal complaint against his mother’s job before resigning himself to it and going in to find Sal.
Bobby was the reason we forgave Sal for Veronica’s presence. He was a cool little kid, and we knew all the time he spent with Sal was going to make him cooler. Sal gave him jobs to keep him occupied, so we didn’t get to spend as much time with him as we would’ve liked.
Sal turned from our table, photo safely captured, to direct Bobby to a stack of glasses that needed drying, which we were pretty sure he had rinsed for just that reason five minutes earlier.
“Roni must have gotten new shirts. That V is working even harder than normal,” Nina said as soon as Bobby and Sal were out of earshot.
“Nah,” said Lindsey. “It’s the bra. They’re riding high.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Decker. “Another warring faction.”
“No,” I said. “We don’t hate Roni.”
“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” said Nina. “She’s not in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or anything, but we don’t have any beef. It just feels like all the brain cells allotted for her personality somehow misfired to the chest.”
It was true, we didn’t hate her, but we unanimously agreed the Shamrock would be better without her. She was always thanking you with her smile and body language for compliments you hadn’t given her yet. She was that sure they were coming. She would be horrified at the suggestion that she thought less than the world of anybody—she was the first preschool teacher with fake tits in that way—but she was one of those women who feed you that line about not really having any female friends. That she just didn’t “trust” other women, a sure sign of untrustworthiness if there was one. It occurs to me now, though, that maybe Decker had a point. There weren’t that many people outside the three of us we did like. I’m not saying we bullied Roni or that she was actually a really good person, just that the only other adult allowed at our table during the year we went to the Shamrock was a movie star.
“Yeah,” said Lindsey. “She’s the kind of waitress who, if she got my order wrong, I would never tell her because I know she’d spit in it before she brought it back. But she would, like, bring it with a smile.”
“Exactly,” I said. “She’s just not that nice.”
“Yes, but of course she’s not,” said Decker. “That’s actually one of my two life mottos.”
“What, slutty waitresses with too much cleavage aren’t nice?” Nina asked.
“No,” said Decker. “But, I mean, kind of. It’s just really, really hard to find people who are exceptionally good-looking—like, naturally good-looking in an exceptional way—who are also exceptionally nice. Like, Here, I’m gonna go out of my way to do this nice thing for you for absolutely no reason, I rescue birds from the highway nice. I think to really get ahead in life you have to be one or the other—really good-looking or really nice. But if you have both or neither you’re sunk.”
“No way,” I said. “I can think of plenty of really ugly asshole
s and good-looking nice people.”
“I’m sure you can,” he said. “But they haven’t gotten very far. Really good-looking people need to have some sort of edge, otherwise they’re just boring. Like their faces are symmetrical, computer-generated-type faces, and if they’re sickly, generically cookie-cutter nice it’s like they’re automated or something. It’s so boring. It’s like the niceness takes the edge off your beauty, or undermines it to the point that you don’t even notice it anymore. Think about it, when you meet a really, really good-looking person—like, we’re talking top one percent good-looking—you’re kind of waiting for them to do or say something interesting. And let’s face it, nice isn’t that interesting.”
“Okay, Roni isn’t exactly making it,” I said.
Decker looked over to where a group of men had gathered around the tap where she was talking about one of the Real Housewives, even though I would bet both my ovaries none of the men had ever heard of the woman.
“She’s getting paid to stand there,” said Decker. “She’ll be fine.”
“She’s not that hot,” said Nina.
Decker looked at her like she had just told him the daily specials on the moon. “She’s hot.”
“Yeah, maybe, but she’s like Denise Richards hot, not Winona Ryder hot.”
“Girls,” Decker said, shaking his head. “You sound like my sister. I mean, what does that even mean?”
By now Nina looked like she had been poked in the eye with the sharp point of those umbrellas that come with piña coladas. I don’t think it was just Decker’s admiration of Roni’s physical assets. I could feel her studying the three of us as Decker waxed about his theory, calculating how it applied to us, and what it meant that Lindsey was both the prettiest and the nicest. Normally Nina was the keeper and setter of our dynamics, and it had probably never occurred to her that there were other forces at work.
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