Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  Sal came slouching over just as Bobby turned his attention to the work of laying all his cars out in a row as Lindsey had suggested.

  “It’s too late for that, Bobby,” he said in his most no-nonsense voice when he was still two real-car lengths away from our table. He wasn’t doing it to be mean. For months now he had designated the booth in the corner of the bar, the coziest one, to Bobby’s nightly ritual. Every night at around nine they retired to the booth to watch two innings of whatever baseball game was on one of the three channels Sal got on the antenna TV he had installed there. Sometimes, when I wasn’t at the Shamrock and I heard a baseball score, or a snippet of a game on the TV or radio, I would think of Bobby and Sal, watching and not talking, together, the bar settling in around them. Bobby was always asleep by the end of two innings, and Sal got up to start the second half of his night. Sal had confessed to us once that he hated baseball, but that it was the only thing that put Bobby to sleep, and the only thing worse than watching a game that boring was watching it alone. He seemed to be afraid that Bobby would witness something he shouldn’t if he stayed up too late, but after-hours the Shamrock usually saw only the same things it did in the middle of the day, however sad they were.

  We knew from the way Sal treated Bobby that, should we need it, Sal would be every bit as fatherly and protective of us, which was probably a big part of why we kept going back to the Shamrock, though it was never something we discussed. We made a big fuss of being grown-up enough to go out drinking, the same way all the other people too old for school vented after long days at work, but by going to Sal’s we got to be adults under the safety of his watchful eye. Sal didn’t let bad things happen to people he liked, at least not until the night he met Sam Decker. Maybe it was because we learned that there were some things even Sal couldn’t prevent that we stopped going to the Shamrock after that night.

  Whatever the merits or limits of Sal’s parenting, Bobby was too young to appreciate them. He stood up taller, suddenly on alert, at Sal’s suggestion that he put his cars away.

  “But I just got them out,” he said.

  “Next time start earlier,” said Sal in a voice impossible to argue with.

  “Don’t worry, guy,” said Decker, finally getting the tone right, and winning Bobby’s attention with it. “You won’t always have to go to bed right when things start to get interesting.”

  • • •

  A few days after our discovery of the swamp pool, Nina, Lila, Lindsey, and I were supposed to meet to make that year’s Halloween costume. We always went as a foursome—the Beatles, or the queens of diamonds, hearts, clubs, and spades. We always met the Friday before Halloween to draft our plan and make our costumes. We knew we were getting too old for it, but we didn’t have anything better to do yet, and we still liked the candy. No one wanted to be the one to call it.

  It was my year to raid the thrift store down the street for clothing and jewelry to pull from. It had become a contest to outdo one another on this front, and the strength or weakness of any year’s ensemble was understood to depend, largely, on the supplies we had available to us, even though some of our best costumes had been waiting for us in our closets, or required no more than a T-shirt and a permanent marker. I had made an extra run to the fabric store catty-corner from the Salvation Army, so I was struggling under the weight of neon pipe cleaners and purple and gold Mardi Gras beads, and bundles of fabric with corn and snowflakes and stars on them, in addition to other people’s discarded clothes, and running late by the time I finally made it to Nina’s.

  Lindsey was sitting on the front stoop, and looked up at me without saying anything as I came unsteadily up the walkway. I slumped down next to her, letting all my bags go at once.

  “Why didn’t you go in?” I asked.

  She handed me a note.

  Heard about this gnarly haunted house in Max’s neighborhood. Tonight is the last night we could go. Can’t wait to see what you tricks come up with for costumes. Don’t be predictable and get mad, k?

  Love,

  Your hottest friend

  P.S. Lila made me do it.

  “Dude, what the fuck?”

  “I know,” she said, betraying no signs of anger, or even irritation. Lindsey took no more than five minutes to get over anything.

  “I hope they don’t think we’re making their costumes,” I said.

  Lindsey shrugged. That wasn’t the point and we both knew it.

  “You don’t think they left without us because they know I’m afraid of haunted houses, do you?” she asked without looking over at me.

  “No,” I said. “Max can’t like them any more than you do.”

  “Yeah, but he’ll have two girls to comfort him. I’m pretty sure that makes it worth the risk even for him.”

  “Whose bosom do you think he’ll cry and start citing the history of the haunted house into?”

  It came out with sharper teeth than I had intended.

  “Sorry, that was mean,” I said. “Max isn’t even the problem.”

  “I really like Max,” said Lindsey. “He’s the weirdest person I’ve ever met, but he’s interesting. I feel like I’ll never get bored with him around. I used to think, I wonder how many more times we can do this before it gets old. And I don’t anymore.”

  “I know,” I said. “That swamp pool was pretty cool. I feel like he lives on this entirely different planet that’s been right under our noses, and now we get both. His planet and ours. Like we have dual citizenship or something. He’s like the E.T. of central Florida.”

  Lindsey started rifling through one of the bags I had brought, probably just to return my favor of saying they hadn’t left us because they knew she wouldn’t be able to handle a haunted house.

  “Do you think Nina is gonna let Max stick it to her?” I asked.

  “Only if Lila will leave them alone long enough.”

  “Do you think she does it on purpose?”

  “Lila?” Lindsey asked, looking up from a handful of Pez-dispenser necklaces I had considered my best find, though they now seemed cheesy and cheap, exposed under all the afternoon sun.

  “No. Elvis. Yes, Lila,” I said. “You’d think she’d take the hint. Every time they’re together Max and Nina come just shy of dry humping, and Lila’s the only one who doesn’t excuse herself from the private conversations they’re always having. You’d think she’d have gotten it by now. Like, I’m surprised Lila’s not here with us. That we’re the two alone.”

  “Are you really, though? I’d be surprised if they didn’t share tampons.”

  I wrinkled my nose, but I was smiling. “Dude, you’re so crass. You’re such a boy.”

  “You know what’s weird, though,” she said, ignoring, as she always did, any suggestion that she was anything less than wholly female.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think it’s Max that Lila’s guarding.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like she can’t stand that Nina might like somebody more than her. It’s like she’s trying to distract Max from Nina so Max doesn’t hog her or something. It’s like she’s hiding the good booze at a party or something.”

  “Maybe,” I said, suddenly tired of trying to work through this riddle that had nothing, I realized, as I said it, to do with us. “You know what’s annoying?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “They probably assumed we’d spend the afternoon talking about them once we found the note. And here we are.”

  “Should we go do something?” she asked.

  The day suddenly lay empty and ugly before us.

  “Like what?”

  “Doesn’t the ten-dollar all-you-can-scream thing start tonight?”

  Every year the discount theater in our neighborhood charged ten dollars to watch as many horror movies as you could sit through. They showed
them all through the night on all eight of their screens. They played everything from The Shining to I Know What You Did Last Summer, and no two screens showed the same movie at any given time, so when you finally had your fill, or needed to hear the click of a lock behind you, there was no blaming your exit on a lack of variety, or on account of having seen everything they were showing.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But don’t you hate scary movies?”

  “I’ll live.”

  We stood up and turned our bodies toward the theater.

  “Should we take this stuff with us?” Lindsey asked, looking down at it.

  “Nah,” I said. “Let them deal with it.”

  And we walked away without having to worry whose hand we would clasp at the scariest parts of the movie, leaving all the supplies I had bought slumped on Nina’s front stoop as evidence that we had been there.

  • • •

  That guy’s cool,” Decker said, watching Sal and Bobby walk away. “He knows what’s up. Can you imagine? Just hanging out at a bar all day long.”

  “Um, I mean, I can think of cooler jobs than that,” Lindsey said.

  “Wait, what do you guys do?” he asked.

  “Not us. You!”

  “Eh. Whatever. By the end I could’ve taken it or left it.”

  “What do you mean, ‘by the end’? You have four movies coming out in the next year,” I said. Nina gave me an Easy, tiger look. “I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but there was a point, right before things took off, when I was ready to pack it in. It felt like the end. I was ready to go.”

  “So what happened?” Nina asked.

  “I was in this B movie. Actually, that’s being generous. It was a C movie.”

  “Can I ask something?” I asked.

  “Because you guys have been so shy till now?”

  “Oh. Sorry. Never mind.”

  “I’m kidding. I obviously don’t care. I like you guys. You’re funny.”

  He said “funny” like it was an alleged, tentative concept that he was trying out. He finished the finger of bourbon left in his smudged tumbler in one shot, and held up the empty glass at the non-Roni bartender in a way that was remarkably inoffensive, as if they’d somehow managed to work out their own silent language without speaking.

  Nina actually winked at him, and when I opened my eyes wide in exaggerated horror when he wasn’t looking, she mouthed, What?!

  “Go ahead,” he said. “What’s your question?”

  “So, why do people even make C movies? Like, why do people make movies that are gonna go right to DVD?”

  “Well, half the time you don’t know. Distributors sometimes pick up movies long after they’re made. You’d be surprised how thin a line it is between Good Will Hunting and Swimming in Winter.”

  “What’s Swimming in Winter?”

  “Exactly. It was written by this earnest, good-looking smart kid—just as likable as Damon. And it was all set, for everything. The festivals. Everything. And now that guy’s working construction. He couldn’t book a commercial.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does.” He shrugged, like it wasn’t actually of that much consequence. “But other times they pretty much know it’s gonna be a flop right from the start, because it’s a shitty movie. And the studio has a writer or an actor on contract for X number of projects, and they figure if they’re paying someone, they might as well use them, and they have biggish-name actors play certain roles in the hopes that Americans are dumber and less sensitive to bad acting and absurd plots and sappy dialogue than we normally give them credit for, and that putting in a few familiar faces will somehow prevent projects that never should have been undertaken from going right to DVD. And they’ll make back some of the money they’ve already paid to the people they’re forcing to be in the movie. Which, remarkably, sometimes works.”

  “Wait, should we be offended by that?” Lindsey asked.

  “What?”

  “The dumb-Americans thing.”

  “No. I already told you. I like you guys. And most Americans are dumb. Including the people who make movies.”

  “Dude, good thing Blush isn’t here to hear that . . .” said Lindsey, eyebrows in a scandalous position as she looked pointedly away from the table.

  Decker looked at Lindsey like she was the irritating after-school friend who had just eaten all of his favorite snack. Like, Dude, c’mon.

  “Anyway . . .” said Nina. “Weren’t you telling us about your big break?”

  Apparently Lindsey and Decker’s looks had come too close to the junior-high-style flirting that Nina had been relying on since she actually was in junior high.

  “Actually, this is all relevant,” said Decker, “because the C movie I was talking about, Jack Alfonso was in it, even though he’s Doctor Oscar. And he was not happy about it. Everyone knew the script was shit.”

  “I love Jack Alfonso,” I said.

  “Yeah!” said Lindsey. “He’s like someone’s clueless but still somehow timelessly attractive father.”

  “Totally. Like, hot grandfather. Or one of those people you know is going to smell good in an I’m-not-trying-too-hard kind of way,” said Nina.

  “I have no idea what that means, but no,” said Decker. “He’s a total fuckhead. Like, epically so.”

  “No!” Lindsey said. “I don’t know why, but I find that really heartbreaking. Like, somehow I would be less disillusioned if you had told me Barack was a dick and cheats on Michelle.”

  “I don’t know, man. Politics is not my thing, but I do know that Jack Alfonso is one of the worst human beings on the planet. And he made no secret of how pissed he was to be there. He unapologetically kept trying to get the craft-services and costume people to go home with him. He didn’t even bother to take off his wedding ring. I mean, I’ve seen some shady shit, but this just took it. And it made me really, really depressed.”

  “Why? So the guy’s a dick,” said Lindsey. “What’s that got to do with you?”

  “Because until you make it out there, it’s a fucking grind. No health insurance, inconsistent schedule—just days of sitting around, feeling like your life’s going nowhere, followed by having to leave for God-knows-where for commercial shoots without any notice, to work thirty-hour days. And that’s all fine, because everyone still willing to do that thinks somewhere in the back of his mind that he’s going to be one of the impossibly few people to make it. And here was this guy, who had made it, who was clearly completely miserable. And I watched him really closely the whole time we were on set, and by the end, I didn’t even want it anymore.”

  “I mean, did you at least talk to him?” Lindsey asked. “Maybe he was just having a bad time. Like, maybe he just learned that his wife was cheating on him or his dog had cancer or something.”

  “Do dogs even get cancer?” Nina asked, as if Lindsey had just accused dogs of tax evasion or lying under oath. Like it was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.

  “I tried,” Decker said, ignoring Nina to answer Lindsey’s question. “I went up to him on the first day and introduced myself and offered my hand and he totally ignored it and said, ‘Kid, don’t be an idiot. I know who you are. No one would be on this set without me okaying it first.’”

  “Wow,” Lindsey said. “Okay, fine, he’s a dick. Maybe there really is something to your attractiveness-slash-personality theory.”

  “Yeah, and keep in mind we played father and son in the movie, so it wouldn’t have been the worst thing for either of us to get to know the other a little better. But after that I didn’t even try. I don’t think we exchanged more than three words when we weren’t acting.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Nina. “Isn’t this the story of how you made it?”

  “It is.”

  “So what the hell?”

  Decker d
idn’t know Nina well enough to know that she wasn’t actually angry that his story wasn’t tight and straight enough for her, she was just pissed that Lindsey was the one leading it astray. Her eyes had been a furious little game of ping-pong between the two of them during their private question-and-answer session. I looked over at Lindsey to see if she was starting to squirm under the agitation she was clearly the cause of, but she wouldn’t look at me, which I knew meant she was even more upset by Nina’s tantrum than I thought she’d be. I also knew she wasn’t trying to flirt with Decker—one love triangle was enough. She just really wanted to know the things she was asking Decker. Nina knew it, too. She just didn’t like to be upstaged.

  Decker was unfazed.

  “So on the last night of filming, everyone’s shocked when he shows up at the wrap party. And he’s in a visibly better mood—like off-the-charts better than he’s been all shoot, probably because the craft-service girl was finally talking to him, and he thought he was gonna get laid. And he comes over to me, and he goes, ‘Kid, you ever hear about the way it works over in Kenya, with the Olympic runners?’ And I’m like, ‘No, sir’—I actually called him ‘sir’—‘What about them?’ And he tells me this story, right? He goes, ‘So it doesn’t work over there the way it works over here. With the trainers and the sponsors and the fancy running shoes. Over there the ranked Olympians just run along the country roads that everyone else uses. And everyone knows the route the current Olympian in Kenya takes every day. They know exactly where he’s gonna pass when he’s out running.’”

  Each booth at Sal’s had its own individual stained-glass lamp hanging above it—the kind you associate with grandparents’ basements and card tables. It was shining over Decker’s face, giving his delivery the air of low-budget, experimental theater with bad lighting.

  “‘And it’s every young tenant farmer in Kenya’s dream to be the next Kenyan Olympian, because over there, there are really only two career paths—running and farming. And so each day, when he runs by, young tenant farmers along his route come out to join him—barefoot, remember—and run alongside of him, just to see if they can keep up. Most of them don’t, of course, and they go back to tenant farming. But every once in a while—and this is very rare—someone does keep up. He stays with the Olympian for part of his run, and so he gets to try again the next day. You know, to see if it was a fluke or if he can really keep up with him.’”