Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  “What a psycho,” I said.

  “Yeah, I don’t get it,” said Lindsey.

  “No way,” said Nina. “That’s hot. Runners are hot. It makes me like him more.”

  “You’re on drugs,” said Lindsey. “It sounds made-up. And why does it feel, I don’t know, vaguely racist?”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Decker. “But it’s definitely evidence of narcissistic personality disorder, because just wait for how it ends.”

  “Wait, what’s that?” I asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “The narcissism thing. Is that, like, a Hollywood thing?”

  “Dude, the story,” said Nina.

  Even Lindsey looked at me dubiously.

  “Right.”

  “So, anyway, he puts his hand on my shoulder, and he goes . . .”

  We all leaned in, and he smiled, knowing he had us.

  “‘Welcome to the Olympics, kid.’”

  “Holy shit!”

  “No way.”

  “Shut up!”

  “I know,” he said. “And he offers me the role in The Last Day of Vengeance that really started everything. He had contractual approval on the tortured hit man out to get him, which in his world means he gets to handpick him.”

  “I’m confused,” said Lindsey. “I thought this guy hated you.”

  “Yeah, I was, too,” said Decker. “And I told him that. I was, like, What the fuck?, before I could even think of anything else to say. And I reminded him of how few words he had spoken to me over the last eight weeks.”

  “And?”

  “And he goes, ‘Oh, c’mon, kid. You think the Olympian makes it easy for the tenant farmers?’”

  “Wow,” said Nina. “Just, wow.”

  “I know. I still wonder what would’ve happened if he hadn’t given me that job. He’s a moody guy, like, notoriously so. He just as easily could’ve left that wrap party without saying anything to me. If someone had cut him off on the way to that party, I’d be sitting in an office somewhere, or maybe working on some fishing boat.”

  “You’d have a lot less money,” I said.

  “But, man, Anchorage is beautiful. Especially this time of year. Have you guys ever been?”

  “Yeah,” said Lindsey. “We’re real world travelers.”

  “Abby wants me to meet her abroad after this. She’s gonna be in Europe for two more weeks, and I have three weeks left before I have to be on set for Criminal Lingo. I don’t know, though, Anchorage might get me in the right place for this role.”

  “I can understand wanting to go back for a visit,” I said, “but you can’t seriously wish you had packed it in to go home for good instead of starring in a movie with Jack Alfonso.”

  “I don’t know. I think I had come close enough that I wouldn’t have spent the rest of my life bitter. Like, I had my chances, and it didn’t work out. I wouldn’t have wondered or asked What if? or whatever else regretful people run around saying, because I had given it a fair shot. And I was never unhappy in Anchorage, just full of plans.”

  “Yeah, Maggie,” said Nina, her voice as cold as I’d heard it all night, even when we were talking about Lila. “Not everyone hates where they’re from as much as you hate it here.”

  Nina had recognized and been suspicious of my wandering eye probably before I did, the way Nina seemed to know everything. One day we were watching TV and I was mesmerized by this stupid, cheesy commercial for Michigan tourism, and when they cut to the final shot of one of the lakes, I almost couldn’t wrap my head around it, it was so enticing—like an ocean without the waves, which always felt more turbulent than fun to me, never mind the one tourist a season who inevitably never popped back up out of them after going in for a quick dip. I was so taken by it that I kept staring straight ahead at the screen where the lake had been when the next commercial came on, and Nina saw my wonder and said, “Dude, who wants to go swimming when it’s zero degrees? It’s cold as balls there all year round. And there’s no sand. What are you supposed to do, lay out on the rocks?” She was like a parent in that you might one day know as much as her, but she would always have gotten there first.

  “But don’t you think that’s part of why you were happy,” I said, not acknowledging Nina. “Because you had those plans? Like, maybe the reason Anchorage was okay and you have such warm feelings for it is that you were dreaming about what was going to come next. And it was all still possible, because you were young. And if you went back, and it was all the same except it was always going to be that, and you knew for sure that none of what you always wanted is going to happen, and it isn’t just the thing that comes before whatever is next, it wouldn’t have nearly the same, I don’t know, magic, if it ever did.”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea.” He fingered the rim of his bourbon glass, turning it slowly. “Maybe there are only two options.”

  I jutted my chin out from my neck, prompting him to go on, incredulous that he thought he might be able to stop there, without telling us what they were. He recognized my urgency and smiled.

  “You either stay where you’re from, thinking about all the things you wish you could change about it until that’s all you see.”

  “Or?” I asked.

  “You leave it and spend your whole life missing it like crazy.”

  “Dude, this is depressing,” said Lindsey. “And I would definitely miss it too much. So I guess I’ll have to be the first type. Though I can’t think of that much I’d change.”

  “We know,” said Nina. “I’ll be impressed if you ever make it out of that house.”

  I was about to make Decker tell me which was the easier one, the least painful, but his phone started ringing again. He took it out of his pocket to silence it, and Abby Madison’s perfectly symmetrical face rejoined our table.

  “Dude, she must know by now that you’re busy,” said Nina. “I mean, does she really think the twenty-first time is the one you’re going to pick up?”

  Nina had once stolen a twenty from her mother’s purse to buy a swimsuit she said she couldn’t function without because it reminded her so much of the one that Abby wore in Brighter Stars Than Ours.

  “She’s persistent,” said Decker. “She’s worse at taking no for an answer than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  “But now you know Nina,” I said. I meant to get back at her for giving me shit about pressing Decker on Anchorage, but she looked pleased.

  “I guess that’s how she gets so many roles, huh?” said Lindsey, the only one still determined to be nice.

  “Is this normal?” Nina asked. “I mean, does this persistence translate into thirty unanswered calls every day?”

  “I think you have to stop calling it persistence at ten,” I said. “Then it becomes something else.”

  The buzzing stopped for a few seconds when the call went to voice mail, but started again a few seconds later, when she hung up without leaving a message and tried again. Nina reached out to grab the phone from him, either to turn it off altogether or answer it herself—both equally likely with Nina. Decker pulled it out of her reach.

  “Ladies, ladies,” he said, though he was clearly enjoying himself. “I’ve got this.”

  We smirked at one another as he silenced it yet again and slipped it back into his pocket, less uneasy, by now, about being in cahoots with him on this. It seemed like less of a betrayal to this woman we had spent hours and days, maybe weeks, of our lives loving from afar, given that she hadn’t even told us her real name.

  • • •

  Max’s small half-plea worked only for so long. Nina tried, she did, but her scheming eventually got the best of her. A few weeks after Halloween, when Max was out of state with his all-male a cappella group from school, we had a rare girls-only sleepover, and she started the conversation we’d all been dreading. Say what you want about
Nina—and most things have been said, when the entire population of Florida is taken into account—but she was never cruel, at least not to people she liked, a list of people Max was surely at the top of. She wasn’t trying to torture him. She was still, I’m convinced, trying to win him over on this thing she loved, so that they could share it.

  “Okay, guys, it’s time,” she said, sprawled out on her bed, flipping through an old Kiss magazine that was sticky and wrinkled from the number of times we’d all been through it.

  “For what?” Lila asked from the floor, where she sat painting her nails a bright red color that made her look even more tan than she was.

  “Day school girls aren’t allowed to play clueless,” Nina said. “Your tuition is too high.”

  “Dude,” Lindsey warned, as much with her eyes as with the tone of her voice, when she turned from riffling through Nina’s closet, even though she knew every item of clothing in it, along with the location of the stains and faded spots and the holes. Even then she was the good cop.

  “Fine, but I know you know what I’m talking about,” Nina said, finally sitting up.

  “Are all of us supposed to know, or just her, because I’m lost,” I said.

  “It’s Max’s turn. To be pranked. I think he’s gonna keep feeling left out until we get him. I think he’s ready.”

  Lila opened her mouth to speak, but Lindsey held up a finger behind Nina’s head, indicating that she’d take this one. Because Lila was always the first to protest on Max’s behalf, Nina was starting to think it was their own private issue, but the truth was, Lindsey and I could’ve used a break by then, too.

  “Neen, I don’t think Max is a prank-war kinda guy,” Lindsey said. “I don’t think he gets it.”

  “No way, he just doesn’t want to be publicly humiliated. Which is why I’ve come up with a prank we can do at his house. We just have to find a way in.”

  “Jesus, Nina!” said Lila, surprising all of us with her anger and flicking little beads of red nail polish on her thigh when she looked up from the job abruptly. “Get a clue. If you fuck up his house, he’s gonna lose it. He’s not going to think it’s funny.”

  “No. You’re underestimating him,” said Nina calmly, still flipping magazine pages and not acknowledging Lila’s tantrum. “Baptism by fire. The sooner he gets used to this prank war, the better off everyone will be. What are we gonna do? Not have the prank war anymore?”

  “I don’t know . . .” I said, looking over at Lindsey, urging her to come up with a nice way to say that, yes, that was exactly what we were going to do.

  “What don’t you know?”

  “It’s getting embarrassing,” said Lila, still clearly pissed. “I feel like I’m constantly in danger of being the girl who shows up to the school cafeteria naked, which normally only happens in people’s nightmares. I’m always looking over my shoulder, like I’m in some sort of witness protection program, all so that I’m not soaked in someone’s bodily fluids or tripping down a flight of stairs.”

  “Still smarting from that locker swap, huh?” Nina asked, unable to suppress a smirk.

  “I mean, maybe we are getting a little old for it,” Lindsey suggested tentatively, as if it were a new or passing thought. “I mean, I respect how creative everyone is getting, but every month it feels like the setup and the planning is taking more and more time.”

  “I agree,” said Lila.

  “Maybe you’re just busier than you used to be,” Nina said, as if Lindsey hadn’t been the one to raise the issue.

  There couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds between Nina saying this and Lila’s response, but some switch was flipped in that silence. I had never seen Lila’s face look the way it did. And I knew if she was that angry, it was for things that hadn’t happened yet. She was going to cave.

  “Okay, fine, Nina,” Lila finally said, a half second after I knew she would. “We’ll prank him. But can we at least not do it at his house? That feels like such an invasion.”

  “Why are you being so protective of him, anyway?” Nina asked, her small victory not enough. “We’re all friends with him.”

  “I just think making someone feel uncomfortable in his own home is crossing the line.”

  Lindsey made an Eek shape with her mouth in agreement.

  “No way. People feel the safest in their houses. We’ll let him stay in his comfort zone, so he feels more secure during the fallout. Plus, I wanna see his house.”

  “Jesus, is that what this is really about, Nina?” Lila asked. “Why don’t you just ask him to see it? It’s really not that great.”

  “You’ve seen it?” Nina asked a beat too quickly.

  Lila sighed. “Of course I’ve seen it. He lives like five minutes from where we go to school.”

  “Perfect,” Nina said. “You’ll know your way around.”

  Lila threw her hands up in a mixture of concession and exasperation, not even trying to salvage her nails anymore. Nina turned to Lindsey and me with her Look, guys, we got her face all alight, but we both looked down at the gray carpet that used to be white.

  I remember every detail of that night. What we were all wearing. How far down the curtains fell on the windows. Which lamps were on. I don’t know if this means that, even then, I knew the prank we were about to pull wouldn’t end well, that it would be the thing to end the prank war, which, though I never would have admitted it to Nina, or even Lila and Lindsey, I might’ve welcomed, if everything else didn’t end along with it. Only one detail has changed in my memory of it. Something that was still true then, I just didn’t understand it yet.

  Lindsey was right. Lila wasn’t trying to protect Max. She was trying to protect Nina. I think as oblivious as she pretended to be, she knew how much Nina loved Max—she knew because she knew what it looked like when Nina loved someone. She knew better than anyone. And as much as she hated the prank war, and maybe even Nina for inventing it, she didn’t want Nina to lose the one thing she wanted the most any more than the rest of us did.

  “We go next Saturday,” Nina said.

  • • •

  Okay, so the million-dollar question,” said Lindsey, looking around at us expectantly, like she couldn’t believe no one else had thought to ask it.

  “Yeah?” Decker asked.

  “Why did you get your big break just in time? You think about it a lot, clearly. So what have you come up with? The timing’s pretty crazy, right? So were you just, like, meant to be a movie star? Is that how it works?”

  “Well, it’s not karma.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “I used to cheat. At Seven Up.”

  He was comically stoic when he said this. We let a moment pass to give his face a chance to collapse into a Gotcha! smile, but he didn’t.

  “What the hell is that?” Nina asked.

  “You guys didn’t play Seven Up? Maybe that’s why all the crazy stuff happens here?”

  “What do you mean, ‘crazy stuff’?” I was surprised by the edge in my voice. No one had to convince me that Florida was a strange, maybe even slightly off, place that saw things other places didn’t, but it was still mine. It was like the sticky, annoying little sister I was always telling to get lost. But whom I would break teeth and draw blood defending on the playground if anyone tried to pick a fight with her.

  “Isn’t this the state where the Scientologists gather?” Decker asked, oblivious. “In Clearwater?”

  “You’re the movie star, you would know.”

  He gave Nina a stern-teacher face for that, looking down his nose at her—if he was wearing glasses, they’d have slipped over the bridge—but he didn’t abandon his tirade.

  “And the recount thing. And I once read that the black market for illegal animals is the third-highest-grossing industry in Florida. Like, more people smuggle in illegal exotic animals than dru
gs. Those Burmese pythons that are big enough to kill alligators—you guys saw the YouTube video, right? They’re not natural to Florida. Someone brought them here.”

  “So?” I asked, trying not to sound defensive now. Like I really just wanted to know why it mattered. Jay was obsessed with that video. It really was terrifying.

  “So I think you guys would all mellow out if you brought Seven Up to the state. It’s, like, my best memory of the first grade.”

  “What’s so great about it?” I asked.

  He shook his head solemnly.

  “As with all perfect things, it’s difficult to say.”

  “Okay, so what are the rules?” Lindsey asked. “Do you remember those, at least?”

  He sighed and leaned forward—settling into the impossible task ahead of him—and we all automatically did the same.

  “There are seven people picked to be ‘it,’ but when you’re it in this game, it’s a good thing. Not like being it in tag or hide-and-seek or whatever. And everyone who isn’t it puts their heads down on their desks to cover their eyes. And each of the seven its taps someone’s head. And then everyone sits back up, and the people who were tapped try to guess who tapped them. And if you guess right, you get to be it, and tap in the next round, and whoever tapped you has to sit down.”

  “That’s it?” Nina asked, looking at me and Lindsey to see if we got it.

  “How in the world would you cheat in that game?” Lindsey asked, probably mostly just to cover Nina’s underwhelmed response.

  “I would cross my arms on my desk when I put my head down, and they’d be half off the desk, and I’d only shut my eyes ninety-nine percent of the way, so I could see the shoes of the person who tapped me. So I guessed right every time, and I was it more than anybody else in the class. I became, like, a Seven Up legend. And people tapped me all the time, because they wanted to try to be the one to elude my master guess. And I felt so guilty, because I didn’t deserve it.”