Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  “And you think that’s why you have bad karma?” Lindsey asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “There are kids who, like, torture animals. All kids cheat, or lie. All the time. Just to see if they can.”

  “I don’t know, we took the game pretty seriously. Kids would routinely cry and shit. Because they weren’t picked enough, or because they always guessed wrong. It doesn’t matter, though, because my reign came to an end.”

  “How’d that happen?” Nina asked. “The method seems pretty foolproof.”

  “I guessed correctly this one time, as always. And got up to take my place as one of the its, and the teacher was like, ‘No, sit down. You were peeking. Adam gets to stay up and tap someone else. And next time, Matt, make sure your eyes are all the way closed.’”

  We all groaned in empathetic horror.

  “Ad-am!” Lindsey said in mock dismay at the boy who had blown his cover.

  “Brutal!” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “At the time it was pretty much the worst thing that had ever happened to me.”

  “And you think that gives you bad karma?” Lindsey asked.

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “I cheated.”

  “Dude, that teacher has bad karma,” she said. “She humiliated a seven-year-old in front of a room full of people. She couldn’t have let you go up and then taken you aside and told you to knock it off later?”

  “Yeah, I thought about that. Years after it happened, like out of the blue, it hit me—that she must have known for weeks before that that I was cheating, and didn’t say anything. And she was probably just having a bad day and decided to take it out on me. She could’ve put a stop to it long before then.”

  He paused for a sip of bourbon and to think about it.

  “You wanna know the really crazy thing about it?”

  We all answered at the same time.

  “Of course.”

  “Duh.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Blush magazine interviewed her. A few years ago, because she was my teacher. They billed her as my favorite teacher, and she talked about what a good kid I had been.”

  “Yikes,” Lindsey said.

  “Yeah. See what I mean? Bullshit. Even when they get it right—like that she was my teacher—they get it wrong.”

  “Well, the good news is you’re fine either way,” said Nina. “Your karma is determined by what you did in your past lives, not what you do in this life. Maybe you donated your trust fund to cancer research in your past life. Maybe that’s what you have to do to be a movie star in your next life.”

  Nina had been a Buddhist for all of two months in the seventh grade. She had never been above adopting theories that served her own life, no matter how exotic or outdated or rare they were in our part of the world.

  “I’m not an authority on much, but as someone who’s met more movie stars than the rest of you, I’m going to go ahead and call it doubtful. And I hope your karma theory is wrong, because I shudder to think where that would put me in my next life.”

  No one spoke for a moment while we all did a silent tally of where what we’d done in the last decade or so would get us cosmically. It wasn’t looking so hot for any of us.

  “Either way,” Decker finally said, “I don’t think you change.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Like, across life. Or lives,” he said, looking at Nina. “You can be shaped, but the color of the clay isn’t gonna change.”

  “Good line!” said Lindsey. “Did you just think of that?”

  “It’s from Tango at Noon,” said Nina, before she could stop herself.

  “Nice,” said Decker, looking genuinely flattered that she knew this. “But you’re missing the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “I think the fact that I cheated then probably says something about me now. Like, given the chance, I would cheat again.”

  No one said anything. Lindsey and I looked over at Nina. We couldn’t tell if this was his way of saying he would cheat on Abby if Nina gave him the chance, and we wanted to see what she made of it. He started talking again before any conclusion could be reached.

  “It’s not just me. I remember the first time I went home with Abby. You guys think you’re from the sticks—”

  “Um, did we say that?” asked Lindsey.

  “She’s from keep-your-money-under-the-mattress Tennessee,” he went on, undeterred. “Her mom’s house was tiny. And it was just covered in pictures of Abby from when she was in pageants as a kid. She has a brother and a sister, and I don’t think I saw a single picture of them.”

  He took another bourbon break, eyeing us over the rim of the glass to make sure we were getting it all.

  “I mean, we obviously want to know anything you want to tell us about her. Because she’s your girlfriend, not because she’s famous,” Lindsey clarified, looking at Nina evenly. “But what does this have to do with cheating?”

  He was so eager to get to the punch line—to show us that there was one—that he slammed his glass down with more force than I think he intended.

  “So she has the exact same stance—her feet turn out at the exact same angle—in every picture. And it’s the same Look how pretty I am and I don’t even care pose she uses now. And it’s like, her mom was saving pennies to buy her inappropriate sparkly pants back then, and now designers beg her to wear their clothes, and the position she uses to show them off is the exact same.”

  Silence descended on the table as we all pictured seven-year-old Abby Madison in sparkly pants. I pictured all the worn T-shirts Jay had had since before we met that he refused to throw away. He claimed they were “part of his story.”

  “Yeah,” said Nina, nodding grimly, playing an Abby Madison reel in her head. “I know the one.”

  “And her eye makeup!” he said. “She does this raccoon-eye thing. Smoldering eye—”

  “Smoky eye,” Nina said.

  “Whatever. And I know everybody does it now, but she must’ve been the first one. She must’ve like, invented it. Because she had that, too, in the pageant pictures.”

  “Dude, the smoky eye is hot,” I said. “I don’t think most guys would complain.”

  That was a lie. When I was a junior, my mom and I drove two hours to Saint Petersburg to be in my mom’s second cousin’s wedding. I had met her only once, but they wanted someone young and in the family to do the second reading, and that left only me. Because I was in the wedding I got to get my hair done in the salon of the four-star hotel, and they had copies of Vogue instead of Blush and Kiss. When I got home, I tried to copy the eye makeup I saw on almost every page of those magazines. Jay had laughed when he walked up to meet me, before he realized that I wasn’t joking, that it wasn’t some stunt Nina had put me up to.

  “I guess it’s fine every once in a while,” said Decker. “But she can barely go to the gym without it, and her eyes are her most interesting feature. Like, sometimes I don’t get it, how someone who watches as much VH1 as she does can pull off the roles she does. But the, like, three times I’ve seen her without all that shit on her face I get it. They have secrets, those eyes.”

  “You make her sound like Meryl Streep,” said Nina. “Or Gandhi.”

  Decker shrugged again. “She’s a better actor than me.”

  “Let’s play a game!” said Lindsey, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Seven Up, anyone?” said Nina in the cheeseball voice we used to illustrate just how idiotic adults could be. She swung her arm all jolly-hey-ho-go-get-’em, punching Decker at the end. She looked like a little Italian elf. If I didn’t know her, I would’ve found it adorable.

  “We don’t have enough people,” said Decker.

  “Dude, I’m obviously kidding. Never Have I Ever?”

  “Oh, man, I hate that game. I’ve
never understood the human impulse to tattle on yourself. To, like, advertise the things that no sane human being would ever willingly admit. I guess I played when I was younger. Maybe that’s how you know you’re old. When you decide to let your secrets be secrets, and you don’t feel the need to brag about them.”

  “No,” I said. “I think that’s how you know you’re really famous.”

  “It’s okay,” said Nina. “We’ve done things we’re not proud of, either.”

  • • •

  There were no buses this time. Nina saw to that. We had agreed to meet at the flagpole in front of the school—a place we had never met before, not wanting to be in sight of the drab, dread-inducing school building, but which Nina assured us would be perfect. But five minutes after the appointed time, Lindsey, Lila, and I stood in a small circle around the pole, facing one another, and there was still no sign of Nina. She had been able to talk of nothing else but this very moment since the date for Max’s prank had been set, so while she was generally the likeliest candidate for tardiness, we couldn’t believe she wasn’t there, ready to go.

  “Dude, it’s a good thing she’s not here yet,” Lindsey said, nodding at the day school logo across the chest of Lila’s sweatshirt. “You had to wear that on her night?”

  “It’s the only black thing I own,” Lila said, her body language a sigh. “And even if it wasn’t, it’s not like it’s her birthday. We’re doing her a favor here.”

  “I don’t think she’s gonna see it that way.”

  “You guys,” I said, glad to have a reason to distract them. “Isn’t that Jeremy Piker’s car?”

  They looked across the street to where I had nodded. Nina waited until the exact minute she had the attention of all six of our eyes before she popped up in the front seat.

  “Bitches!” she called, not even trying to keep her voice down, even though she had insisted we all wear black and avoid any distinct jewelry or accessories, to call as little attention to ourselves as possible. “We’re going in style.”

  “Dude, what did you have to do to get Jeremy to hand his car over?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Nina had been making herself comfortable behind other people’s driver’s seats since we were thirteen. You could track her love life by whose car it was she convinced you to drive down the block with her in during any given week, but we rarely left the neighborhood, and the cars’ owners were never far away. In fact, those owners were very often the people she was showing off for.

  “Nina, you’re not sixteen,” Lila said.

  “Yeah, but I’m not ten, either. Besides, you guys ride with me all the time.”

  “Not on the highway.”

  No one said anything for a minute, and I had a small surge of hope adrenaline at the possibility that we might get out of it.

  “I guess it beats the bus,” Lindsey finally said, walking toward the car. Lila and I fell in line behind her and we all climbed in, Lila in the front seat.

  “Do you know how many laws we’re breaking?” Lila grumbled, buckling her seat belt.

  “I don’t know,” Nina said. “You’re the one wearing the Day sweatshirt. We don’t have AP government.”

  “Jesus, do you just want me to take it off? Why doesn’t anybody give Max shit? He goes there, too.”

  “Oh, relax, Lilac. It’s when we don’t tease you that you’ll know you have a problem.”

  We all did relax a little when Nina used her old nickname for Lila.

  “Fine,” said Lila, a little less pouty. “But can you at least tell us what the prank is?”

  Lila had been asking questions about the plan all week, but Nina had revealed exactly nothing.

  “It’s a surprise. Just trust me.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Lila. “I don’t. I’m sorry, Neen. But I don’t.”

  She may as well have slapped her. The silence that fell in the car wouldn’t have been any more charged if she had. Lindsey clamped her right pointer finger over my left pinkie—an involuntary gasp of a gesture—the only acknowledgment anyone made of what had just happened. We waited for Nina to argue with her, but she only turned to give me and Lindsey her scariest What the fuck? look, which didn’t help anything, because we were already on the road, and we all would have preferred Nina keep her attention on it.

  “You can be as pissed as you want, Neen. But this is it. Last chance, or I walk home at the next stoplight.”

  “You’ve really gotten really uptight, you know that?”

  Lila unbuckled her seat belt.

  “Okay, fine. Food coloring. We’re going to put food coloring in the pool.”

  Lila didn’t rebuckle, but she did turn back to Nina to give her her full attention.

  “Go on.”

  “I bought about a million little bottles of green food coloring. And about a hundred rubber snakes. And a blow-up alligator on top. If Max likes that swamp pool so much, we’re going to give him one.”

  “Um, Neen?” said Lindsey tentatively from the back, like she was a schoolteacher talking to the slow student in her class at the end of a long day—good-natured, but fraying. “Isn’t it also going to take us hours to put in enough of those little food-coloring vials to change an entire pool? I wasn’t anticipating an all-nighter.”

  “Yeah, and what if it fucks up their pool?” I asked. “I could see the woman who raised Max being, like, meticulous about the shit she puts in there. And the, like, chemical levels or whatever.”

  We were getting bolder in our objections, now that it was clear that none of us were alone in them.

  Lindsey and I sat waiting for Lila to lodge her own complaint. Lila had loved that swamp as much as Max did. Apparently Nina was waiting for it, too, because she kept looking over at her.

  “Actually, I like it,” said Lila.

  I sagged into the back of my seat at almost exactly the same time Lindsey did. We were going to have to go through with it.

  “It’s simple, but effective. And it’s outside, which is good.” It was more than that, we knew. The prank was as much a nod to the swamp as anything else. An acknowledgment of how weird Max and his hobbies and passions and the strange things he gravitated toward could be, but also that they were worth celebrating in the only group activity in which Nina focused on anyone other than herself. If she really thought it was stupid, the prank war was the last forum Nina ever would’ve raised the swamp in. I was just surprised Lila was willing to see it that way. “And unless we screw up, no one’s going to get hurt. It’s harmless.”

  • • •

  Okay, it looks like we all need another drink and I don’t see my man Sal. I’m going up,” Decker said. “What do you guys want?”

  “I’ll go,” Nina said.

  “Don’t be an idiot. I have more money than God. Literally. I’m pretty sure I’m worth more than the Catholic Church at this point.” He said this without any ego, like just the fact that it was.

  He made it easy to accept his generosity.

  “Dude,” said Lindsey. “I mean, I know we didn’t land on any one certain or rigid order of the universe or anything, but aren’t you worried that he’s gonna smite you when you say shit like that? Or, like, take away all your money?”

  Decker thought about it for a moment before beaming a stoner’s satisfied, placid grin at us.

  “Nah.”

  “I’m not even religious,” said Lindsey, “but you don’t, you know, have to go looking for trouble. Or bragging or whatever. I’m pretty sure there’s a commandment about humility.”

  “It’s not even that. I was raised Episcopalian. My family goes to church on Easter and all that.”

  “So what the frick?” Lindsey asked, a stray curl leaping out from behind her ear for emphasis.

  “I just think God has bigger things to worry about than a white
guy in America with too much money.”

  He started to lift his glass to his mouth but stopped before he could discover that it was still empty.

  “And no, there’s no commandment about humility.”

  Lindsey shrugged.

  “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “When it’s three in the morning and I don’t want my delayed flight to be canceled, or I’m down by one point in a game of pickup basketball, I’m not above throwing up a Hail Mary, but in general I think he’s done enough.”

  “So you’re more grateful than cynical?” asked Lindsey, ever the optimist.

  “So not above thanking him in, say—”

  “An Oscar speech?” Nina finished for me in a playful, singsongy voice that was the adult equivalent of pushing him on the playground.

  “Very funny,” he said, eyes roaming the crowd for Sal now.

  Nina started the chant, but Lindsey and I were quick to pick it up.

  “Os-car SPEECH! Os-car SPEECH!”

  Carine and the patterns looked over along with the rest of the bar. Nina made the finger at them with one hand and then pantomimed that she was crushing it violently with the other one.

  “I mean, sure,” Decker finally conceded, turning back to us abruptly. “I would thank God.”

  Our chant turned into wild, encouraging applause. He gifted us a tight, irritated smile, like, Okay, good one, guys, move along.

  We didn’t stop. He sighed like the kind of prissy girl Nina ate for breakfast.

  “Okay, fine. And my mom.”

  More applause.

  “And the guy who invented the In-N-Out Burger, because you know I’m gonna have to go there after I win.”

  Our applause mounted.

  “Don’t forget Jack Alfonso!” Nina shouted with her whole body, gleeful.

  “Love that frickin’ guy!” Decker shouted, finally giving himself over to the spirit of the game. He was on a roll now.

  “And the kid who sat behind me on the bus who showed me my first Victoria’s Secret catalog. I knew I was going to have to go big to get a girl like that.”