“Well, maybe don’t say that,” I said.
But we kept cheering anyway.
“Don’t forget Abby Madison!” Lindsey shouted.
“Eh . . . Okay, fine. Stacy Berliner!”
This was followed by applause and hollering so loud that Sal finally waddled over from the corner of the bar he’d been ignoring us from. When he saw that we were all smiling and that no one else seemed to care, he only waved his hand in dismissal and turned around.
“To My Man Sal!!!” Decker shouted at his back, banging his fist on the table for emphasis on every word.
We banged our own fists on the table in approval and whooped.
We had dedicated ourselves so completely to the task of creating celebratory noise that we didn’t notice him stand up slowly, as if rising for the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m not sure if it was the alcohol, or if he was just that swept up in the moment, but his eyes were shining. “To the nights you don’t go to bed, and the people who keep you up.” He nodded down at us. “To the friends you’ve known forever, and the enemies you share who only make you closer.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively, but even having reached this level of spectacle, and without having exchanged a single word with any of them, he knew better, by then, than to acknowledge Carine and the patterns with a look in their direction. “To the girls whose hooks you just can’t get out of you”—here he patted the breast pocket where he kept his cell phone—“and the hometowns you talk about even hundreds of miles away from them. To the haunts you go back to again and again, and the ones you never return to. And to the people who offer you a bed and a meal and good conversation when you’re only passing through to somewhere else.”
We stayed quiet for a moment after he finished, in case there was more, even though he had pretty much covered everything by then. Then we waited for him to reach the punch line, or laugh to break the less playful tone he had wandered into, and to reassure us it was all part of the joke. We all realized he was serious at the exact same moment, and started clapping as one, and the smile he gave us then was more than enough to reward this bit of good timing. We could have listed half a dozen different smiles that Sam Decker called upon in his acting, complicated blends signaling several simultaneous emotions, but this one was easy. The simplest kind of smile. He was happy.
“Now we just need to win you an Oscar,” Nina said.
“Nah,” he said, batting the idea away with his hand.
“Or at the very least a fresh drink,” I said.
“I’m on it,” said Nina, standing up. This time he let her go.
“But, dude, awkward fact,” said Lindsey, leaning in toward him like she was about to divulge a secret. “We don’t have a bed for you. That booth is just for Bobby.”
He laid his head on her shoulder for a second and they laughed into each other.
“I think just the beers and the good conversation will do it.”
“Look, I’m obviously in for another round, and this is great, but there are better bars in Orlando,” I said, trying to snap them out of the sleepy contentment they seemed to be settling into.
“Dude, what are you talking about?” asked Lindsey. “The Shamrock is the balls. We come here every weekend.”
I had never lobbied to leave the Shamrock before, but I suddenly wanted everything to match the electric buzz that Decker’s presence had created at our table, and in our lives. The friendly, chatty exchange of information that our conversation had been up until that point now felt like a waste of the opportunity we had been presented with. Maybe I had reached the point of drunkenness where you talk just to hear yourself and reckless ideas take shape, but it occurred to me that if even a movie star joining our table couldn’t change the routines and settings of our Saturday night, maybe we were doomed to a life where nothing ever changes. Not the scenery or the seasons or the things you did to pass the hours, no matter who you passed them with. The suggestion in Decker’s speech that the Shamrock was a place we would return to in an endless cycle seemed to cement that it was.
“I just mean, you know, Orlando also has bars you can’t wear T-shirts to, with, like, doormen and ten-dollar drinks,” I said.
Lindsey looked down at her T-shirt. I hadn’t thought about the fact that she was wearing it when I suggested we roam.
“What?” I asked sheepishly, even though no one had said anything. “Those drinks are delicious.”
We had been drinking watery, two-dollar beers all night. The idea of ten-dollar drinks with fruit flavors sounded ridiculous even to me. “I just don’t think it would kill us to try something new,” I said.
“I hear you on that,” Decker said. “But if you want a new or novel experience, there are other things we could try.”
“Gross,” said Lindsey.
“Dude, don’t be a pervert,” he said, smiling like a pervert was the most charming concept he’d come across in a while. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What are we talking about?” Nina asked, bending to drop off the four beers she was expertly managing.
“Switching bars,” Lindsey said.
“We just got more drinks!”
“You know these will be gone in no time,” I said.
“No, I like this one,” Decker said. “You know I like this one.”
“But you might like other bars here, too,” I said. “For all you know, Orlando’s bar scene is, like, far and away better than L.A.’s, and you’ve been missing out all these years, and the chance to see what you’ve been missing out on is finally here, and you’re still missing it.”
“Dude, your FOMO is really starting to get out of control,” Nina said.
“What’s FOMO?” Decker asked.
“Fear of missing out,” Lindsey and Nina said at the same time, both looking at me.
“Jesus!” I said.
“Whatever,” said Decker. “I’m staying here. But you know what we could do?”
“What?” Lindsey asked.
“This is what I was talking about before,” he answered, making pointed eye contact at her. “When you were being a pervert.”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“We could bring a little more of Orlando to us.”
“What, like kids running around with sticky fingers from twelve-dollar lollipops, chasing around middle-aged men in cartoon costumes?” Nina asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “And the ocean’s a good hour away.”
“No, I was thinking we could take the party up a notch.”
“This is what, like seven?” said Lindsey, holding up her new beer. “What did you have in mind?”
“Something a little harder.”
“What, like pot?” Nina asked. “I might have a little in my glove compartment.”
“You’re getting closer . . .”
“Ha! That could mean so many things,” said Lindsey. “None of which we can help you with.”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved that Lindsey had shut down that line of inquiry so Nina and I didn’t have to. “You’re talking to some honor-roll, most-likely-to-succeed ladies here.”
“Wait, really?”
“No, but thank you for that,” I said.
“I mean, if you want I could make some calls,” said Nina, ever determined to be in the know, even after Lindsey had gotten us off the hook.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Who needs it, right?”
• • •
The magazines that taught us the things we knew about Sam Decker had changed more than just what sort of person’s face became as familiar to us as the faces of our family members and loved ones, and what we thought about in the minutes before we went to sleep, and how many movies we went to go see each month. The people in those magazines were captured doing the most ordinary things—things like getting manicures and eating fast food, biking with friends an
d going for runs. It made us feel they weren’t so different than us, which was, of course, ridiculous. They were movie stars. But in our minds, in the streams of consciousness we kept even from one another, if they were like us, then we were like them, susceptible to the eyes of the world at any moment. I used to walk down the street sometimes with five-dollar sunglasses on, waiting for the world to marvel at how normal I was.
Those magazines changed the size of the handbags we carried, and the angle at which we tilted our heads up to invisible cameras not following us. They made us think that our lives might be worth watching, because the lives that we watched weren’t so terribly different from our own. They made us think that people like Sam Decker would want to be friends with us, because we had so much in common—we loved dogs and playing in the park, too. Once, when we passed a girl who was wearing cowboy boots with cutoff shorts and oversized sunglasses, who was letting her roots grow out to show the dark brown hair she had started with in a way that only a Rumor or Kiss reader would know to credit as fashionable, Nina said, “Someone’s been reading a few too many trashy rags,” but the truth was we all had, and the same thing could be said about any one of our outfits or hairstyles, the expressions that we used, and the postures that our bodies fell into at rest.
I wonder now if those magazines weren’t also part of what made me want more than I had—why I couldn’t shake the image of that snowy field, or that calm, waveless lake—and why I was so maniacally unsatisfied with the things I did have. Jay was good and handsome by almost every standard. It was those magazines that made me believe our small town wasn’t the insular small town of movies and shows, but just one of countless places to leave from or arrive at in the comings and goings happening everywhere, on every one of those magazine pages. Any given issue might have pictures of a single star in both London and Dubai. It also took the mystery out of where these people were from and who they had been before they were the center of the glossies. I imagine it was possible to believe that Audrey Hepburn was born on the set of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but there was no forgetting that Allison Cash was from Denver or that Mimi Peterson was from Detroit—our magazines had pictures of them in these places at least once a year, or the recipe for their mother’s stuffing, which they still made every Thanksgiving. It felt like everyone was only ever one eyeblink away from being somewhere else—somewhere even more glamorous and charming, where they would smile even wider. It felt like we were all one reality show or contest away from joining the faces on these pages, and this made us wish for things it might never have occurred to us to want otherwise.
Or maybe just me.
We stopped reading those magazines a few months after the night we met Sam Decker. Maybe it was because nothing ever felt as real as it did to us when he was sitting across the bar from us. Maybe it was because he had discounted them. Maybe it was because, as kind as he was to us, as humane and human as he was, it was apparent, too, how different he was. The magnetic force of the room changed when he entered it—we felt people’s bodies turn toward him, even if they couldn’t have told you why, opening up and inviting him in the way that no room had ever opened for us.
I like to think it was also partly because there was a hole in those magazines where Sam Decker’s picture used to appear—there was not enough magic in Hollywood after he left. But I think it is at least as much because it showed once and for all that for all the golf he played with his father on Father’s Day, and as many times as he was seen having to go through the airport security line that plagues us all, he did things that the housewives in Minnesota and the cheerleaders in Iowa who left the beach copies we scoured never did. He had been moving away for some time, it became apparent to us after that night, in bottles and milligrams, and long, lonely trips to the bathrooms of the restaurants we watched him step into and out of, and sleepless nights engaged in losing staring contests with the ceiling, and we had been too busy marveling at his favorite frozen yogurt toppings to notice. We preferred caramel, too. As much solidarity as we projected onto him, there were some things he did outside of sidewalk cafés and airports and red carpets and the streets of the city where he lived—things he did outside of our omniscient gaze—filling holes we thought all the hobbies and likes and habits we shared with him would fill, and that it was a lonely, sad black magic that drove him until it didn’t.
The ugly reveal of how empty, in the end, those magazines were, of how easily we had been fooled, might’ve crushed any wanderlust they had created in me.
But I was already gone.
• • •
No one spoke the rest of the way there. We didn’t realize we were there until Nina stopped the car. She knew exactly where to go, and I wondered if she had made a practice run by herself. I wasn’t sure why the thought made me sad.
Max’s house wasn’t huge, but it might’ve been better if it had been. It was modest in size, but it was elegant and tasteful. It wasn’t an assembly-line house of cheap, overnight construction, the way so many of the new condo developments were. The kind with stainless-steel appliances but plaster walls a six-year-old girl could’ve punched a hole in. Max’s house was stone and brick, and it looked like it had been around for decades. These were people with nothing to prove. People who were accustomed to their money.
Once we realized which house was his, we were horrified that we hadn’t parked farther away.
“Shouldn’t we at least park behind some bushes or something?” I whispered.
“The less suspicious you act, the less suspicious people are gonna be,” Nina said. “There’s no reason for anyone to assume we shouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah, except this piece-of-shit car,” Lindsey said. “Nobody ever intends to do anything good in a car like this, as evidenced by the fact that Jeremy Piker owns it.”
“Well, we’re not going to be in here for very long, anyway,” Nina said, “as long as Lila did her job.”
Lindsey and I, who were both leaning forward, scrunched together through the small opening between the driver and front passenger seats, turned in synchrony toward Lila. We were expecting her to demand to know why all the hard shit was always her job—why she, Nina, had only bought a couple of packs of food coloring, while Lila was expected to figure out how to break and enter—but she didn’t. She looked placidly out the window, appraising the house with mild disinterest, as if it were passing scenery.
“It’s gonna be even easier than you think,” she said. “There’s a screen door that leads directly into the screened-in porch where the pool is. We’ll be able to go right through it. People who live in neighborhoods like this don’t lock their doors.”
And there it was. The first piece of evidence that Lila had provided for us, that we hadn’t imagined, or invented to mock her with, that she was different from us. She knew what people in neighborhoods like this did.
People like us.
Lindsey and I didn’t say anything, didn’t dare even to look at each other, and waited for Nina to say something, to call her on it, playfully or not, but she didn’t.
“So are we going or what?” Lila asked, turning to look at us.
We were girls so unversed in this sort of midnight activity that it didn’t occur to us to crouch or dart between the trees or travel in the shadows any more than it had occurred to Nina not to park right in front of the house. Our bodies didn’t yet know the language of illicit behavior. Our knees didn’t automatically bend at the sound of twigs cracking underfoot, and our default posture wasn’t a slouch to make ourselves as small as possible. We were poor, and maybe a little easy; we weren’t honor students, and we would probably never work jobs with health benefits, but we weren’t, until then, bad girls. We made our way out in the open, single file, like the girls from the Madeline books that our parents could never afford and made us check out of the library instead, or like we were at the mall, avoiding walking abreast so we all had equal view of the store windows. I
t occurs to me now that someone must have seen us—the houses in Max’s neighborhood weren’t very far apart—and that the way we were moving is probably what stopped them from calling someone, or trying to stop us. Girls who cause the sort of trouble we did don’t arrive out in the open like that. Everyone knows it’s the trouble you don’t see coming that gets you.
We walked to the back of the house, to the screen door of the patio. Lila was right. It was unlocked.
“Oh, my God, this is going to save us so much time,” said Nina, surveying the length of the pool. It was meant for just one family, rather than a whole row of houses like the pools we were used to, so it was smaller. “It’s not going to take nearly as much dye as I thought. Though I hope getting this tarp off isn’t going to be a problem.” She kicked the brown piece of plastic covering the pool.
This confidence on her part didn’t seem to make anyone else more eager to get started. We all just stood behind her, awaiting further instruction.
“We should divide into teams,” she continued. “A dye team and a wildlife team. Someone’s gotta blow up the inflatable alligator. Use as many of the rubber snakes as you can, but don’t go overboard. We don’t wanna clog the filters. I’m pretty sure that’s the only way we can fuck the pool up.”
I saw Lindsey’s eyes go wide with horror at the thought.
“All right,” Lila said, sticking her hands in one of the plastic bags. “Let’s get started.”
Suddenly, without any noise or warning, the light above the door that led from the house to the porch went on. Everyone froze.
“Shit! Nina, I’m sorry, but this is too much,” said Lindsey, her hands up in surrender. “I was game to give it a try, even though this is crazy, but someone is clearly awake, and home, and we’re definitely going to get caught. This is stupid.”
Nina looked at her expectantly, as if awaiting a translation of what she had just said.
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