“Can’t you just say no?” I asked. “I mean, if you don’t want to go and you feel bad that they’re going out of their way. Can’t you just save both of you the trouble?”
“I would love to. But the same eager-beaver agent who abandoned me in Orlando of all places—no offense—says I need to take advantage of every PR opportunity we’re offered. He always does that—uses the plural pronoun even though he never ends up going with me. He would make me go to a Wendy’s opening in Antarctica if we got the invite. And there are always like thirty people, tops, because the people throwing these things want to get off on how exclusive they are. Maybe Abby’s right—she’s been trying to get me to switch to her agent for months.”
“She really is a bossy pants, huh?” Nina said. Now it was my turn to give the look to her.
“Have you ever talked to a shrink about this?” Lindsey asked. “Because I have no idea what you should do about it, but I’m pretty sure a therapist would have a field day. One of my brothers goes to a shrink, and he has a lot to say about guilt.”
“Once,” he said. “I spent an hour talking about how I worried I would never have a marriage as solid as my parents’.”
“And?” Lindsey asked.
“And what?”
“Did it make you feel better?”
“At the end of the hour she asked for my autograph.”
“No way,” said Lindsey.
“Way.”
“Can’t you get fired for doing something like that?” I asked.
“Yeah, imagine the press. ‘Sam Decker Gets Starstruck Therapist Fired.’”
“Yowzah,” Nina said.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“What about Abby?” I asked, to another look from Nina. “I mean, she must have some experience in this, too, right?”
“No,” he said, “because people like Abby like to fawn over the bird corpses. They ooh and aah and are all ‘That pigeon is so amazing, it makes me so happy I practice kabbalah,’ or whatever it is, ‘and I just don’t understand why more people don’t go to see it—isn’t that so sad,’ like she’s some enlightened Buddha that had his stomach stapled, and I’m like, ‘No, Abby, I don’t think it’s sad that farmers in Iowa and teachers in Detroit aren’t shitting their pants over taxidermy, and the only reason you know about it is because you’re in B movies. And you’d never find these things if they weren’t thrown in your face.’”
“Have you tried telling that to her?” Lindsey asked, nodding at his jacket pocket, which had started, once again, to vibrate.
We had all grown so accustomed to the Abby Madison vibrations that kept our table humming along that when I first heard the buzz of my own phone against my thigh, I assumed her buzzing was getting more invasive as her desperation grew. It took me a moment to realize it was my own phone, and that Abby Madison, who somehow still didn’t know me after all this, didn’t have my number.
It was a text from Jay:
WHERE U AT?
• • •
They forgot to put the tarp back on. I guess it has to be part of your plan in the first place for you to forget, which I’m not sure it was. But either way, that was their fatal mistake. Nina was four bottles of food dye in when the dog came back. Not aware of any danger—only that the dog would now surely give them away—Lila and Nina took off, and had just reached the screen door when they heard the house door open. They assumed it was the adult male who had been yelling out the door earlier. In fact, it was Max’s seven-year-old sister, who walked out on the patio to find the dog she had picked out and named floundering in the water. The fact that he couldn’t swim did nothing to diminish his love for the pool, which was why the tarp was there.
Max’s sister jumped in to save him, but, already an unsteady swimmer, she was pulled down by the weight of her nightgown, which she wasn’t used to in the pool. Her father got to her in time, but just. She spent a week in intensive care. The dog didn’t fare as well. It wasn’t until Max’s sister was safely out of the water and whisked away in an ambulance that anyone thought to go looking for him. By then he was all the way down at the bottom of the pool. They found him sucked up against the drain.
We had no way of knowing any of this that night. When she cursed, Lindsey had only been reacting to Nina and Lila flying toward the car—running full speed from the back of the house, clearly excited, buzzing with some sort of news that Lindsey and I didn’t yet know. They were both so beautiful—Lila’s blond hair waving all over the place, reinforcing the chaos of the moment, Nina’s young, able legs pumping high-school-track-star fast. They were giggling even as they ran out of breath, and they kept charting the other’s progress as they made their way, like they were racing. Or like they didn’t want to leave the other behind. The bout of giggles that each shared look sparked made it clear that they had conspired over whatever they were laughing about. I remember feeling, when I saw them, the full weight of how young we were, and that we wouldn’t always be. It was one of those rare moments when you’re not sitting around waiting for something to happen or reflecting back on something that already did, but simply marveling at what is. When the present, the middle child of tenses, swallows the ever-dominant past and future, and your entire life floats within a single moment. I remember thinking, This is what it is to be young. You will tell this story later.
They came for Nina the next morning. Nina and Lila never came face-to-face with any witnesses. Jeremy Piker swore up and down that they never asked him any questions—they didn’t trace the getaway car back to him only to have him serve us up. He wasn’t a particularly pleasant person—my first distinct memory of him is a sneer in reaction to his little brother wiping out on a skateboard he had lent him, and he always told everybody who would listen which girls’ shirts his hands had had a chance to roam under. But he wasn’t cruel—he would never, for instance, have tried to knock his brother off the skateboard, or let his hands continue roaming when the owner of the shirt asked him to stop—and he didn’t care enough about us to lie to us. All of which meant, of course, one thing.
Max must have given them her name.
We understood, kind of. She was his sister—his little sister—and you don’t even stay in the hospital for a whole week when you have a baby, or your appendix is taken out, which were the only other reasons we had encountered for a stay there. It was touch and go for a while. The trip to the hospital might have been the least of it. And Max loved animals. The angriest I ever saw him was when Lindsey killed a spider that was creeping on the nacho tower we were enjoying in Nina’s front yard. He listed all of the ways spiders contributed to our ecosystem, and he was so obviously affected by it all that Lindsey didn’t even go back to eating the nachos until he had finished, which would mean more to you if you’d ever seen her eat nachos.
What we couldn’t understand was why the lone cruiser that pulled up in Nina’s driveway just before dawn that Sunday didn’t go on to make stops at Lindsey’s house, and mine and Lila’s. They wouldn’t have had to go far. For days after they came for her, we kept waiting for them to come for us, but they never did. Not even to question us or confirm whatever story Nina told them. We never knew how close they were to discovering the varying degrees to which the rest of us were involved. Nina never said, even when she came back. She was remanded to the juvenile detention center where she would serve her one-year sentence less than a week after it all happened, and our parents agreed it would be better if we didn’t visit her there, so she didn’t really have much chance to say.
Max knew us well enough by then to know that none of us ever did much alone.
For all the trouble that night caused, on the way home from Max’s house, Nina was electrified by the chase. Once we were out of the short, intersecting roads of his neighborhood and out on the open road she rolled down all the windows and blared her favorite Doors album and gave up the howl of joy that other girls in other li
ves give to the world upon being announced homecoming queen, or getting into college.
“That was crazy!” she said. “I thought for sure someone was going to stop us! I can’t believe we got away.”
“Yeah, barely,” said Lila, still panting in the front seat.
“No complaints from you!” Nina said, clearly too happy to be angry. “You didn’t think the doggie door was worth noting in your recon?”
“Whatever,” Lila said.
“Of course I’ve been to his house. He lives like five minutes from where we go to school. We go there all the time,” Nina said in a voice that, it would have been hard to deny, sounded exactly like Lila.
Lindsey and I had nothing to add. We gave in to the music and the feel of the air on our faces just a little. We were going to make it home.
“But when you think about it, it’s kind of good that we screwed up,” Nina said, almost babbling now. “I mean, it’s kind of like Max won this round or something. And people are always more inclined to like things they’re good at, right? I can’t wait to see what he comes up with for this.”
She was so animated, so cheerful, so sure that everything would be fine that she left no room for us to doubt it. We all slept soundly that night. But that certainty was only the arrogance of youth, which lasts only as long as you can avoid seeing, a certain number of times, an adult doing something they’ve expressly forbid you not to—even if it is mostly harmless—like pick your nose or talk critically of someone who’s just left the room. Before you’ve watched someone in generally good standing deliver something you know to be a lie without any hesitation, or stammer, sounding convincing even to you. Before you realize how much effect an arbitrary detail like the placement of a plastic tarp can have on the course of a life, and that the order that is projected upon the world by the people who teach you that there is one is really just for show. It’s the same arrogance of youth that leads to donuts in icy parking lots and chicken fights in murky waters with rocky floors. Things that are mostly harmless except for the scattered few for whom they aren’t. We couldn’t tell you if what decided the category you fell into was luck or fate or good planning any more than we could have told you why Sam Decker was a movie star and we didn’t have savings accounts, but we all knew—in the gut, without talking about it—that no matter how many rules you followed and how slowly you burned through your second chances, or how meticulously you’d counted the number of times you could flip a coin and have it land in your favor, everyone got slapped with the realities of life at some point—a standard new-shoe blister that turns into an infection you almost don’t survive; the one-night-stand pregnancy test that reads positive; the night you enjoy too much of your favorite not-quite-legal substance that has always gotten you through in the past; or being sent away from all the people you love because of a dark sense of humor that, until the day it stops working, only ever made people like you more.
To be fair, it’s the same arrogance of youth that allows for swan dives off suburban roofs into suburban pools by teenagers with bodies so beautiful even they can’t quite believe them—bodies built exactly to do foolish, unsafe things like that—and for the first sip of alcohol in the back of someone’s mom’s car, which almost never tastes as good as you think it will, but that you go on to recall almost reverentially, with pride that you were doing exactly what you should have been doing at that age. Not according to the law, but the elusive recipe for marinating a person that comes out on the happy ground between interesting and broken. It’s the arrogance of youth that would cause anyone to believe they might find success at the other end of a one-way ticket to Hollywood, giving an entire generation of girls the pleasure of their first crush, which even after it fades they’ll remember for the rest of their lives and giggle about with the other old women they shared these feelings with. It is the arrogance of youth that drives most of the wild, devilish stories that make your grandchildren like you more than they like their other set of grandparents—stories that are wicked without being evil.
And it’s only yours to lose once.
• • •
So what’s this Criminal Lingo thing you’re starting in three weeks?” Lindsey asked, probably trying to lighten the mood after the pigeon-corpse tirade capped by unanswered rings that carried with them the disappointment of the caller on the other end.
“Eh.” He wrinkled his nose, as if the question had been accompanied by a nasty smell. “I don’t really know.”
“Dude,” Nina said, “you’ve already told us everything else. You’re seriously gonna draw the line here?”
“No,” he said. “I just haven’t read the script rewrite yet, and apparently it’s totally different. Like different end and everything.”
“Aren’t you curious?” I asked. “What if they, like, kill off your character in the third scene now?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not worried about it.”
“Why?”
“I’m the only name in it. It’s a low-budget indie.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Nina. “Like some Blue Valentine bullshit or something?”
Decker looked at her skeptically.
“What, you’re surprised I saw Blue Valentine? I see a lot of indie movies; I just saw this one a few nights ago, which is why it was the first one that came to mind.” She started to take a sip of her beer and then stopped, the thought she had too pressing to wait for a swallow. “They put all that shit on pay-per-view now so that even the peasants can watch it. And, you know, pay for it.”
He laughed. “You make it sound like a conspiracy,” he said. “Isn’t it a good thing that it’s easier to watch good movies?”
“Don’t you mean films?” Lindsey asked.
Nina ignored her. “It would be if that shit was any good.”
He laughed again, totally unoffended. “Okay, fine,” he said, his palms up in surrender. “Tell me what the problem is with Blue Valentine. Maybe I can go back to Hollywood as your ambassador and make some crucial fixes.”
“Good,” she said. “You should.”
I was about to jump in and try to coax the conversation back from her before she said something truly unforgivable, but just then my phone buzzed with another text from Jay:
HEADING INTO THE CITY WITH THE GUYS. MEET UP?
I could feel Nina looking at me, pissed I wasn’t giving her big moment my full attention. Only ever able to worry about one thing at a time, I ignored the text and looked back up.
“I’m waiting,” Decker said.
“Okay, maybe it’s not even that it’s so bad, in a vacuum, but it’s supposed to be this elevated, like, art film, so much better and serious and wise than those movies with little blond architects and fashion editors running around hip cities in four-hundred-dollar high heels after the beefcakes you know they’re going to end up with, and those high school movies about the war between the popular kids and the nerds, but really they’re all the same.”
“They’re not. I promise you,” Decker said.
“They are.”
“Okay, fine. How?” Decker asked.
“Okay, take, for example, the movie She’s All That.”
“I love that movie,” Lindsey said.
“Yeah, no shit. You made us watch it like nine thousand times.”
“It wasn’t that many.”
“No, I didn’t even mind because that movie is really fucking good. But I remember everybody was all like, Oh, yeah, I love how they have this gorgeous girl and they put her hair in a ponytail and put glasses on her and are like, Oh, yeah, look at how ugly this obviously gorgeous person who is always going to be the hottest person in any high school is with these terrible glasses. Like it was such an obvious conceit. But then they do the exact same thing in Blue Valentine. I mean, the only thing that changed in their relationship between when it was a hipster fairy tale and when it became this screaming
nightmare is that he starts wearing horrible fat-man glasses and grows bad facial hair.”
Decker laughed, one sharp crack of a Ha, but he kept listening. He didn’t even look away to take a drink, just kept running his thumb up and down the side of the bourbon glass, the up-and-down motion of a nod.
“Even when things are shit he’s obviously a great dad. Funny as hell. He doesn’t even get mad when she lets the dog out and gets it killed. He’s still got those fucking biceps, and she looks at him like a Bible leper. And please, any man who knows how to kiss a woman the way he does when she’s waiting for him outside the moving company in her adorable plaid shirt—no questions asked, right, he’s just so happy to see her—still knows how to do that when he gets a little soft. Plus he’s, like, obviously the best person in the movie and, what, he loses some hair and grows a bad mustache and she won’t fuck him? That’s why God invented the fucking razor.”
Decker was shaking his head by now, but he was smiling with more teeth than he had the entire night. He was loving every word.
“And I mean, at least in She’s All That it goes in the right direction. The, like, hair transformation or whatever. And the glasses swap. Plus there’s that baller dance scene. But somehow that movie is simple and so transparent, but when they do it in Blue Valentine it’s a fucking Oscar parade.”
“No one won an Oscar for that movie,” Decker said, his bourbon-rubbing thumb pausing in recognition of this observation.
“You know what I mean.”
“Okay, but what about the end? When he goes totally apeshit and freaks out.”
“Oh,” she said, her maniacal politician posture deflating just a little. “I didn’t see the end.”
“Dude!” he said. “That’s cheating! Total foul! Technical foul.”
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