Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  Decker was the only one surprised. That was just Nina, we knew, always willing to take a hard stand on a subject she came to casually, one she really didn’t know that much about.

  “Whatever, I got a sense of it,” Nina said. “And I don’t care what he did at the end, I’d still fuck him.”

  “Okay, what if I promise to keep the same haircut and eyewear for the entirety of this movie, and you promise to watch the end of Blue Valentine?”

  “Eh. If I have time.”

  “I’m just saying, if you don’t see the ending I think you might be missing the point.”

  “No way,” said Nina. “You’re missing the point. And so are those movies.”

  “Which is?”

  “People don’t change. You can put a pretty girl in glasses, but she’s still got a twenty-six-inch waist. And you can put the hero in a fat suit, but he’s still a good guy.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I feel you on the glasses thing, but people can change. Like, in theory.”

  “Yeah,” Decker said. “I’m with her.”

  “No,” Nina said. “You said so yourself. You’d still cheat, all these years later, at Seven Up. And Abby still uses her pageant pose.”

  “Yeah,” Decker conceded, unconvinced. “But by that I meant how crazy it is that those small things—habits and tics—don’t change when everything else about a person does.”

  Nina didn’t say anything, but shook her head into her beer.

  “You’re young,” he said. “Once you’ve been out in the real world for a couple of years, you’ll see.”

  I braced myself. The real world was a trigger phrase for Nina, and tonight was no exception.

  “Jesus,” she said. “I hate it when people say that. Seriously. What is the real world? Like, I get it. You’ve been to Togo, West Africa, and Cannes or whatever. But I don’t get how any of those places are more real than this bar.”

  She was gesturing the way she did only when a concept had really planted roots in her.

  “Or how anything that happens there says more about anything or how it means any more than what happens here.”

  We had always believed, before Nina went away, that someone other than us would realize that she was destined to lead the universe, even if she would only get it into trouble, lead it into ruin. Not because of any career or calling—she was too unambitious and restless to go to college, even before she went away, and too smart, too scrappy to be a model. She could never have taken direction the way it would have required. She just had a wit that, if the world was to be trusted, would somehow find its way into a fur coat and a series of regular lobster dinners. I think we all relished the thought, because we knew some of this good fortune would make its way down to us, but we also dreaded the inevitability of it, because we knew it would separate her from us.

  It was part of why we distrusted Lila’s good fortune. It was supposed to be Nina.

  We knew in similarly vague and intangible terms, once she got back, that this was never going to happen. That Nina was always going to live within a one-mile radius of her mother. And when she went on tangents like this she was declaring to everyone that this was okay.

  “The world always has been and always will be exactly what you make it,” she said, finishing strong. She turned to me and I averted my eyes, pretending not to notice she wanted my attention in particular. That I was beginning to waver in my complicity in this illusion that there was nowhere else in the world that might suit us better, and there was nothing we might want that we didn’t have, was unforgivable. “You can find whatever you really need wherever you are.”

  • • •

  There were pieces of our friendship with Lila that might’ve been salvaged. We were angry and confused at the disparity between their punishments, but, because Nina was gone, we had no way of knowing what exactly happened when that police cruiser showed up in Nina’s driveway. We couldn’t be sure that Lila had confirmed what everyone already assumed—that girls like Nina were a bad influence on girls like Lila, and that Lila had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. When bad things happen to girls like Nina, people like to say they had it coming. There was an equally good chance that Nina had insisted—the way only Nina could—on handling the situation and taking the fall, and that the grand result was only proof of her being a good friend, not Lila being a bad one. And it was impossible to ignore, of course, that even though we had stayed in the car, we had been there, too. About a month after Nina was sentenced, though, we heard from a boy who had been in Marie’s class before she transferred and who sometimes stole cigarettes for us from his mother’s purse that Lila and Max had started dating.

  Because she was one of only four people outside my family who knew my middle name and I had been there in the third grade when Nina had told her what sex actually entailed and she cried on and off for the rest of the day, when Lila called late one Saturday afternoon a few weeks after Nina went away, I agreed to meet her.

  We met on the bridge we called Frankie Lane after Lindsey’s grandpa, dead almost a decade by then. A widower himself, he had stayed with Lindsey and her family for a few weeks after his daughter-in-law died, another well-meaning male crammed into a house already full of them, one that really only needed a woman’s touch. He had taken Lindsey and her brothers to the bridge every day to look at the alligators that congregated underneath it. He took a liking to one of them and started feeding it cold cuts and other treats, and named him George. Lindsey’s father had been endeared by this tradition—one he knew only from secondhand stories, since his work schedule prevented him from going himself—until, on a rare day off, he had joined his father and children on their ritual outing and discovered that the gator was not the average six- or seven-foot gator he was imagining from the stories he heard, but one of the biggest alligators he had ever seen firsthand. A full twenty-foot stunner whose tail alone could have knocked them all out in one swipe. Horrified at the evident joy his children got from going right up to the edge of the small bridge’s railing and dropping food to their new pet, and sure from the ease with which they did it that they did it regularly, he forbade any more trips there. Lindsey was too young when it happened to remember any of this, but it had become one of her favorite stories, and ours. In junior high we had started going to look at the alligators, and to see if George was still there. He wasn’t, but plenty of other alligators were, which was enough to keep us coming back.

  We used this meeting spot for outings we’d just as soon no one else know about—it was farther from home and less vulnerable to passersby. For a movie at the dollar Cinema Savers we would meet at the crosses, but it was Frankie Lane that would gather us before parties thrown without an adult chaperone. I had hoped, by suggesting we meet here when she called and said she needed to talk to me, to convey just how sordid I considered the issue at hand.

  Lila was already there when I pedaled up, still sitting on her bike, doing nothing to shade herself from the sun that sat straight above her, making everything too bright to look directly at.

  “Hey,” she said, turning around to smile at me, like we were here for a bike ride, or to hang out, like any other day.

  “Hi.”

  “It’s been a while since we’ve been here. I wonder how many of these alligators are new,” she said, nodding down at them. “I can’t remember why we stopped coming here, do you?”

  I didn’t look down at the alligators but at her new designer jeans, and the haircut I knew she hadn’t gotten at the Supercuts by our house.

  “I guess they live a long time, though. Maybe these guys will be here longer than any of us,” she said, ignoring my silence, or trying to fill it. “Maybe we should start coming here more often. Max is right about the crosses being depressing.”

  Any hope that this meeting would be productive vanished at the physical reaction I had to her saying his name.
<
br />   “Why did you call me?”

  “Right,” she said, shrinking into the timid, apologetic posture I had wanted from the start. “Look, I know it sounds bad. I can only imagine what people are saying.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” I said it in the emptiest voice I could muster.

  “I can’t stand to think what you guys are saying,” she said, fiddling with the handlebar streamers she’d had since she got the bike for her tenth birthday. Lila’s dad had had Nina ride past the patch of sidewalk where Lila, Lindsey, and I sat eating cupcakes, talking about how annoying it was that Nina was always late. I wondered how long it would be before the bike was replaced, too. When I didn’t answer right away, she looked up at me. I could tell she was hoping we could laugh it all off. That all of us were too tightly bound to one another, and for too long, for any of this to have any lasting consequences.

  “We’re careful to only say things that are true,” I said. “Which is why I’m here. Set me straight.”

  She squared her shoulders back and took a deep breath, ready to launch into whatever speech she had prepared. She opened her mouth but then changed course.

  “Wait. Where’s Lindsey?”

  “Her brother had a softball game.”

  “Oh,” she said. Lindsey had enough brothers that one of them always had a softball game. There were enough to go to that she could afford to miss one, and she often did.

  “I’m not screwing her over,” she said in a rush, suddenly realizing how dire her standing was with us. She said it like it was poison that she was trying to get out of her body as quickly as possible, which maybe it was.

  “You already did,” I said. “When you let her take the fall. We all did.”

  “Wait, Nina didn’t tell you?” she asked, leaning forward, really looking at me for the first time, confused and eager to set the record straight.

  I was embarrassed that I had no idea what she was talking about. Even after all that had happened, Nina still belonged more to her than to me.

  “She told them she was the only one there. It was her decision. I didn’t even ask her to do it. What’s the point of all of us getting in trouble for this?”

  “Fine. But how can you stand to be around Max when he just handed her over like that? He had to know she didn’t mean any harm.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she said, shaking her head and looking down at the ground, trying to convince the concrete. “The police were involved. If he said he had no idea who might have done something like this, he would have been lying. You know him. You know he doesn’t know how to lie. It wouldn’t even have occurred to him. And . . .”

  “What?”

  “It’s his little sister. You can’t really understand if you don’t have one.”

  I hated her then for bringing Marie into it. It felt like she was trying to take her away from us, too.

  “Well, I guess there’s just a lot I don’t get, isn’t there?”

  She shook her head sadly, making no indication that she understood I was being sarcastic.

  “But none of this actually matters,” I said. “I really only have one question for you.”

  She didn’t say anything, knowing what it was.

  “Are you or aren’t you?”

  When she still didn’t say anything I turned around and started riding away, feeling how inappropriate my getaway vehicle was. It felt like we were in territory way too adult to be navigated with a bike you got in junior high, but I kept my chin up as I pedaled.

  A few months later, Max would disappear, along with the rest of his family, starting rumors that upstaged the ones about what happened that night, and whatever was going on with Max and Lila. It was like putting a real supermodel next to the prettiest girl in a small rural high school. Between the two of us, Lindsey and I heard everything from them having moved to Texas as part of the witness protection program, to them having been taken out in a mob hit after Max’s father tried to skim some off the top from the men who had invented the trick. We might’ve asked Lila what happened—she would’ve known better than anyone—but we hadn’t been talking to her for months by then.

  That day, Max was still very much around, and I wondered, as I picked up speed, if he was somewhere close by, waiting for Lila to finish what was surely going to be an unpleasant exchange. The possibility made me angrier than I got when I rode past Nina’s empty house.

  There were only thirty yards between me and her when Lila called after me, panicked at the sight of my back. I must have been getting smaller and smaller as I pedaled away.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said.

  I stopped my bike but didn’t turn around.

  “Okay. Fine. What is it?”

  “I’m not doing this to her. He’s just the only thing I have left of her.” She was desperate now. You could hear it in her voice.

  “She isn’t dead. She’s coming back.”

  “But it won’t be the same. You have to know that.”

  And even though I did, I started pedaling again, and didn’t look back.

  • • •

  By now Abby’s “persistence” had reached a feverish, maniacal peak. The calls were coming with almost no pause between them. Decker’s batting them away after only a ring or two did nothing to dissuade her. We had to wonder if getting wasted in the earliest hours of the morning was something that people did in Italy. We couldn’t imagine behaving this way in any context other than extreme, I-might-need-my-stomach-pumped intoxication.

  “Never do long distance,” he said, finally shutting the phone off altogether.

  We all nodded attentively, like he was giving us advice we were going to need imminently—how to make our voices travel across the stage we were about to step onto, or how to get around the defensive men we’d be facing.

  “If that Jay guy tries to open a franchise out of state,” he said, nodding at me, really wound up now, “let him do it without you. It doesn’t even have to be out of the state. Don’t even try to make it work from here to, I don’t know, Miami.”

  And then, as if Jay were running a race with Abby Madison and she had just passed the baton to him, my phone went from the isolated blasts of a text’s buzz to the steady hum of a ringing phone set to vibrate, and I knew he was calling me. The fact that Jay was eager to be present at the scene where he was a topic of conversation, with the very person I was trying to keep him away from, paired with the fact that my own phone problem had exploded at the very moment Decker had taken control of his, was starting to make me panic. All this was set, of course, to a 1950s musical doo-wop background, which seemed, suddenly, fresh and timely from Decker’s enthusiasm, rather than the vintage throwback we always thought of it as. It gave everything at the table a surreal quality. I felt like I was floating, or like the universe was shrinking—had, in fact, started running out of characters and settings along with decades and musical styles, and that it was only a matter of time before all the ones left were in a room together. The alcohol, and the movie star among us, and the persistent buzzing that felt like a mechanized mosquito, was starting to make me feel like I was dreaming. The conviction in Decker’s speech—still going strong—drew me back to him.

  “Long distance makes everything more difficult. I don’t know how we could ever have kids when we can’t even find a night to have dinner on the same continent.”

  I stiffened at the word kids at the same time that every atom in my body shifted all the nervous energy it had been training on the threat of Jay coming here to Lindsey and Nina. Children were a concept we’d never discussed, even in the hypothetical.

  “Whoah!” said Lindsey. “Who said anything about children?”

  “C’mon. It’s not a secret that after two years women start looking at rings, and e-mailing them to their friends, and dropping hints and making a point of fawning over other newly engaged co
uples, and talking about them when they’re not around. And what’s the point of getting married if you’re not gonna have kids? I mean, both of my brothers had knocked their wives up less than a year after they had gotten married.”

  “Yeah, but I bet your brothers don’t have their faces on buses,” said Nina. “Doesn’t that buy you even a little time?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But it starts to feel, at some point, like you’re falling behind. All the guys I went to high school with, my brothers, even the guys I used to cater with and bartend with—they’re all doing it. And sure, it looks, for the most part, pretty miserable. They’ve gotten fat, and the lack of sleep, man, it’s like a second nose for as subtle as the effects of that are. But, you know, they also love their kids like maniacs. Like the way a four-year-old loves her new puppy. Guys who you never would’ve guessed would care about anything other than getting laid and making money. And, you know, it’s just something I always assumed I would do. It’s just, you know, something you do, unless you’ve made a conscious decision not to, which I never did.”

  “So, dude, go knock Abby Madison up,” Lindsey said. “She’d be superhot pregnant. And I’m pretty sure you guys can afford it.”

  “Babies are in right now,” said Nina.

  “I don’t know, man. It feels, sometimes, like everything that happens out there is fake. Not even in a superficial, plastic kind of way. I’m not having some no-one-has-a-soul existential crisis. I’ve actually met a lot of really nice people doing what I do. People I like and trust and relate to. I don’t mean plastic fake in a bad way, is what I’m saying. It just feels totally divorced from the way every other human every other place does things. And there’s just such little overlap between that life and life everywhere else. And, you know, that’s fine for me, and maybe it’s fine for Abby, but we chose that, you know? And God knows it has perks. Like perks you guys can’t even imagine. No offense. But it feels unfair to bring kids into the world and make them live in some weird, sci-fi-ish isolation chamber from the rest of the human experience. I see four-year-old birthday parties at the Ivy and I literally want to go have a vasectomy.”