• • •
She got out eventually, of course. A year passes, even when you are eternally young. She came back with as little fuss and ceremony as she had left with. One day she was just there, at the three crosses. Lindsey and I weren’t even meeting there; we were on our way to the movie theater. I would say it was good timing that we happened to be walking by just then, given how much less frequently Lindsey and I saw each other that year than we had every other year of our lives, but it occurs to me now that Nina could have been out there any number of nights before the one we finally went strolling by. She looked comfortable where she sat on the ground, between the second and third crosses, like she had settled in, had been there for some time but didn’t even mind because she had time to spare.
Lindsey and I stopped dead in front of her. For a second no one said anything, we just looked down at her while she looked back up at us. Lindsey and I half turned toward each other and then pounced on her, whooping as if one of us had just scored a goal against an opponent that made it unlikely.
“Bitches, don’t start,” she said, but it was clear from her voice, muffled under Lindsey’s armpit and my chest, that she was happy.
When we finally rolled off, we sat on either side of her, one for each of the crosses.
“Where are the others?” she asked, as if we had all agreed to meet ahead of time.
The few times Lindsey and I did talk about Nina—always in dark rooms, watching movies, so we had somewhere else to look—it was always the same thing we wondered: if she would want anything to do with Max when she got back.
She saw Lindsey’s eyes and mine look for each other again.
“What?”
We both opened our mouths at the same time to speak, but our flapping jaws only underscored the fact that we had nothing to say.
“Is he still pissed? I just need five minutes. I’ll be able to explain everything.”
“Nina,” I finally said, starting with her name just to buy more time. “Max is gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”
“He doesn’t live in Florida anymore,” Lindsey said. “Or if he does we don’t know where he is. They sold the house.”
“We drove by,” I said unhelpfully, trying to prove that we hadn’t just resigned ourselves to rumor. We had looked into it the way she would have.
“He’s not at the day school anymore.”
“Was it us?” Nina asked, resting her arms on her knees and looking at the ground between them. “What happened, I mean?”
“Nah,” I said.
“I mean, I doubt it,” said Lindsey.
But we didn’t know for sure, and she could tell.
“Wouldn’t Lila know? I mean, he didn’t just disappear.”
“Don’t look at each other,” she said in the pause that followed, clearly exasperated at the possibility. “Just tell me.”
“Things got weird after you left,” I said, tossing the leaf I had been twisting more violently than I intended to.
“What do you mean? What’s she been doing? Is she doing it now?” She turned from one to the other of us, trying to decide which of us had the least offensive answer before settling her attention.
“I don’t know. I mean, we don’t see her.”
“Lila? You don’t see Lila?” Her back-and-forth became more frantic now. Like there was a choking man on the ground in front of us and she couldn’t figure out why no one was doing anything to help him.
“She was dating Max,” Lindsey said when it became clear I wasn’t going to.
“But Max is okay, right? We’re sure he didn’t, like, die or anything.”
“No,” Lindsey said, and sighed. “I’m pretty sure we would’ve heard about that.”
“Nina, did you hear her?” I asked, suddenly pissed that she wasn’t. “Max and Lila were dating. And I’m pretty sure he’s the one who, you know . . .”
“Weird,” she said, but whether she meant that Max and Lila had dated or that this had been enough to make us stop seeing Lila, she never said. She could simply have been so caught unaware by these turns that she could only manage to repeat back to us the word that we had used.
We all looked out across the street, not saying anything, watching the streetlights go on one at a time, trying not to look at the stop sign that Max preferred to the crosses. In the rare instances when Nina didn’t know exactly what to say, she changed the subject while she figured it out, expertly continuing in a totally separate conversation as she sorted and sifted. She had no idea I knew she did that, but I could always see the work going on behind her eyes.
“What movie are you guys going to?” she asked, turning to me.
“How did you know?” Lindsey asked, mystified.
“Your pockets,” she said, nodding at Lindsey’s thighs. “They’re bulging with candy. You cheapos never spring for actual movie-theater candy.”
She was onto us, always.
After that, none of us mentioned either of them, and Nina, for the first time in her life, didn’t say much of anything. She seemed totally uninterested in everything around her, like she was too tired to care, or like they had drugged her in juvie and we were all still waiting for it to wear off. But I would catch her, sometimes, looking over my shoulder, or pausing right in the middle of a thought or sentence, to look out on the horizon, and I knew she was waiting for Lila. Not convinced, somehow, that she was staying away on her own accord. She never came out and asked us, but you could feel it punctuating trips to the DQ for Blizzards and even our long sessions of lounging in one of our bedrooms: But there was no fight or anything, right? Or Who told you they were dating? It was the questions that haunted us more than even Lila’s absence. Just as Nina would never put these words to air, she would never come out and say that, as badly as she wanted to see Lila, Lila had to come to her. She had been willing to take two people’s worth of blame for that night. Could even, maybe, understand Lila’s indiscretion with Max—she was loyal above all the other things she surely was—but she was also proud. Too proud to go seeking out thin excuses from someone who should have been falling over herself to produce them.
Lila never came. We never stumbled upon her at the crosses the way we had Nina, or at Frankie Lane, or at the abandoned swimming pools we still used as our own. She had no way of knowing that Nina was out, at first, but word must have eventually made its way to her, even at the day school. Whether she had found a way to morph her guilt and desperation into anger or simply never thought of us was one more thing I never knew.
In those first days back, spent waiting, Nina seemed nervous. She seemed expectant at times, and empty at others, but never angry. And every time I noticed that absence of anger, I thought again of that day on the bridge when I made it clear to Lila that the only thing that mattered was whether or not she was dating Max, and here, now, the only thing that seemed to matter to Nina was that she come back. I hadn’t told any lies to Nina. I had told her we stopped seeing Lila when she started dating Max, but I wondered, sometimes, if I had given Lila just enough of an opening, if it had been on my watch that she ran. Strangely, it made me feel included more than anything else. Like we all had an equal hand in this mess. Nina for being too stubborn to walk away from an idea everyone had told her was bad; Lila for searching for Nina in all the wrong places when she went away; me for proving my loyalty to Nina by sending away the one person she most wanted to see; Lindsey simply for always letting other people lead the way, for smoothing things over instead of preventing them, for reacting, always, instead of acting. It was the last thing we did together—sinking the ship we had taken years to build.
I posed what I did, I think, just so I could introduce Lila back into the conversation. I thought being allowed to say her name might release something. It had been the thing to get us into this mess, why not the thing to get us out? Maybe two wrongs canceled each oth
er out after all.
I told Lindsey first, giving her only the rough edges of the prank I had drafted.
“Really?” Lindsey asked. We were in the hallway at our lockers between second and third periods. The idea had come to me in the algebra class I was taking for a second time and really should have been focusing on. Instead I let the idea build and gel, expand and collapse back into itself throughout class, and decided to pose it right away. I was eager to know if it was as good an idea as it had sounded in my head. “I kind of think that’s the last thing we need. Things are finally calm again; we don’t have to worry about Nina anymore.”
“Seriously?” I said. “That’s the line you’re going with? She can’t have been much worse off in juvie than she is now.”
“I guess I just don’t get what the end goal is here.”
“Maybe Lila’s staying away because she feels bad. And this can be, like, the thing that evens the score. Each bad deed cancels the other.”
“You don’t think she’s gonna be pissed?”
“I mean, probably, but what are we actually doing? Ruining some stupid party with girls she probably doesn’t want to be friends with anyway. Once she knows we’re back, she’s not gonna need them anymore. At the very least, she can’t ignore us anymore.”
“And if she doesn’t see it that way?”
“What do you mean?”
“If she doesn’t want to be back? I mean”—she turned from the locker she had been piling books into haphazardly—“what if it isn’t guilt?”
The anger that crippled my muscular system at this possibility must have shown on my face, because she softened her theory.
“I just mean, what if she’s happier now? It’s been a long time. She’s had time to settle.”
“Then fuck her,” I said. “She deserves it, then.”
From the same source who had informed us that Max and Lila were dating, we had learned that Lila was rushing the day school’s equivalent of a sorority, the Day Owls. Ostensibly it was a community-service organization—the Owls visited old ladies in nursing homes and baked cookies for prisoners—but from one look at the pictures of the girls in the group that we found online, it was clear that they were at least as pretty and popular as they were good-hearted; their average body fat had to be below one percent. It was the kind of organization designed for girls like Carine and the patterns.
Of course, we were eager—greedy, even—to learn the details of how Lila had been passing the time without us, and disappointed in the answer. Worst of all was the news that Lila had been designated the leader of her rushing class, which meant she was in charge of throwing the party at which it was announced who had been accepted into the Owls. From a single call to the school placed as the mother of one of the bitchiest-looking Owls in the picture, we got the name of the caterer who was doing the event. (We claimed her daughter was deathly allergic to those fried Asian noodles they put in salads, and that we needed to call the caterer and hear for ourselves, right from the source, that they didn’t plan to use them.) From there, it had not been terribly difficult to track down Jeremy Piker’s best friend’s older brother, who worked at the temp agency that staffed the catering company and, susceptible to all kinds of bribes, agreed to let us crash a catering squad for one night.
Our plan, once we infiltrated the party, was to spike the punch with a vicious amount of vodka. While all of the Owls surely drank in unflattering, unladylike quantities off campus, to get drunk at an official, school-sanctioned event meant to showcase their contributions to the community and a “commitment to the legacy as it soars into the future,” whatever the fuck that meant, would be unthinkable. At the very least, Lila wouldn’t get in; best-case scenario, the Owls would be puking up and down the school hallways.
When we finally told Nina we were reminded how bad off she really was, because when she heard the word prank, before she heard what we had in mind, and who our victim was, she unwilted for a second. It was like a neighbor had finally remembered to water the flowers he had promised to take care of just before they died for good, just before you had to throw them out. And it reminded us of what she had been, and proved that we had not only imagined her the way she used to be. The legend of Nina was real. Which by then only reminded us again what we had lost. Once she understood the scope of our plans, she retreated back into herself. She occasionally chimed in a word or two here—a fact she remembered about the layout of the school from that first locker prank, a suggestion on where we might buy clothes that resembled catering uniforms for cheap. She never looked up from whatever she was doing when she said these things, though, and we got the sense that they were automatic. That for her sitting in on our conversations was like hearing a group of small children struggling to name the color of the sky. There was no way not to produce the answer when it was so ready, but there was no triumph in something that easy.
As we had on the day we drove to Max’s house, we agreed to meet at the school flagpole on the night of the party, across from where the car we had borrowed and were still not old enough to drive would be waiting for us.
It never occurred to us that she might not show, but Lindsey and I knew as soon as we arrived that she wouldn’t be coming. Never one for subtlety, Nina had masking-taped her note to the flagpole. It was waving in greeting, visible when we were still a good twenty yards away from it. As we made our way across grass bent at severe angles, flattened from years of student tread, I knew that whatever was waiting for us wasn’t going to be good.
After I read it, I sat down on the base of the pole, dumbfounded, my catering cummerbund dangling like an arm or a leg hanging at an unnatural angle, one that meant it was broken. Lindsey started to take down the note, methodically pulling away the thick tape so we didn’t have to litter or deface anything on top of everything else, the only one who would think of something like that.
Couldn’t quite, it said.
Lindsey and I had no way to know if Nina was only scared to get caught again—if it was a lesson learned—or if she loved Lila that much. She didn’t become an altar girl after her time served, of course. When Regina Bresford started a rumor that Lindsey was a lesbian a few months later, Nina poured pudding in her gas tank, and later still she punched Danny Raker right in the middle of the prom dance floor when he grabbed her ass without asking, even though she would have said yes if he had, hard enough that he left without any parting words, cupping his jaw in pain. When I think about it now, I think about the cat I had years after all this happened, one who was capable of incredible jumps, from one piece of furniture to another nowhere near it, who would still, sometimes, sit at your feet and mewl to be picked up and put on the bed or the couch next to you. Who could have made the jump and a million that were far more difficult, but, for whatever reason, didn’t always feel like making it. Wanted a break every once in a while.
Lindsey and I didn’t wonder about this on the way home from the flagpole. In fact, we didn’t say anything, but when we got to the turn in the road at which we would have had to take a left to go home and a right for Nina’s, we both took a right without saying anything.
What I can tell you is that the scrawl was different in the second of the two lines of the note, almost as if two different people had written them. The first line was all Nina—loops and pure abandon, for everything, including what her penmanship might look like to anyone but her; the second was smaller, printed out in block letters. It was more determined, bolder, more final and declarative. It was easy to read, even in the dark.
Let it go.
• • •
Decker was wearing a watch. Judging from the thick leather cuff it was attached to and the massive size of its face, we had assumed it was for show, but now that his phone was off, he actually used it to check the time.
“New York and Florida are in the same time zone, right?”
“Um, do you seriously want us to answer th
at?” Lindsey asked.
“Yes,” he said, muffled, since he had laid his head down on his arms, which were folded on the table in a distinctly Seven Up–like posture.
“Okay. Yes. Why?”
“I have to be on set in four and a half hours.”
“Fuck that,” said Nina, taking another gulp of beer, the only one still drinking at this point. “I thought you were gonna tell your agent to shove it anyway. You are way too big for the frickin’ Disney Channel.”
“No way, man. It would be such bad press if I bailed on a show for kids,” he said, shaking his head into his arms now. “And I’m already here.”
“Isn’t it gonna be bad press to show up still wasted to a kids’ show?” I asked.
“There are ways to get my energy back between now and then. And with a few pieces of gum, kids don’t know the difference.”
“Just don’t go to sleep,” said Nina. “If you go to sleep now, it’s a lost cause. No sleep is way better than three or four hours at this point.”
“Now, that I would agree with,” he said, pointing at Nina without picking his head back up.
The Regents’ “Barbara-Ann” came on—a song that, judging from previous reactions to previous songs, would’ve topped Decker’s best-of-the-sixties list, a list he had surely crafted at some point or another—but he didn’t move. I thought about poking him, but before I could Sal walked back into the bar, still chewing on the end of his cigar. As if Decker could sense him coming, he finally lifted his head up, his entire body a weary smile.
“Sal, my man!” Decker shouted when he was still twenty feet away. “Livin’ the dream.”
Sal nodded at him and pulled his pants up again when he got to the head of our table.
“Next time you go out there, man, you gotta take me with you. We’ll smoke those cigars and you can tell me more trivia. I’ll impress you, I swear.”
“Who would watch these girls, then?” Sal asked, clearly flattered to be invited into a huddle with this man of some repute, even if he wasn’t sure what it was. “One of us has to do it. We’re the only ones with any sense.”
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