Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  “That’s the truth,” he said. “I watched them while you were away. Those other ones stayed in their corner.”

  “Dude, we’re not farm animals,” Lindsey said, incredulous even in her drunken state.

  “One of these days, I’m gonna go back home and open a bar just like this there,” Decker said, ignoring her. “I’m gonna hire my brothers to work there, I’m gonna have inside jokes with all the regulars. I’m gonna raise my frickin’ kids there.”

  “Dude, in a bar?” Nina asked. “That’s probably worse than the Ivy.”

  I would’ve had my own case against his plan, but just then my phone buzzed again, signaling another text:

  YOU AT THE SHAMROCK? I’LL COME. I’M NOT FAR.

  • • •

  When we got to Nina’s all the lights were on in the house. We walked in without knocking to find Nina on the couch, an entire sleepover’s worth of snacks before her. The remote poised in her hand.

  “What the fuck took you guys so long?” she said. “I’ve had this cued up for almost an hour. You’re lucky I didn’t start it.”

  “What are we watching?” Lindsey asked, picking up a handful of salt-and-vinegar chips at the same time that she dropped in the nearest chair.

  I looked over at her like, Seriously? She chomped violently on a chip in response.

  “We’re watching Dirty Dancing and we’re drinking every time someone kicks their leg above their waist,” Nina said, nudging the bottle of peach schnapps on the coffee table in front of her. “We have orange juice and Sprite in the fridge to mix.”

  I opened my mouth to ask her why she’d changed her mind. How she wasn’t dying to see Lila just one more time, at least long enough to demand answers. The prank was mine, yes, but it was only to summon Lila. To poke her back awake to actual life. The rest was up to Nina. But she actually seemed happy, sitting there in the neon-orange T-shirt we all had an identical version of, a glass of God-knows-what in the mug she’d painted at Lindsey’s twelfth-birthday party, when we all got to paint one mug and Nina had painted what was obviously a phallic design. She had done it to get back at the lady who ran the place and who had told her she couldn’t use more than four colors. The purple penis was turned gleefully away from her and toward us. It was, suddenly, like she had never left. Like she had decided to excise that year of her life right out of the story, right along with Lila. She refused to speak of Lila from that night on, even when we found ourselves across from her in bars. She stopped waiting. Once she decided that Lila was gone, or gone enough that it wasn’t worth risking pushing her even further away, to the point that obliterated not only all the things that might have lay ahead, but all the things we had shared, there was no going back. And certainty was the currency Nina ran on.

  I wonder, now, if in needing her to be back I did her a disservice by corroborating the chunk of our past she’d cut right out. I’m not sure, though, that I would have gotten to keep her otherwise, if maybe pretending wasn’t part of the deal. So while I wonder, I don’t regret.

  “My mom had to take me to the grocery store with her today. She’s not allowed to leave me alone at the house for three months, which is awesome. I put a ton of extra shit in the cart. So we have the stuff for pigs in a blanket if you want. But I’m not making them.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll go at the boring part.”

  “There isn’t one!” Lindsey said, already moving closer to the TV.

  Nina gave me the private look we had for all the things Lindsey did that made us think that, in another life, in the one where she kept her mother, she would have been a total drama-camp queen.

  “I swear to God, Lindsey, if you start singing along I’m going to shave your eyebrows when you fall asleep. And you,” she said, turning to me. “When do I get to meet the boyfriend?” She said the word the way she might’ve said cunnilingus.

  “Jay?”

  “You have more than one boyfriend?” she asked. “I’m impressed. Seriously, though. I have big plans for us this year. I need to make sure he’s on board.”

  I would’ve worried about how quiet he would’ve surely been in her huge, neon presence, but I was too relieved that there would be someone else’s plans to follow again. And while I wasn’t exactly proud of Jay, I had been a little wounded at her refusal to even ask who he was when I dropped his name casually, unwilling to accept one more change.

  “Whatever you say,” I said.

  “Oh, shit, I almost forgot. Elaine went to the nail salon and copped a bunch of magazines. She always pretends like she bought them, but I know she’s totally filching them from the salon. Some of them are even marked with the salon’s name, which probably means they’re onto her. We should get our fill before they ban her from the premises,” she said, wandering into the kitchen and then out again with a small stack of magazines. “Get it while it’s good, ladies.”

  While Lindsey and I were running around occupying ourselves with the tools of Nina’s previous life, Nina had been taking stock of the materials available to her, I saw, the way every master craftsman did. She had been calculating what was left, really. Now that she had made her measurements, she was ready to do what she always did. To charge out into the world she had found waiting for her at full speed—recklessly, even—doing the sort of things she did best—spiking movies meant for little girls, making new couples squirm, indulging in the hot goods procured by a parent always meant to be more of an accomplice than a guide. This charge would happen in a world Lila was no longer a part of, so she could not be in the line of fire.

  “I call the one with Jackson Garrett on the cover,” said Lindsey, whipping around from the TV, which she had scooted up to so that there were only six inches between her face and the screen.

  “You would,” said Nina, tossing it to her even though we both knew Lindsey would be so engrossed in the movie that it would take her hours to make it through the magazine. She passed me the second-best issue and opened the one beneath it.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said. “Why is everyone wearing leopard print? Is Russian hooker, like, a trend now?”

  It was with that comment, somehow, that the transformation was permanent. Lindsey looked back at me and smiled. It was like our parents just told us they were getting back together.

  We stayed up until three that morning, but the cereal and the underwear stayed where they belonged.

  • • •

  Even though I could barely feel my legs by that point in the night, when I read Jay’s text, my panic was physical. Jay being at the Shamrock would completely shatter the illusion that we were somewhere else. Somewhere far away from the lives we’d all have to go back to soon enough. The idea of Jay and Sam Decker meeting was the most horrifying possibility I could fathom, and for some reason, Sam Decker is the person this made me irrationally angry at.

  “I don’t buy it,” I said.

  “What?” he asked, looking at me with roaming, unfocused eyes, ready to laugh at whatever joke I was setting up.

  “You’re not going back to Alaska any more than I’m going to Hollywood,” I said.

  “And how do you know that?” he asked, suddenly less sloppy—he sat up a little straighter, the way he might’ve if a cop had pulled him over in this state. Ready to answer questions, but not necessarily honestly.

  “Because you would’ve done it by now if you were going to,” I said. “I’m sure you wouldn’t even have to buy whatever bar you want to. They’d be so happy to have you back they’d probably just give it to you.”

  “Maggie,” Nina said. She had eyes I hadn’t seen since I almost let slip where we were really going to be when we said we had an overnight orientation for driver’s ed sophomore year.

  “Well, look. It’s not that simple. I pay my mother’s mortgage, and all of my siblings’,” he said. “And they don’t exactly live in the house we grew up in, if you know what I
mean.”

  “You don’t actually have to move back. That’s not what I mean. I just mean that I think you’d probably hate your life just as much if you’d never left. Being poor and ordinary isn’t exactly the joyride you seem to be imagining.”

  Lindsey tried to help, as always.

  “I mean, it sounds like you’re a little sick of the pace of your life, right? But it isn’t all bad. You’re not, like, alone or anything. You have Abby, who must know what it’s like. I mean, I know you haven’t exactly been thrilled to talk to her, but that’s just because we’ve had a lot going on over here, right? I hate talking on the phone or checking in with other people when I’m having a good time, even if it’s someone I like. And like you said, the phone is pretty horrible. I mean, she really wanted to talk to you. That’s gotta count for something, right? You guys are gonna share an agent soon.”

  As if she had any idea what that meant.

  “Is there a question in there?” he asked, but he was smiling, with mischievous, squinty, I’m-just-fucking-with-you eyes. Lindsey was irresistible when she rambled.

  “Not really. I mean, no. I mean . . . it’s just . . . My dad always used to say, really the key to life is just finding someone good to be on your team. To, like, help you through it, right? And they used to go at it like cats and dogs. I mean, at least that’s what my brothers say. I mean, I’m sure there were times when they didn’t take each other’s calls. But everyone knew how much they loved each other. And you guys. I mean, I can’t even imagine that. You guys have, like, an empire.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he groaned. “You sound like her.”

  We all froze at the way he said her. It was not the way Sam Decker was supposed to refer to Abby Madison. Not picking up her calls was one thing; this was another.

  “And that word. It’s exactly the word she uses. Empire. Has she been saying that shit in magazines? Is that why you said it? I truly can’t figure out what having an empire means in the twenty-first century. Just a joint checking account?”

  “But you guys are in love, right?” Nina asked, in the first and only case I can think of in which she advocated for love. “I mean, it’s Abby Madison. We’ve all seen her in a bikini; how could you not love her, right?”

  “Well . . . the thing is . . .” He put his head back down in his arms.

  We tried to be polite in our silence, but none of us blinked and I’m pretty sure at least one of us had our mouth open, too frozen with expectation even to make the simple gesture of closing it.

  “Well, we’re not strictly together anymore,” he said, looking back up to face us, the red veins in his eyes more visible than they had been a minute ago.

  “But she’s been calling you all night,” Lindsey said.

  “Yeah, she’s not exactly happy about breaking up. Or maybe she is. I don’t even know.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Nina.

  “She’s really just calling to make sure I don’t let my publicist announce it before her press tour for Existential Madame finishes. She wants me to go to meet her for the end of it. One last photo op in Venice.”

  “The city of love,” said Lindsey.

  “That’s Paris,” he said.

  “Okay, fine. Of romance, at least.”

  “I guess it would be a poetic end,” he said.

  “It’s the perfect place to get back together,” Lindsey said.

  “It might be,” he said. “If I had any intention of going.”

  He studied us when he said this, a petulant child waiting to see how big the reaction to his antics was going to be.

  “Um, you should definitely go,” I said. “Like, now.”

  “And why’s that?” He looked right at me when he said it, not quite a challenge, but almost as if he really wanted to know.

  “Because it’s Italy. And Abby Madison is probably going to win an Oscar this year. And you’re sitting in Orlando in a bar with only two beers on tap with three girls who barely graduated from high school, and only one of us is going to put out, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  “Ha! That’s not what I was thinking. How many times do I have to tell you? I like you guys.”

  “That’s nice, but you should still go.”

  “I’ve been to Italy. The beds are really small,” he said, suddenly sober, and a little sad. “They don’t have central air, and it’s almost as hot there as it is here this time of year. All of the channels are in Italian, and the only sport they show is soccer, which everyone knows is the worst sport. They only sell Coke in these tiny little bottles, and their beer selection is bad.”

  The thought of Sam Decker enjoying a pleasure as simple as Coca-Cola made me want to cry.

  “So have some wine,” I said.

  “I can’t have red teeth. You never know when someone’s gonna take your picture.”

  I would’ve found this unforgivably self-indulgent, even for a movie star, but I had seen enough pictures of him—pictures he clearly didn’t even know were being taken—to know that it was true.

  “So have someone bring beer you like with you. You’re Sam Decker.”

  “I think it’s cool,” Nina said, seeing her opening. “You should do whatever the fuck you want.”

  She flagged Sal down and motioned that she wanted four shots. He brought five—one for him, too, which made Decker happy again, and we all took them.

  “To doing whatever the fuck you want!” Nina said, right before we all threw them back. Even I finished it in one go.

  “Well, I guess we know which one puts out now, right?”

  As if it hadn’t been clear the whole time.

  “Dick!” Nina said, but she slapped his arm when he said it, and her eyes were more active than I’d seen them in years.

  “I gotta hit the john,” Decker said. “But we’ve still got—”

  He looked down at his watch.

  “—four hours until my big Disney comeback. Don’t go anywhere.”

  • • •

  He was gone a long time. I have no idea if he was already shooting up then, or if that was a late-night activity, long after we were gone. At the time it didn’t even occur to us. He may have already been high when he walked into the Shamrock. We were girls who knew what we needed to about the things in our immediate orbit, but nothing about things like that. After, we thought about it all the time. He went to the bathroom a million times and spent the minutes there a million different ways in the days and months, even years, after that first time.

  It was not lost on us, even then, at nineteen, when there were so many bits of wisdom still strewn across the world, waiting for us to pick them up—in ugly, lonely, gray-streaked dawns, and the early-morning cries of our unborn children; in solitary hotel rooms of our own, shades drawn well into the day, and Shamrock bars in third-tier cities the world over—how tragic it was that he died alone. This was a man who couldn’t part his hair differently without people demanding a press conference to fawn over him for it.

  Lindsey had been in the hospital room when her ninety-two-year-old, generationally racist grandmother died, cursing through her last breath, and had spent a considerable amount of time deciding the exact shade of the goo that trickled out of the old woman’s mouth right after. Nina’s pet Lab and the fifth lady at all of our sleepovers for as long as any of us could remember had been surrounded by all four of us, plus Nina’s mother, when the needle that would stop her heart went into her left paw, and we could all pinpoint the exact instant when she went from here to gone even though the vet had said it would be a gradual shutting-down process of the organs. The pressure in the air just changed. When a boy the grade above us slit his wrists in his parents’ bathtub the only thing anyone talked about for weeks was the exact language that Jenny Blume had used to break up with him the day before, and the song that had been set to repeat when he made the cut, and afte
r.

  We cried about these things alone and together and wrote about them in the journals we had grown too old to call diaries, and used the glamour of these tragedies to rescue us from the slow tick of the clock that culminated in coffee breaks from jobs we had not yet been working at long enough to have acquired a taste for coffee, but not nearly as hard as we cried about the fact that no one had been there to record these details about the night Sam Decker died.

  We were shocked, in the weeks that followed his death, that we could not find them in the magazines that so faithfully cataloged how many pairs of sneakers he owned, what his favorite day of the week was, and how many children he wanted to have. We turned to them for answers about how our own night ended, expecting them to fill in the holes of the single biggest event that any of us had ever lived through, and they didn’t even have the courtesy to make something up. There was no mention of the Shamrock in any of the coverage of his death, and this felt to us like a lie of omission. If what had happened to us had happened to other girls in other cities, we would have wanted to know the color of the chipped nails that they clutched their glasses with just a little bit tighter when they saw him across the room, and what those glasses were full of, the exact rates their hearts had climbed to when he slid across the cheap, cracked vinyl of their booth.

  We would have been willing to tell.

  It never occurred to us until later how many other people had stories from that night that they would tell for years—at high school reunions and on first dates, as if it were the story of how they lost their virginity or decided to pursue the career path they did. The Ecuadorian hotel maid who, recognizing the unlikely resemblance between Decker and a son she had not seen in years, had wiped the bead of blood that had pooled just under his nose before she called the front desk; the first-class stewardess on the flight to Orlando who had fed him peanuts and pretzels and probably plenty of champagne on the way to the city where he would die; the apprentice at the local funeral home who would have to explain to his aging boss the significance of the scruffy man they were about to embalm. For years we would argue over whether he smelled like bourbon or mint or clean sweat and who he made eye contact with first, but it never occurred to us to wonder about the last text he sent to Abby Madison, or if he finally picked up one of her calls—if he gave her the small indication of hope she was looking for from him that night—or how she chose the black lace dress she wore to his funeral, photographs of which made it all around the world, to Anchorage and then Italy and back, and became, for a generation, the unequivocal symbol for tragic love—even to us, who knew better—and would stand in our minds as the only dress she ever wore.