Local Girls: A Novel

by Caroline Zancan

  Because the one thing we could agree on was that, after that night, Sam Decker belonged only to us.

  • • •

  Dude, what the fuck,” Nina said as soon as he disappeared into the bathroom.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We get it. You hate your life. It’s miserable. So why are you still here?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means don’t take your fucking preteen angst out on Sam Decker.”

  “Dude, easy. He’s still gonna fuck you,” Lindsey said.

  “Oh, and that’s a problem, Dr. Adultery?”

  “Really? Now you’re gonna judge me for who I fuck? And thank you, by the way, for pointing out that I’m someone’s second girlfriend to Sam Decker, of all people.”

  “Listen to yourselves,” I said. “You’re right. Clearly I’m the miserable one. Because you guys are both really happy.”

  “Oh, Jesus, back to this again. Look, man, don’t put your shit on me,” Nina said. “I’m actually really good at teaching housewives how to Jazzercise. It’s not fucking brain surgery—it’s not even a real word—but I’m good at it. And I happen to like it. And my class is so full that the gym just added a second one. At least I’m not sitting around pouting about how my life turned out, doing nothing to fix it.”

  I looked at Lindsey, waiting for her to take my side again, because she always did. But she didn’t tell Nina to back off, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Don’t look at her. She’s fine, too. Stop trying to project your misery onto other people and bring us all down with you.”

  “Oh, so you think Fred’s a good idea, then?” I asked.

  “Of course I don’t. But she doesn’t need a real boyfriend. She doesn’t even want one. She’s not crawling out of that man cave she lives in anytime soon. Testosterone is like her oxygen, and she could never find enough of it in a pool of nonrelatives. No offense,” she said, looking at Lindsey.

  Lindsey raised her eyes a millimeter above the spot they’d been studying to indicate that there was none taken, maybe even to acknowledge that it was true.

  “Look, if you’re unhappy—”

  I was pissed at her, but I still would have liked to know what she thought I should do, because I was unhappy. It had never been more apparent to me than it was that night. I never found out, though, because just then Lila and Carine and the patterns came back, and with even more purpose than before. Lila was trailing behind them, I’ll give her that, but she was there.

  I’ll always wonder if they would’ve come back if Sam Decker hadn’t been there that night. If they hadn’t wanted to prove to him, too—confident that the rest of the world already knew—that they were better than us. If a defeat in front of him wasn’t just that much more humiliating. Maybe if it had been just us, they would’ve let us go. They usually did. Whatever they had to say to us could’ve waited. None of us was going anywhere. That was the whole point of their attack. We were girls you always knew where to find.

  “Look,” Carine said, only inches from Lindsey’s face. “I get it, you’re fucking. It’s really cute. But summer’s almost over, and we both know he’s not taking you with him back to school, so let’s not pretend this is more than it is.”

  “What exactly are you asking me to do?” Lindsey asked, defeated and clearly tired. It really was getting late.

  “I’m asking you to tell me where he is.”

  “Dude, I’m right here. With you. How would I know that?”

  “So you mean to tell me he hasn’t been calling you or texting you?”

  “I’d be happy to say he had if it was true.”

  “Look, the fact that he’s not with either of you right now probably means he’s fucking somebody else,” said Nina. “And if anyone had any sense, they’d be ganging up on him instead of distracting each other from the fact that he’s probably balls-deep in some ninth-grade homecoming queen.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” asked Lindsey.

  “What?” Nina asked.

  “You really think now’s the time to point that out to me.”

  “Jesus,” Nina said. “You didn’t know? Where did you think he was?”

  “I don’t know. Sanibel.”

  “Wow,” Nina said, nastier than we’d said anything to one another in a while. “Well, I can’t help you with that.”

  “Oh. That’s convenient. Every man for himself now, huh?” Lindsey said. “When did that start? Were you going to let us know?”

  “No, not every man for himself. I would just like to go to a bar just once and not have that horrible woman look at me like she’s going to bite my lips off and use them as a douche,” Nina said, gesturing violently at Carine. “If you even gave a shit, I would cut a bitch, but you don’t. You only like him because you know nothing’s ever gonna come of it, so you can sleep in the twin bed you had your first impure thought in, taking care of other people, so that you don’t ever really have to do anything.”

  “You’re right,” Carine said, turning to Lila at the exact moment we forgot they were there. “She is trash.”

  Everything stopped then. When I think about it now, that moment is more of a portrait than a memory—Bob and Jax raising their heads high enough, for the first time that I can remember, that we could see their eyes. Sal, half sitting on one of the bar stools, leaning into the scandal mounting at a pace that even he had trouble keeping up with, but trusting us enough, despite what he had said, to see where it went before he got involved or, worse, kicked us out. At some point during the exchange we hadn’t bothered to lower our voices for, little Bobby had come wandering out, squinty-eyed and confused, and that’s when I knew we had gone too far—when the tower of bed hair on top of his head first came into view. Roni was standing protectively behind him, her arms wrapped around his tiny chest in a maternal gesture I wouldn’t have been able to picture her making before I saw it, wondering, it was clear, who we thought we were to make such a scene in this, their home. I understood, seeing her cold, demanding face, that she had never been anything but pleasant until now. So maybe Decker’s theory was wrong after all.

  “I didn’t say that,” Lila finally said, though it was unclear if she said it to Nina or Carine.

  She turned so that she was facing Nina and said it again.

  Nina stayed frozen, but her eyes were wild, occupied. They searched every inch of Lila for the answer to a question Lindsey and I and probably Paisley and Polka Dot couldn’t begin to guess at. I had never seen such busy, desperate, demanding eyes. Lila must have read them better than I could, because she said, “His family changed their name to Balander when they moved to New Mexico. His father was involved in some sort of scandal at work, which is why they left. It had nothing to do with us. He came back to Florida for school. He’s at State, just twenty minutes away. His e-mail is just Max Balander at Gmail. I’m sure he’d want to hear from you.”

  Nina is the most unpredictable person I have ever met. The kind of unpredictability you find only in someone who truly doesn’t care, not someone who only wants to seem like she doesn’t. I always wanted to know what she was going to do next, but never so much as I did then, in the face of the one thing that maybe ever mattered to her. But just then Sam Decker came gliding out of the bathroom with liquid hips and four-hundred-dollar jeans that most of the women in our hometown would never have been able to squeeze into and that bomber jacket of his grandfather’s, pointed at Nina the way he did at the heroine of Madeline’s Last Laugh, and said, “Lady, it’s time.” And they left before any of us could demand to know what for.

  Six

  The next morning, when the news broke that Sam Decker had been found dead in his hotel room by a maid who went in to clean the room after checkout time, we all kept waiting for the others to call, but none of us did. I still can’t say why. We had never gone a day without speaking. Even t
he time Lindsey crashed my parents’ car a full two years before we were old enough to drive, and my father demanded that Lindsey’s father pay for the damages, insisting he wasn’t interested in raising other people’s daughters, and Lindsey’s father, still small from the death of his wife, had only shrunk in his doorframe and nodded, and my father, suddenly realizing the impact of his words, left without saying another, and paid for the repairs himself. Or the time Nina left the homecoming dance with Jimmy Reagan the year he took me, even though she had been the one to help me do my hair before the dance, and stole one of her mother’s favorite dresses out of her closet for me to wear, and had even bothered, later, to say she didn’t realize I might have liked him.

  The reason for Nina’s silence was clear. There were very few details available about the scene of Sam Decker’s death—at that point, they didn’t even know that it had been a drug overdose, only that they could rule out foul play—but the one fact of interest all the news sources were reporting was that hotel cameras caught him returning home alone at four o’clock in the morning, which meant she probably didn’t want to explain how he’d lost her, or why they’d parted. Why she wasn’t there at the end. It meant that even if they had screwed they had done it somewhere public—the beach, his souped-up rental car—and even for her, that was worse than not doing it at all. Later, after we slowly made our way back to each other, we started to compare notes about the night—things we wished we had asked him and things we were glad we had said. We searched every pause in the conversation, every evasion and every reveal, for some omen that what had happened was going to. We mused at what Carine and the patterns must have thought when they heard the news, and we talked about if he seemed happy. If his pouty complaints and discontent or the smiles he gave us across the night—still burned into our memories—and his willingness to laugh even at himself were the truer thing. Eventually we tired of the other details, but never that one. He was angsty, sure, but sometimes that was the very thing that propelled you, we knew, and got you where you needed to go. The thing to make you happy. Maybe he was on the road to that bar in Anchorage after all. Maybe knowing you wanted it was the first step.

  Lindsey and I figured Nina would eventually, if left unprodded, give us the final piece of the story that we had not been there for, but she never did. I couldn’t decide if this was because she was mortified or because it meant something to her and she wanted to keep that piece of Sam Decker for herself.

  That morning, the sound of air empty of a telephone’s ring and a door not knocked upon felt cryptic, like Sam Decker had taken everyone with him when he left, but it never occurred to me to be the one dialing, or knocking. I wondered if what I came to think of as the standoff would have happened if he hadn’t died, and all the ways in which the fact that he had would curse us. It’s probably better, for me, at least, that we weren’t speaking, though, because I’m not sure I would have done what I did if we were gathered on Nina’s bed talking in fevered whispers about the night Sam Decker died.

  At around seven that night, I went out for some air, just to hear the sound of people talking, intending to go to the diner down the street for coffee. And that’s when I saw it. She had wrapped the note and the check around a rock, which only underscored the fact that she hadn’t used the rock to make any noise, or draw my attention, the way rocks are often used to do. She was letting me come to it when I was ready, but she had put it in the middle of my front step so that there would be no missing it when I was.

  I should have recognized the penmanship. Having the handwriting that most resembled a parent’s, Lindsey was always the one who forged the things that needed forging. I didn’t, though, not right away. Maybe because she and I were never the girls writing the notes, but the ones waiting for them, needing them for our cues. She must have recognized this, too, because she bothered to sign her name at the end of it, the way Nina never would have.

  The note was only one line, but that was enough. The amount the check was for would be, too.

  This town’s no good since Decker left. Might be time to blow?

  • • •

  Like a coward, I hid in the bathroom after Nina and Decker left the bar that night. I didn’t want to see Lindsey any more than she wanted to see me right then. We both knew that being around each other would only remind us that Nina wasn’t there and make us feel guilty for not being better friends, and we weren’t sure exactly what that entailed in a situation like this. Especially when we were both as pissed at her as we had every right to be. It felt a little like Nina had demanded everyone get naked at once, and then disappeared at the exact minute Lindsey and I had discarded our last piece of clothing. We were retreating to separate corners to rebuild our dignities or, at the very least, get dressed. We were losing face to the patterns maybe, but they felt, suddenly, more irrelevant than they ever had. They had served any purpose they ever would.

  I stayed there, crouched in the stall closest to the tampon machine, long enough that I actually had to use it. The sight of the tampon machine had made me nauseous on the way in, a reminder, as it was, of why I wouldn’t be needing it, but when I sat down the stall started to spin, and I put my forehead on the side of the stall just for the cool of it. I was drunker than I had realized, and I thought about turning around to get sick. So maybe it wasn’t the tampon machine’s fault.

  They were almost pretty—the two ribbons of red that spiraled through the toilet water like food coloring. I still don’t know if it was the end of the beginning of something, or just a really late period. I had gone off birth control three months before, deciding the monthly cost would be better spent on beer and gas money—it was one of the reasons I had assumed I was pregnant—and I hadn’t been entirely regular since.

  Whatever it was, it felt more tragic, there in the middle of a dirty, mostly empty bar, than it would have anywhere else. And I was pissed at the universe that it had waited until the exact moment I ran out of friends to give me the very thing I fell asleep praying for every night, knowing, as the universe probably did, that getting what you wanted sometimes hurt as much as having to deal with what you didn’t. It was a little sad, like all endings are, and I felt a door that had been open close. But I was mostly glad. I waited until I stopped crying and used the tampon machine, grateful for it now, and took pleasure in the predictable swing of the door on my way out.

  I had no car and no way home, and the size of my headache left no limit on the level it would reach the next morning, and my tongue was nearly stuck to the roof of my mouth, it was so dry. But all I could think was that, just like that, I was on my own.

  • • •

  I left the morning after I found the rock. In the end, it was as easy as that. I think I just needed one of them to tell me it was a good idea. I called Lindsey from the road, no more than twenty minutes out, ending at least that part of the standoff. I started to dial Nina—then, and again a half-dozen times over the next three months—but somehow never got through all ten of the digits. Not only because I was still a little mad at her—we had never been in a fight like that before, raw and exposed and public, and she had just left—but because I wasn’t sure of the Nina I would find on the other side of that night.

  She had caused her share of the trouble that night. She had used us to measure herself against for Decker, which didn’t feel any better than when she did it with ordinary boys—someone had to be on the bottom of the heap for her to be on top. But even though she was nobody’s victim, and even though she got to leave with a movie star, a grand prize beyond even her wild imagining, I knew that the night had been harder on her than it had been on the rest of us. It wasn’t just being the one to escort him to his grave. It had finally all caught up with her. The one thing she could never outrun or outwit or argue against using even her most practiced Nina logic, and she had spent all the years since losing Max and Lila convincing herself she could.

  I finally called her from a motel roo
m in Kansas, maybe because The Wizard of Oz was her favorite movie. She used to put it on at the end of the sleepovers she kept us up at, finally falling asleep mouthing Dorothy’s lines. Or maybe I was just lonely. I had associated the West with mountains and horses and ranches, but really the thing they had more than anything else was space. I was heading to Denver in a few days, but only for a little while.

  She picked up on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting for me. Her voice was strong and clear, so I knew she was in the kitchen, the only room that got real service. I could picture her, a plate of lukewarm leftovers that she hadn’t had the patience to heat all the way through half finished in front of her—the Tupperware she took it from still out on the counter with the Saran wrap she and Elaine used when they couldn’t find the right lid crumpled in a ball, which drove her mother nuts. The bright yellow tile behind her would’ve set a cheerful tone that would’ve been dulled only a little by the chips and cracks in the tile from years without any renovation or even maintenance. Her feet would be up in the chair next to her, her hair in a messy bun, and she’d be leaning in to the phone like she was eager for whatever news was on the other end of the line, though she never would have admitted it. I decided to keep it light.