Local Girls: A Novel Page 2

  At first this rushed adulthood was all we had hoped it would be. Lindsey and I worked at the mall—her in customer service, me in the coffee shop, where I spent most of my time making new creations that the three of us rated using a complicated system of factors, like the aftertaste and the effect on the stomach, and never paid for. Nina started out cleaning machines at the nearest gym but had recently begun teaching an aerobics class, a concept we found funnier than YouTube clips of people falling, even when we saw for ourselves that she wasn’t horrible at it. “Besides,” she had said, a cigarette between her teeth, “I’m not exactly fit, but anyone not pushing two hundred pounds counts as trim in this state.” Though we were often bored, our jobs were rarely humiliating or uncomfortable or hard, and there was still the novelty of having any job at all.

  Life was quieter, maybe, without our classmates, but they had generally been white noise, noteworthy mostly for the extent to which they weren’t us. We were well liked enough, but I doubt anyone who didn’t live in a five-block radius ever wondered what had become of us. And the ones who did we still saw—they drove to their classes in hand-me-down cars instead of living in dorms.

  At night we had money to burn. We had decent enough fake IDs to get into most bars in town even though everybody knew who we were—they were simply good enough to cover the bars’ asses should the sheriff come in for a drink while we were there partaking underage—and we were attractive enough to get into the more upscale bars when we ventured into the city. Though by that night we had grown tired of the wardrobes those bars required, and had pled monogamy to the Shamrock.

  We were still pretty in a high-school-girl kind of way, but we wouldn’t be for long, and neither of those facts was lost on us the night Sam Decker walked into the Shamrock and renewed our dwindling confidence that we were living the right kind of life—the kind where anything could happen. We adored him ironically—we made fun of his movies but always went to see them opening weekend—but it was with pure earnestness that we watched him slide into our booth and ask us what our names were.

  • • •

  It was dusk, and I knew it would be dark by the next round. I loved the Shamrock as much as the other girls, but it was two different bars by night and day. During the day it was a distinctly Florida bar. Even though it was tucked into the last lot of the street it was on, dwarfed by the other, looming buildings that you had to pass to get to it, and surrounded on one side by dense Florida foliage that came closer to swallowing the entire building every day, the sun still found you there, like it did everywhere else in the state. The light was a tangible thing, another regular.

  By night, though, Sal, the bar’s owner, didn’t do much to light the place. It felt like the inside of a ship. It was entirely dark wood—the tables, the floors, the walls—that dimmed even the brightest bulbs and made you feel small. Starting to drink in the Shamrock in the middle of the day and going straight through to the night was a little like going down for a nap when it’s light out and waking up when it’s dark. You always wake up a little panicky, like you gave up more time than you intended to, even if you closed your eyes for only the exact twenty minutes it takes the sun to drop out of the sky.

  “Okay, I have to ask,” Lindsey said just after the first bar light came on. “What are you doing here?”

  All traces of whatever distress Carine had caused—which Nina and I both knew she had, even though Lindsey tried to downplay the fact that she, our most good-natured third, was the one to have found a nemesis—had dripped off Lindsey’s posture and sat sweetly in a puddle at Sam Decker’s feet.

  “I’m here for some Disney Channel reunion,” he said, clearly grumpy about it.

  We remembered, then, that he had gotten famous because of The New Mickey Mouse Club, which seemed strange to us, even though we had grown up watching it, because we couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t have stubble. We liked to joke that there was a clause in all of his contracts that demanded he be allowed to keep it, no matter the role—he was the grungy heart surgeon and the baker who couldn’t be bothered to wear deodorant.

  “No offense,” I said, “but aren’t you a little too famous for that?”

  “Are you ever too famous for Mickey Mouse? He’s like the animated Harvey Weinstein. You don’t say no to him.”

  We looked at him blankly. His eyes went wide at the fact that we didn’t know what he was talking about, but he deflated into the booth instead of explaining it to us.

  “I’m kidding. My agent made me go.”

  “Does that mean Clive Bennett’s gonna be here?” Nina asked, as if the reunion were going to be held there in the Shamrock.

  Clive Bennett was another Mickey Mouse Club alum. He was currently on the show Buckle Up, about traffic cops and the crazy, heavy shit they got into that nobody would ever suspect them of because they were traffic cops. It was a good show—we all watched it—but we knew that even good television shows ranked far below movies.

  “No, and that’s the problem.” Decker took a swig of bourbon that he put his whole body into, nearly finishing it. “But that guy’s a dick anyway.”

  “Um, he goes to Rwanda like once a year,” I said, putting on my snottiest voice and hoping he realized I was kidding.

  “Ha. That guy couldn’t show you Rwanda on a map if it bit him on the dick.”

  “Ouch,” Lindsey said. “I had no idea that was a problem you people faced.”

  He had just taken another sip of bourbon and he almost didn’t get it down. And we knew it was a real laugh because we knew his acting laugh intimately, and this wasn’t it.

  “Ha. That’s really funny.” He turned to me and Nina. “She’s really funny.”

  “So if he doesn’t have to be here, why do you?” Nina asked.

  Lindsey gave her the Seriously? eyes, probably pissed that Nina hadn’t confirmed how funny she was.

  “My agent thought it would help me reconnect with my original fan base. The box-office returns haven’t exactly been what they once were.”

  It never occurred to us that Sam Decker checked his box-office returns, given how busy he was escorting Abby Madison in and out of expensive cars and five-star restaurants and parties full of people even more important than he was. We had noticed that one of his movies had gone right to pay-per-view, bypassing theaters entirely, but that happened even to people like Jennifer Lawrence and Christian Bale sometimes.

  “He always has these big plans but never has the time to see them through.”

  He shook his head and reconvened with his bourbon, looking into the glass he tilted toward himself as if he expected a prize like the kind you find at the bottom of a cereal box to float up.

  “So does that mean the reunion’s off?” I asked.

  “No, it just means he was supposed to come with me and canceled at the last minute,” he said, looking back up at me with a face that was still jarringly beautiful even after twenty minutes spent looking right at it. “And now I have no one to drink with.”

  “Well,” Nina said, “thank God you found us.”

  • • •

  Though she had a rule against makeup and kept to a uniform of hooded sweatshirts and running shoes, Lindsey was the prettiest. She had deviant curly hair that couldn’t decide if it was dirty blond or auburn, but didn’t waste much time thinking about it. Like most things in her and everybody else’s life, she tried to control this force of nature by pulling it into giant knots on the top of her head and into nautical French braids, but it usually got the better of her. The stray curls that escaped even her most intricately conceived hair plots were always leaping from behind her ears, where she tucked them. She had been awkwardly tall for as long as we’d known her, but somewhere in between sophomore and junior year even the latest-blooming boys had caught up with her, and she complained about it less. The hard, lean figure she’d always had from years of sports made her seem olde
r than she was, chiseled and able, like a woman who knew how to garden and sail, but the freckles that covered her body kept her young-looking. Nina liked to say she had an ass that wouldn’t quit, mainly to make her uncomfortable—she had skin that showcased every blush, so she could never hide when she was flustered, delighting Nina—but it was also true. She bought her jeans two sizes too big, but there was no pair of pants she didn’t fill the seat of.

  Her mother had died when she was four, but Lindsey still told stories that featured her regularly. They always sounded nice, but we assumed they were made up because we couldn’t remember anything before six. We knew there was a chance that one of her four older brothers had passed them down to her, but because we had never heard more than three consecutive words out of any of them, we doubted it. They were sluggish, not terribly clever boys who Lindsey had a bond with that Nina and I could never understand, maybe because we were both only children.

  Maybe it was because she played so many sports, and the coaches at our high school loved to use battlefield metaphors, but Lindsey had no trouble doing what needed to be done, stoically, without asking any questions. If you needed someone to pull the plug on a beloved vegetative family member, Lindsey would have been your girl. Not because she didn’t care, but because she understood that someone had to do it. She was our puller of splinters and killer of exotic Florida bugs. Maybe it was because nothing would ever be as bad as her mom dying and maybe it was because of her four older brothers, but she could do things like watch tigers disembowel antelopes while they were still alive on the nature channel without turning away or even starting to while everyone else squealed and demanded the channel be changed. The thing that made her a magical creature instead of just creepy was that she didn’t sacrifice an ounce of cheerfulness or optimism to this acceptance of life’s unpleasantries. She was as likely to be found baking cookies as she was looking for worms after a rainstorm. She drew hearts over her i’s and loved maudlin, sappy endings more than anyone I knew.

  Though we counted Carine an unreliable source on all things, she wasn’t incorrect about the fact that Lindsey was sleeping with her boyfriend, Fred. We didn’t object to the affair on principle, but we were confused as to why she would ever want to see him naked. He was hot in a lacrosse-player kind of way, but his face was the human-face equivalent of vanilla ice cream. He had no distinguishing features whatsoever—not even the accidental cookie-dough chunk or Reese’s Pieces that had snuck in. If Nina was the one dating him we would’ve asked her flat out what the appeal was, but we knew that Lindsey had said yes to him mainly because he was the first person who had ever asked.

  I had spoken to Fred only twice—once when Lindsey invited him over to her father’s backyard to drink with us without any warning, and once when he came to visit her at the mall—and I still couldn’t pick him out of a five-man lineup. If I hadn’t held him in such low regard I would have been worried that I was going to snub him one day through my sheer inability to recognize and respond to such a stock, cardboard-cutout face. Though we would miss Carine’s horror at her inability to prevent Lindsey from having something she didn’t want her to have, Nina and I were both looking forward to Fred’s return to school in New Hampshire in September.

  The one mark in his favor was that he bought Lindsey expensive gifts, mostly jewelry and flowy silk clothing in prints that girls who wear Laura Ashley when they’re young wear when they grow up, and at first we were surprised at how pleased she seemed to receive them, given that she would rather shave her eyebrows than wear either. But then we remembered that, because she worked in customer service at the mall, she had no trouble returning them for cash. We knew exactly what they cost because she pointed the items out to us in catalogs and online. So while we appreciated the times she picked up the tab and insisted on one more round, promising to cover it, we also knew that this generosity wasn’t putting a very big dent in her savings, wherever she was keeping them. Nina and I occupied the nights Lindsey was with Fred trying to guess what she would eventually spend it on, no easy game, given that she wore the same Fruit of the Loom uniform everywhere she went and had no aspirations to move out of her father’s house. All of her brothers still lived there.

  When I think of Lindsey now, I think of the time, right after graduation, when we were done with school but didn’t yet have jobs, when we went to the beach every day. Outside of that one stretch we didn’t really go as often as you would think we would, living so close, but we thought of the beach as some sort of kid brother—loud and attention-hogging—and all the tourists that it drew were the kid brother’s loud, annoying friends who laughed too hard at his fart jokes. But for, like, six weeks we went every day, to the same spot. And this one day, halfway through that stretch, we saw this three-legged cat. It was big and muscular enough that it might have been a bobcat. Though this guy had certainly won his fair share of fights, in addition to missing the leg, he had about half the whiskers he was born with and generally looked like the first cat God ever made, but he was hopping around like it was no big deal. Like cats made do with three feet all the time. But there were no other animals on the beach when we saw him. Most stretches of beach, private and public alike, had about four different kinds of wildlife for every person. We knew that cats were territorial creatures, and that maybe this relative wasteland was only the result of him successfully claiming this piece of land for himself, but it felt more like the rest of the animal kingdom had smelled his three-legged fate and wanted to be as far away from it as possible. And it made the ocean look even bigger and more indifferent than usual.

  We named him Ralph.

  Nina and I were pretty impressed by how well he was doing on three feet—he really was hopping every which way, getting his half-whiskered face into every potentially fish-bearing mound of sand in sight—and we were pretty optimistic, really, about his long-term chances of success. But Lindsey insisted he wasn’t long for this world. And she wasn’t sentimental enough to try to save him and make a pet out of him; this was a woman raised by men. Instead, confident that Ralph was on his last legs in more than just the literal sense, she insisted that we give him half of our picnic food, because he should have one last nice thing in his life before whatever savage end nature had in mind for him. Ralph happily took our sandwich meat and buns, and even the cupcakes we had brought for dessert. And he must have been restored by these reserves, because for the next few weeks, he was there every day, waiting to see what we had for him, until finally he wasn’t. All Lindsey would say about him not being there was “fucking cat,” as if, suddenly, she had forgotten the name we had been calling him even when we weren’t with him, finding it hilarious to wonder what Ralph would do in various social settings if he was there. But when Nina gave a blow job to one of the lifeguards who worked that stretch of the beach, he told her Lindsey showed up every morning at dawn—before even the old people who walked the sand and waded for exercise—with miniature feasts under her arms. And even though she never talked about Ralph ever again, we knew that she was always looking for him when we went, and that when we stopped going to the beach every day, it wasn’t because it had gotten too hot, it was because she had given up on him.

  The only story you really need to know about Nina to understand her is that she didn’t know the name of that lifeguard she gave the blowie to. But that she cried over what he told her about Lindsey. Later, when she was alone.

  She had one of those mothers who wanted to be “friends” with her daughter, which really meant not bothering with any parenting. The effects were more pronounced in Nina because her father wasn’t around, either. She never even met him. As we got older, we came to appreciate Elaine more, because she actually gave good “friend” advice, especially where dating and love were concerned, and I think her intentions were always good, despite their results. But I think Nina would’ve gotten fewer detentions and drawn less ire from the teachers and maybe made it to a few more classes if her mother hadn
’t spent so much time during the early years out in the trenches, gathering the hard way the advice she would later gift us.

  I, meanwhile, always felt a step behind—not just of them, but of the entire world—which led to destructive, nonsensical decisions that confused even me. Like moving out of my parents’ house that summer with no money saved, into an even dumpier part of town and pretty much the one apartment in Florida I could afford on a mall-coffee-shop salary. I think my parents assumed I was moving in with my boyfriend, Jay, and their feelings were hurt all over again when they found out I was living alone. I would’ve complained to Lindsey and Nina about how measured my parents’ voices had become in the weeks before my move, even more polite and distant than usual, but I don’t think either of them understood why I, the only one with two parents, wouldn’t keep living the dream for as long as I could.

  We sound ordinary, I know, like a million girls everywhere. But we weren’t. Lindsey had taught herself to play the piano without a single lesson; even though her father couldn’t afford a piano, she just kept getting better. We used to stay after school with her so she could play the piano in the band room that Nina figured out how to pick the lock of when we were sophomores. Nina and I would share Ho Hos and read Kiss and Blush, pointing out particularly beautiful or awkward or compelling pictures to each other, or just listen to her play. Lindsey could play just about anything without the music for it—theme songs to our favorite after-school sitcoms, commercial jingles, the latest radio hits. We used to try to stump her, demanding she play this or that, but she got it right every time. She never joined the school band, maybe because it would have been a bore to someone like her, but it’s equally likely that it was in service to spending more time with us.