Local Girls: A Novel - Softcover

Zancan, Caroline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0399573127 ISBN 13: 9780399573125

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Named one of the summer's best books by People, Glamour, The Huffington Post, and Pure Wow
Publishers Weekly Book of the Week 
Named one of Refinery 29’s “21 New Authors to Watch” in 2015

The first person to break your heart isn’t always your boyfriend. Sometimes it’s your best friend.

Maggie, Lindsey, and Nina have been friends for most of their lives. The girls grew up together in a dead-end Florida town on the outskirts of Orlando, and the love and loyalty they have for one another have been their only constants. Now nineteen and restless, the girls spend empty summer days bouncing between unfulfilling jobs, the beach, and their favorite local bar, The Shamrock. It’s there that a chance encounter with a movie star on the last night of his life changes everything.

Passing through Orlando, Sam Decker comes to The Shamrock seeking anonymity, but finds Maggie, Lindsey, and Nina instead. Obsessed with celebrity magazines that allow them a taste of the better lives they might have had, the girls revel in his company. But the appearance of Lila, the estranged former member of the girls’ group, turns the focus to their shared history, bringing all their old antagonisms to the surface—Lila’s defection to Orlando’s country club school when her father came into some money, and the strange, enchanting boy she brought into their circle, who fundamentally altered dynamics that had been in play for years. By the night’s end, the escalation of these long-buried issues forces them to see one another as the women they are now instead of the girls they used to be.

With an uncanny eye for the raw edges of what it means to be a girl and a heartfelt sense of the intensity of early friendship, Local Girls is a look at both the profound role celebrity plays in our culture, and how the people we know as girls end up changing the course of our lives.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Caroline Zancan is a graduate of Kenyon College and holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Zancan is an editor at Henry Holt, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The last summer we were teenagers was as hot as every other summer in Florida, but we spent it in the Shamrock, probably the only bar in the state without air-conditioning. It was the summer Nina got a ticket for public urination and Lindsey lost her virginity, although she wouldn’t admit it until later. She had always told us that she lost it at seventeen to someone named Chad—no last name—a friend of one of her brothers, which should have tipped us off. Her brothers would have murdered anyone who came near her, never mind that there was no one any of us knew that the other two didn’t. I got my own apartment that summer—the first one of us to do it—but when we weren’t drinking or working, we hung out at Nina’s mom’s house like always.

“Blistering Love” was the number-one song on iTunes, and the only song we all liked. We sang it in Nina’s car at the top of our lungs like maniacs—windows down, driving too fast, the city neon before us. Nina told us to put the third line of the first verse on her tombstone.

Despite all the singing, and the trips to the city, and the small freedom my apartment afforded us the few times we were all there, we were miserable that entire summer, and furious at one another, though we didn’t know it at the time. If someone had pointed it out to us, we wouldn’t have been able to say why.

That summer was the summer we met Sam Decker on the last night of his life, a fact so strange we barely believe it ourselves, so we don’t expect anyone else to, either.

There’s a picture proving that we met him, though. It’s still hanging in the Shamrock, or was the last time any of us checked—we haven’t been back much, which is another thing we wouldn’t have believed, had you told us back then. Sam Decker surrounded by three girls with faces still baby-fat round, smiles bigger than our disbelief at what was happening in that moment, skin shiny from humidity, the oppressive magnitude of which you could imagine only if you’ve been to Florida between the months of May and September. There is no sign indicating the date, so there would be no way for you to calculate what happened a few hours later. And you probably wouldn’t be likely to guess, because in the picture, Sam Decker looks happy.

But then, so do we.

One

These are the things we knew about Sam Decker: Tacos were his favorite food. He had a collie-poodle mix named Rickie. He was a Sagittarius, and the first thing he noticed about a woman was her laugh. We knew that Flight Opus was his best movie but that Sender Unknown was the one he looked most handsome in, and that he fell in love with Abby Madison when they were filming Dancing on Thursdays. We knew he was the co-owner of cocktail bars in Manhattan and London, which made it even more surprising that he would come to a dive like the Shamrock, or even that he would be in Orlando at all. Lindsey was the first one to spot him across the room, and though none of us had any idea what he might be doing there, we intended to find out.

We took copies of the magazines that had taught us these things everywhere we went that summer. We read them at one another’s houses, on car rides to and from the city, at swimming pools and beaches and barbecues. We exchanged facts we had uncovered about perfect strangers the way most people exchanged pleasantries. We delivered them as greetings, mid-sentence, and halfway through conversations about totally unrelated subjects, as one of us sat idly flipping through a worn, dog-eared copy of Blush or Kiss, half listening to the others. We managed never to pay for them, taking them instead from doctors’ offices and the gym where Nina worked. We picked up the copies tourists left on the beach like they were seashells.

While the tourists would’ve had to turn these magazines aside halfway through them to close their eyes from the Florida light our own eyes had grown used to long ago, we could continue to worry and wonder and bask in the things we most wanted to know, even as the sun did its work: the cut and color of the dress Joni Parsons wore for her dinner out with which Hollywood director, and the name of Corey Jones’s fourth-grade teacher, who he had recently thanked in an acceptance speech for an award that no one had heard of but that everyone got dressed up for—the pictures flew around the Internet, and bloomed from the pages of both Rumor and Kiss, even though they tried never to cover the same events. We cared less about how we would fill the empty nights that followed vast but indistinct days at the beach than we did the brand of toilet paper February Mathis was seen carrying out of the Whole Foods in Beverly Hills.

Until the night we met Sam Decker, it had been too hot for even the beach, even for us, because it was August in central Florida. August came to Florida every year, but it felt like the end of the world every time if only because of how empty the streets and sidewalks became—everyone stayed inside. It got so bad that you started to blame the heat on other things—the palm trees and the beach and the sunsets and the sand—because heat that unpleasant had to be blamed on something. It surely wasn’t benign. And for all its unpleasantness, it went unseen, measured instead by the size of people’s pit stains and just how far out of their mouths the tongues of panting dogs hung.

There was always a day, usually during the second or third week of the month, when the heat broke. It was an unofficial holiday in the state. On the morning of the night we met Sam Decker no one would have braved the sand too hot to stand on without flip-flops, or the lukewarm water that offered no relief from the invisible palm the air held over your nose and mouth. But it dropped five degrees between noon and three, and we followed the temperature like it was the Super Bowl score in the fourth quarter. By the time we hit the outskirts of Orlando that night, it felt like something had been released, like someone had changed the radio from a somber symphony to a rock song, and change of any sort felt promising to us back then, because we were young, and lived almost a full hour from even Orlando.

That we could enjoy the coral-orange colors of the sunset without indicting them for their association with the sun was the first sign that it was going to be a good night. The second was that, after parking our car in the overnight garage and walking up and down the same drag we walked up and down every Saturday night, we had seen Lindsey’s secret boyfriend’s actual girlfriend, Carine, walk into the Shamrock. If she had been a color she would definitely have been a pastel, which was only the first of several reasons we hated her. Her equally horrible friends—reasons two and three—were with her. We had promised we were going to try a new bar that night, but it was late August, which meant Carine and Paisley and Polka Dot, whose real names we could not be bothered to learn, would be returning to out-of-state colleges in only a few weeks, and tormenting them was pretty much our favorite thing to do that summer. So we went to the Shamrock as always.

Carine and the patterns were Golden Creek girls, but wouldn’t be for long. The whole point of attending the sort of colleges they were on summer vacation from was to move away from home for one sort of important career or another—in fields so competitive that you had to go wherever the work took you, which usually happened to be somewhere you wouldn’t mind moving. Though we knew the distinction of having been from Golden Creek would never fully leave them—it would keep their postures straight, and it...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0399573127
• ISBN 13: 9780399573125
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: RIVERHEAD; https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland