Local Girls (3 page)

“We're insane,” Jill
said to me in her clear, sweet
voice.

She was probably right, and I was about to suggest that we never play these sorts of tricks again, but then the police car turned onto another street, and as soon as the siren faded, so did my resolve. Revenge did that to a person; it caused even the insecure and the meek to take foolhardy chances. After a while it became a way of life: the risks felt as natural as drawing a breath.

The day after the buttermilk incident, Jill and I spent the afternoon at the municipal pool, in awe of our own daring. Everyone was talking about Mr. Richie's garbage cans. It was legend now; it was all over town. Jill and I wore big sunglasses to hide our true natures. Who knew the real us? No one. Who knew what we were capable of? Not a single soul.

We sprawled on beach towels we'd arranged on the cement near the deep end of the pool. I couldn't help but notice how much longer Jill's legs were than mine. This was the summer when she'd suddenly become beautiful; by August people she'd known all her life wouldn't recognize her.
Jill?
they'd say, as though she were a mirage.
Is that you?

“Maybe we'd better stop while we're ahead.” Jill was eating a melting Almond Joy. I, as usual, was on a diet, and had brought carrot sticks along for a snack. I rarely ate anything else and my fingers and toes had a distinctly orange tinge.

“You're kidding, right?” I sounded like a rabbit, but I kept right on crunching. “We're just getting started. And what about Mr. Castle?” I reminded her. “We haven't gotten him yet.”

Jill and I both baby-sat for the Castles; they had two cute kids—Amy, who was four, and little Pearl, who was just about the most adorable baby in the world. Twice last month, Mr. Castle had tried some really disgusting things with Jill when he drove her home. Once, he'd insisted she kiss him goodnight, and the other time he did something Jill was too embarrassed to tell me about even though she knew every single detail of my life. I asked and asked; I crossed my heart, vowing never to repeat a word, but still she wouldn't speak.

Well, Jill wasn't baby-sitting for the Castles anymore, and in a show of solidarity, neither was I. Mrs. Castle had called me three times and practically begged, but I told her I had mononucleosis and the prognosis for my recovery wasn't good. To tell you the truth, I felt sorry for Mrs. Castle—she was the type of person who bought extra potato chips and Coke when you baby-sat for her kids, and she always asked what was new in your life, which very few employers bothered to do—but I stuck with my mono story. When Elinor Nagle informed me the Castles had hired her to sit, I told her that Amy was a monster who threw food, and that the baby had diarrhea constantly, and that it was best never to walk barefoot in the Castles' house, since a black widow spider had gotten loose in one of their kitchen cabinets. Later, I heard Elinor never showed up at the Castles', and even though she wasn't a particularly close friend, I was glad she'd had second thoughts.

Taking our revenge on Mr. Castle was different than all the others, and we knew it from the start. We were long past buttermilk and cottage cheese and coal. We were in far more serious territory now. When we met in Jill's backyard we didn't feel giddy anymore; now we were out for real retribution, and there was no backing down. We discussed possibilities we knew we'd never go through with—fires and floods, even vermin. We'd set his garage on fire with kindling and matches. We'd stick the garden hose through his basement window and turn it on full blast. We'd have Monica Greeley's younger brother release the squirrels he trapped down by the creek into Castle's garage. But the truth was, neither of us wanted Mr. Castle's family to suffer, which is why we zeroed in on his car, a new Lincoln he was so crazy about he wouldn't even let Mrs. Castle drive to the store.

Their house was on Maple Avenue, right at the end of the development, next door to the original farmhouse that had been built nearly two hundred years earlier. People we knew avoided this part of town, which made perfect sense. There was nothing beyond this border but a weedy field, and after that a service road which led to the parkway. It was a place that made you feel lonely and disoriented, and that was the way we felt on the night we went to play our last trick. We had appropriated three gallons of paint Jill's father kept stored in their basement. I was only carrying one paint can, but it was heavy; as I walked it bumped against my shins and my knees. Still, I didn't dare complain. After all, Jill was carrying two gallons, and she certainly wasn't whining. She was looking straight ahead, into the dark. The weather was humid and warm; every mosquito in town seemed to have hatched, and each one was hungry for blood. It was the sort of night that feels like a dream, when you're suddenly about to do things you only thought yourself capable of imagining. Before you know it you're inside of something that feels as unavoidable as destiny.

We planned to prepare for our attack behind the hedges that separated the Castle house from the old farmhouse. I had taken a screwdriver out of my brother's tool-box, and had grabbed two pairs of old leather gloves from the coat closet, to ensure that we wouldn't leave fingerprints. Although I hadn't yet informed Jill, I'd already decided this was to be my last revenge. Since we'd begun our paybacks I'd developed a nervous stomach. I'd become afraid of the dark. Even walking on this street in my own neighborhood was giving me the creeps. It seemed as though we could fall off the face of the earth at any time. Just one more step, that's all it would take, and we'd be goners for sure.

“Maybe we should think this over,” I whispered to Jill after we reached the Castles'.

“What do you mean?” Jill said. “You were the one who said we should do it.”

“I know. But all the other stuff was fooling around. This could be considered a felony or something. I think I changed my mind.”

“Well, I haven't,” Jill said.

I had always believed that of the two of us I was the leader. Now, I wasn't so sure.

“What if damaging a motor vehicle is a federal offense?” I asked. “We could go to jail.”

If Jill had argued or called me a big baby, maybe I would have turned and walked home. But instead, she started to cry. She stood there, beside the hedges, all dressed in black, and she lowered her head so I couldn't see, but I knew anyway. Her shoulders always shook like that whenever she cried.

“Oh, what the hell.” I gave in. “He deserves it.”

We crept through a hole in the hedges in complete and utter silence. We were barely breathing, and we were thinking even less. We set the paint cans down, but before we went farther we realized something was different on this side of the hedges. We breathed deeply, and deeper still. The air was amazingly sweet, and when we crept forward we saw the reason why. The old farmhouse was covered with roses, little red roses that were all opening on this night. There were so many blossoms they covered the peeling clapboards; vines twisted over the roof, making it impossible to tell how many shingles had been blown away by last winter's storms.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked Jill, but she wasn't listening. She had already pulled on her black leather gloves; now she handed me the other pair.

“Hurry up,” she told me. “Let's get the tops off the paint cans.”

I'd been past this old house a thousand times and never noticed roses before. Could it be that they bloomed only at this hour, or on this day? Could it be I'd never bothered to look? I just had to have one of those roses. I had to have proof that something like this could grow in our town.

“I'll be right back,” I whispered to Jill, and before she could react I went right up to the house. I had never seen anything as lovely. It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you beautiful too. I was so involved with looking at the roses that I didn't even realize someone was out on the front porch until it was too late for me to run. I knew it was Mrs. Dennison, even though I'd never seen her before. People in town said she was a hundred; she'd grown up in this house and her family had owned the potato farm that had been chopped into tiny lots when the land was first developed. Mrs. Dennison was wacko, that's what I'd heard. She kept a shotgun in her parlor; she hated people. If you dared to walk across her front lawn, you'd better beware.

“I wasn't doing anything,” I said as soon as I saw Mrs. Dennison, though, certainly, I looked guilty as sin.

“Well, go on, take it,” she said to me.

“Take what?” I said, but I could see right then that Mrs. Dennison wasn't easy to fool.

“Go on,” she told me. She nodded at the roses.

“All right. Fine.” I took a flower from the branch closest to me.

“Do you have those gloves on for a reason?” Mrs. Dennison asked.

I could have lied to her then, but I didn't. It wouldn't have done any good, I could see that. One thing people didn't bother to report about Mrs. Dennison was how smart she was, a hundred years old or not.

“If I told you why I had these gloves on, you'd be a coconspirator, so I'd better not say any more.”

“Don't say another word.” Mrs. Dennison seemed to understand.

Jill was signaling to me like crazy.

“Your friend's upset.” Mrs. Dennison could judge things in an instant, that much was clear.

“She's got her reasons,” I said.

“I planted these roses when I was your age,” Mrs. Dennison told me. “And look at them now.”

“Pretty impressive. Actually, they're amazing.”

By then I had tears in my eyes. Sometimes, the world cracks open to reveal itself to you in a single instant. Standing there in the dark, humid night, I realized there was no turning back. We could try to stop it, we could drag our feet, but we were going forward, no matter what. When Mrs. Dennison went inside, I brought the rose with me and walked back to where Jill was crouched in the dark.

“Well, that's the end of this plan.” Jill's voice sounded shaky, as if she were exhausted.

“Why?” It was the oddest thing how the scent of roses stayed with you.

“Because she'll turn us in. She can identify us.”

“She won't,” I said.

“You can't know that,” Jill insisted.

But some things you do know, you know them fo sure. For instance, I was certain that when I ran into the Castles' driveway and lifted the can, white paint would spread out in pools on the roof of that Lincoln, then spil down over the hood. It was oil paint, so white it was hypnotic, almost like watching the stars. I might have stooc beside the car forever if Jill hadn't grabbed my arm. As we ran we left footprints of paint on the asphalt, but Jill wa clearheaded; she made sure we stopped and took off ou: shoes before we made too much of a trail.

Jill had also thought to grab the paint cans and the screwdriver; by the time the police were called the nex morning, there wasn't any evidence left. Nearly everyone in the neighborhood was questioned, but nobody knew thing. Two cats were found with oily white feet, and a rose dipped in paint was discovered at the corner of Maple Avenue; beyond that there wasn't a clue. I still wonder wha Mrs. Dennison told the police. Sometimes I think she sleepwalked out to her porch that night, and believed our conversation to be a dream, although when I went out tc see her the following Friday, she knew exactly who I was

At any rate, the police never found out who ruined Mr. Castle's Lincoln. No further information was ever unearthed, in spite of Mr. Castle's offer of a five-hundred-dollar reward for any tips leading to an arrest. Sometimes for no reason at all, Jill laughs out loud, and I always think she's remembering that night we attacked Mr. Castle's car But you never can tell. You can only know a friend so well after all. When you come right down to it, even your best friend is a puzzle. Jill, for instance, is convinced that I still go to visit Mrs. Dennison because I'm afraid she'll turn us in, but that isn't the reason. I go to sit on the porch, that's all. I go to hear how it used to be in our neighborhood when there wasn't another house for miles around, how twilight came so slowly then, how the roses bloomed all summer long.

Flight

Eugene Kessler was supposed to be my brother's best friend, but he and I actually had a lot more in common. It wasn't so much that Eugene and I liked each other, or that there was any possibility of romance between us. It was more that we both despised Franconia, the suburb where we were doomed to live. In Franconia, no one's imagination was working overtime, that much was evident from the moment you first walked through town, where you could find the Franconia High School, the Franconia Mall, the Franconia Diner, and, for special occasions— proms, for instance, or extramarital trysts—the Franconia Steak House, which Eugene and I called Marie's, not only because Marie Fortuna's husband caught her there, eating antipasto with her boyfriend, who happened to be the soccer coach at the high school, but because we couldn't stand to hear the word Franconia used one more time.

Eugene and I were in business together, earning money for our escape from town by selling term papers, and June was our busiest time of the year. By the end of the month, however, we were no longer doing our best work. The pressure was on, the stupid among us had panicked, and I was writing all night. In part, I kept odd hours because my brother strongly disapproved of our venture, and Jason was so honest and good that a single look from him could make a person feel sordid and corrupt. But the real reason I was writing three or more papers at a time was that Eugene was in charge of the division of labor, and he'd divided it so that two thirds of the labor was mine. After all, he had started the business, so it was only fair that he administered everything, including our finances, which were kept in a joint savings account. Or at least, this was Eugene's line every time I complained. And when I really considered my situation, it wasn't so difficult to accept the deal he offered and keep my mouth shut. In August, Eugene would be leaving—he and my brother had done what no one in our town had ever managed before and had both gotten into Harvard—at which point the business would be all mine.