Childhood friends Hannah, Maya, Blue and Renee share a bond that feels more like family. Growing up, they had difficult home lives, and the summers they spent together in Montauk were the happiest memories they ever made. Then, the summer after graduation, one terrible night changed everything.
Twelve years have passed since that fateful incident, and their sisterhood has drifted apart, each woman haunted by her own lost innocence. But just as they reunite in Montauk for one last summer, hoping to find happiness once more, tragedy strikes again. This time it’ll test them like never before, forcing them to confront decisions they’ve each had to live with and old secrets that refuse to stay buried.
Advance praise for East Coast Girls
“Kerry Kletter’s East Coast Girls is a mix of gorgeous writing and page-turning suspense as four friends enjoy summer pleasures that lead to terrible mistakes, desperate choices, and, as we all hope from the ones we love, the grace of forgiveness.”
—Nancy Thayer, New York Times bestselling author of Surfside Sisters
“With lush prose and poignant reflections on fate, forks in the road, and the power of female friendships, East Coast Girls is a book whose pages demand to be both snuck in under the covers late into the night and savored. I’ve already made a permanent place for it right beside Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters in the bookshelf of my heart.”
—Chandler Baker, New York Times bestselling author of Whisper Network
“East Coast Girls is a dazzling and thoughtful beach read that brings to life the unique friendship of four unforgettable characters, a gorgeous Montauk setting, and a driving mystery that touches on timely feminist themes. Readers of Elin Hilderbrand and J. Courtney Sullivan will devour this book.”
—Brenda Novak, New York Times bestselling author of One Perfect Summer
“A powerful and compassionate story where young lives are forever altered in the aftermath of tragedy. Beautifully layered with hope, sorrow, and keen observations into the complexities of the heart.”
—Beth Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt
“A brilliant firecracker of a book. East Coast Girls perfectly captures that time in a girl’s life when friendship and the summer sun is enough to make you feel invincible—and the fallout when you realize that you’re not. A beautiful, heartfelt, and life-affirming story about the things worth holding onto and those moments when you just have to let go.”
—Emily Henry, author of Beach Read
“With equal parts true grit and big heart, East Coast Girls is an unputdownable exploration of the enduring bonds—and unexpected tests—of friendship, love, and who we are deep down.”
—Mia March, author of The Meryl Streep Movie Club
Also by Kerry Kletter
The First Time She Drowned
East Coast Girls
Kerry Kletter
For my hometown friends of Ridgewood, NJ, especially my own crew of first responders Amanda Fredericks Marti Daniel Moats, Ruth Brown and John Tashjian because you are home to me.
Contents
Prologue
Twelve Years Later
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Maya
Blue
Hannah
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Reader’s Guide
Questions for Discussion
A Conversation with the Author
PROLOGUE
It was mid-July, when the sun shined the memory of every good summer before it, and the days wandered like beach walkers, hot and indolent, catching chance breezes off the ocean. They’d stopped at the fair on a whim on their way back from Montauk, were supposed to be home hours before, but the vibrancy of live music and crowds and the feeling of a party not yet over beckoned them, so they lingered, wanting to stay inside this future memory a little longer.
The photo booth was Hannah’s idea, and now they erupted out of it into the flash and shimmer of daylight, giddy with the theater of posing. The image spat out like a lottery ticket and Hannah reached for it. But Maya, ever impatient, yanked it out of her hand. Maya squinted at it, covered the other three girls’ faces with her thumbs. “With a little cropping I think we might just have a masterpiece!”
“Oh, give me that,” Blue said, rolling her eyes.
They passed the photo around, each looking down at their leaping white smiles, their faces full with youth and colored by the sun. There was a looseness in their eyes from the peach wine coolers purchased at a local deli with the worst fake ID ten bucks could buy and a heavy dose of Maya’s winning charm.
As usual Maya was in the center of the picture, hugging the others like dolls to her chest, her three best friends who had never asked her to be anything but who she was, who never hinted that she should contain her big spilling personality in order to be loved. Beside her, Blue was wearing the sweatshirt of a boy she met earlier that weekend, the sleeves carefully rolled to the elbows, the memory of his kiss, her first, alive in her stomach as if it had been caught there, netted like a butterfly. Renee was squeezed in practically on Blue’s lap, half cut out of the photo, her head on Blue’s shoulder as it so often was, as natural as sunlight on trees. And finally, Hannah was on the other side of Maya, her arms outstretched in raucous exuberance, her red hair a wild burst, salted and wind dried after a day in the ocean, her face blurred with laughter at something Maya had said just before the camera clicked.
They’d been captured in perfect summation—four best friends celebrating their recent graduation from high school.
“I love us,” Hannah said. “Best vacation ever!”
Maya placed the photo in her purse. “Promise we’ll come back every year, no matter where we are, for the rest of our lives.”
“Yes!” everyone agreed.
“Should we make that pact in blood?” Hannah asked.
“I think we’re good with just...ya know...saying it,” Maya said.
“So...” Blue said, nodding toward the parking lot where they’d hidden the booze in the car trunk. “I feel like I’m starting to regain my balance. Round twelve, anyone?”
Hannah hit speed dial on her phone as they walked. A moment later Henry’s voice came on the line. She pictured him, hair probably slicked from a post-tennis shower, a wry smile at the corners of his mouth. He was not handsome in the classic sense, but there was a benevolence in his eyes, a kind of soft patience, that made him so. He said something Hannah couldn’t make out over the staticky sound of a local band playing through bad amps, the tinny merry-go-round music, the meandering crowd full of parents and children. But she heard the tender tone of his voice. He missed her.
She put him on speaker and held her phone out to the girls.
“Hi, Henry!” the other three shouted, sticking their faces into the phone, making kissing noises.
“Loons,” he said, and they laughed. Though he belonged to Hannah, he was theirs, too, the extra limb.
Hannah
took the phone off speaker, put one finger in her ear to block out the noise.
“Are you having fun?” Henry asked.
“Yes, but I miss you.” She missed him every summer when the girls took their annual trip to stay at Blue’s nana’s beach house. But the longing itself was part of the fun, a romantic ache that reminded her how lucky she was.
He said something she couldn’t hear.
“What?” she said.
“Come home.”
Her heart whooshed. “We’re leaving soon. Can’t wait to see you!”
“Bring me a souvenir!” he said. And then, “Never mind. All I need is you.”
“Cheeseball,” Hannah teased, but her face hurt from smiling so big. “Love you so much.” She ended the call, already daydreaming of their future. She imagined the two of them renting a small summer cottage that sat watch over the ocean, a hammock lolling in the breeze, a picnic table where she could sit on pink-lit summer evenings and write. As much as she was excited to attend college together, she was more eager for what followed, for the realizing of all their plans and dreams. Henry would take over his parents’ newspaper, and Hannah would teach college classes while she worked on her book. They would have a house on an intimate East Coast campus outside Boston or perhaps in Maine, hosting potluck dinners with bright-eyed students and fellow teachers, talking poetry and literature and current events. She would catch Henry watching her from across the table—he loved when she got passionate about things—and she would smile back at him. How safe she would feel being a family with him, living in a warm, loving house just like his parents’ home, and nothing like her own, so depressive and quiet.
“Hurry, Hannah,” Maya called.
Hannah moved to catch up with the others, pausing just a moment to consider a psychic at a booth, a young woman with white-blond hair, a sharp, narrow chin and big, loopy earrings that hung like small nooses. She made a mental note to tell the girls about her. It would be fun to get their palms read before they left.
At the car, Blue dug into the trunk and retrieved the wine coolers and a water for Hannah, who was their designated driver, and passed them around.
“A toast,” Maya said. “To you three lucky bitches who get to be friends with me!”
Maya waited, arm in the air, while they stared at her. Blue coughed.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “You’re shy. I get it. To us, then.”
The girls raised their arms high and clinked, faces glowing with hope, the sun igniting in the glass bottles as if they had caught it there.
“To us,” they all said in unison, four forever friends on the cusp of their lives.
TWELVE YEARS LATER
HANNAH
Another July. Hannah sat by Henry’s bedside, her wild red hair pulled into a tight bun, her pale face underlaid with gray like winter light. She stared out the window as she so often did these days, the view familiar as a painting, inciting surprise and a sense of unreality anytime life appeared inside it, a person passing by, for instance, or a bird fluttering past.
The day was in slow retreat, the night sky drawing its navy blue blind upon it. Soon a nurse would be in to give Henry a sponge bath. Hannah closed the book of crossword puzzles she’d brought, as if they could actually do one together. On the nightstand, a picture of the two of them at senior prom, their smiles almost too big for their faces, Maya, Blue and Renee goofing in the background. She’d planned to put it in the frame she’d brought back for him from the summer fair all those years before, but then as soon as the girls got home from their trip, tragedy had struck, and she couldn’t bring herself to even look at the gift he’d been unable to receive.
Now she squeezed Henry’s pale hand, soft and round as sorrow, and watched his face, hoping for his eyes to register the touch or the sigh or the puzzle book or her leaving.
Once in a while, out of nowhere, he would be suddenly present, wide-eyed and able to recognize her, as if his mind had simply wandered off somewhere, gotten lost in a wooded dream and then unexpectedly emerged through a clearing. At these times, she, too, would feel instantly awake, her heart lit up as if on a wick. Each day she sat waiting for it. A tight prayer in her chest that this time he would stay. Maybe tomorrow, she thought when it didn’t come.
She leaned in and kissed his untroubled forehead just below the cowlick. The faint bready smell on his neck—that scent of home, of the breathing soul inside—always gave her comfort. Then she walked out into the hallway, passing rooms inhabited by people so much older than both her and Henry. In the last was Mrs. Miller, all cotton-ball hair and lived-in eyes tucked inside a shriveled brown face.
“High five, Mrs. Miller,” she said when she spotted her sitting in her wheelchair, hunched but alert, in the doorway of her room.
The old woman raised her delicate, tremoring hand for Hannah to slap. Hannah couldn’t remember when or how they’d developed this ritual, but it always buoyed her to see her youth reflected in the wistful gaze of Mrs. Miller. It was as if the old woman could see the expanse and promise of Hannah’s life, and for that moment Hannah, too, could imagine it, could almost believe in something beyond her small routine.
“Are those new slippers?” she asked, pointing to the old woman’s leopard-print footwear. “I’m telling you, Mrs. Miller, you’re bringing sexy back.”
“Ninety is the new eighty-five,” Mrs. Miller said with a wink, and Hannah watched with something like envy as the full history of her laughter crinkled across her face.
Mrs. Miller reached up and Hannah bent to her hand, which caressed Hannah’s cheek. “You seem tired,” Mrs. Miller said. “You come every day. I don’t know how you do it. But you’re not going to do him any good if you don’t take care of yourself too.”
“I do,” Hannah lied. “I’m fine. Really. Thanks though.”
She said her goodbyes and hurried out the door into the breezeless, sticky summer evening.
Moments later she was on the Metro, watching the tunnel walls flash past, wondering as she always did how all that graffiti got there. The train shrieked and rumbled, and she imagined the crash of steel on steel as the car coming from the opposite direction bore down on them. She turned to the businessman beside her and envisioned a bomb going off from inside his briefcase. She looked up at the three teenagers looming over her, pictured one pulling out a gun. Finally, she caught her own reflection in the window, her red hair too bright and conspicuous, her body tucked into the smallest package she could be. She doused her hands in Purell, closed her eyes to the world.
The Metro chimed at her stop and the doors opened. She was jostled with the crowd, pushed toward the steep stairway, climbing up to the small square of sky at the top. Her apartment was a short block away.
Her cell phone rang. She glanced at it, saw that it was Maya. She hit Ignore. She loved Maya, but right now the world felt like too much, and she would have to call her back on a day when it was less so.
Once in the safety of her small apartment, she took off her clothes and put them in a plastic bag, zipping it tight so that whatever Metro germs were on them wouldn’t leak out. Maya often told her how neurotic this was, as if she didn’t know it. Sometimes she watched those television shows about extreme obsessive-compulsives, and a gnawing worry would hatch in her chest that someday she might be one of them. She could see how it could happen, how each day you needed to do just a little bit more to make yourself feel secure, until one day you woke up to find your entire apartment wrapped in plastic, no hole to breathe through.
“Why don’t you just get a hazmat suit and call it a day?” Maya had said recently.
Maya had limited tolerance for Hannah’s anxieties, which Hannah actually appreciated. Something about the way Maya trivialized her concerns helped to shrink them, took some of the terror out. Hannah had laughed the comment off, not admitting that she thought it was a great idea. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets
out. She’d even priced them on Amazon.
Her cell rang again. She sat down on the couch, pressed herself against the pillows and waited for it to stop. A moment later, a text from Maya appeared on the screen.
Pick up the phone, loser.
Hannah rolled her eyes and smiled. But still she didn’t answer. She was just too tired today. Every day, really.
I know you’re sitting in your apt. ignoring me.
She sighed.
Unless you’re dead.
Are you dead?
Hannah considered the question.
The phone rang again.
This time she picked up, realizing that the calls wouldn’t stop until she did. “I do go out, you know,” she said.
But Maya, who never listened, wasn’t listening. “Hold, please.”
There was a series of clicking noises, Maya muttering to herself and then silence.
“Okay,” Maya said finally, “I’ve got Blue on the line too.”
Hannah frowned. They never did three-way calls. Something must be up. “Hi, Blue,” she said.
“Hey, you,” Blue said.
“Okay, ready, Hannah?” Maya asked.
“For...?” Hannah braced.
“My great idea!”
Ever since they were kids, Maya was always having “great ideas” that not only weren’t great but, in fact, were epically terrible.
“No really, this time it’s a good one!” Maya said into Hannah’s pointed silence. “Nothing like that time we got locked out of my house and I said that you could fit through my doggy door.”
“That was me, actually,” Blue said. “I still have the scar.”
“No, Hannah has the scar.”
“Different doggy door,” Hannah said.
Though they talked often on the phone and through varying forms of social media, it had been a while since Hannah had seen either of them in person. Adult concerns had slowly eclipsed superfluous things like fun, and the seductive promise of technology had rendered in-person visits seemingly unnecessary. The last time they’d been together was for Blue’s father’s funeral a few years back. Hannah had taken the train from DC and Maya drove in from New Jersey, and the three of them had gotten so bombed in Brooklyn after the wake that they almost missed the service the following morning. Hannah and Maya knew it was what Blue needed, how she honored the man who had never been present for her—through dark-humored toasts and temporary obliteration. In retrospect, Hannah’s life had been slightly more expansive back then—each year it seemed to shrink a little further, the way people’s bones do as they age. Occasionally Blue would come to DC on a work trip and they’d have lunch, and those visits were always the highlight of Hannah’s small life. But it had been twelve years since all four of them, including Renee, had been together in one place. Twelve years since the summer that would both haunt and link them and Henry together for the rest of their lives. Shortly after that, Blue had taken off to some small school in Vermont with a name Hannah always forgot, Maya to Ramapo College in New Jersey before dropping out entirely, and Renee, their long lost fourth, to Duke. Only Hannah had stayed in DC, her plans to attend UCLA with Henry shredded. She went to community college instead, unable to leave him behind. It was never even a question. It was what he would have done for her.
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