East Coast Girls

by Kerry Kletter

  “Cool,” Blue said, though there were so many things she wanted to say instead—she just didn’t know how.

  Renee jumped up suddenly, all long legs and long hair and eyes on the distance. “I’ll race you to the end of the block!”

  And Blue, who’d had no interest in moving, who was about as fast as a garden snail, had agreed. Somehow, she understood the request as an act of trust. That wherever Renee had to flee to in her mind to cope, she was inviting Blue to go with her. Of course, Renee had beaten her easily and then wanted to do it again.

  She’d been a runner even then. She always wanted to run.

  Now Maya said, “It’s just... I miss her.”

  “I thought we were dropping the subject,” Blue said.

  “She was your best friend.”

  Blue let the sentence hang there, unanswered.

  They moved out of the lighted city and onto the highway. The moon was high and indifferent. How strange, Blue thought, to be gazed upon nightly by a thing that does not know you, that stands over you as you sleep and dream, seeming benevolent but in truth neglectful, uncaring. It was like...well, it was like her mother, actually. Both her parents, really, but especially her mother. Like all of their mothers. Though truthfully Blue had no right to complain. At least her mother had been around. She wasn’t abusive like Maya’s mother, or casually cruel like Renee’s or a depressive locked away in her room like Hannah’s. She was just uninterested. And besides, Blue had Nana. Not all the time, but every summer at least.

  Regardless, their commonality was the engine of her fierce loyalty, that deep gratitude for being allowed into the pack, four feral teenagers rearing one another like abandoned pups. Maya used to call their respective families “the Unchosen Ones.” And it was true. People just got born into a house with a bunch of randoms and then were expected to love them regardless of personality or commonality or even, you know, decency. It didn’t make sense. Sure, some people got lucky. But a lot of people didn’t. The four of them had been the true family. They had chosen one another. It was why it mattered so much to Blue when one of them betrayed the contract. She didn’t understand how Hannah and Maya could forgive Renee, how Maya’s offhanded mention of her felt like asking Blue to do the same. In the back of her mind, a flash of dark night, that quickened heartbeat of terror. She blinked it away, climbed into the sky, letting the perspective shrink her into something tiny and irrelevant. It was a comfort—to be one step from disappearing.

  Maya and Hannah were watching her. She knew they thought she was cold.

  “It’s no fun with you two fighting,” Maya said. “We’re supposed to be a foursome.”

  “We’re not fighting. We don’t speak.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, and no offense, I don’t care.”

  It seemed to Blue that Maya was often sympathetic to the unsympathetic character, that friend who always, without fail, took the wrong person’s side because she felt sorry for their weaknesses, regardless of how destructive they were to the people around them. On the one hand, Blue admired Maya’s forgiving nature, but on the other she just wanted to be mad at Renee. Why was it so hard, Blue wondered, to allow other people their anger? Especially women. Women were always denied it. Told to be nice. To forgive. Screw that.

  “Whatever she did to you, it was over a decade ago,” Maya said. “How long do you plan on dwelling on this?”

  Blue’s jaw clenched. She took another deep drag on her cigarette. She wanted to strangle Maya for getting everything so backward. Part of her wished she could come out and say exactly what Renee had done, make Maya feel guilty for her casualness. But even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. She had to sit on it like a suitcase that wouldn’t quite zip, suffocate the air out of it. To speak of it would be to release its combustible content into the world, make what happened too real, too true. And once out, she could never put it back. To even think about Renee right now was stirring things she didn’t want stirred.

  For years she’d pushed Renee out of her head. The last time she’d even seen her was in the hospital—those weeks of keeping vigil over Henry. By then they’d already stopped talking. The last time they were actually friends was the night everything went so terribly, irrevocably wrong for all of them. The night after they’d returned from their last annual trip to Montauk, so blinded by their own happiness they didn’t anticipate life’s ability to take it all away.

  It made everything worse—how happy they’d been then, how naive. It always made Blue hate herself to think of that. Like she’d let herself be duped somehow.

  They’d gone to a party. A house they’d never been to before. Some guy Maya had picked up at the mall along with a new tank top and lip gloss. Chuck? Chet? Maya hadn’t been sure—they’d called him Check.

  Loud music from the backyard lured them toward it, heads turning as they entered through the back gate, her friends so tan and beautiful. She could see them as they were being seen—like sunbeams, like photons, so radiant and alluring, emanating some intangible spark. Another night she might have been jealous—she’d always been the approachable one, the buddy guys came to for advice about her friends. But that was before she met Jack in Montauk. With Jack, some part of life that had previously been closed to her was unlocked, allowed her to consider that she was desirable too. She even wore his sweatshirt that night, wrapped around her waist like a hug, like proof.

  The party was wild and boozy with a kind of darkness at its edges—small groups slipping off into bathrooms or shadows, sniffing their noses as they rejoined the crowd. Maya ran off to find Check, leaving Blue, Renee and Hannah on their own among strangers. They were hesitant at first, shy and awkward. But then Henry arrived—and, oh, there he was, so crystal clear in her memory. That slight hunch in his shoulders as if stooping to listen, compassionate brown eyes, such genuine sweetness in his smile. His hair was cut short for summer and he was wearing a soft weathered T-shirt and khaki shorts, just filling into himself, becoming a man. She could almost reach out to touch the image of him as he kissed Hannah’s head, then turned and greeted her with a brotherly squeeze. Henry. Henry. Two months from a tennis scholarship at UCLA he would never get to claim.

  Renee dragged Blue off to get beers from the keg, then they wandered toward the pool. In the deep end, partygoers jumped in fully clothed, clutching their beers and pulling unsuspecting people in with them, everyone shrieking and laughing. Blue and Renee plopped down on the scratchy concrete edge of the shallow end, took off their flip-flops. Their bare legs dangled in the fire-blue water, swaying in unintentional sync. Renee’s calves were long and lithe, her toes pointed gracefully like a gymnast’s in midflip. Beside them Blue’s legs looked scabby and thick. Somewhere along the way Renee had transformed from a tomboy like her into a coy, contained beauty and carried a new self-consciousness in how she presented herself, as if she was always aware of her angles. She’d become the exact opposite of her mother, who drank too much and always had stains on her shirts and lipstick on her teeth. Blue suspected that was the point. If Renee was perfect, if she was like a girl in a magazine, no one would leave her, no one would regret that she had been born.

  Renee pulled her long, sleek hair into an effortless knot, and Blue wondered if femininity was an inborn trait she’d failed to inherit or something she’d just never been taught or bothered to learn. Just the fact of Renee’s perfectly pedicured toes wiggling in the water seemed so mysterious—it would never occur to Blue to paint her toes! Or her fingernails for that matter. It seemed exhausting, and yet she often envied Renee for being the kind of girl her own mother had wanted, for looking the way the world insisted a girl should look. Life was hard on girls who existed outside that expectation. For years Blue had never faced any kind of reflection—mirror, window, photograph—beside Renee without feeling some dim, peripheral inadequacy. But that night it hadn’t mattered. That night she had Jack in her m
emory and her best friend beside her, their legs kicking side by side in the water.

  “I’m going to miss this,” Blue said, staring ahead.

  “Not me,” Renee said. “I’m so ready to skip this town.”

  The words stung. Blue understood it wasn’t about her, that Renee was running from her awful home life and toward a new version of herself, but still she wanted to say, “What about me?” She didn’t understand wanting to leave. Here was where they had each other. There was where they would not. She felt ill equipped to be without her friends. How could Renee feel so differently? Beneath the din of the crowd, she could hear the quiet knock of water against the pool drains. A hollow, lonely sound.

  “I’ll miss you, obviously,” Renee said. “But we’ll visit each other all the time.”

  A sudden pierce of regret. If only Blue had studied harder, she could be joining Renee at Duke, the two of them in matching sweatshirts casting long fall shadows as they walked across a golden-lit quad. Instead she’d spent her high school years rebelling against her parents by screwing around in school. And while everyone else was charting their futures, she had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up, only what she didn’t want to be—a robot like her mom and dad, going to jobs they hated day after day just so they could take fancy vacations and drive a BMW and belong to a country club they never had time to visit. Blue wanted more than that—she just didn’t know what.

  “It’s just not going to be the same,” Blue said, staring into the pool. Emotions were hard for her to talk about and also to have, and she was suddenly congested with them. She took a huge sip of beer.

  “You’ll only be twelve hours away by car, twenty-three by train, three and a half by plane. Which means that if you ever...you know...want to be a pain in my ass, or miss my random trivia or whatever, the shortest distance is only two hundred and ten minutes.”

  Blue shook her head. “You mapped it out?” That made her feel a little better.

  “And priced it.”

  “Dork,” Blue said, laughing.

  They bumped shoulders and watched the party grow and left the conversation at that. Soon the crowd turned friendlier with drink, and they found themselves pulled into a game of beer pong. Maya reappeared nearby, sitting on Check’s lap and telling a story with her big hand gestures to a small crowd gathered around them. Blue spotted Hannah leaning against Henry’s chest, his arms wrapped around her, her face relaxed and content. Blue waved, they waved back and then she saw Hannah tilt her head to Henry for a kiss, and Blue’s heart torqued with feelings both painful and lovely, remembering Jack, missing Jack, the feelings so big she didn’t know what to do with them. A Ping-Pong ball landed in her beer and she guzzled it down.

  The night moved, blurred and swayed. Color and spin and murmuring voices, one occasionally rising over others. The air was charged, dense with humidity, lusty as an oyster. Blue went to the bathroom, lost her friends for a bit, wandered off to smoke pot behind the garage with a few guys she didn’t know. She remembered looking back at the party, at her friends in their respective pockets of fun as she turned the corner and disappeared into the shadows. She remembered the electricity of youth humming inside her, that sense of ripeness, life plucking her from childhood into its mouth, all of them being pulled toward bright futures, tugged back by their love for one another, none of them knowing what horror was waiting for them on the other side of that night.

  As she looked back on it now, she was struck by how detached she was from the memory, as if she was recalling someone else’s life. She had walked into that night one person and came out another. Reincarnated into a colder world, a distrusting soul, an exhausted heart. And with a new enemy—Renee.

  HANNAH

  “I wish you’d just tell us what she did...” Hannah said.

  Both she and Maya had always suspected they were missing a piece of the story, that what happened between Blue and Renee that awful life-changing night went deeper, darker than they knew. But Blue would never say, and now Hannah could tell she’d walked too closely to the edge. She could sense the barbed wire around Blue, feel its sharp prick. Blue could be remote, sometimes even harsh, when she was hurt, but Hannah understood that was how she protected herself. She suspected that was the case for most harsh people. Still it was the kind of thing that made her want to return to her apartment, close the door like a coffin, escape from people and their power to take themselves away. Too dangerous, the world.

  And yet she missed Renee. She hated to think of her without them, of how lonely she must be. It wasn’t hard to imagine. It was how Hannah had felt her whole life before she met Maya back in elementary school. Hannah had been on the swings by herself after classes had let out. She did this often, lingered behind until it got dark. It was easier to stay than to go home where no one even noticed she was gone. She liked to be outside where her aloneness was both visible and concrete. Sometimes if she swung high enough, the wind would seem to blow right through her chest and dissipate some of the heaviness there. At home, the feeling was concentrated, the air dense with it, the closed door behind which her mother stayed an ongoing rejection: Keep Out. How quiet she had to be as she passed that room where her mother slept and slept, how light and undemanding each footstep, each heartbeat—a soft little shadow without needs.

  When Maya wandered along and sat beside her and started talking, Hannah was genuinely confused. Maya was so popular and Hannah was so...not. And yet Maya spoke to her as if they were already friends, which itself was a wonder—the simple way Maya assumed her presence was welcomed.

  Hannah couldn’t remember what they talked about, only that Maya kept daring her to swing higher and higher until soon they were racing each other into the sky, legs pumping, feet pointing into blue, and Maya beside her was just like the wind, dissipating her aloneness.

  Then Maya leaped off the swing at its highest point and said, “Let’s go to your house!” like this was something they usually did, like Hannah’s apartment was a desirable place to go. How different the place had seemed once Maya was in it! Suddenly there was life standing in her kitchen. There was Maya with her long, sleek hair as black and shiny as a night ocean, her tea-tan skin and raspy voice—this fierce, wild girl with galloping bright energy, unleashed into her home like a horse through a graveyard. Maya wasn’t worried about tiptoeing past Hannah’s mother’s door. Instead she walked in, announced, “What do you have for snacks?” and then flung open the fridge and the cabinets, pulling things out like she hadn’t eaten in days. They’d decided on bagels—Hannah’s favorite even then—and Hannah remembered being so surprised by the fact that Maya didn’t know how to use the toaster and then again by how little butter she used for someone who seemed so comfortable helping herself to anything she wanted. “That’s not how you do it,” Hannah had said, almost affronted by Maya’s under-buttered bagel. “Give me that.” She slathered on a thick glaze. “Now make little slits like this.” Hannah showed her with the knife. “So the butter melts all the way through.”

  Maya did as she was told, and when she took her first bite, Hannah watched her. “Good, right?”

  “Oh my God,” Maya had said, and her huge smile entered Hannah, lit her own.

  After Maya left that day, Hannah worried what Maya would do when she found out how unpopular Hannah was at school—how leprous she seemed to be with her red clown hair. But it turned out Maya didn’t care what other people thought. In fact, all the better if other people were against it. Maya threw other people’s opinions out the window, not with a summoning of courage, but with a rush of glee. And anyway, Maya taught her how to tame her ridiculous hair, how to move through the world with her back a little straighter, how to ride a swing into the sky and then leap.

  Hannah couldn’t imagine not having Maya the way Renee no longer had Blue. The way Renee no longer had any of them.

  There had been a moment right after Maya mentioned Renee was
living in Connecticut that Hannah had wanted to say, “Let’s go get her!” That’s the kind of thing they would’ve done when they were younger—show up on Renee’s doorstep with “Surprise!” and drag her off with them on an adventure. That instinct still lived in her somewhere. A small, mostly buried seed of spontaneity. But even if Blue would’ve gone along (never!), Hannah wouldn’t have suggested it. She was too aware of how easily things could go wrong, how an unplanned detour could result in catastrophe. She’d already learned that lesson once. They all had. Her mind darted back to that night, the fork in the road. “Which way? Which way?”

  The black highway unrolled. A fleet of headlights whizzed past at unsettling speeds. An unpleasant flurry in her chest, that small bird beating its wings against her rib cage. She should’ve known the peace she’d experienced when she first got into the car would be short-lived. Wasn’t peace always?

  She opened her bag, pulled out the Xanax. She would just take a half.

  Blue turned. “Hey, can I get one of those?”

  “Are you anxious?” Hannah asked as she tapped out a second pill into Blue’s outstretched palm.

  “Nope,” Blue said, popping it into her mouth. “I just want to knock myself out so I don’t have to deal with Maya the traitor.”

  “Good plan!” Maya said, unfazed. She switched the radio station to something light and easy, as if coaxing Blue into sedation.

  Hannah suspected Blue really was anxious—that her impertinence with Maya was a cover for genuine distress over the mention of Renee. But she knew Blue would never admit that.

  Hannah sighed and closed her eyes, tried to let the music soothe her. Everything would be great once they got to Nana’s house. It always was. They’d gone every summer of middle school and high school, and each time they’d made the drive, that thrilling wind rushing through the open windows, Hannah would feel as if a big bright balloon were suspended in her chest, weightless and airy and flying about. When they hit the Sunrise Highway, she knew they were close, and this glow would fill her as if they were driving straight into light. And then to be at the house! Hannah loved all the noise and the laughter! There was always someone around to chat with or to go on a snack run with or simply to climb into bed with and lean her head against. She’d imagined this was what it must be like to have a real, loving family. And then she’d realized that she did have one, that nothing could stop her from claiming a family that wasn’t blood born.