East Coast Girls

by Kerry Kletter

  “Blue! Watch out!”

  Blue turned as a blur of greasy hair and rotten teeth lurched toward her. She yanked the door closed just as his grimy hands slammed down on the glass in front of her face.

  He went for the door handle.

  Hannah dove for the locks.

  “Go!” Blue cried.

  Hannah fumbled to get the key in the ignition. “I’m trying!”

  “Fuck, Hannah, go!” Maya said.

  He pounded on the window so hard the car shook.

  Renee leaped forward, blasting the horn to alert the store clerk. Blue saw it draw the attention of the man’s friends instead. They turned and pointed, abandoning their stuff as they ran for the door.

  “Oh my god,” she said.

  Hannah was fishing around on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Blue said.

  “I dropped the keys!”

  The man made a lewd gesture with his tongue, rattled the door handle as Hannah scrambled for them in the darkness. “Shit.”

  He pressed his face against the window, baring that nasty shattered-glass smile.

  “Hurry!” Blue shouted.

  “Shut up!” Hannah cried.

  His friends reached the car just as Hannah found the keys, got them in the ignition. One creep pounded the hood. She slammed the car in reverse. Screeched out of the parking lot.

  “Jesus,” Hannah said. “Is everyone okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Maya said. “Everyone’s fine. Those slimeballs don’t get to ruin our good time.”

  But Blue wasn’t fine, couldn’t shake the look in the man’s eyes. She’d never been that close to pure hatred before, the way it bored into her, black and parasitic, hunting for a new host.

  They’d been on the road only a minute when Blue noticed Hannah glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  Blue turned. Saw two pinpoints of light stabbing the darkness, growing bigger, coming faster. She knew it was them even before the beat-up car came into view. She could feel the darkness, darker than the night around them, spilling toward them. “Oh my God.”

  Hannah sped up. Much too fast for the road. Almost missing curves in the darkness.

  Soon the men were beside them. Swerving threateningly into their lane. Nearly pushing them off the parkway.

  The light ahead turned red.

  “Run it!” Blue shouted.

  “I am!” Hannah yelled as the car shook with too much speed. “Which way?!”

  “Make the next left!” Maya said. “I think.”

  “You think?!” Blue said. “What street?”

  “Whipple or...I don’t know...Whitehall? Begins with a W...maybe... I don’t... She was talking so fast!”

  “You didn’t write it down?” Renee said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Blue said.

  “Everybody, shut up!” Hannah said.

  Blue frantically checked her phone for cell service.

  Renee screamed as the car pushed back up behind them, riding their bumper.

  “You guys...” Hannah said.

  Before she’d even gotten the words out, Blue understood by the tremor in her voice that they would be bad.

  “We’re running out of gas.”

  * * *

  Now as Blue scanned the parking lot, she felt the way she always did when she remembered that night—that dark, disorienting descent, a scuba diver in murky waters, losing her sense of which way was up. How quickly that blackness could engulf her, steal even the direction of light. She thought of her unfinished second drink inside the restaurant, missed it like a limb.

  Hannah and Renee approached, grim faced.

  “We looked everywhere,” Hannah said.

  Blue pulled out her emergency cigarettes, shook one out of the pack and lit it. That night was so close to her now, the thin veil between past and present dissolving. Bright, useless moon, the guttural bark of a dog, Renee, help! She needed something...she needed... She inhaled slow and deep, studied the ribbon of her exhale as it curled and drifted and finally disappeared. Smoking was meditation and forgetting. A few drags were all that was necessary to suffocate the feelings.

  Hannah was hugging herself, rubbing her arms like a child self-soothing. Renee looked pale, her hairline damp and curling with sweat.

  “Should we call the police?” Renee said.

  No one moved. Their eyes met, wide and spooked. The awful unspoken thought pulsing between them once more: Jesus, not again.

  The roar of a bike broke the pall of dread, a single headlight zooming toward them.

  “Please tell me that’s not her,” Blue said.

  “I hope it is,” Hannah said. “It’ll mean she’s still alive.”

  “Right,” Blue said steadily, “but then I’ll have to kill her.” It was all stirred up in her—everything, all of it. That night, this night, the burden of loving people.

  The bike skidded to a stop in front of them with a little fishtail flourish. Maya, on the back, wearing a man’s jacket, took off her helmet and flashed a big smile. Beside her some random dude with slicked-back hair, a wet T-shirt clinging to his chest.

  “Did she pick up a stripper?” Renee whispered under her breath.

  “Hi!” Maya said, scrunching her own wet hair. “What are you guys doing in the parking lot?”

  Blue wanted to punch her. Her fists were balling as if she might. She was relieved too. Of course she was relieved! But her whole back was soaked with fear sweat and her heart wouldn’t calm and all she had wanted, all she’d freaking wanted, was a quick getaway with her friends, with Maya and Hannah only. And just maybe to have a little tiny romance, just for a few days, to be kissed for freaking once, just one more time in her stupid life. And instead here she was, the walking credit card, dealing with other people’s BS as usual, terrified that Maya had been murdered. She might as well be back at work fixing the mistakes of all the Wall Street bros who outearned her while underperforming her.

  “Andy,” Maya said. “This is my fr—”

  “You’re dead to me right now,” Blue said with the controlled menace of a cocked gun.

  Maya flinched with surprise, recovered. “Oh! I am? Okay, well, can I not be dead until Monday? Because I haven’t even had a day at the beach yet. Or a last meal, for that matter. Plus, we’ve already had one loss.” She pulled out the box of ashes from Andy’s jacket pocket. “This is...well, was...Indy.”

  Blue scowled. No one spoke.

  “All righty, then. Guess you’re not dog people,” Maya said.

  “You’re such an asshole,” Blue said.

  “Should I...ah...” Andy thumbed toward his bike.

  “No,” Maya said. “Just wait over there a sec.” She motioned to the edge of the parking lot, and he dutifully headed that way.

  “What were you doing?” Hannah said as soon as he was out of earshot. “We were seriously worried.”

  “We thought you’d been kidnapped or something,” Renee said. “Think of where our minds went.”

  “I went swimming! I wasn’t gone that long.” She paused, glanced at Andy and back to them. “I mean, come on, did you see him? What choice did I have?”

  Blue was so mad she thought she might stroke out. “What choice? Oh gosh, I don’t know. You could’ve chosen not to scare the crap out of your friends, I suppose. You could’ve chosen to be considerate. You could’ve... I’m just spitballing here...not gone.”

  “Could you possibly overreact more? Excuse me if I didn’t want to share in the misery party you guys were having. Maybe if you weren’t fighting—”

  “Oh, right!” Blue threw her hands up. “It’s our fault. You had no choice but to run off with some random drifter you met in a bar.”

  “You cou
ld’ve at least told us you were leaving,” Renee said.

  “You guys would’ve stopped me!” Maya said. “Whatever. I’m not going to apologize for trying to enjoy my vacation.”

  “Your vacation?!” Blue said. “Okay, hold on, everybody, let’s all take a minute to remind ourselves that we are on Maya’s vacation and we should not interfere with her fun if she wants to take off and abandon us to bang some loser on a bike!”

  She saw Andy turn, look dumbfounded. It gave her a sick pleasure to know he had heard.

  “Real mature, Blue,” Maya said.

  Blue gave her the finger.

  Maya gave her the finger back.

  A young couple hurried their children past.

  “Okay, you guys...” Hannah shook her head.

  “Blue’s right, Maya,” Renee said.

  “Thank you,” Blue said.

  Blue and Renee exchanged a look, realized they were on the same side. Oh, whatever. Blue didn’t have the energy to be mad at two people at once and right now her fury at Maya trumped everything. “You know what? To hell with this. I’m out of here.” She started toward the car.

  “Excellent plan,” Maya said. “This is stupid. Let’s go fight it out with a dance-off at the Talkhouse.”

  “I mean back to the city,” Blue said over her shoulder. “You’re absolutely right. This trip is miserable.” She stopped, turned. “And by the way, how about giving Hannah back the Xanax you stole from her?”

  “What are you talking about?” Maya said.

  Blue just stared.

  “I didn’t take it!”

  “Oh, really? It’s just a coincidence that for years you’ve been going on about how she needs to stop, and it’s a crutch, and now—poof—it’s gone, when you were the last person to have it?”

  “Wait, what?” Hannah said, wounded. “That’s really what you think of me, Maya?”

  “No!” Maya said. “Okay, yes. No. It’s complicated. I’m sorry. And I did take it. I’ll give it to you as soon as we get back to the house.”

  “You stole her medication? Seriously?” Renee said incredulously. “Jeez.”

  “I was only trying to help.”

  Hannah and Renee looked at each other, started toward the car.

  “It was a mistake, okay?” Maya said.

  Blue walked back to her. “Give me the keys.”

  “All of this because I met a guy? It was nothing! Just a laugh.”

  Blue extended her hand.

  “But—”

  “Keys.”

  “Whatever,” Maya said, lobbing them at Blue. “Leave, then! What do I care?”

  “We are,” Blue said.

  She hit the remote key with flare, unlocking the car doors. Hannah and Renee exchanged glances before climbing in.

  “No, wait!” Maya cried.

  They all turned.

  “What about the beach? The sunsets? The happy hours? Just screw it all? Forget the friendship? See you later? The whole point of this stupid trip was to fix us! To go back to the way things were before everything got all messed up. And we were happy. And normal. And best freaking friends! Remember?”

  Blue opened the driver’s door. “Sorry,” she said, “but your plan didn’t work.”

  “You didn’t give it a chance.”

  “It never had one.”

  “Look, I apologize, okay? I shouldn’t have left without telling you! I admit it!”

  It wasn’t enough. Even if Blue wanted it to be, it just wasn’t.

  “Tell me what you want me to do to make you stay,” Maya pleaded.

  I want you to have kept your mouth shut that night, Blue thought. But that wasn’t fair. She knew it wasn’t fair to blame Maya. “You know what I want?” she said instead. “I want you to grow up. I want you to consider people. I want you to keep a job for more than three months. I want you to pay me back the four thousand six hundred dollars and twenty-five cents you’ve borrowed from me over the last ten years.”

  “You kept a tab?”

  “I did. But no more. The days of me bailing you out are over. You need to act like a responsible adult for once in your life.”

  “Fine,” Maya said. “Consider it done. All grown up. I’ll be so mature I won’t even laugh. I won’t even smile. Okay? If I agree to that, can we just try—”

  Blue got in the car, slammed the door shut. Renee and Hannah joined her.

  “You guys,” Maya called.

  Blue gripped the steering wheel, stared straight ahead. The anger was out of her. Now all she wanted was to drive away. From everything. From all of it. Just go and go and go until nothing felt hard anymore. It seemed like she’d been wanting to do that for so long now. Even before that terrible night. But who was it she wanted to leave? Her parents, yes. Herself, probably even more so. But not her friends. They were what had kept her sane, possibly even kept her alive. But that was before. When they weren’t so damaged and life so complicated. When they didn’t hurt her. Not in a real way.

  And yet it tugged at her. Those things she tried so hard to deny—her love, her dependency. That endless devotion to her old friends that she sometimes wished she could cut out of her heart and toss away. It hurt to stay. It hurt to go. In equal measure.

  She sighed, rolled down the window, motioned toward Andy. “Him or us,” she said.

  Maya looked sadly at Andy, back at Blue. “But—”

  “Five seconds to decide,” Blue said.

  Maya didn’t move.

  Blue started the engine.

  HANNAH

  Hannah sat in the back seat, momentarily away from the noise and the tension and the cavity of night sky. She was exposed wire, a downed telephone line, spewing high-voltage electricity. She couldn’t believe Maya took her Xanax! Not that it mattered now. Between this and the call from Vivian, she was so out of there. Henry needed her. Or she needed him—she wasn’t sure.

  “I seem to remember much less fighting last time we were here,” Renee said dryly.

  “Yeah,” Hannah said. “And more fun.” They both stared wistfully ahead.

  Outside the car Maya stood stubborn and conflicted.

  Blue honked and she jumped a little, glared into the headlights. “Do you think she practices being a pain in the ass?” Blue asked.

  “Yes,” Hannah said.

  “I think it comes naturally,” Renee said.

  Hannah pulled out her phone, pulled up Google to search for train and bus schedules. She wondered which would be more likely to be the target of a terror attack. A bus, she bet. She decided to go with the train.

  Blue lit a cigarette.

  Renee discreetly rolled her window down.

  Hannah pulled up the train schedule. Checked the times. It was too late to go tonight. But she could take the first one out in the morning to Penn Station, a second to DC. She swallowed. Weirdly her throat no longer hurt. Just in time, now that she was leaving.

  Blue shined her high beams on Maya. “Should we just leave without her?”

  Before Hannah or Renee could answer, Blue backed up, steered left, let the car roll forward without Maya in it.

  “Wait! Don’t,” Hannah said. “Even though she probably deserves it.”

  Blue sighed, stopped the car.

  Maya marched up to the window. “Let me just say goodbye,” she said, and stomped off to the edge of the parking lot where Andy stood.

  “I almost feel bad,” Renee said. “He was pretty hot.”

  “She’ll find another one in ten minutes,” Blue said with a shrug.

  They watched as Maya and Andy embraced.

  Blue honked the horn again, and Maya’s middle finger shot up behind Andy’s back. Finally Maya returned to the car, climbed in beside Hannah, slammed the door shut.

  They pulled out of the lot, and
Maya turned to wave goodbye with an expression that Hannah had never seen on her. It almost looked like longing. Hannah hated longing. It hurt in such a physical way, like your heart was reaching outside your chest, came just short of its desired target. But no, she was probably projecting. Maya never got attached to men.

  They drove in silence, not even the radio to camouflage the strife, and everything had a lonely quality to it like the howl of a wind. Hannah scanned the side of the road for deer that might bolt out in front of them. It was so dark out here, the night.

  “So that’s it?” Maya said. “We’re all just going to hate each other and be miserable for the rest of the weekend?”

  “No one hates anyone,” Hannah said.

  Blue cleared her throat.

  “Am I seriously the only one who cares about fixing this?” Maya said.

  “Some things are past fixing,” Blue said as she pulled up to a stop sign.

  Hannah felt this in her chest. She felt this in her life.

  “Do you believe that too?” Maya said to Renee.

  “I don’t know what I believe,” Renee said.

  They turned onto Montauk Highway. The air near the beach was salty with sea and the stir of memory. It was as if summers lay dormant in the body, awoken again by that smell. Hannah wondered what the memory of vacation smelled like to people who lived here full-time.

  They turned onto the street where Maya had once ridden Blue’s skateboard straight into a sewer. They passed the beach where Hannah, wading in the night ocean, had turned to see Blue getting her first kiss. They reached Nana’s street and Hannah saw them as they were at eighteen, coming home after a bonfire at Ditch Plains, singing at the top of their lungs and stumbling drunkenly into one another, Renee trying her first cigarette and gagging and coughing so violently that she fell down a small ravine.

  Now Blue spun into the driveway. The house was a dark, unwelcoming silhouette. They’d forgotten to leave the lights on. The engine ticked and settled, made the quiet louder as if they’d parked underwater. As they got out, Hannah could hear the waves booming like the thundering footsteps of giants. Storm surf. Angry ocean.