Praise for The First Time She Drowned
“Lyrical, emotional…Cassie’s biggest revelation is a punch in the gut.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“This raw, evocative read is one you won’t want to miss.”
— BuzzFeed
“Beautiful, passionate…a writer of great distinction and infinite promise.” —Pat Conroy, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“One of the most lyrical novels I’ve ever read. Haunting and
exquisite.” —Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“[An] excellent debut novel.”
— Booklist, starred review
“A stunning story of family and friendship, this is a novel to look out for.”
— Book Riot
“Poignant… This heartfelt, lyrical debut will strike a chord.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Emotional y devastating… A complex novel that ultimately
uplifts.”
— Publishers Weekly
“The writing is beautiful, insightful, and often shockingly witty.”
— LA Review of Books
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Also by Kerry Kletter
The First Time She Drowned
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EAST COAST GIRLS
KERRY KLETTER
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If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the
publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Recycling programs
ISBN-13: 978-0-7783-0949-9
for this product may
not exist in your area.
East Coast Girls
Copyright © 2020 by Kerry Kletter
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5H 4E3, Canada.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its corporate affiliates.
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For my hometown friends of Ridgewood NJ
especial y my own crew of first responders
Amanda Fredericks
Marti Daniel Moats, Ruth Brown and John Tashjian
because you are home to me.
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EAST COAST GIRLS
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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 Hannaht 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
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KERRY KLETTER
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
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> 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 mo-
ment 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.”
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“Cheeseball,” Hannah teased, but her face hurt from smil-
ing 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!”
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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 glow-
ing 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.
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TWELVE YEARS LATER
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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.
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Now she squeezed Henry’s pale hand, soft and round as sor-
row, 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 com-
fort. 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.”
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“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 tun-
nel 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 teenag-
ers 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.
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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
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