East Coast Girls (ARC)
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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 ad-
mitting 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 an-
swer. She was just too tired today. Every day, really.
I know you’re sitting in your apt. ignoring me.
She sighed.
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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. Some-
thing 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 Han-
nah’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 doggie door,” Hannah said.
Though they talked often on the phone and through vary-
ing forms of social media, it had been a while since Hannah
had seen either of them in person. Adult concerns had slowly
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eclipsed superfluous things like fun, and the seductive prom-
ise of technology had rendered in-person visits seemingly un-
necessary. 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. Han-
nah and Maya knew it was what Blue needed, how she hon-
ored the man who had never been present for her—through
dark-humored toasts and temporary obliteration. In retro-
spect, 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 drop-
ping 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 in-
stead, unable to leave him behind. It was never even a ques-
tion. It was what he would have done for her.
“Anyway,” Maya said. “The reason I’m calling is because
we’re going back to Montauk.”
“What?” Hannah said.
“Long weekend. You, me, Blue and a twelve-pack of wine
coolers—just like old times.”
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Old times. If only. Old times seemed like someone else’s life—that’s how far removed she felt from her carefree youth
or their summers together in Montauk. They’d spent two
weeks every year there at Blue’s nana’s beach house, staying
up late and laughing until they’d cried, playing drunk truth
or dare in the kitchen and watching the sun climb out of the
ocean by the lighthouse. She thought of them soaking in light over long, luxurious days at the beach, chasing the umbrella
they’d failed to secure as it skidded like a leaf in wind across the sand, Maya pretending to drown to get the attention of
a cute lifeguard, ice cream and souvenir T-shirts and more
laughter. The last time life had been perfect, the last time
Hannah had ever believed it could be.
Now she looked out the window. The evening had turned
cloudy with the promise of rain.
“Before you even think about saying no, we made a vow.
Remember? We said we’d go back every year, and now we’re
almost thirty. We have to go back before we turn thirty.”
“I’m already thirty,” Hannah said. “Thanks for the card
by the way.”
There was a pause.
“Let me tell you something,” Maya said. “I am sick and tired
of the postal service. Rain, sleet and snow my ass.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Come on, it’s gonna be great! We’ll rent a convertible and
wear our old bikinis, maybe even accidentally run over an-
other fruit stand. Seriously, this is a nonnegotiable.”
Hannah remembered Maya plowing through the fruit stand,
bright oranges bouncing like giant hail off the windshield,
Nana’s Volvo coming to a stop in the potato field behind it.
That was the summer Nana was teaching them to drive, and
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there had been a moment of shocked silence before Maya said,
“Well, I guess that wasn’t the brake,” and Nana said, “It ap-
pears not,” and then they all burst into hysterics. Later Nana said the price of paying for all those oranges was worth it just for that one good laugh.
Now Hannah smiled at the memory. It seemed impossible
that the girls were ever that innocent. When they didn’t know what life could do.
“Where is this al
l coming from?” she said. There seemed
an unusual urgency in Maya’s voice.
“Stop overanalyzing and say yes,” Maya said.
“Maybe next year,” she said.
“We can’t go next year,” Blue said. “We put Nana’s house
on the market.”
“Oh no.” Hannah could hear the sadness in Blue’s voice. It
made her sad too. They all loved Nana so much, the one adult
in their world whom they’d trusted. But Blue was forced to
move her into a home last year when Nana lost the last of her memory. Already, Nana’s apartment in Manhattan had been
sold; the Montauk house would probably go just as quickly.
“Now or never,” Maya said. “It will be so fun!”
Hannah tried to picture herself on an actual vacation, re-
laxed, driving with the top down, sea salt and the smell of cut grass on the wind, the rosy sunset blushing across the Atlantic, her lifelong friends beside her. She felt a pressure lift. Then she envisioned all the terrible things that could happen. Their car swerving off the road. Careening into the ocean. All of them
going under. What would Henry do without her? “I can’t.”
“You need to,” Maya said.
“I have things to do, Maya. I have a life.”
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“What things? You don’t have things. And you definitely
don’t have a life.”
Hannah tried to come up with examples, but the truth was
she worked from home and was beholden to nothing. Well,
nothing except Henry. She wanted to tell them about how well
he was doing lately, how just a few days before she could see his eyes tracking her with understanding as she talked, and then
as if to prove it, he had smiled at her. Smiled! At her! And, my God, didn’t they know there was no more important place to
be, no more important thing to do than to witness that? But
she knew it would be a mistake to talk about Henry. It was
the unspoken condition of their friendship that she speak of
him as little as possible and definitely never of the night that changed them all. Anytime she’d tried, she’d felt her friends’
walls go up. Maya didn’t like to talk about hard things. She
put them away like china in a cupboard, stored them some-
where just out of reach. Blue simply didn’t know how to talk about them, grew uncomfortable and shifty.
“Really, I want to, but…”
“Sorry.” Blue made crackling noises into the phone. “I
think you cut out there. Did you hear her, Maya?”
“Sounded like she said yes.”
“I said—”
“Hold, please,” Blue said and began humming Celine Di-
on’s “My Heart Will Go On” into the phone.
Hannah tried to speak over her. Blue hummed louder. Han-
nah sighed and leaned against the wall and wished she was
still the kind of person who could do, who would dare. She
wanted to ask them how they went about saying yes, or at
least saying it ever again.
“Listen to me. Are you listening to me?” Maya shouted over
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Blue’s singing. “You’re coming. Do you understand me? Ask
yourself this—when was the last time you were truly happy?
You know the answer. Now go pack your bags. We leave the
day after tomorrow. Blue and I will even pick you up.”
“We will?” Blue said.
“Yes—road trip!” Maya said. “It’ll be great.”
Hannah chewed her lip. “I’ll think about it,” she lied and
hung up the phone before they could argue.
But the thought was like an earworm the way it kept wig-
gling its way back into her consciousness. She missed her
friends. She missed fun. She missed herself—the girl she’d once been with them, the one who would’ve already had a suitcase
packed. She thought of the fortune-teller at the Bridgehamp-
ton fair all those years ago with that fountain of white hair and that pointy jaw that jutted out like an accusation, whose face had startled when Hannah sat down before her and let her palm be read. She still wondered what would’ve happened if
only she had listened to her warning, how different her life, all of their lives, might have turned out.
Pointless to think about, she told herself . Besides, I can’t leave Henry. She climbed into bed, convinced, and fell asleep with the TV light flickering across her closed eyes.
Even in her sleep Hannah could sense the storm when it
came, beating at her windows, thundering around the build-
ing, making the city its drum. She was restless inside all that rain, inside Maya’s question about happiness, and in her dreams the storm got inside her apartment, the water rising higher
and higher. She woke at one point with the sheets so drenched that she decided she had leukemia and spent an hour online
both confirming her diagnosis and discovering several other
deadly afflictions she had, as well. She could practically hear East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 26
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Maya’s voice in her head saying, “I’ll give you a diagnosis.
Batshit crazy.”
In the morning the sky was the color of loneliness, and in
the jaundiced light of her bedside lamp, the walls seemed to
close in on her like a migraine. The phone call from Maya
and Blue had latched like an infant to a breast at the back of her mind, a small incessant tug, a hunger. She made instant
coffee in the microwave, turned on her laptop and sat on her
couch with both, hoping to distract herself with work. There
were so many letters to answer. It was something that Hannah
both loved and hated about her job. So many people sought
out her counsel, and most of the time it amused her to be
perceived as someone who knew things, and perhaps in mo-
ments, she believed that she really did. Other times the sense of being something she wasn’t made her solar plexus ache like someone had hurled a baseball through it.
Henry’s mother, Vivian, had given her the job at the paper.
Even before disaster had struck, Vivian had always been kind
to Hannah, intuiting, Hannah suspected, that her parents
were…not very loving. Now that the two of them shared the
bond of pain, Vivian was even kinder.
“It doesn’t pay much, I’m afraid,” Vivian had said, “but
nothing is easier and less taxing than dishing out advice—
which is why everyone feels the need to give it so freely.”
Hannah had secretly wanted to write obituaries instead.
She’d thought there might be something in the reviewing of
a life that might reveal the secret of how one went about having one. Or at least on her better days that was why she had
wanted the job. On her not-so-better days, Hannah wanted
to know all the ways a person could die so she could know
what to avoid.
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Now Hannah opened the first letter of the morning and
sighed. Dear Miss Know-It-All: My neighbor’s dog barks incessantly.
I’m going crazy! What should I do? Not for the
first time, Hannah wondered what kind of people took the time to write in
to an advice columnist. She decided that most of them were
probably like her, reclusive and frightened, hoping that see-
ing their words in print might offer proof of their existence, something they could cut out and tape to their fridge the way an Everest climber marks their place in history with a flag.
They often signed their letters “Anonymous,” which Han-
nah suspected was more an attempt at accuracy than privacy.
Most of the letters answered themselves, the writers already
knowing what they wanted to do but looking for permission
to do it. People were always looking for permission to be who they were, to feel what they felt, which was, of course, always the thing that scared them. She tore through a few more letters, trying to pick out the most interesting ones—but they all seemed like the same problems, the same answers. Why didn’t
people ever change? Always stuck in ruts that made them un-
happy but unwilling to give them up. She caught her reflec-
tion in the mirror beside her bed, frowned, looked away. The
clock said 10:00 a.m.—it was time to go see Henry. She got
up, got dressed, buttoned her raincoat against the day.
It was cold for summer, and the rain was dirty, splashing
from its puddles up into her shoes. On the way to the Metro,
she saw a group of girls, four of them, laughing as they raced down the street, reminding her so much of Maya and Blue
and Renee, of those times when even rainy days felt sunny.
Hannah watched them live inside the hug of friendship, her
longing like talons inside her.
By the time she reached the care facility, her pants were
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plastered to her skin. An image of the beach popped into her
mind, its warm sand, the rupture of ocean spray, a vibrant sun spoked with shiny beams. She buried the thought, or tried to.
The long-term care facility, usually strangely comforting in
its familiarity, today seemed as cold and sterile as an autopsy suite. The sound of her footsteps down the empty hall echoed
in the aching hollow of her chest.
Henry was in his wheelchair, eyes glazed and fixed on the
wall. She’d fallen for those eyes back when they were four-
teen and she’d walked into her favorite bagel shop one morn-
ing and there was a new person behind the counter—Henry.
She recognized him from school, though they never talked