The problem was she couldn’t keep up with the property
taxes. She hadn’t even bothered to open the bills after the
first one. Somehow she’d convinced herself no one would
notice. What else could she do? She didn’t have the money.
That was another thing that screwed you when your parents
sucked—no one taught you things like money management.
And when you don’t get taught money management or self-soothing, well…it could be a bad combination for your bank
account. She knew it was a problem, but once in a financial
hole, fixing it was a whole other level of difficulty.
The loan manager had nodded patiently, then smiled that
well-practiced, placating smile. “Let me pull up your account,”
he said.
He tapped at his keyboard, peered at his screen, leaving her
to stare at the bone-colored walls, a set of framed awards, a series of pamphlets about credit cards and business accounts
and money markets. The minutes swelled into tiny lifetimes.
The room felt refrigerated and she, pink and raw inside it, a chilled shrimp.
“So, I’m looking at your credit score, and it’s just…it’s going to be hard to get you approved. Is there someone who can
cosign? A parent? Or relative?”
Maya shook her head, swallowed on something hard.
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KERRY KLETTER
“Okay. See, normally I would suggest a home equity loan,
but I have to be honest…with your FICO score that’s going
to be tough. My advice really would be to try to clean up
your credit. You have a lot of credit cards, a lot of credit card debt…if you bring that down, pay some of that off, you can—”
“Wait, how can I pay off debts if I… I mean, that’s the
whole reason for the loan. If I could pay off the old debts, I wouldn’t need to—”
“Or you can develop a history of on-time payments. We
just have to get your score up, because—”
Maya pushed against the threat of tears. “But I don’t… I
need this money now! Like right now. I don’t have time to…
to…to develop a history. I’ll lose my house! Do you under-
stand?” Her voice was rising, her grip on calm slipping.
“I do. I do understand. I’m sorry, but I can’t just…see, we
have rules for…”
A wide abyss blossomed inside her, a dark internal bleed.
“I have a job now,” she heard herself say. “I’ll probably be
getting a raise very soon.” A lie, but whatever. “All of the
bad credit was from before. Look, I just need a few months.
I need to keep this house. I… I don’t have anywhere to go.”
He smiled at her with compassion. Maybe even attraction.
She relaxed a little bit.
“Let me mess around with these numbers,” he said, “and
talk to my supervisor. I’ll call you this week.”
She leaned forward. “I don’t have a week.” A sudden daz-
zle of panic.
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
“Thank you,” Maya said standing, moving toward the door.
“I would appreciate that.”
“Miss Marino?”
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She turned.
“I’m going to do everything I can. But don’t get your hopes
up.”
“Hope is the only thing I have,” she said. And it was. It
would work out. They would give her the loan. She was sure
of it. Then she’d just have to figure out how the hell to pay it back. But that was for another day.
That night she’d gone home and called Blue. It wasn’t pride
that stopped her from asking Blue for the money. It was that
she’d asked so many times before that she wasn’t sure Blue
would say yes. And the thought of her saying no—she couldn’t
even think about what that would do to her, how deep that
rejection would cut.
“Everything all right?” Blue had asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” she’d said.
They’d chatted for a few minutes, and then Blue had men-
tioned that her mother put Nana’s house in Montauk on the
market. Maya was surprised to find her eyes well with tears.
But she’d loved that place and their vacations together there.
Nana’s beach house was the last place they were innocent, the last place they’d been a family together. Just thinking about it summoned a sense of ease, the way being with your friends
could feel like swimming a lazy backstroke beneath a warm
embracing sun. How soft life had felt then, surrounded by her best people and a summer sea. No responsibilities. No burdens. No one trying to take the roof over her head. If only
they could just go back to that…just for a little while. But
then, they could, couldn’t they? Before the house sold. That’s what she’d realized. They should all go back. No, they needed to go back. One last hurrah! A chance to be wild and carefree like they used to be. To be a “framily” again. Man, she could East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 41
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really use that right now—to have her friends in her life. Really in it. Not just texts and calls, but together as one again. It could be like a do-over, a restart for all of them.
“So, listen, I have an idea…” She knew this would be a
tough sell. She reminded Blue of the vow they’d made, of how
long it had been since they were all together. She said that
she’d been given a few days off—which wasn’t true, but she
could just call in sick. The hospital would understand. Tech-
nically it really was in the best interest of her health.
“Yes, let’s do it,” Blue interrupted. “When do we leave?”
Maya had stared at the phone in perfect shock. “Does
Thursday work for you?”
Right after that they’d called Hannah. Got the “no” they
were expecting but hoping against. Maya still wasn’t sure what made her change her mind, but when she got a text from Hannah saying “What day are we leaving and what time are you
guys picking me up?” she wasn’t about to question it.
Now Maya stood in the ER twenty minutes before her shift
was over and said to Steve, “About that dollar.”
“Not happening.”
“Have you no pity? My blood sugar is plummeting.”
“I can probably score you a glucose tablet.”
“There’s no time,” she said, putting a dramatic hand to her
forehead, letting her knees start to buckle.
He laughed and then sighed and pulled the bill from his
wallet. There was a clear understanding as the money swapped
hands that Steve would never see this dollar again, but Maya
liked to think she paid it back with her sparkling personality.
“Hey, by the way,” she said, “remember that smokin’
twenty-one-year-old who came in last week with a scaphoid
fracture? We recently bumped into each other. In my bed-
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43
room. Who knew what one could do with a cast?” She wag-
gled her eyebrows and then, knowing the power of
leaving
an audience hanging, skipped off to the vending machine.
“When are you going to have a real relationship?” he called
after her.
She turned, smiled. “What the hell is that?”
She returned with a bag of Fritos to find him sitting at the
nurses’ station, doing a search on the computer. She stood next to him, peering over his shoulder, crunching loudly into his
right ear to get his attention. “Do you think anyone will no-
tice if I slip out early?”
“Yes,” he said.
She sighed, glanced at her watch. Sixteen minutes left in
her shift. Sixteen minutes and eight hours until she was off
to Montauk. She’d tried to convince Blue to take today off
so they could get an earlier start, but her great powers of persuasion could only go so far.
Steve stood, stole a chip from her bag and went to check
on a patient. She glanced at her watch again, its unmoving
hands like prison bars.
Screw it.
She slipped past the nurses’ station, grabbed her purse from
her locker and bolted for the door. She pulled out her phone, texted Blue with her designated arrival time. Together they
would go get Hannah.
She stepped out into the dewy morning, shedding work
and adulthood like a bad mood, eager to watch them shrink
into the distance until finally she was at the beach, where the whole world would drop away the minute her feet hit sand.
The beach would fix everything.
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BLUE
Blue double-checked Maya’s designated arrival time and
grabbed her duffel bag by the door. She paused, glanced back
at her apartment, at the sleek contours of her furniture, the spare open space, the walls hung with paintings her interior
designer had purchased at auction from Sotheby’s. The New
York City skyline gathered around her windows, buildings
of every height stacked deep, like a photo of a large family
reunion.
The cleaning lady had come again that morning. Blue al-
ways had her come on the day she left for a trip. Part of it
was so she’d have an immaculate place to return to, but ever
since her father died and Nana moved into the home, there
was also that creepy thought that if something happened to
her, some unfortunate person would have to come and get
her things in order. Who would it be? Surely not her mother.
No chance she and her new husband would fly in from Paris.
She’d probably just send flowers to the funeral home with an
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impersonal note. No, Blue was being unfair. Of course her
mother would come! It would look terrible to her friends at
the country club if she didn’t. Blue laughed darkly but then
thought, Seriously, who would it be?
Maya and Hannah were the obvious. She hated the thought
of them having to enter her place, how quiet and strange it
would be without her in it. Maybe someone from work in-
stead—ugh—one of the Wall Street bros on his lunch break,
sorting through her personals while making deals on his cell.
Or maybe her building manager.
What would a person think of her when they walked in
here? What would her apartment tell of her life? It looks like a showroom, she thought. She caught her own image in the mirror, alone at the door, then locked up behind her as she left.
It was early evening and the city was gritty and seething
in the airless heat. Cars and taxis nudged one another like a crowd charging for the exits, while swarms of people darted
across streets and down sidewalks, cyclists zigzagging wildly in and out of traffic, everything jarring and intense and in
motion beneath a vein of blue sky. The air smelled like pret-
zels and exhaust and urine. It always did.
Blue’s doorman jabbed his arm into the air, and a yellow
taxi swerved across two lanes amid an orchestra of angry, dissonant horns and pulled up beside her. She threw her bag into the back seat and climbed in beside it.
“Port Authority, please,” she said while simultaneously
composing a work email on her phone. She brought only a
small leather duffel bag for the long weekend, packed “like
a man,” Maya always said. One pair of linen pants, a classic
button-down, a couple of khaki Bermuda shorts and white T-
shirts, a ten-year-old bathing suit she had no business wearing, East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 45
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KERRY KLETTER
toothbrush, underwear and a pair of flat comfortable sandals.
She usually felt no need for makeup or hair products, if only because she’d decided years ago that they wouldn’t help. But
this time, because there was the possibility of seeing Jack again, she brought a few additional things: a necklace, a new leave-in conditioner her stylist had been trying to push on her forever, some fancy lingerie. When she thought of these hopeful
little items in her suitcase, she cringed with embarrassment.
Her phone rang. She sighed, picked up. “I’m on vacation,”
she said. “Fine, okay, go. Mmm-hmm. Yes, I heard. Did you
look at the reports? Well, look at the reports.” She ended the call.
The phone rang again. “I’m on…okay. Yes, I heard. I told
him to look at the reports.” She sighed. Pulled out a ciga-
rette. She wasn’t a smoker. She just kept them around in case of emergencies.
“Do you mind?” she said to the driver, though she knew
they never did. They could smell the wealth on her, the big tip.
She lit up, took a deep drag, creating a calm dampening
cloud over her brain. Her email buzzed. Work again. She
read it, responded, experienced a flash of dread at her over-
flowing inbox.
While she was there, she opened up social media, reread
the message in her inbox for approximately the fiftieth time.
It had come in at the end of a long day, in a long week when
even a few hits of weed off her vaporizer couldn’t quell a loneliness that made her skin hurt.
Blue, I don’t know if you remember me. We knew each other many summers ago. I saw your profile in the Times and just wanted to congratulate you on your success! If you’re ever back in Montauk, hit me up! Love, Jack Giles.
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47
The first time she’d seen the message, she’d stared in a kind of blinking shock, the words Oh my God looping in her head.
She’d stood, bewildered and giddy, wringing the nerves out
of her hands as she paced, repeatedly returning to the com-
puter to see if the message was still real. No way, she’d said to herself. No way, no way. He remembered her. All these years later. Thought of her enough to friend her, send a message.
It had to mean something, didn’t it? It had to mean a lot. She felt like a carnival ride had taken up residence inside her body, making her all lit up and twirly and nauseated. She wanted
to call Maya or Hannah, ask their opinion, disperse the giant unfamiliar feelings she was having, hand them off. But it had been two in the morning. And besides, she was convinced that
everyone she knew pitied her when it came to such things,
thought she was a loser at love—which was absolutely true,
she was—but it was one thing to know it and another to have
other people believe it. If she told them, they would just make a huge mortifying deal about it. Instead she’d poured herself another scotch and then danced around her living room like
the fool she swore she’d never be.
She’d stayed up half that night stalking him on the internet.
There were no pictures, and she’d resented him for it. How
did one make it to thirty without a single photo on Google
Images unless they were in prison or the witness protection
program? By the time she went to bed, she was already dreaming of their future courtship, the shared confessions of years they’d spent thinking about each other, how they’d never
loved anyone else. Of course, she’d actually have to write
him back first, but she needed to come up with a perfect re-
sponse. Something funny and just a little flirty. If only she knew how to flirt.
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The following morning, sleep deprived and wired, she’d
nearly put an extra zero in a million-dollar stock trade. Her mind had been usurped. All she could think about was him—
this boy she’d met on a blue-bright summer day back when the
world was sharp and immediate. This boy who had kissed the
promise of love into her heart, unlocked a feeling of beauty
within her she didn’t know she had. She could hardly bear
to remember how long she’d gone since then without being
kissed. Just the thought opened a cellar door inside her, dark bottomless grief and shame underneath. Twelve years. Jack
had been the first and last boy to do it, the first to ever like her, the last to know her before that terrible night had turned her hard and sleepless and low lit as the moon.
The taxi pulled up to Port Authority, and Blue handed the
driver a hundred-dollar bill and waved off the change. The
surprise and delight on his face made it worth it. Her favorite thing about money was the joy of giving it away. She often
fantasized about giving it all away, but then inevitably she
thought, Without money what would I have? No real friends in her own city, no love, not even a decent hobby, unless smoking weed in her bathrobe at midnight could be counted as one.
She climbed out of the taxi and watched as an endless stream
East Coast Girls (ARC) Page 4
