“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 high-
way. 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, seem-
ing 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
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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 ask-
ing 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 sup-
posed 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, East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 71
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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 combus-tible 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 keep-
ing vigil over Henry. By then they’d already stopped talking.
The last time they were actually friends was the night ev-
erything 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.
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They’d gone to a party. A house they’d never been to be-
fore. 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 shad-
ows, 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 scholar-
ship at UCLA he would never get to claim.
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Renee dragged Blue off to get beers from the keg, th
en 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 car-
ried 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 manicured 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 East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 74
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had Jack in her memory 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 hol-
low, 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.
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KERRY KLETTER
“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 friend-
lier 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, remem-
bering 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 electric-
ity of youth humming inside her, that sense of ripeness, life East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 76
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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 de-
tached she was from the memory, as if she was recalling some-
one 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.
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HANNAH
“I wish you’d just tell us what she did…” Hannah said.
Both she and Maya had always suspected they were miss-
ing 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 with-
out them, of how lonely she must be. It wasn’t hard to imag-
ine. It was how Hannah had felt her whole life before she met Maya back in elementary school. Hannah had been on the
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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 con-
crete. 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 pop-
ular 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 tip-
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KERRY KLETTER
toeing 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 sur-
East Coast Girls (ARC) Page 7
