East Coast Girls

by Kerry Kletter

  “Jack,” Renee said. She glanced at Blue as if hoping to see she’d scored a point. “Jack was his name. He was adorable.”

  “A local, right?” Maya said. “They were all townies.”

  Maya remembered how hard they’d been rooting for Blue the night she’d met him, eighteen, and never kissed. They knew it bothered her—not that she’d ever admit it. Even back then Blue never showed vulnerability. Which was part of the problem. You had to let yourself be vulnerable in order to be kissed.

  And then to see her face after her night with him. The change in her. For days after she glowed like she’d swallowed the sun.

  “I wonder where he is now,” Renee said.

  Blue shrugged, but Maya caught a glint in her eyes and, she thought, the hint of a smile.

  “Anyway,” Renee said. She made a move toward the door.

  Maya stepped in front of her. “So—check this out—you guys are gonna laugh.” She went back to her suitcase, pulled out a bright pink bikini and held it up. It was about four sizes too small. “Remember this? My thirty-year-old ass is going to be hanging like Christmas stockings, but see if I care!”

  “Yeah, I don’t think that’s structurally sound,” Hannah said.

  Renee giggled. “That thing definitely won’t meet code.”

  “Hmm, what’s the inspector look like?” Maya said. “Might be worth having him check it out.”

  “I brought mine too,” Hannah said. She dug into her bag and pulled out a pair of bikini boy shorts and a bandeau top. It looked two sizes too big. She’d lost so much weight in the months that Henry was first in the hospital and she’d never gained them back.

  Maya watched Hannah hold the top up to herself and observe her reflection in the glass door. She was certain she saw a glimpse of the old Hannah in her eyes—that wide-eyed girl with the quick laugh, so easy to amuse and delight. She was sure Hannah had seen it too.

  “What about you, Blue?” Maya said.

  “I did not bring the same bathing suit,” Blue said, “considering how much you guys mocked it last time.”

  “I didn’t,” Renee said softly. “I thought it was cute.”

  “That’s true,” Maya said. “See how nice Renee is! She would never make fun of your banana-colored old-timey swim dress, no matter how justifiable.”

  “I wasn’t just being nice,” Renee said.

  For a moment Maya thought she saw Blue’s face soften. It seemed like Renee saw it, too, because something like hope seemed to flare in her eyes.

  Maya’s “Uptown Funk” ringtone cut off the moment. She looked down, didn’t recognize the number. “Dammit! Hold that thought!” She brought the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Hi, I’m calling for Maya Marino.”

  “This is she.”

  “This is Donald Mason. From Mid-Atlantic Bank and Trust. We spoke on Tuesday.”

  “Hi!” A bolt of anxiety slashed through her, sharp and quick like the bright startle of a razor. “Hold on a sec.” She stepped out onto the porch, let the screen door shut behind her.

  The world was the color of memory, faded blue sky, fragile, liquid light, branches moving in a gentle breeze as if to some twinkling melody. From somewhere on the street, an eruption of laughter.

  Maya started walking. Soft, harmless summer, open and forgiving. “Okay, I’m here,” she said. “Please tell me I got the loan.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  Time stalled, held its breath.

  “I’m afraid that after a full review of your credit history and even taking into account your current employment...”

  Oh no.

  “Okay,” Maya said. He continued talking but her heart was pounding over the sound of his voice. She didn’t need to hear the rest anyway. “Not a problem. Thanks for calling.”

  “Miss Mar—”

  She hung up.

  The weight of it was so crushing. She wanted to put it somewhere—heave it off herself. She wanted to sit down. Give up. Cry.

  There was nothing she could do. That was the worst part. She’d screwed up. Just like she’d screwed up a million other things. And now it was too late to fix it. One more loss in what had felt like an endless sea of them over the last twelve years.

  She turned, stared up at the house, at the dark aging wood and cracking white paint on the shutters, the murmur of voices drifting out the kitchen window.

  She felt so alone.

  But no. She wasn’t alone. And she refused to accept that there was nothing she could fix.

  She put on her brightest smile and went back inside. “Okay, new plan!” she said to them. “Renee, you’re staying for dinner.”

  BLUE

  Blue realized she was mildly stoned the moment she did not murder Maya. Instead the suggestion of Renee staying for dinner seemed to move over her like a ducked punch. What were a few more hours of torture? She couldn’t be bothered to care. Renee looked at her, her eyes asking permission. It was difficult, even when you hated someone, to outright deny them. What was she going to say, no?

  “I’m going to my room,” she said instead. Renee could take the obvious hint.

  She marched up the creaky stairs, where thirty years of sand had settled in the cracks of the floorboards, to the second-floor rooms with their summery, mismatched furniture. The air was musty with uncirculated air, but throw open the windows, add a little polish and everything really was the same. If only people could be that easily returned to themselves.

  As she entered the bedroom she’d slept in as a child—yellow curtains the color of morning sun, white chest of drawers with a handle missing, two twin beds quilted in a soft checkered gray—Blue knew Maya was right. She’d arrived at the last place she was truly happy. She could feel the lingering, pale wisps of daylight through the windows enter her, lighting up old spaces in her brain, time morphing between then and now so that she was looking out with the eyes of all the Blues she’d been—child, teenager, adult.

  She threw her duffel on the bed by the window, sat down for a minute to decompress. She glanced at the empty one next to hers. Had a flash of Renee sitting on it in a camisole top and pajama shorts, her hair pinned up, a moisturizing mask on her face that made her look at once ghoulish and girly. Blue across from her in an oversize T-shirt and boxers, spots of acne cream on her chin. The two of them whispering late into the night as the ocean stomped outside the window. They were supposed to age side by side, grow into old ladies swinging on a porch, cursing the neighborhood kids and drinking spiked lemonade. That had always been the plan. Instead Renee had ended up with a shiny, perfect life while Blue carried all the damage, vandalized like a late-night subway car.

  She shook off the thoughts. Felt something lumpy just underneath the anger. A swallow of sorrow.

  It never got easier, mourning someone who was still alive.

  From downstairs, laughter in a chorus of three. Apparently Renee hadn’t taken the hint yet. Blue closed the door against the sound but still it lingered, a hollow echo in her chest. How did she end up being the one pushed to the outside? It was so unfair that her anger—her righteous anger—labeled her with a bitterness that was undeserved, that the script had been flipped so that she was the perpetrator for feeling wronged.

  But then, self-doubt—was she right to still be mad? When was it time to forgive? Was it just a guess, a stab at a particular passage of time—a month, a year, a decade—or was forgiveness a feeling you could deliberately walk into like a room?

  She pulled out her laptop, checked her brokerage account. There was always relief in seeing that large number staring back at her. The comfort of knowing she could be an island, utterly self-sufficient. No attachments, no need.

  Of course the price of such self-sufficiency was a job she despised. She’d never meant to have this kind of career. It had started as a summ
er internship at her father’s brokerage. She’d taken it only because it required less effort than finding something she actually wanted to do. Back then most of her energy was devoted to simply surviving the hours between sleep. Maybe it still was. But the talent for the job must have been in her blood, because she picked it up quickly and her instincts were good. She’d been hired on, moved up the ranks and eventually was poached by a rival company—a job she took, in part, to spite her father. At times she actually did enjoy the work itself, getting lost in the numbers, feeling she was good at something, having somewhere to go. It was the greed and corruption that bothered her most. She didn’t want to be part of a system that seemed to glorify psychopathy. Some days she walked into the office and imagined jumping on a desk, delivering a grand speech about what dead-eyed, money-hungry, bottom-feeding, little-guy-screwing, status-seeking, sociopathic menaces to society some of her coworkers were, and the fantasy was so pure and gratifying she worried she might actually play it out at some point.

  As if on cue, her email pinged—a message about an IPO her brokerage wanted her to push, one she suspected would not be in her clients’ best interest. She chucked her phone on the bed and carefully, heavily, stood and began to unpack.

  When she opened the top drawer of her dresser, she gasped. There, worn thin from age and still stained with chocolate, was the ice cream wrapper she’d saved all those years ago, a memento from the best night of her life. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t been thrown away.

  She took it out. Sniffed it, though of course it smelled nothing but old. It all came back to her. The slow fade to memory, the beach re-creating itself around her. She was eighteen again, walking along the ocean’s jagged seam, the sun riding her shoulders until they tingled. She’d left the girls back on their towels, their quest for beauty in a tan a ritual she’d felt left out of even then. Around the cliffs and over jagged rock she climbed to reach a spot that was empty, littered only with the carcasses of crabs and the cling of seaweed. A place that understood her.

  On the other side of it, more people. A Frisbee landed at her feet. He came running up, shouting, “Sorry!” He had the bronzed skin of a lifeguard or a surfer, with brown hair tipped gold by the sun. She was immediately self-conscious of her pale body in her one-piece bathing suit with the flouncy skirt, the one the girls had been making fun of all morning, insisting she looked like an octogenarian cheerleader. Well, not all the girls. Renee at least had understood that Blue would rather die than expose too much, that Blue experienced her body as a place she didn’t like to travel in, her own version of a dirty motel.

  He stopped in front of her. “That didn’t hit you, did it?” He pointed to his friend. “It’s his fault. He does that deliberately to get the attention of pretty girls.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but the shock of his sentence knocked the capacity for language right out of her head. He smiled at her, it felt like their eyes ignited in each other’s gaze, and then she blurted, “Okay, bye” and took off. She wasn’t sure if he’d called “Wait!” or if she’d only been thinking it, but by the time she found the courage to turn around, he was back to playing Frisbee. She walked back to the girls slowly so she could process their interaction, savor it.

  No one had ever called her pretty before. She’d never dreamed that anyone ever would. It was impossible to think of yourself that way when your own mother thought otherwise.

  And then that night she’d spotted him with his friends inside John’s Drive-In. She was sure it was fate, and she stood at the counter with cheeks burning as she placed her order in the spotlight of his gaze.

  “I think that guy likes you,” Renee said, nudging her. “He keeps looking over.” She grabbed Blue’s arm and dragged her over to him. “I’m Renee,” she said. “And this is my awesome best friend, Blue.”

  He smiled and his cheeks turned a bright, endearing red. “We’ve met,” he said, looking only at Blue. “I’m Jack.”

  Jack.

  She smiled at him. “Blue.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  She laughed, embarrassed. “Oh, right.”

  They couldn’t take their eyes off each other.

  The ice cream cone was starting to melt down her hand.

  He jumped up and grabbed her a napkin. “Let me know if you need help eating that,” he said, grinning.

  “Have some,” she said, holding it out. She couldn’t believe how bold she was being.

  He took a lick. “Chocolate Brownie. My favorite.” His eyes on her made her flustered and hot. “Next time I’ll buy you one with sprinkles. It’s even better that way.”

  Blue’s head swam. Next time? Buy you one? “I don’t like sprinkles,” she blurted because she was an idiot and she didn’t know how to flirt and now she was screwing it up.

  Jack balked. Then his face turned serious. “Well, neither do I, then,” he said. “Hate them, in fact. What kind of maniac likes sprinkles?”

  Blue giggled so he kept going.

  “Down with sprinkles. We don’t need your waxy goodness. Hit the road, Jimmy.”

  He was making a list of all the awful people in the world who probably liked sprinkles (“Charles Manson—definitely a sprinkle lover...”) when Maya and Hannah came over to join them. Eventually his friends and hers ended up cruising around town as a group, too young to go to the bars, too old to go home early. In Jack’s truck they drove at a reckless, exhilarating speed around the small swooping hills of Old Montauk Highway. Eventually they found their way to Ditch Plains Beach, where the others ran toward the soft-breaking surf while she and Jack sat on a wooden bench overlooking their splashing friends, shouting “Shark! Shark!” to spook them. Once the humor of the joke wore off, they were left with only each other, their delicate, clumsy aloneness. The wind had been salty and sweeping, the night clear and deep with stars. A white lane of moonlight shimmered on black water. She shivered. He gave her his sweatshirt and put his arm around her, thinking she was shaking because she was cold. The act made them both suddenly shy. When she finally turned to speak again, he took her face in his hands and kissed her and she was stunned first and then struck with wonder, the ice cream wrapper still sticky in her fist and later tucked in the back pocket of her jean shorts so she could save it, so she would never forget that night and the delicious tremor of first, astonishing love.

  Now she looked out the window, almost expecting to find Jack there, waving up at her. But there was only the dimming sky, a triangle of seagulls riding the breeze, winged shadows against the setting sun. She folded the wrapper, smoothing out the crease, returned to her laptop. She pulled up his profile to send a message and saw he’d uploaded a photo of himself.

  A sudden commotion in her chest. To unexpectedly see that face, which had once looked at her so tenderly that her whole body yielded to it. Twelve years older and still so familiar.

  Finally something good. She had the urge to drive immediately to his house—never mind that she had no idea where it was—and kiss him as soon as he opened the door.

  But then the arrival of another feeling. It wasn’t excitement, though it shared its features. It was excitement’s sadistic cousin. She wanted to shed it like an itchy sweater.

  She went to the mirror. Braced. Against the darkening room the half glow of early evening light through the windows illuminated the first sign of wrinkles under her eyes, the happy hours and business dinners around her belly. She touched her throat, a gesture she’d seen other women do, but found no fragility or beauty in her hands, in her collarbone.

  What if he didn’t think she was pretty anymore?

  How had she failed to consider that before now?

  A slump, something falling inside her. There was no way she could do this, risk rejection. All this time he’d been her island, the refuge she retreated to in her mind, a promise of hope—as long as she didn’t try to cash in on it.

 
She pushed open the sliding glass door to the balcony, stepped out and lit an emergency cigarette. At the wooden railing she stood overlooking an ocean turned sideways with the threat of a storm. Loneliness flapping on the wind. The sun dropping into the water like a bright woman drowning in a slow surrender to the sea.

  Now in more darkness herself, Blue was struck with a sense of doom, of doors closing all around her. She’d made a mistake, she realized, in allowing Jack to open this particular part of her life again. She’d learned to live without love. To make her need small, store it like a child’s paper valentine in the attic of her mind. Now that she had opened the door, it occurred to her that perhaps the worst thing wouldn’t be to go through life unloved. Perhaps the worst thing would be to have the opportunity for love only to discover you’re too wounded, too self-protective to seize it.

  HANNAH

  Hannah sat with Maya and Renee at the table where they’d once all chugged cheap beer and played Truth or Dare until they’d gotten so drunk they ran down to the beach in the middle of the night—four girl-shadows dashing, so alive with the universe, claiming the breeze and every star and the shiny black Atlantic as they splashed into it. Whoop! Whoop! They thought they knew what their lives would be.

  Now Blue was upstairs probably hating them all and Hannah was googling symptoms of Lemierre’s syndrome on her phone.

  Sore throat: check

  Headache: check

  Fever: ?

  She turned to Maya. “Feel my forehead. Does it feel hot?”

  “It’s summer. So yes,” Maya said without checking. “Now tell Renee she’s staying for dinner.”

  “Renee, you’re staying for dinner,” Hannah said. Maybe it wasn’t Lemierre’s. Maybe it was the measles. Vaccinations could lose their potency after time, couldn’t they? But that was stupid. She was fine. She’d been in therapy long enough to recognize that she probably wasn’t dying, that her fear was simply triggered by the stress of being away from Henry and the current tensions between her friends. Too bad that being aware of anxiety’s source never helped to quell it. Logic was happening in one part of the brain and fear in another and the two sections seemed to have no system in which to communicate with each other. It made her feel like she couldn’t trust herself.