East Coast Girls (ARC)

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East Coast Girls (ARC) Page 5

by Kerry Kletter


  of people who were not Maya emptied out of the building

  into the steamy heat. She’d rushed to get here, assuming that there would be some sort of unexpected traffic jam or holdup.

  But of course, the holdup was Maya, who could cause more

  chaos than an overturned truck on the highway just by being

  herself. Blue was about to call her when a text popped up.

  I’ll be on the next one I swear!!

  She had to laugh. It was so utterly annoying but also so

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  predictably Maya. There was an odd comfort in knowing

  and loving a friend so much that you not only accepted their

  flaws but found amusement in the familiarity of them. In that most basic way, Blue thought, all friendships were rooted in

  forgiveness.

  This made her think of Renee. She abruptly discarded the

  thought.

  Another email came in . Jesus, I picked the wrong time to take a vacation. Though on reconsideration she couldn’t think of a more perfect time. In truth, it had seemed like fate—the most romantic, perfect fate—that just a few days after she received that message from Jack, while she was still trying to come up with a response, Maya had called with the suggestion about

  going back to Montauk. She would write to Jack as soon as

  they got there. Make it look spontaneous. Say something like,

  “Coincidentally happen to be in town for the weekend, you

  free?”

  Now she walked alone down Forty-Second Street to the

  car rental place, something she and Maya had planned to do

  together. How unsurprising, she laughed to herself, that Maya was always miraculously absent whenever a credit card or cash was needed. But then, she thought, not always.

  There was that one time in junior high school when Blue

  got roped into doing a bake sale auction. It was a charity event to raise money for soccer equipment for her team. Blue had

  played goalie. She decided she would bake Nana’s famous

  cream pie, which happened to be her mother’s favorite. Truth

  was she wasn’t much of a baker. She was more of a woodshop

  kind of girl, but that was part of the problem. Blue suspected that her beautiful, feminine mother might actually love her

  if Blue was a different kind of girl—pretty and dainty with a East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 49

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  KERRY KLETTER

  knack for cooking and shopping and ballet. These were the

  kind of girls her mother would dote on and adore, the ones

  with bows in their hair and frilly dresses, delicate boned and shy. But Blue was built like her father, athletic and husky. It was a quality she’d felt proud of until around fourth grade,

  when society’s poisonous messages about femininity wormed

  their way in. That’s when Blue had the epiphany that her

  mother felt about her the way society did—that she was the

  wrong kind of girl.

  Somehow her thirteen-year-old mind thought that if she

  could just make a perfect pie, she could earn her mother’s approval. She was always looking for the angle, the mathematical solution—as if she could rearrange herself in the exact dimen-sions that could squeeze into her mother’s heart.

  The night before the auction she invited Renee over to

  help her bake, and the two of them made sure to copy Nana’s

  recipe to the letter. They made two pies to sell plus one to

  sample to “make sure it was right.” As it turned out, she had a lot of fun doing it, especially the sampling part. It was delicious, just the perfect amount of sweet, and by the time she

  went to bed that night, Blue was imagining a big stage and an enormous crowd, everyone fighting to get ahold of her pies.

  In reality the auction was held in a small hot tent behind

  the gym, the unimpressive crowd comprising the parents and

  siblings of the soccer team members. The girls got up one by

  one and described into the microphone what they’d baked,

  using the most mouthwatering descriptions they could come

  up with, and then the auctioneer (their soccer coach—this was a low-rent affair) would open up for bidding. As the auction

  began, Blue noticed that pretty much the only people bid-

  ding were the parents of whoever was onstage at the moment.

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  Blue sat to the left with the rest of her team and scanned the crowd for her mother. She’d told her about it several times,

  and each time her mother promised to come. Just in case,

  she’d left the flyer on the counter that morning with the time and location circled in red to remind her. Her mother would

  be there, she would. Blue looked at the clock. Her shirt was

  beaded with sweat and her heart was starting to pound hard

  against its dampness. Her mother was probably just late. She

  was always late.

  The line of girls ahead of her was quickly dwindling. Blue

  watched with panic as the girl two ahead of her finished her

  presentation, sold her pie to her own grandfather for a cool

  hundred. Still no sign of her mother. The next girl was called.

  Blue wanted to dissolve into the grass beneath her chair. What if she got up there and no one bid? What if she had to stand

  there, exposed and humiliated, with her stupid, unlovable pies?

  The room went suddenly fuzzy, the coach’s voice muffled

  in her ears. Her own name was called twice before it regis-

  tered. She stood, her legs shaking so hard that one of her knee socks dropped to her ankle. Once at the mic she stammered

  into it, her wavering voice sounding so much louder than the

  girls’ before her. She kept repeating herself as she tried to describe what she’d so proudly baked. She could see the audi-

  ence quickly drifting, losing interest. Who would want a pie

  made by a sweaty, brutish girl whose own mother didn’t like

  her enough to come?

  Her coach opened the room up to bidding. There was si-

  lence from the crowd. Please, she thought desperately. Someone.

  Anyone. A woman coughed. People looked around, shifted, waited. Sweat was pouring off her forehead into her eyes. Oh God. Then at last a hand was raised. Someone’s mom she didn’t East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 51

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  KERRY KLETTER

  know, some kind, beautiful person who took pity on her and

  bid ten dollars. Blue was so grateful. She wanted to run out

  and hug her. She wanted to be adopted by her. She started to

  walk off the stage when her coach said, “We’ve got ten dol-

  lars! Can we get fifteen?” Blue turned to him, pleading with

  her eyes, Please don’t do this to me. Take the ten and let me go.

  She was so afraid she was going to start crying and make the

  humiliation worse.

  Then suddenly a commotion from the back of the tent. A

  loud shout from just beyond it. “Fifteen dollars!”

  Blue turned and peered out and there was Renee running

  in, waving her hand high, Hannah and Maya trailing behind

  her.

  “We have fifteen!” the coach said excitedly. “Can we get

  twenty?”

  There was a pause.

  “Twenty!” Hannah called.

  “We’ve got twenty, can we get—”<
br />
  Maya’s hand shot up. “Twenty-five!”

  Hannah whacked her. “Do we even have twenty-five?”

  “Oh, shit, good question,” Maya said, completely oblivi-

  ous to the judgmental looks from some of the parents. “Hold

  on a sec!”

  Renee and Hannah pulled out crumpled dollars from their

  pockets, Maya retrieved hers from her shoe and they piled

  them together, holding up the auction as they counted. “Uh,

  never mind,” Renee said finally. “Our bid is twenty-three

  dollars!”

  “And ten cents!” Maya added.

  God, they were just so unbelievably embarrassing. Just look

  at them, all grubby and weird and oblivious. But Blue didn’t

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  care! Because they were there, they showed up and now everyone could see that she had people. Ridiculous people but

  people!

  “Sold for twenty-three dollars and, uh, ten cents to the

  young ladies at the back!”

  “Suckas!” Maya said to the crowd. “You don’t know what

  you’re missing.”

  Blue covered her face with her hands. Maya always took

  it too far.

  Afterward they sat on the bleachers and ate the pies with

  their fingers and fed some to the birds and it was just nor-

  mal, that they did this for her; she could take it for granted just like people with loving families did. In retrospect that was the best part.

  For a moment the memory made Blue soft—to think of

  how friends are life’s greatest first responders, rescuing one another time and again from life’s little atrocities. It was the big atrocities that no one could help with. Which was why

  Hannah was nuts now and Maya was reckless and imprudent

  and none of them had spoken to Renee in twelve years, Blue’s

  anger toward her so solid and unmovable that even that mo-

  ment of fond memory couldn’t make a dent. Pie auction res-

  cue or not, Renee didn’t deserve her forgiveness, not after

  what she’d done.

  She put away the memory and pulled out into the blare of

  car horns and the smoky breath of buses and an early evening

  sky as luminous and blue as the Hudson beneath the glow of

  bridge lights. The city had a particular lively beauty she could recognize but not connect with. She’d only moved here to be

  with Nana in her failing age, but she always felt like an outsider—a tourist who forgot to leave.

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  KERRY KLETTER

  As she pulled back up to Port Authority, she spotted Maya

  on the corner, standing out among the throngs—the only

  person in New York without her guard up, the only person

  smiling. It was in part this careless beauty that drew people to Maya. There was something so compelling about an adult who

  was as trusting as a puppy on its back. Blue rolled down the

  window and shouted Maya’s name twice before she noticed.

  Maya took one look at the frumpy green sedan Blue had

  rented and then bent down to look at her with disgust.

  “You’re kidding me,” she said, climbing in. “You rented a

  Jolly Rancher.”

  “Sorry you’re late,” Blue replied.

  Maya laughed and her eyes f lashed with love. “Let’s try

  this again.” She leaned across the front seat and held her arms out wide and warm and welcoming as a beach. “Hi! You look

  amazing!”

  “Hi!” Blue said back, and the feeling of having someone

  be so truly, openly happy to see her was like the sun shining right into her chest, brightening the place up a bit. In all her busyness it had been over a year since they’d last seen each

  other in person, and she’d forgotten what it felt like to see in someone’s face that she mattered. She couldn’t imagine why

  anyone would like her enough to give her such a reception.

  But that was the thing about old friends. The love was built-

  in to the innocent bones of youth, long before a proper assessment of each other’s qualities could be made.

  Now Blue accepted Maya’s hug, then surrendered it just as

  quickly, aware of her own awkwardness, how she’d forgot-

  ten how to be close.

  “It’s been way too long,” Maya said. “But really, you’re

  joking with this car, right?” She eyed the roof like it had in-East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 54

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  sulted her. “How are we supposed to re-create our fun trip

  without a convertible?”

  “I think we’ll be okay,” Blue said.

  “We’ll just have to improvise. I assume you’ve got a chain-

  saw at the house?”

  Blue rolled her eyes. “Buckle up. Poor Hannah is probably

  freaking out that we’re not there yet.”

  “Wait, you didn’t tell her we were going to be late?”

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  HANNAH

  Hannah sat beside her suitcase with her phone in hand. On

  the other line, Vivian’s voice buzzed with excitement.

  “It happened again! I was wheeling Henry outside for some

  air and he looked up at me, his eyes so clear and present—you know how they can be sometimes—and he said, ‘Hi, Mom’!

  Just like that! ‘Hi, Mom.’”

  The smile on Hannah’s face was so big she could feel the

  stretch of it. “Ooh,” she said, “that’s amazing!” And there it was, just like every other occasion when Henry had spoken

  or squeezed a hand or flashed a smile—sudden irrepressible,

  delicious hope. On those days everything was okay again, ev-

  erything was worth it, all the waiting and worrying and care-

  taking and loneliness and sleepless nights and gray despair, all of it worth it because he was still there, he was still in there, her Henry, her love, her one. He was still capable of coming

  back. Oh, how she wished she’d been there to see it!

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  phone, but the girls would be here any minute. As soon as she hung up, she thought of Henry in the care facility, imagined

  him wide awake and conscious, back for good. There was still

  some brain activity. And advancing medicine. Miracles did

  happen. Even the doctors said that. There was that kid who

  woke up after eighteen years—turned out he’d heard every-

  thing around him. There was just so much they didn’t know.

  But then, another thought: What if he woke up again,

  even brief ly, while she was away? She imagined him con-

  fused, disoriented, swallowed inside a lights-out loneliness in that sterile, loveless room. Imagined him saying “Hannah?”

  and getting no reply. It was the wrong time to be leaving for a trip. She couldn’t even bring herself to mention to Vivian

  that she was going. She should back out of it right now. But

  her friends were already en route, driving a considerable distance in the wrong direction just to get her, knowing she’d

  never come if they didn’t show up at her doorstep and drag

  her along. Knowing she wouldn’t, couldn
’t, get behind the

  wheel of a car ever since that night she’d inadvertently driven them into a hell they couldn’t have imagined.

  She unzipped her suitcase, double-checked that everything

  she needed was in there. There were so many self-created sys-

  tems that had to be followed for her to feel like she could go.

  She had to pack everything in plastic vacuum bags, sealed

  tight against germs and bugs. Any item of clothing taken

  out would need to be hot washed and dried in the dryer for

  at least an hour before it could be returned to the bag. The

  suitcase itself could not touch the ground or else that would have to be discarded. And of course, she needed her bleach

  packs, her Purell. And then all her medications—she couldn’t

  go five feet without those. There was half a drugstore in her East Coast_9780778309499_TS_txt_277098.indd 57

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  KERRY KLETTER

  purse. Vicodin in case she got hurt, antibiotics in case she got an infection, muscle relaxers in case she got stiff, et cetera.

  And then there were the rules: no large crowds (terrorism),

  no driving through tunnels (claustrophobia), no swimming

  in the ocean (sharks, drowning), no shellfish (she could be al-lergic—who knew for sure?), no sharing utensils or towels or

  sheets or anything, really—oh, she had to be so careful not to slip, to stay ever vigilant. It was exhausting to live in a state of “just in case” and “better safe than sorry.” To try to avoid more disaster and regret.

  She checked her watch. Maya and Blue were almost an

  hour late. Darkness pressed against her windows, pushed into

  her thoughts. She considered calling to find out where they

  were, but to do so would telegraph her irrational fear/hope

  that they’d forgotten her entirely.

  She glanced out the window overlooking the street, up at

  the stars glowing politely in the sky. Waiting was such an intolerable state for her, being in limbo, unable to relax and settle into any one place yet. Hell, sometimes just the mere transition of crossing from one side of the room to the other gave

  her a dim existential anxiety, like she could disappear inside the cavity of neither here nor there.

  Years ago, in the early days of Henry’s coma, she’d talked

  to her psychiatrist, Dr. Maloney, about this. She’d been failing to cope with the unendurable in-between place where hope

  was on one side, despair on the other, and she was never sure upon which side to wait. It wasn’t even just the uncertainty

 

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