East Coast Girls (ARC)

by Kerry Kletter

  Maya parked in the lot and then they dashed toward the

  boats, their beach bags bouncing, their flip-flops nipping at their heels.

  “Too much running!” Blue groaned as she pulled up the rear.

  Soon the old wooden planks were underfoot, the bay

  sloshing and slurping beneath them, the squawk and glide of

  seagulls overhead.

  Just ahead of Maya, Hannah stopped abruptly to gape at an

  enormous, lifelike great white shark hanging by the entrance, its jaws open, mouth painted blood red. “Uh…”

  “Cool!” Maya said, dragging Hannah along before she could

  have second thoughts. “I hope we see a live one today. Look!

  There she is!” She pointed at an old white boat with aqua trim bobbing and creaking against the timbers, the words Viking Star painted across the cabin. It was already loaded with tourists in beach gear and binoculars, a scrawny teenage deckhand untying the line from the docks.

  “Wait!” Maya called to him just as they reached the boat.

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  He paused, held out his palm, eyed them impatiently. “Tick-

  ets,” he said.

  Hannah bit her lip, looked nervously out at the water. “Is

  it safe?” she asked.

  “Put it this way,” he said. “If you were actively trying to

  die, whale watching probably wouldn’t be an efficient way

  to do that.”

  Maya laughed. “I like you. Are you single?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “He’s twelve, Maya,” Renee said as she handed him her

  ticket.

  “Seventeen,” he corrected her indignantly.

  “I can’t personally think of a more efficient way to die today than whale watching,” Blue said, shuffling up behind them,

  her face scrunched with misery. “Bury me at sea, please.”

  “It would be an act of compassion,” Maya said to the deck-

  hand. She turned to Blue. “I’m not convinced you’re not al-

  ready dead. I’ve seriously never seen anyone that color before.

  Your face is like a mood ring the way you go from green to

  gray.”

  “What mood is this?” Blue said, holding up her middle

  finger.

  Renee laughed, looked sympathetically at Blue. “You sure

  you want to go? It’s only a four-hour wait in the car.”

  Blue gave a thumbs-up. Continued her slow death march

  onto the boat.

  Suddenly Maya felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned.

  “Looking for me?” he said.

  It took a second for her brain to catch up to the skip in her heart. “Holy shit. Andy!”

  The night came back to her in a rush—her chest pressed

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  against his strong back as they rode on his motorcycle, the

  two of them lying side by side beneath a ceiling of stars, tumbling together into the swimming pool—that blissful, scary

  suspension of the fall. The way his kiss felt a little bit like love.

  A small, feathery spin in her stomach. And with it, surpris-

  ingly, a swell of relief. Like a wrong had been righted, an un-natural separation fixed.

  “What are you doing here?” She was nervous. Which she

  never was. She ran her hand self-consciously through her hair, remembered she hadn’t combed it before she left.

  “I work here,” he said. He stepped up to her, just close

  enough into her space that she could feel the way he towered

  over her. She looked into his eyes, acutely aware of her body’s desire to breach the inches between them. “I was hoping you

  knew that and came looking for me.”

  “We’re looking for whales, actually,” she said.

  But he was staring at her and she was staring at him and it

  seemed like words were in the way and neither of them were

  really listening.

  Crap, she really liked him.

  He leaned in closer. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “You would have missed me,” she said.

  “I already did.”

  She smiled, looked away.

  “Guess this means fate has decided,” he said.

  “Could be coincidence,” she said with a shrug.

  “Hey lady,” the deckhand called. “You in or out?”

  Andy arched an eyebrow. “Good question,” he said. “You

  in or you out?”

  She smiled, called to the deckhand, her eyes still on Andy.

  “In,” she said.

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  Andy grinned. Time stopped. Just for a minute.

  “You should probably give me your number,” he said.

  “We’re leaving in the morning.”

  “You’ll be back.”

  She laughed at his confidence. “Give me your phone.”

  She put her number in.

  “Okay, then,” she said.

  “Okay, then,” he said.

  They gazed at each other for one more lingering moment

  and then she hopped onto the Viking Star and blew him a kiss.

  She joined her friends at the stern as Andy stood watching.

  The deckhand threw the coil of ropes onto the dock and the

  boat rocked and bounced off the old tires on the pilings. Hannah grabbed Maya’s hand nervously and squeezed.

  There was a sudden swirl of white water as the motor

  purred, growing into a frothing wake. The diesel engines

  hummed, low at first as the boat moved slowly from the dock

  and then changing pitch as the captain hit the throttle. The

  horn blew as they slid into open water, the white sun flash-

  ing on the ocean. The wind picked up as the shore receded,

  Andy on the docks growing smaller, waving one last time be-

  fore walking away. Something in Maya’s chest fizzed, reached

  back to him like the boat’s wake.

  They moved starboard, their faces pitched toward the sea.

  Hannah took a deep breath, let go of Maya’s hand.

  “You all right?” Maya said.

  Hannah clutched the rails. “Trying to tell myself this is

  fun,” she said. “Like falling down the ski hill stoned. What

  about you? You’re looking a little flush.” She laughed at her own teasing, her hair whipping across her face as the boat

  picked up more speed.

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  Maya scoffed, tried to make her smile smaller. It seemed

  so embarrassingly big.

  “You always get the guy,” Blue said, staring queasily into

  the water. “It would probably make me sick but—” she paused

  as the boat heaved over a small swell, looked like she might

  retch into the ocean “—I already am.”

  “Please,” Maya said. “I never want the guy. I’m a free bird, baby.” But she didn’t feel free. She felt the tug of longing, of Andy back on the docks, pulling her into port. She was surprised by how nice it was. How much it caught her off guard,

  introduced her to a part of herself she didn’t know was in there.

  “I remember that feeling,” Hannah said, reading her

  thoughts.

  Their eyes met. Hannah smiled lovingly, but Maya could

  see the sadne
ss.

  She wanted to say something, to apologize, to take back

  everything that had just happened with Andy so Hannah

  wouldn’t have to see it, be reminded of what she’d lost.

  “I’m gonna hurl,” Blue said suddenly. She ran off the deck,

  pushing sightseers out of the way with such force that Maya

  pictured them being thrust overboard in her wake.

  The other three looked at one another.

  “I’ll go,” Renee said.

  “Guess we won’t be seeing her again this trip,” Maya said as

  she watched Blue disappear down the stairs, Renee at her heels.

  She turned back to see Hannah headed toward the ship’s

  bow in her big sun hat and glasses. She seemed determined,

  white-knuckling the rails as she went, passing a mother and

  her toddler feeding bread crumbs to the seagulls. The birds

  glided along at the boat’s pace, dive-bombing to snatch the

  crust out of the kid’s hand as he squealed in fearful delight.

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  Maya watched Hannah reach the front, square herself

  against the expanse of ocean as if issuing a challenge. She

  saw her lift her face to the sun as she held her hat. There was something so poignant and solitary and heroic about her in

  that moment. At this distance Maya could see the whole of

  her—how the bubbly feeling inside Maya once belonged to

  Hannah: romance, innocence, hope, all taken in an instant.

  Hannah turned as if she could sense Maya watching her. She

  smiled and waved. Look at me! she seemed to say. I’m doing it! Maya smiled back, felt a pang. She forced herself to forget about Andy, put him away. She had to.

  She joined Hannah at the bow.

  “It’s so pretty out here,” Hannah said.

  The salty wind pattered their faces, the boat cutting across

  the sparkling water like scissors on a cloth.

  “When I saw you before with Andy,” Hannah said, “it re-

  minded me of how good life can be. Like, not just pleasant or fun but that really euphoric good, you know? That juicy…”

  She reached out her hands as if trying to grab at something. “I don’t know…center of it all.” She laughed. “What am I trying to say? I’m babbling. Just maybe that I’d forgotten that.”

  Maya stared out over the ocean. She didn’t know how to

  respond. It didn’t feel right that she got to have the juicy part.

  “I thought I was protecting myself. Being so conscious of

  all the bad things that could happen,” Hannah said. “But I’m

  beginning to think that anxious voice in my head isn’t even

  mine. It’s those men. It’s like they’re everywhere, around every corner in my brain, dangling a new fear, saying, ‘We’re out

  there. We’re going to get you again.’”

  Maya turned. She could feel Hannah’s eyes behind her sun-

  glasses, searching her face.

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  Hannah gave her a small smile, looked out on the water, let

  go of the rails. “I know I shouldn’t be talking about it. That we don’t talk about it. It’s just… I’ve been waiting for them to go away. I think I secretly hoped that if I just came here, if I…stepped out of my comfort zone, they would stop. But I get

  now that they’re not going to. I just have to know what they

  are, live over them, in defiance of them. Be brave, I guess.”

  The boat lifted over a wave and Hannah squealed and

  reached out desperately to clutch the rails again, which made them both laugh.

  Maya wondered if she herself had ever been brave. She al-

  ways thought she was, but then, life never felt as hard for her.

  She glanced back at the dock but it had slipped out of sight, only open sea in every direction. She imagined Andy standing

  exactly where she’d left him, waiting for her return. It wouldn’t work anyway, she thought. Long distance relationships never do.

  Renee found them at the bow. “Blue’s begging everyone

  who walks by to throw her overboard,” she said.

  “That’ll teach her not to binge drink,” Maya said.

  “I think that’s only half of what’s making her sick,” Renee

  said.

  They all got quiet.

  “Well,” Renee said. “See any whales?”

  “Not yet.” Maya said. “I want to see a blue whale. Those are the biggest, right?”

  “Biggest animal to have ever lived on earth. Their tongues

  alone can weigh as much as an elephant.”

  “Ooh la la,” Maya said.

  “Ew,” Hannah said.

  “Seconded,” Renee said.

  Maya scanned the horizon.

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  Around them, tourists had their binoculars out as the cap-

  tain came over the loudspeaker reciting all that they might see as if he’d given the same speech three times a day for thirty years and just wanted to move to Colorado and never see a

  whale again. The girls’ excitement grew upon hearing the pos-

  sibility of seeing dolphins leaping in the boat’s wake, leather-back sea turtles dining on jellyfish, packs of seals with their doglike faces, poking their slick gray heads out of the water.

  And of course, the whales: minkes and humpbacks, pilots and

  sperm—the last making them laugh like prepubescent girls.

  They stood watch, waiting, ready. The anticipation nur-

  tured their excitement as they scanned the waterline. The boat chugged on. Hannah went below to check on Blue, returned

  twenty minutes later with drinks and a grim report. They ate

  fruit from the farmers market and drank their colas and Han-

  nah read Dear Miss Know-It-All questions off her phone and

  recruited answers from Maya and Renee.

  “Okay, here’s a good one. Should Anonymous pursue her

  dream job in LA or stay with dream guy in Chicago?”

  “Dream job,” Renee said.

  “Dream guy,” Maya said.

  Hannah and Renee looked at Maya in surprise.

  “Who knew you were such a romantic?” Hannah said.

  “I’m not,” Maya said. “I just hate work. Next question.”

  “Dana from Oregon wants to know when it’s the right time

  to have sex with a new guy.”

  “As if there’s a wrong time,” Maya said.

  “Whenever you actually want to,” Renee said.

  “After he’s been tested for STIs,” Hannah said, making a

  note in her cell phone.

  The sun rose higher. The salt started to sting against their

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  sunburns. Soon the beauty of the world they were gazing upon

  became monotonous. Flat and blue.

  “Dear Miss Know-It-All, where the hell are the whales?”

  Maya said, getting restless.

  People began looking at their phones, retreating to the bar

  below. The kids on board were getting cranky, the energy

  turning bleak.

  “Come on, whale!” Maya whispered to the ocean. Just one.

  Even a fin. She would be satisfied with a glimpse. She felt the pain of wanting. The urge to shut it down and accept that she would not get to have i
t.

  Time stalled, the sun turning sharp and hard and relentless,

  stealing color, casting a layer of white over everything. An-

  other hour passed. They ate more food, wandered the deck,

  blinked out at the unchanging landscape.

  Hannah picked at the chipping paint on the rails with her

  fingernail. “Don’t think we’re going to see any today,” she said.

  “Don’t say that,” Maya said.

  Renee sighed.

  Blue reappeared. “Any—” she retched. “Any whales?”

  The three of them shook their heads.

  “Of course not,” Blue said. “Story of my life.”

  “Oh, stop,” Maya said.

  “Nothing to see for miles and miles in any direction,” Blue

  continued.

  Maya shook her head, sighed. But as she looked at her

  friends, thought of their lives over the last twelve years,

  thought of her own meandering future, she understood what

  Blue was saying—the way monotony could seep into adult-

  hood. No one had ever warned her about that.

  The captain came over the loudspeaker. “Well, folks,” he

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  said, “I’m sorry to say the whales have eluded us today. We’ll be heading back now.”

  “Shoot,” Hannah said. “We didn’t even get to see a freak-

  ing dolphin.”

  “Let’s sit down,” Maya said. Her face burned and her eyes

  felt gritty with salt. She headed toward the benches. Tedium

  and disappointment—she couldn’t think of enemies greater

  than those. She thought of Andy. If only he lived closer. But even then, an internal resistance, something in the way. She

  closed her eyes.

  Almost as soon as she shut them, a collective gasp from

  the boat.

  “Maya, look,” Hannah shouted.

  Maya jumped to her feet, turned just in time.

  Euphoric eruption! Life bursting from below into the air. Its fins outstretched like wings. Its grooved white belly arced toward the sun. I live! it seemed to shout at them with its enormity, its acrobatic grace. We live! It paused, midair, suspending time for a moment. Its skin oil-slick and gleaming. Water raining

  off its barnacle-covered flanks. Then with a thunderous splash, it landed back on the ocean’s top, slapped the surface playful as a child, carbonating the white water. A show just for them, a circus act at sea. The passengers cheered, electric with awe, witness to some impossible majestic beauty, some seemingly