Excerpt from Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

JANE

On the last Saturday in May, I drown in my sleep. It happens quickly. I'm standing at the edge of the ocean and when I look down into the water, the wobbly hand of my reflection reaches up to pull me under. Only it's less of a pull and more of an angry yank, like my arm's a dangling ponytail, and suddenly I'm pressed to the sand with my own hand holding me down from above. I want to scream, but my words dissolve into a stream of bubbles. I'm not ready, is what I'm trying to say. But then everything goes black.

I thought you weren't allowed to die in dreams.

When I open my eyes, I see that I've left the window beside my bed open, because sometimes I'm an idiot. The rain's coming in so heavily that when I sit up, my wet sheets stick to my chest like strands of seaweed. If I weren't a scientifically minded person, the dream plus the bedroom shower might seem like a bad omen. But I'm an unsuperstitious atheist, so it doesn't bother me.

The window won't close unless I bang my fist loudly against the glass, so I tiptoe to Mom's room at the end of the hall to see if she's still asleep. In the sliver of space between the wall and the door, I see her: not actually sleeping, but lying on top of her comforter in her underwear, tracing her chin with an unlit joint from the med¬ ical dispensary. Lately she's been wandering around the house half naked, something I don't appreciate. She says she's hot, burning up, on fire, but nothing helps—not frozen peas on her forehead or baths full of ice or a sticky balm I bought at Walgreens that smells like chemical mint. What if it's all in my head? she asked one day, after a doctor suggested meditating twice a day to prevent the flashes. It's not, I said. But even if it was, it'd still be just as real.

I close the door quietly as possible, but when it clicks I can hear the mattress bounce. "Jane?" she asks, "is something wrong?" But I'm already halfway to my own room, where the rain's blowing in so fast and thick that my duvet squishes under my sweatpants when I kneel forward to pound the windowpane shut.

Outside, it smells like seaweed and crab shells, which means the street is flooding. The blizzard cracked part of the seawall back in January, but no one cares because it's on our side of the beach where people actually live, as opposed to the side where people "summer." Sometimes I'll walk barefoot against the rushing water with our colander, trying to catch sand dollars or horseshoe crabs (if I dry them on my windowsill, I can sell them to the souvenir shops in the harbor), and a neighbor will see me from their porch. They'll nod aggressively and say something like, "They think this is acceptable?" except they never say who they are or what this is.

It's early, seven o'clock, and no one's up yet. I straddle my bike under the remote-controlled awning that Mom uses to protect her car from the elements, since we don't have a real garage, just a driveway that doubles as our patio during the summer. I tie plastic grocery bags over my bike seat and my head, even though my hair looks stupid no matter what I do because my ancestors were frizzy-haired Irish peasants who ate too many carbs. I'm about to kick off into the street when I hear our neighbor's side door open. She moved in six months ago, a little before the blizzard. We never introduced ourselves, or brought a pie, or left a note in her mail¬ box, which I guess means we're unfriendly. She's pregnant—she's always been pregnant—but I've never seen a man over there. Today she's wearing an oversized shirt for sleeping and, as far as I can tell, no pants. Her legs are stringy in a way that means her hips are probably small and tight and won't easily allow a baby to pass through them. I'm never going to have a kid because I don't like being in unnecessary pain.

She rubs her big belly under her big shirt and looks out at the street. "Must be someone special," she says, and I actually look around to see who else is out on their porch this early because there's no way she'd be talking to me.

Excerpted from Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski. Copyright © 2024 by Alina Grabowski. Excerpted by permission of Zando. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.