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

"What?"

"Must be a special boy to get you to ride your bike through this storm." The rain's making her shirt stick to her stomach, and I can see the pointy nub of her flipped-out belly button. We watch a piece of driftwood float down the street, and I wish I could grab on to it and float away from this conversation. "What's your mom think about him?"

"I'm going to work," I explain, pulling at the collar of my Village Market polo.

"Good for you." She grasps her hands beneath her belly like it might fall to the ground without the safety net of her fingers. "I hear we women can have it all these days."

I can't think of anything to say to that, which is fine because she

peels open the door with her big toe and slips back inside.

No one's on the road except for anorexic moms headed to the Y, sunburned old dudes en route to the marina, and me. Our neighbor's right, in that I'm going to see someone special, but she's wrong, in that said person is a boy.

One of the old guys rolls down his window to talk while we're at a stoplight beside the salt marsh. Overgrown cattails stoop into our lane with the rain's weight and I have to squint my eyes to keep the water from dribbling into them. "Now, what kind of boy lets his gal fend for herself in this weather?" he asks. His mouth keeps moving after he's done talking, little specks of chewing tobacco wobbling on his lip.

I try to remember the tone I used to use with my dad's fishing buddies. "The kind of boy who can't keep up."

He laughs a lot at that, slaps his steering wheel with his chubby fingers. Men love it when you make fun of other men. They think it "keeps them honest," which is apparently something they can't do themselves.

"You stay sharp, young lady," he tells me before pulling away as the light changes. He watches me in his side mirror with little pink-rimmed eyes, and I pedal extra fast to pass him, just because I can. The wind sharpens the rain against my cheeks and my water¬ logged socks slap against my ankles like dead fish and I remember how much I used to love this, being fast. When I want something, I block out any possibility of not getting it. That's how I used to win so many races. The other girls ran toward something stupid, like hope. I ran toward the inevitable.

The road turns into a bridge that bumps over the bay, and the bridge drops onto the smooth pavement of Main Street, which slips between the docks and candy-colored shop awnings. I sprint through the harbor on my lowest gear, the seagulls screaming above me, the stores blurring beside me, the puddles splattering under me. I'm not wearing a rain jacket, so water slides down my shirt and soaks into the band of my bra, which feels like having a melted ice pack tied to my rib cage. Why am I doing this? I think, like I don't already know.

The rain comes down even harder, and I keep my head down until I reach Route 5A, the only highway that runs through town. For reasons my mother calls "objectively insane," there's a stop sign instead of a stoplight where it meets Main Street. Everyone at school calls it the Murder Merge, which parents like to mention whenever someone new dies and they write yet another op-ed for the Mariner. Their essays are all the same: They spend a long time contemplating What's Wrong with Kids These Days, because if you die on 5A you were probably drunk or hit by someone who was, which leads the author to the same conclusion, either Bad Parenting or Not Enough Church. I don't know why they never ask one of us. The answer's simple: The world feels big and boundless when you're drunk in a fast car, and it feels small and choked any¬ where they can see you.

There are so many white flags along the shoulder that it looks like a field of wildflowers from a distance. I used to feel sick when¬ ever I saw them, and I actually did throw up once—I didn't even get off my bike, I just pedaled faster and held my head out to the side, mouth open. But last year there was some kind of anniversary related to the first flag, and then all of a sudden people started taking pictures with them. Mostly kids from school, but some strangers, too. They spilled into the road, ignoring the cars that veered into the left lane to pass them, ignoring me on my bike until I came so close that they shouted, Watch it! They were busy. They were writing long captions about childhood and angels and the fragility of life, they were tagging all of their friends, they were retagging their friends because they'd missed someone, they were looking sad, they were looking constipated because they didn't know how to look sad, they were holding each other close because this was Real Life, because this was Growing Up, because they wondered what it would be like if they died, if they would be called funny or nice or smart or pretty or handsome or hot. They weren't thinking that no one would call them anything, at least not for long. Once you take a picture at a kid's death site you don't come back for a second one.

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.