Toward the beginning of Alina Grabowski's kaleidoscopic debut Women and Children First, 16-year-old Jane Ryder rides her bike through the rain-slicked streets of Nashquitten, a fictional town on the Massachusetts coast, south of Boston. It's a Saturday morning in May, and the smell of "seaweed and crab shells" hangs in the air — Jane's street has flooded due to a cracked seawall that the town won't repair "because it's on the side of the beach where people actually live, as opposed to the side where people 'summer.'"
As Jane bikes past the "Murder Merge" onto the town's single highway, where a thicket of white flags memorialize the teenagers who died in car wrecks, she thinks about the kids she's seen taking selfies there, "writing long captions about childhood and angels and the fragility of life...holding each other close...because they wondered what it would be like if they died, if they would be called funny or nice or smart or handsome or hot." Jane knows that in a town like Nashquitten, where a half a dozen high school students have died in the past five years, where opioids are easy to cop and people regularly disappear, no one is remembered for long.
