A queer Sliding Doors YA rom-com in which a girl must choose between summer in NYC with her dad (and the girl she’s always wanted) or LA with her estranged mom (and the guy she never saw coming).
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Dahlia Adler’s Going Bicoastal, which is out now!
In Dahlia Adler’s Going Bicoastal, there’s more than one path to happily ever after.
Natalya Fox has twenty-four hours to make the biggest choice of her life: stay home in NYC for the summer with her dad (and finally screw up the courage to talk to the girl she’s been crushing on), or spend it with her basically estranged mom in LA (knowing this is the best chance she has to fix their relationship, if she even wants to.) (Does she want to?)
How’s a girl supposed to choose?
She can’t, and so both summers play out in alternating timelines – one in which Natalya explores the city, tries to repair things with her mom, works on figuring out her future, and goes for the girl she’s always wanted. And one in which Natalya explores the city, tries to repair things with her mom, works on figuring out her future, and goes for the guy she never saw coming.
Chapter One
in Which Natalya Has a Decision to Make
What would you say is the appropriate amount of time in which to have to decide which parent you love more than the other?
Because my parents seem to think that twenty-four hours ought to cut it, and while I’m not what the kids call a “whiz” at math, that feels a little short.
“Let’s go through this again,” Camila Morales says with the focused dedication of a girl who already has both her love life and future career in order. “Pros of staying here for the summer. Obvious number one: I’ll be here.”
“I don’t know if you can count your presence in Manhattan when you’ll be visiting your Abuela in Puerto Rico for an entire month, but okay.” I yank a handful of grapes from the bunch we brought with us on our picnic to Central Park—because nothing helps us make big decisions like people watching—and put one between my teeth, letting them pierce the skin slowly. About ten feet to our right, three girls who look a few years younger than us sit together on their own blanket, each one glued to a cell phone, and to the left, a couple is babying a cat so big and fluffy, it looks like the world’s comfiest pillow. “Obvious number two: it means not ditching my dad, plus not packing.”
“Okay, but obvious number two is canceled by not seeing your mom, though I will give you points for the packing thing. You’re horrible at packing.”
I can’t even be offended. I absolutely am horrible at packing. If you invite me to a pool party, you can be certain I’ll forget my bathing suit. In fairness, my absent-minded gene is so clearly inherited from my dad, I can hardly be blamed for it. If it weren’t for his various TAs and author’s assistants over the years, and the fact that he’s one of the most brilliant math professors Columbia has ever seen, he would have been out of a job decades ago.
“Fine.” A throuple walks by, the man in the middle wearing a baby in one of those carriers while the parents on either side of him each have a pinkie in the cooing infant’s grip. It’s impossibly cute and reminds me of my easy number three, though I’m not going to say it aloud to Camila.
Unfortunately, my best friend knows me at least as well as I know myself, if not better. “Obvious number three: the Redhead.”
“The Redhead is not a reason to stay,” I argue weakly, even though she absolutely is, because we both know she occupies an absurd amount of my brain space. But to be fair, she is obscenely cute, and also ridiculously hot, and impossibly cool, and it’s not easy to roll that all into one person. “Besides, what if she’s not here for the summer?”
“Okay, but what if she is?” Camila counters. “What if she’s wandering the Upper West Side all summer wondering why she’s stopped running into that cute blue-eyed brunette everywhere? And then, because that cute blue-eyed brunette was the last thing keeping her in Manhattan, she leaves town and moves to Nebraska?”
“I don’t think they have punk girls in Nebraska.”
Camila rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure there are no punk girls in the entire state of Nebraska. I forgot they’ve completely banned nose rings over there, and I hear listening to Bad Religion can get you exiled to Kansas.”
I stab another grape with my teeth. “Now who’s being ridiculous?”
“Still you, Tal,” she says, yanking out her ponytail holder and immediately putting her thick black curls in an even higher and tighter knot. “Always you.”
“Says the girl who thinks random run-ins at bookstores and cupcake shops are the last things keeping the Redhead in New York.”
“You know what I mean.” She stretches out her legs in front of her and flexes her toes back and forth, fuchsia pedicure winking in the sunlight. “The universe is clearly smashing you and the Redhead together. You’ve been crushing on her for almost the entire year, and you haven’t even managed to get her name. This is the summer you finally introduce yourself and ask her out. I’m convinced.”
“Or, point for going to my mom in LA: no pressure to make a fool out of myself to the Redhead, who may or may not even be queer, let alone interested in me.”
“Didn’t you say she wears a rainbow pin on her backpack?”
“Yeah, but maybe it’s an ally thing. Maybe she’s got queer parents.”
“Maybe she has a bisexual best friend who absolutely cannot get up the guts to ask out anyone of any gender, despite the fact that she would be the world’s greatest girlfriend and anyone would be lucky to have her,” Camila says pointedly.
Whoops—I accidentally crushed the last couple of grapes in my hand. I shove them all in my mouth together to avoid acknowledging Camila’s jab, sweet as it may be, and immediately regret it when one goes down the wrong pipe. She has to whack me on the back, and eventually it dislodges. “You talk big for someone who’s practically married,” I shoot back. “You haven’t had to deal with dating since before we were old enough to date.” That part isn’t even an exaggeration—Camila’s and Emilio’s moms are both nurses at New York Presbyterian and bonded immediately over their parents being from the same city in the Philippines. Their kids bonded just as quickly the first time they met, and their friendship morphed into romance the second hormones hit. They’ve been “Camelio” for as long as I can remember. “Let’s tone down the judgment, please.”
“That was a compliment mixed with judgment, thank you very much.” She helps herself to some of the grapes, then reaches for her phone when it chimes with a text. Judging by her sappy smile, it’s Emilio, which fascinates me because it feels like a person should not be able to still have that effect on another person after this long.
Then again, I don’t have much to model it on. You know those couples who split up and everyone is all, “Oh no, why? They seemed so happy!”?
My parents are not that couple.
My parents are the couple who make you say, “What were they ever doing together to begin with?” And they’d be right there with you in asking it.
In their defense—or, at least, as they tell it—finding another Jew at a grad school Christmas party in Durham, North Carolina, seems like the kind of scenario for which the word “bashert” was created. Between awkwardly declining shrimp cocktail and crab puffs at every turn and faking knowing the words to carols they’d only ever heard on TV, Ezra Morris Fox and Melissa Rina Farber exchanged numbers. Then they went on way too many group dates to realize they didn’t actually like each other when it was just the two of them, eventually figured it out on their honeymoon, but also realized they’d gotten pregnant on their honeymoon, and voilà—then came me. Cue three years of trying to make it work with couples therapy, four years of trying to keep it together by throwing themselves into their jobs and avoiding me as much as possible, and finally, a weary, inevitable divorce that was just amicable enough to work out shared custody.
Until three years ago.
When Melissa got poached from her marketing firm to join Cooper Frank in LA as an executive vice president, she couldn’t say no—but I could. And my refusal to move to LA meant I was now in full custody of one absent-minded professor and spoke to my mom approximately once a week. So it could be nice to actually get to spend the entire summer with her.
Or it could be awkward and miserable, lonely for my dad, and just generally an ill-advised mess all around. Who can say, really?
“Maybe LA will have its own version of the Redhead,” Camila suggests, her daggerlike nails catching the sun as she unscrews the cap on her coconut water. “Los Angeles definitely has punk girls.”
“How do you know what LA has?” I challenge, watching a corgi do a series of tricks for a bone-shaped treat and willing it to toddle over so I can pet it. “You’re always complaining that you’ve never been west of Chicago.”
“First of all, LA is huge—I’m pretty sure they have literally everything. Second of all, my mom’s brother lives in Eagle Rock, so we’re going to visit at some point. We just have to, you know, actually get there.”
“I don’t think that makes you an expert on the city, Cam.”
