Friendship between Kelly Kelleher and Buffy St. John

Kelly Kelleher’s friendship with Buffy St. John is both a foundational intimacy and a relationship strained by Kelly’s withdrawal. The two women had roomed together at Brown, and Buffy was Kelly’s closest friend. When Kelly leaves a Fourth of July party with The Senator, Buffy’s affectionate farewell becomes the last ordinary gesture of their closeness before the car accident. Later, as Kelly imagines surviving the sinking Toyota, she embraces Buffy as a sister and acknowledges that she had deliberately shut her friend out for years.

Identity and Shared Background

Kelly and Buffy were both twenty-six and worked for magazines published in Boston, but their professional and social temperaments differed. Kelly worked for Citizens' Inquiry; Buffy worked for Boston After Hours and was described as more worldly, experienced, and adventurous. Her brightly painted fingernails and toenails and the condoms she kept replenished in several purses mark a confident ease with sexual and social life that contrasts with Kelly’s greater reserve.

Their friendship had been established through sharing a room at Brown, and the narrative identifies Buffy as Kelly’s closest friend. Their closeness does not mean they were alike: Buffy’s more worldly manner gives her a different vantage on Kelly’s choices, while the intimacy between them makes Kelly’s later embarrassment especially consequential.

The Party and Kelly’s Departure

At the Fourth of July gathering at the oceanfront cottage on Derry Road, Buffy hosted while the cottage’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Edgar St. John, were away. The Senator and Kelly had met only that afternoon; they were new acquaintances who seemed to have taken to each other, not established friends or lovers. Buffy and Ray Annick would later insist that the two had not known each other before the party, and Buffy would vehemently reject speculation that they had already been lovers.

As Kelly packed hurriedly to leave, Buffy pinched her teasingly and asked why she had to go then, suggesting she could leave later. Kelly flushed and apologized, but could not say what she and Buffy both understood: she believed that if she did not do as The Senator asked, there would be no later. The silence makes the departure more than a simple change of plans. Kelly recognizes how Buffy may interpret it, yet embarrassment and the pressure of the moment keep her from explaining herself.

Buffy caught up with Kelly in the driveway, squeezed her hand, and whispered, “Call me, sweetie! Anytime tomorrow.” Her raised hand as she watched them go gives the farewell a subdued finality. The offer to talk the next day belongs to a future Kelly cannot be sure she will reach; the story places Buffy’s warm, practical gesture beside the danger into which Kelly is departing.

Distance and Misunderstanding

The friendship’s strain is expressed through Kelly’s concern about the story Buffy might tell afterward. Kelly imagines Buffy thinking that Kelly had treated her as a friend only to abandon her, and she is too embarrassed to voice the shared implication behind Buffy’s teasing. The scene does not establish that Buffy has rejected Kelly; rather, it shows Kelly anticipating judgment and failing to confide in the person closest to her.

The novel also distinguishes Buffy’s knowledge from what others assume about Kelly and The Senator. Buffy’s insistence that they had just met supports the account of a sudden connection, not a hidden prior affair. That insistence protects Kelly from speculation while underscoring how little time Buffy has had to understand the decision that carries her friend away from the party.

Imagined Return and Meaning

As the black water rises around Kelly, she recalls that The Senator had kicked her in blind panic while trying to escape. She understands his action as terror rather than deliberate cruelty, and the narrative’s movement between the drowning and imagined alternatives makes her consciousness reach beyond the immediate danger. In one such possibility, Kelly strains upward, grips what she recognizes as a means of saving herself, and finds herself embracing a startled Buffy.

In that imagined reunion, Kelly holds Buffy hard, vows that she loves her like a sister, and apologizes for deliberately shutting herself off from Buffy for the past two or three years. She calls the separation an accident and assigns no one blame. The imagined reconciliation gives the friendship a clear emotional shape: affection has endured beneath distance, but Kelly recognizes too late how deliberately she had withdrawn. The scene does not undo the drowning; instead, it lets the prospect of reunion surface within Kelly’s struggle for life, making her estrangement from Buffy part of what she longs to repair.