Peekskill

Peekskill is the Hudson River town where Hannah and Jules first became friends, turning a shared after-school job into a lasting refuge from the separate worlds of their teenage lives. Its importance lies less in any later action there than in the ordinary routine through which the two girls learned to trust one another.

Setting and Arrival

Hannah recalls that her grandfather had recently moved them from Tennessee to Peekskill, a small town on the Hudson River. Jules’s family had moved there from New York City. The town therefore brought together two girls whose families had arrived from different places, without placing them in the same school or social world.

The Beginning of a Friendship

Hannah and Jules met while applying for after-school work at Lucky’s, a local dog-walking service. Both were hired, and they began walking their assigned dogs together every afternoon. The image Hannah remembers is distinctly unruly: two small girls surrounded by as many as fifteen rowdy dogs.

Their working afternoons offered a common life beyond their schools. Hannah attended the public high school, while Jules went to a prestigious private school a few miles away. Hannah later describes the friendship as essential to getting through high school: because they were so removed from each other’s actual lives, they could tell each other everything. Peekskill thus becomes the starting place of a relationship defined by candid confidence and the perspective they gave each other beyond their immediate circumstances.