Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (27 page)

“Hey, look what I brought for you,” Lena said, pulling the Pants out of her bag.

Bridget clutched them in both arms for a moment before she put them on.

“Tell me what happened, okay?” Lena said, sitting down on the sand, pulling Bridget down next to her. “Tell me everything that happened, and we’ll figure out how to fix it.”

Bridget looked down at the Pants, grateful to have them. They meant support and they meant love, just as they’d all vowed at the beginning of the summer. But with Lena right here, right next to her, she almost didn’t need them.

Bridget looked up at the sky. She looked at Lena. “I think maybe you already did.”

Epilogue

T
radition called for our annual late-night celebration at Gilda’s to fall on the middle day between birthdays—nine days after Lena’s and nine days before mine, two days after Bridget’s and two days before Tibby’s. I always find comfort in numbers. I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny. So today it felt like God Himself practically wrote it into my Day Runner. The celebration this year happened to fall the night before school started again, which was significant too, if not in a happy way.

Like salmon swimming back to the tiny tributary where they were spawned, we returned to Gilda’s as the honorary birthplace of the Septembers and now of the Sisterhood.

As usual, Tibby and Bee collaborated on the birthday cake, and Lena and I created the mood with decorations and music. Bee always got to do the breaking and entering.

Usually by this time in the summer, we were as worn in to one another as pebbles in a riverbed. For three months we’d had complete togetherness and not much outside stimuli. What few stories we had, we’d considered, analyzed, celebrated, cursed, and joked into sand.

Tonight was different. I felt like we were each separate and full to our edges with our own stories, mostly unshared. In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt real. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

The Pants were the only witness to all of our lives. They were the witness and the document too. In the last few days we’d made our inscriptions, telling a little of the story with pictures and words that stood out bright against humble denim.

Tonight I looked around at my friends, sitting on a red blanket, surrounded by candles in the middle of a crummy aerobics studio. Usually the centerpiece was the cake, but tonight it was pushed off to the side in deference to the Pants. Two tan faces and Tibby’s pale one looked back at me. Their eyes were all the same color in this light. Tibby gamely wore the sombrero from Mexico and the T-shirt Lena had painted for her showing the harbor at Ammoudi. Lena wore shoes she’d borrowed from Bridget, and Bridget stuck her bare feet toward the center, displaying toenails bright with my favorite turquoise polish. Tibby’s and Lena’s knees touched. We were settling into one another again, sharing our lives.

But we were quieter tonight. There was more care and less ordinary teasing. In a way, we were still strange to one another, I realized, but there was comfort in the Pants. The Pants had absorbed the summer. Maybe it was better that they couldn’t talk. They would let us remember more how we had felt, and less what had actually happened. They would let us keep it all and share it.

It wasn’t that we hadn’t shared the big outlines of our stories. Of course we had. I told them all about how Al’s wedding was. We knew that Bee had messed herself up over Eric. We all saw Lena talk about Kostos in a way she’d never talked about a boy before. We knew about Bailey, and we knew intuitively to be careful when we asked Tibby questions. But there were a million little lines of shading that we couldn’t convey so easily. They were the subtle things, and understanding them, even knowing when you missed them, was what separated other friends from real friends, like we were.

Still, the Pants promised us there was time. Nothing would be lost. There was all year if we needed it. We had all the way until next summer, when we would take out the Traveling Pants and, together or apart, begin again.

The Second Summer
of the Sisterhood

With a bit of last summer’s sand in their pockets, the Traveling Pants and the sisterhood that wears them embark on their sixteenth summer.

Available everywhere April 2003.

Here’s an early preview . . .

The Pants find Bridget in the Deep South. . . .

B
ridget took a lot of extra steps up the front walk of the two-story brick house. There were little anthills along one side. Grass pushed up triumphantly through the concrete in many places. The doormat said “Home Is Where the Heart Is” in large letters decorated with pink and yellow flowers. Bridget remembered that doormat, and she also remembered the brass doorknocker in the shape of a dove. Or a pigeon. Maybe it was a pigeon.

She banged on the door a little harder than she’d meant to. She needed to keep it moving. “Come on, come on,” she mumbled to herself. She heard the footsteps. She shook her hands to keep the blood flowing.

Here we go,
Bridget thought as the doorknob turned and the door swung open.

And there she was.

The old woman was the right age to be Greta, though Bridget did not actually recognize her.

“Hello?” the old woman said, squinting into the bright sunlight.

“Hi,” Bridget said. She stuck out her hand. “My name is Gilda, and I just moved to town a couple of days ago. Are you Greta Randolph, by any chance?”

The old woman nodded. Well, that was that.

“Would you like to come in?” the woman asked. She looked a little suspicious.

“Yes, thank you. I would.”

Bridget followed her over white wall-to-wall carpet, amazed by the smell of the house. It was distinctive in some unidentifiable way . . . or maybe it was familiar. It stopped her breath for a moment.

The woman invited her to sit on the plaid couch in the living room. “Can I offer you a glass of iced tea?”

“No, not just now. Thank you.”

The woman nodded and sat in the wing chair across from Bridget.

Bridget wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but this wasn’t it. The woman was overweight, and the fat was distributed clumsily around her upper body. Her hair was gray and short and permed looking. Her teeth were yellow. Her clothes looked straight from Wal-Mart.

“What can I do for you?” the woman asked, looking at Bridget carefully, probably to make sure she didn’t swipe any of the crystal doodads on the bookcase.

“I heard from your neighbors you might need a little help around the house—you know, odd jobs. I’m looking for work,” Bridget explained. The lie came effortlessly.

The woman looked confused. “Which neighbor?”

Bridget arbitrarily pointed to the right. Lying was easier than most people thought, she decided. This was key, because liars preyed on the general truthfulness of everybody else. If everybody lied, then it wouldn’t be easy.

“The Armstrongs?”

Bridget nodded.

The woman shook her head, looking puzzled. “Well, we all need a little help, I guess, don’t we?”

“Definitely,” Bridget said.

The woman thought a moment. “I do have a project I’ve been thinking of.”

“What’s that?”

“I’d like to clean out the attic, then maybe turn it into an efficiency and rent it out in the fall. I could use the extra money.”

Bridget nodded. “I could help you with that.”

“I warn you, there’s a lotta junk up there. Boxes and boxes of old things. My kids left all their stuff in this house.”

Bridget shrank back. She hadn’t imagined that would come up quite so fast, even indirectly. In fact, as she sat there she’d sort of forgotten the connection she had to this woman.

“You tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

The woman nodded. “Fine. I’ll pay you five dollars an hour. How would that be?”

Bridget tried not to grimace. Maybe that was the pay scale in Burgess, Alabama, but in Washington you wouldn’t flip a burger for that. “Uh, okay.”

“When can you start?” The enthusiasm seemed to have changed hands.

“Day after tomorrow?”

“Good.”

The woman got up and Bridget followed her to the front door. “Thanks a lot, Mrs. Randolph.”

“Call me Greta.”

“Okay, Greta.”

“I’ll see you day after tomorrow at . . . how’s eight?”

“That’s . . . fine. See you then.” Bridget groaned inwardly. She had gotten very bad at waking up in the morning.

“What did you say your last name was?”

“Oh. It’s . . . Tomko.” There was a stray name that could use a new owner, even temporarily. Besides, Bridget liked thinking of Tibby.

“How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Just about to turn seventeen,” Bridget said.

Greta nodded. “I have a granddaughter your age. She’ll be seventeen in September.”

Bridget flinched. “Really?” her voice warbled.

“She lives up in Washington, D.C. You ever been there?”

Bridget shook her head. It was easy to lie to a stranger. It was harder when they knew your birthday.

“Where are you from, anyway?”

“Norfolk.” Bridget had no idea why she said that.

“You’ve come a long way.”

Bridget nodded.

“Well, nice to meet you, Gilda,” the woman who was her grandmother called after her.

The Pants join Tibby at a summer film program. . . .

B
rian was dressed and sitting patiently at Tibby’s dorm room desk when she woke up the next morning. Tibby was conscious of how her hair stood up when she first got out of bed. She flattened it with both hands.

“Are you hungry?” he asked her companionably.

She remembered about breakfast. She remembered the IHOP and walking down the highway. She meant to tell Brian about the plan and have him come along. She meant to, but she didn’t.