Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (3 page)

The rules took a while to sort out. Lena and Carmen wanted to focus on friendship-type rules, stuff about keeping in touch with one another over the summer, and making sure the Pants kept moving from one girl to the next. Tibby preferred to focus on random things you could and couldn’t do in the Pants—like picking your nose. Bridget had the idea of inscribing the Pants with memories of the summer once they were all together again. By the time they’d agreed on ten rules, Lena held a motley list that ranged from sincere to silly. Carmen knew they would stick to them.

Next, they talked about how long each of them should have the Pants before passing them on, finally deciding that each person should send them on when she felt the time was right. But to keep the Pants moving, no one should keep them for over a week unless she really needed to. This meant that the Pants could possibly make the rounds twice before the end of the summer.

“Lena should have them first,” Bridget said, tying two Gummi Worms together and biting off the sticky knot. “Greece is a good place to start.”

“Can it be me next?” Tibby asked. “I’ll be the one needing them to pull me out of my depression.” Lena nodded sympathetically.

After that would be Carmen. Then Bridget. Then, just to mix things up, the Pants would bounce back in the opposite direction. From Bridget to Carmen to Tibby and back to Lena.

As they talked, midnight came to divide their last day together from their first day apart. There was a thrill in the air, and Carmen could see from her friends’ faces that she wasn’t the only one who felt it. The Pants seemed to be infused with the promises of the summer. This would be Carmen’s first whole summer with her dad since she was a kid. She could picture herself with him, laughing it up, making him laugh, wearing the Pants.

In solemnity Lena laid the manifesto on top of the Pants. Bridget called for a moment of silence. “To honor the Pants,” she said.

“And the Sisterhood,” Lena added.

Carmen felt tiny bumps rising along her arms. “And this moment. And this summer. And the rest of our lives.”

“Together and apart,” Tibby finished.

We, the Sisterhood, hereby instate the following rules to govern the use of the Traveling Pants:

1. You must never wash the Pants.

2. You must never double-cuff the Pants. It’s tacky. There will never be a time when this will not be tacky.

3. You must never say the word “phat” while wearing the Pants. You must also never think to yourself, “I am fat” while wearing the Pants.

4. You must never let a boy take off the Pants (although you may take them off yourself in his presence).

5. You must not pick your nose while wearing the Pants. You may, however, scratch casually at your nostril while really kind of picking.

6. Upon our reunion, you must follow the proper procedures for documenting your time in the Pants:

• On the left leg of the Pants, write the most exciting place you have been while wearing the Pants.

• On the right leg of the Pants, write the most important thing that has happened to you while wearing the Pants. (For example, “I hooked up with my second cousin, Ivan, while wearing the Traveling Pants.”)

7. You must write to your Sisters throughout the summer, no matter how much fun you are having without them.

8. You must pass the Pants along to your Sisters according to the specifications set down by the Sisterhood. Failure to comply will result in a severe spanking upon our reunion.

9. You must not wear the Pants with a tucked-in shirt and belt. See rule #2.

10. Remember: Pants = love. Love your pals.
Love yourself.

O
ne day, around the time Tibby was twelve, she realized she could judge her happiness by her guinea pig, Mimi. When she was feeling busy, full of plans and purpose, she raced out of her room, past Mimi’s glass box, feeling faintly sad that Mimi just had to lie there lumpen in her wood shavings while Tibby’s life was so big.

She could tell she was miserable when she stared at Mimi with envy, wishing it was her who got to drink fat water droplets from a dispenser positioned at exactly the height of her mouth. Wishing it was her who could snuggle into the warm shavings and decide only whether to spin a few rotations on her exercise wheel or just take another nap. No decisions, no disappointments.

Tibby got Mimi when she was seven. At the time she thought Mimi was the most beautiful name in the world. She had saved it up for almost a year, waiting. It was very easy to spend your best name on a stuffed animal or on an imaginary friend. But Tibby held out. Those were the days when Tibby trusted what she liked. Later, if she loved the name Mimi, she would have thought that was a good reason to name her Frederick.

Today, with her green Wallman’s smock crushed under her arm, with no one to complain to, with no good things to look forward to, Tibby was purely jealous.

Nobody ever sent a guinea pig off to work, did they? She imagined Mimi in a matching smock. Mimi was hopelessly unproductive.

A howl rose from the kitchen, reminding Tibby of two other unproductive creatures in the house—her two-year-old brother and one-year-old sister. They were all noise and destruction and evil-smelling diapers. Even Wallman’s drugstore seemed like a sanctuary compared to her house at lunchtime.

She packed her digital movie camera in its bag and put it on a high shelf in case Nicky found his way into her room again. She stuck one piece of masking tape over the Power button of her computer and another longer piece over the CD drive. Nicky loved turning her computer off and jamming discs into the slot.

“I’m going to work,” she called to Loretta, the baby-sitter, heading down the stairs and straight out the front door. She never liked to phrase her plans as questions, because she didn’t want Loretta to think she had jurisdiction over Tibby.

Many going-to-be juniors had their licenses. Tibby had her bike. She rode the first block trying to pin her smock and wallet under her arm, but she had trouble maneuvering. She stopped. The one reasonable solution was to wear the smock and put the wallet in the pocket of her smock. She stuffed them back under her arm and kept riding.

At Brissard Lane her wallet came unpinned from her arm and bounced on the street. She nearly rode into a moving car. She stopped again and retrieved her wallet.

With a quick look around, she determined she’d see no one she knew in the four blocks between here and Wallman’s. She pulled the smock over her head, stuck the wallet in the pocket, and rode like the wind.

“Yo, Tibby,” she heard a familiar voice call as she turned into the parking lot. Her heart sank. She longed for the wood shavings. “Whassup?”

It was Tucker Rowe, who was, in her opinion, the hottest junior at Westmoreland. For the summer he’d grown an excellent soul patch just under his lower lip. He was standing by his car, an antique seventies muscle car that practically made her swoon.

Tibby couldn’t look at him. The smock was burning her body. She kept her head down while she locked her bike. She ducked into the store, hoping maybe he’d think he’d been mistaken, that maybe the loser girl in the polyester smock with the little darts for breasts was not the actual Tibby, but a much less cool facsimile.

Dear Bee,

I’m enclosing a very small square cut from the lining of my smock. In part, I enjoyed maiming the garment, and in part, I just wanted you to see how thick 2-ply polyester really is.

Tibby

“Vreeland, Bridget?” the camp director, Connie Broward, read off her clipboard.

Bridget was already standing. She couldn’t sit anymore. She couldn’t keep her feet still. “Right here!” she called. She hitched her duffel bag over one shoulder and her backpack over the other. A warm breeze blew off Bahía Concepción. You could actually see the turquoise bay from the central camp building. She felt the excitement rising in her veins.

“Cabin four, follow Sherrie,” Connie instructed.

Bridget could feel lots of eyes on her, but she didn’t dwell on it. She was used to people looking at her. She knew that her hair was unusual. It was long and straight and the color of a peeled banana. People always made a big deal about her hair. Also she was tall and her features were regular—her nose straight, all the things in the right places. The combination of qualities made people mistake her for beautiful.

She wasn’t beautiful. Not like Lena. There was no particular poetry or grace in her face. She knew that, and she knew that other people probably realized that too, once they got over her hair.

“Hi, I’m Bridget,” she said to Sherrie, throwing her stuff down on the bed Sherrie pointed to.

“Welcome,” Sherrie said. “How far did you come?”

“From Washington, D.C.,” Bridget answered.

“That’s a long way.”

It was. Bridget had awoken at four
A.M
. to catch a six o’clock flight to Los Angeles, then a two-hour flight from LAX to the minuscule airport in Loreto, a town on the Sea of Cortez on the eastern coast of the Baja peninsula. Then there had been a van ride—just long enough for her to fall deeply asleep and wake up disoriented.

Sherrie moved on to the next arriving camper. The cabin contained fourteen simple metal-frame twin beds, each with one thin mattress. The interior was unfinished, made of badly joined planks of pine. Bridget moved outside to the tiny porch at the front of the cabin.

If the inside was standard-issue camp, the outside was magical. The camp faced a wide cove of white sand and palm trees. The bay was so perfectly blue, it looked like it had been retouched for a tourist brochure. Across the bay stood protective mountains, shoulder to shoulder, across the Concepción peninsula.

At the back of the camp buildings stood shorter, craggier hills. Miraculously, somebody had managed to carve out two beautiful full-sized soccer fields, irrigated to an even, glowing green, between the beach and the arid hills.

“Hi. Hi.” Bridget waved to two girls lugging their stuff into the cabin. They had tan, muscular soccer-player legs.

Bridget followed them into the cabin. Almost all the beds were claimed. “You want to go swimming?” she asked. Bridget wasn’t afraid of strangers. Often she liked them better than people she knew.

“I’ve got to unpack,” one of the girls said.

“I think we’re supposed to go to dinner in a couple of minutes,” the other one said.

“Okay,” Bridget said easily. “I’m Bridget, by the way. See you later,” she called over her shoulder.

She changed into her bathing suit in an outside shower and ventured out onto the sand. The air felt the exact temperature of her skin. The water held all the colors of the sunset. Fading sun rays touched her shoulders as they disappeared behind the hills. She dove in and stayed under a long time.

I’m happy to be here
, Bridget thought. Her mind flicked for a split second to Lena and the Traveling Pants—to how she couldn’t wait to get ahold of them and live her own story in them.

A little while later, when she arrived at dinner, she was thrilled to see long tables set up on the big, simple deck off the side of the cafeteria building, instead of crammed in under the low ceiling inside. A wig of dense magenta bougainvillea drooped from the roof and crept along the railings. It seemed crazy to spend even a minute indoors here.

Tonight she sat with the rest of cabin four. There were a total of six cabins, which she quickly calculated to mean eighty-four girls, all of whom were serious athletes. You couldn’t come here if you weren’t. She would know, and possibly even care about, these girls by the end, but tonight they were hard to keep track of. She was pretty sure the one with the dark, shoulder-length hair was Emily. The girl with the frizzy blond hair across from her was Olivia, called Ollie. Next to Ollie was an African American girl with hair down to the middle of her back, named Diana.

Over seafood tacos, huge mounds of rice and beans, and lemonade that tasted as though it was made from powder, Connie stood at a makeshift podium and talked about her years on the U.S. Women’s Olympic Team. Spread among the tables were various coaches and trainers.

Back in her cabin, Bridget crawled into her sleeping bag and stared at the crack of moonlight reaching through two planks of wood in the ceiling. Suddenly it occurred to her: She was in Baja. Why should she grasp for a crack of the sky when she could have the whole thing? She got up and bunched her sleeping bag and pillow under her arm.

“Anybody want to sleep on the beach?” she asked the group.

There was a pause and scattered discussion.

“Are we allowed to?” Emily asked.

“I never heard that we weren’t,” Bridget answered. It wasn’t crucial to her plans that anyone follow her, but it was also fine when two others did—Diana and another girl named Jo.

They set up their sleeping bags at the edge of the wide beach. Who knew how high the tide came? The gentle sound of the surf beat away on the beach. The stars spread out above them, glorious.

Bridget was so joyful, so full, it was hard to make herself lie down in the sleeping bag. She heard herself sigh at the pulsing sky spread out above her. “I love this.”

Jo dug deeper into her sleeping bag. “It is unbelievable.”

For a while the three of them watched the sky in silence.

Diana raised her head and propped it on her elbow. “I don’t know if I can fall asleep. It’s so . . . obliterating, you know? The feeling of insignificance. Your mind wanders out there and just keeps on going.”

Bridget laughed appreciatively. At that moment, Diana reminded her of Carmen in the nicest way, full of philosophy and psychochatter. “Honestly?” Bridget said. “That idea never occurred to me.”