Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (3 page)

“Brian, Brian, Brian!” Katherine and Nicky were literally dancing around him. Brian had earned their love the hard way, not by being their peevish older sister, but by playing every endless, tedious game they could devise and listening carefully to every harebrained thing they could think of to say. They were a lot more demonstrative than his real live date, come to think of it.

Brian’s innocence gave him a funny kind of confidence. It was hard to explain. He didn’t care that he had walked all the way to her house because he had no car. He wasn’t self-conscious that their date car was her car. Once outside, he gallantly opened the door for her. On the driver’s side. He didn’t care, so it didn’t matter.

Inside the car, it was private. So dark and private. He touched his hand to the inside of her elbow. She got scared, and fumbled the key into the ignition.

They were growing up. That was a fact she had to face. He had grown from a kid to nearly a man. He was eighteen years old. He wanted Tibby in a different way than he used to. He looked at her differently. He wasn’t pushy or gross, but his eyes did linger on her breasts. When he put his hand on her, she could tell he was feeling the curve of her waist. And when he looked at her like that, she felt different too. It was natural, right?

In the school parking lot he reached for her hand. Hers was clammy.

What about friendship, though? What about the ease between them? Where was that going to go? And if they let it go, could they ever get it back?

That was the thing about this summer. With everything that was happening, she wondered, was there any going back?

The auditorium was dark and the DJ was loud and grating like at every school social function, but this was their last one, and for that reason, Tibby couldn’t bring herself to hate it quite as much.

Brian held her hand fast. He was declaring their couplehood. Ironically, he did her more credit than himself. This spring his social star had certainly risen past hers. Not that he noticed or cared. In spite of her beautiful friends, Tibby was identified more with the disaffected artist types. Bee was a glamour jock. Carmen had turned into quite the babe, the target of a lot of underclassman fantasies, though she’d never curried favor with the ruling set. Lena flew under the social radar. And Brian, oddly, had become a darling of the social whirl—even they needed new blood occasionally—getting invitations none of the rest of them got. Tibby was one of those who sat on the sidelines in dark clothes, making cynical observations with other self-designated misfits who were too cautious to jump into the fray.

Of all the boys in school, only Brian seemed to notice how Tibby’s hair had grown out, how her delicate shoulders looked in a tube top, how the Pants made her small behind look especially nice. She loved being noticed like this. And also, she didn’t.

Bee and Carmen found them right away. Lena and Effie hadn’t arrived yet. Effie was an infamously slow and primping date. Bee was wearing a white halter dress and her hair was brighter than the tea lights. She looked like an extremely fit Marilyn Monroe. Carmen wore a siren red slip dress, to which the boys were already flocking. As stunning as they looked in their finery, Tibby was still grateful it was she who had drawn for the Pants.

Bridget and Carmen hustled Tibby off to the bathroom in their time-honored way. The cavernous girls’ bathroom was always the most happening spot at a school party. “You both look unbelievable,” Tibby said along the way.

“You, Tibby, are luscious,” Carmen responded. “Brian looked like his heart was going to break when we took you away.”

An army of gussied girls were perfecting makeup, smoking, and gossiping in front of the mirrors.

Bee took out her lip gloss. She put some on and shared it around.

“Hey, Bee?” Carmen said.

“Yeah?”

“If you ever meet a guy and you fall in love with him, but because of some weird genetic mutation he doesn’t seem to return the feeling?”

Bee always went patiently along with Carmen’s counterfactuals. “Yeah?”

“Wear that dress.”

Bee laughed. “Okay.”

Lena arrived a few minutes later, dressed down as usual, in an olive green cargo skirt and a black shirt.

“Lenny, did you have to wear the ponytail?” Carmen asked fake-irritably.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Come on, it’s our last high school party,” Bee said.

Together, they put some mascara and lip gloss on her and coaxed the elastic out of her hair.

Looking at their faces in the mirror, Tibby felt as though she might cry. This was the place where they’d spent the majority of school events these last four years. They had had more fun here, together, than anyplace else. This, on some level, was their real high school experience.

Carmen caught her look. “It’s sad, I know.”

“Let’s get back out there,” Tibby said. She didn’t want to feel these things right now.

Back in the auditorium, they dispersed. Brian was waiting eagerly. “Do you want to dance?” he asked Tibby.

Was she allowed to say no? Was a real live date allowed to say no? As he took her hand and led her to the floor, the fast song changed into a slow one. Was that better or worse? She couldn’t decide.

It would have taken her an hour to figure out how to get her arms around Brian, but he went right for it. He closed in and held her tight.

So here it was. This was a first. She had, admittedly, thought a lot about Brian’s body and how it would feel. Friendship seemed to fuzz at the edges as this new thing happened.

He was so much taller than her now, her head barely reached his chest. His hands were on her waist, her hips, her back. Slowly touching the places he’d looked at for so long. She felt a lightness in her lower abdomen, a wobbliness in her legs.

This was going too fast. It was getting away from her. She couldn’t do it.

Her cheeks were deeply flushed as she pulled away. “Can we go?” she asked.

“Where?” he asked.

“I’m not sure.” She took his hand and led him out of the auditorium and toward the parking lot.

She suddenly had her idea. She’d get them back to basics.

He followed her into the car without complaint. In silence she drove to the seminal 7-Eleven on River Road.

He realized what she was up to. He smiled and shrugged at her under the pulsing lights of the store. He went obligingly toward Dragon Master and fished around in his pockets for change. Even as she watched him she knew he would play their old game to please her, but his life was outside of the screen now.

“Never mind,” she said. She was skittish. Her legs were jumpy. A drop of sweat rolled down her spine. She couldn’t figure out where to be. She was on the run.

They got back into the car. She drove to a small neighborhood park equidistant from their houses. It was another of their places.

They got out of the car and sat on a picnic table. It was quiet and dark. She was just going to have to stay still and let it catch her. She knew it.

She hopped off the table. She stood in front of him. With her standing and him sitting, their faces were at the same level. She put her clammy hands on his knees. He scooted toward her, to the very edge of table, and pulled her into his arms. He held her like that for a long time while her heart slammed out a beat.

When she looked up he kissed her first on the forehead and then on the lips. It was such a kiss. Full of pent-up desire and no uncertainties at all, he put his hands under her hair, supporting the back of her head. He paused the kiss for only a moment to say something in her ear. “I love you” was what he said.

It was beautiful to her, unlike anything she had ever felt before. It brought tears to her eyes and still more warm blood to her face.

Tibby felt the odd sensation of a wind blowing through her mind, alternately hot and sultry, then cold and bracing. And when the wind subsided, she realized that the friendship, as it had been, was gone.

Someday somebody’s going to ask you a question that you should say yes to.
—Old 97’s

C
armen was on a supremely important mission: She needed to steal her mother’s fake eyelashes and she needed to do it now.

She’d gotten up early to say good-bye to Bee one last time before Bee left for camp in Pennsylvania. She’d eaten breakfast with her mom, and spent a few minutes feeling guilty about not having a job as she watched Christina trundle off to work. She’d written a long e-mail to her friend and stepbrother, Paul.

Then she’d started to feel sad about saying good-bye to Bee and it reminded her of good-byes generally. So Carmen turned to the most recent issue of
CosmoGIRL!
for solace, as she often did in moments like these. And voilà, she was swept away by the imperative need to copy the innovative use of fake eyelashes on page 23. Sometimes it paid to be shallow.

It was so different for Carmen these days, walking into her mother’s room. The reason was obvious: It wasn’t her mother’s room anymore. It was her mom and David’s room. A woman’s room was so different than a woman’s room together with a man. It was utterly different when the woman was your mother and the man was her spanking-new husband, whom you’d met less than a year before.

Carmen wasn’t grateful for her parents’ divorce. There were so many things she’d lost. But it took David’s presence now to show her what remarkable access and role-defying closeness she’d shared with her mother for all those years when it had been just the two of them.

When her father had first left, a lot of the usual boundaries had come down. She’d slept in her mother’s bed almost every night for a year. Was it for Carmen’s sake? Or for Christina’s? Once there was no dad coming home after a hard day of work, “we girls,” as her mother called them, had eaten Eggo waffles or scrambled eggs for dinner many nights. Carmen had considered it a treat, not having to saw through some hunk of flank steak and stomach the obligatory vegetables.

Carmen used to feel an easy ownership of this room. Now she treaded uncertainly. She used to flop at will on her mother’s bed. It was a different bed now. Not literally a different bed, but in every other way different. She steered wide around it now.

It wasn’t just that the room contained a lot of male stuff. David wasn’t a slob or anything. He was always conscious that this apartment had been Christina and Carmen’s long before he joined up. He commanded one closet, three bookshelves, and a new bureau from Pottery Barn. He didn’t even have pictures yet. The room now testified not so much to him but to
them—
their intimacy, the things they whispered to each other when they were falling asleep. Even when they weren’t present, Carmen felt like she was invading it.

The bathroom used to bloom with female stuff—creams, lotions, makeup, tampons, and perfume. Now, in deference to
them
, Christina kept it all mostly stowed in the cabinet. Even seeing David’s shaving cream can lined up next to Christina’s nail polish remover made Carmen feel like she’d just crawled between them in bed.

The false eyelashes weren’t in the medicine cabinet, Carmen quickly discovered. When you lived with your daughter, you left things like that in easy view. When you lived with your brand-new husband, you hid the evidence.

Carmen already knew that most of the stuff Christina didn’t want David to see, she stored in the cabinet above the toilet. Yes, this was the right department, Carmen realized as soon as she’d jiggled open the sticky door. There was wart remover, there was mustache bleach, there was bikini wax and hair straightening balm and a box of Nice ’n Easy in Deep Mahogany. Carmen snaked her hand toward the back, knocking over appetite suppressants and a pack of laxatives. A plastic bottle was set rolling by the falling laxatives. Carmen watched in displeasure as it fell off the shelf and…splash, into the toilet. Damn.

She watched it bobbing in the toilet water. She could see it contained some kind of vitamins. She really hoped the cap was watertight.

While she delayed reaching her hand into the toilet—who hurried to do a thing like that?—she absently wondered why her mother kept vitamins in the cabinet of shame. David was all about vitamins. He ate them for breakfast. He talked about various herbal supplements like they were his best friends. What kind of vitamins would Christina keep from her dashing nutrition-man?

Carmen’s curiosity was always her best motivator. She stuck her hand in the toilet and plucked out the bottle, tossing it directly into the sink and running hot water over it. She added some liquid soap. Once the bottle and her hand were sufficiently clean, she turned it over to satisfy her questioning mind.

Her head grew chill and fuzzy. The fuzz invaded her chest and expanded in her lower abdomen. The front of the label communicated precisely why this bottle lived between the laxatives and the Preparation H. But it wasn’t David her mom was trying to hide them from. At least, that was what Carmen powerfully suspected.

They were prenatal vitamins. The kind you took when you were having a baby. And Christina was almost certainly hiding them from Carmen.

Tibby squinted in the morning sunlight. She was groggy and disoriented, her lips were swollen, and her eyes felt puffy. She felt like she had a hangover, but not because she’d had any alcohol.

It was one of those mornings when you come to terms with a strange new reality. You ask yourself, Did I dream that? Did I actually do that? Did he really say that? Reality comes back in bits and pieces, and you experience the novelty of it all over again. You wonder, Will this day and this night and tomorrow and all the rest of the days be different because of what happened last night? And in Tibby’s case, she knew the answer.

She put her fingers on her lips. Could you get a hangover from kissing?

Was Brian awake yet? She pictured him in his bed. She pictured him in her bed. She got the shivery feeling in the bottom of her stomach, so she stopped picturing him in her bed. Was he regretting anything? Was she regretting anything?

What would they say when they saw each other again?

Would he just drop by during pancakes the way he often did? Would he plant a wet one on her lips and wait to see if anyone noticed?