The Second Summer of the Sisterhood (18 page)

“Kostos,” she said faintly. Then she slammed the door in his face.

Bridget had memorized Greta’s schedule. Monday evenings she played bingo at church. Wednesdays she played bridge with her neighbors across the street. Today was Thursday, the day Greta went to the Safeway to do her weekly shopping and splurge on a shell steak. On the third Thursday of every month, her son Pervis came from Huntsville to have dinner, and Greta bought two shell steaks. Bridget volunteered to tag along. The real draw for Bridget was the cold of the meat aisle. She’d become a girl of simple pleasures.

“What’s your son like?” Bridget asked, lazily watching the signs flash by on the interstate.

“Quiet. Not so social,” Greta said.

“What’s he do in Huntsville?”

“Custodial services at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.” She looked at Bridget in confidence. “That’s a fancy way of saying janitor. He cleans and buffs the floors.”

“Oh.” She remembered her uncle Pervis always in his bedroom, always at the window looking through his telescope. Once, when she’d been older, he had come to Washington, D.C., and stayed with them overnight. It was the only time she remembered him coming. He’d set up his telescope, got it all set and trained, and let her look through it. Pervis saw a thousand familiar pictures in the sky, and Bridget saw chaos.

“His father and I saved up our money and sent him to space camp there the summer he was nine. I don’t think he ever wanted to leave. He’s happy with it.”

“Did he ever get married?” she asked.

“No. He’s always been real shy with girls. I don’t see him getting married. He’s got his ham radio friends. That’s about as social as it gets for him.”

Bridget nodded. Pervis had realized his dream of working at the Space Center, yet he spent his days looking down.

Thinking of Pervis made her think of Perry, his namesake, who was like him in many ways, minus the ham radio. Bridget had finally spoken to Perry for a few minutes on the phone the night before. He’d been curious about Greta, but guarded. He didn’t want to hear anything about Marly.

At the Safeway, Greta marched around purposefully with her cart and her coupons, while Bridget drifted through the refrigerated and frozen aisles, letting her mind go to places it had never gone before.

She wondered about Perry and she wondered about her father. Tragedy brought some families together, maybe, but not hers. Her father never talked about what had happened. He never talked about the things that might lead to talking about what had happened. There were so many things they couldn’t talk about, they had stopped trying to talk about much of anything.

She pictured her father, when he wasn’t at school, sitting in his den, wearing his earphones tuned to NPR. He never played the radio to the whole room, even when he was alone.

Perry spent his time in front of the computer. He played elaborate fantasy games on the Internet. He spent more time interacting with strangers than with people he knew. Bridget sometimes forgot she lived in the same house with him, let alone that they were twins.

It was sad. She knew it was. She wondered if maybe she could have held on to them better, Perry and her dad. Maybe if she’d tried hard enough she could have kept them feeling like a family and kept her home feeling like a home. Instead, they seemed to float out from under the roof, off into the stratosphere, farther and farther apart, orbiting nothing.

Lena strode around her room, her face burning. Kostos was here. Kostos was here in her house. Kostos, in three dimensions. Living, breathing Kostos.

Was it real? Was she having a psychotic break? It wasn’t
that
hot, was it?

She had dreamed it. She had dreamed him. Her knees swayed with the disappointment of that idea. God, how she wanted him to be real.

He looked the same. He looked much better.

He’d seen her in her bra!
Oh my.

Nobody in the world besides her mom, her sister, and her three best friends ever saw her without her clothes on. She was a modest person. She was! She didn’t even like fitting rooms unless they had doors that closed all the way. Kostos had seen her twice!

Kostos was downstairs in Lena’s house! Effie had brought him downstairs. They were in the kitchen. That is, if he really existed and this whole thing wasn’t a dream, they were in the kitchen.

He had come to see her! All this way! What did that mean?

But wait! He had a girlfriend! What did
that
mean?

Lena was walking in such a tight circle she was making herself dizzy. She straightened out her path and sent herself to the door.

Oh! Get dressed. Oh, yeah.

The Traveling Pants were sitting on her desk chair, waiting patiently. Did they know about this? Had they seen this coming? Lena eyed them suspiciously before she pulled them on. What exactly were those Pants up to? Were they going to make her miserable before they made her happy?
Oh, please, no.

She pulled a white T-shirt over her head. She took a quick peek in the mirror. Her face was shiny with sweat. Her hair was dirty. She had a stye in her eye.
Oy.

What if Kostos remembered her as beautiful and when he saw her now he thought,
God, what happened? And here I traveled all this way?
Her face had launched at least one ship, and now the ship was going to turn right back around.

What if he wasn’t even waiting for her in the kitchen? What if he was leaving town in a hurry, thinking,
Wow, how things change.
He was probably waiting for the bus at Friendship Station.

In desperation Lena drew on some lip liner. It was orange. Her hand was shaking too much to stay in the lines. It looked horrible. She ran into her bathroom and washed it off. She washed the rest of her face too, so it wasn’t so shiny. She pulled her dirty hair back into a knot.

Fine. If he thought she’d gone ugly, fine. If that was what he cared about, then too bad. Besides, he had another girlfriend!

Lena looked at herself in the mirror despondently. Grandma thought she was prettier than Kostos’s new girlfriend. What did Grandma know? Grandma thought Sophia Loren was the hottest thing going. It didn’t matter what Grandma said; Lena was certainly
not
prettier than Kostos’s new girlfriend!

Lena made herself stop pacing. She forced herself to take a breath, possibly her first in the last ten minutes.

Calm. Calm down.
She needed to quiet her mind.
Shut up!
she screamed at it.

Ahhh. Okay.

Kostos was downstairs. She would walk downstairs. She would say hello. That was what she would do.

Deep breath. Okay. Calm.

Lena stumbled at the top of the stairs and grabbed the railing before she fell down the whole flight. More breaths. She walked into the kitchen.

He was sitting at the table. He looked up at her. He was even more . . . how he was before.

“Hi,” he said. He gave her a small, questioning smile.

Was her entire body shaking or did it just seem that way? Her bare feet were sweating profusely. What if she slipped and fell in a puddle of her own foot sweat!

He looked at her. She looked at him. She imagined a cloud of romance washing over her and embracing her in its grace and flattering light, giving her good ideas for things to say. Any moment now.

Come on! He was a boy, she was a girl. He was a boy with a different girlfriend, but still. Wasn’t fate supposed to take over sometime around now?

She stood. She stared.

Even Effie looked worried on her behalf.

“Sit down,” she ordered Lena.

Lena obeyed. She was safer off her feet.

Effie passed her a glass of water. Kostos already had one.

Lena didn’t dare touch the glass in case her hand shook.

“Kostos is working in New York for a month this summer. Isn’t that amazing?” Effie said.

Lena’s heart went out to her sister. Effie knew how to take care of her sometimes.

Lena nodded, trying to process this information. She didn’t trust her vocal cords with the job of saying anything yet.

“An old school friend of my father’s runs an advertising agency there,” Kostos said. He was answering Effie, but his eyes stayed on Lena. “He offered me this internship months ago. My grandfather’s health is much better, so I thought I’d give it a try.”

There were too many thoughts for Lena to contain in her head. She wished she had a separate head for each of the thoughts. First, there was Kostos’s father. Kostos had never spoken of him before this. He was so forthright and brave about it, it gave Lena an aching feeling.

Then there was the thing about being in New York. Why hadn’t he told her? Had he been planning it before they had broken up? Had any thought of her figured into his plans?

“I’ve always wanted to see Washington,” he went on. “I grew up on
Smithsonian
magazine.” He smiled more to himself than to them. “Grandma thought it would connect me to my American heritage.”

So he hadn’t come to America to see Lena, obviously. That was disappointing. He hadn’t come to Washington to see Lena. But he had come to this house to see her. He’d at least done that, hadn’t he? Or had he stumbled over their doorstep on his way to the subway? Was his girlfriend going to pop out of the pantry or anything?

“I hope it’s okay, just dropping in like this,” he said. “It turns out you live right near the place I’m staying.”

Figures,
Lena thought bitterly.

“I’m sorry if I caught you at a . . . bad time.” He said that to Lena, and his eyes had a mischievous look. Even a sexy look, she would have thought if she hadn’t known that he didn’t care about her anymore.

“Where are you staying?” Effie asked.

“With another family friend. You know how Greeks are—a port in every storm. Do you know the Sirtises in Chevy Chase?”

“Yeah. They’re friends of our parents too,” Effie said.

“They’ve made it their mission to show me everything in D.C. and introduce me to every Greek family in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia.”

Effie nodded. “How long are you here?”

“Just till Sunday,” he said.

Lena wanted to throw a plate at his head. She felt as though she might cry. Why was he acting as if they didn’t even know each other? As if they weren’t even friends? Why hadn’t he even called her to say he was coming? Why had she stopped mattering to him?

Lena felt tears sting her eyes. They had kissed each other. Kostos had told her he loved her. She had never, ever felt about anyone,
anyone
, the way she felt about him.

You broke up with him,
a combination Effie-Carmen voice in her head reminded her.

But that didn’t mean you were allowed to stop loving me,
she felt like saying to him.

Was she so deeply forgettable?

She felt like running up to her room and pulling all his letters from their shoe bag and shoving them in his face.
See?
she’d shout.
I’m not just nobody!

Kostos stood up. “I should get going. I’m due at the National Gallery before it closes.”

Lena realized she hadn’t yet said a word.

“Well, great to see you,” Effie said. She looked plaintively at Lena, as if to say,
Just how big of a loser are you, anyway?

The two girls trailed him to the front door. “Take care,” he said. He was looking at Lena.

She looked at him in pure agony. She felt that her eyes were blinking at him from deep, deep inside her head. They’d spent months apart, longing for each other, wishing fervently for a letter or a phone call or a snapshot, and now he was here, close enough for her to kiss, so heartrendingly handsome, and he was just going to go and leave and never see her again?

He turned. He walked out the door. He headed down the walk. He was really going. He looked back at her once.

She ran after him. She put her hand in his. She let her tears fall; she didn’t care if he saw. “Don’t go,” she said. “Please.”

She didn’t really do that. She ran up to her room and cried.

T
ibby couldn’t face another hour in her room. There had been almost twenty-four unbearable ones since she’d returned from D.C. late the night before. She hated this room. She hated everything she had thought and felt and done inside it. She couldn’t make herself get into her bed. There was no safe place for her to be, least of all her own mind, where her conscience had overthrown the normal government. It ranted at her and harangued her and would
not
shut up no matter how cruelly she threatened it.

In desperation, she got into her car and drove to Washington. She didn’t even know specifically where she was headed until she turned up at the Giant on MacArthur Boulevard.

She found herself at midnight standing in the checkout line with a pathetic-looking fistful of orange carnations. But then her conscience shot that down too. The flowers would die, and anyway, neither of them had cared much about flowers. Then she had an inspiration. There was one thing both of them had loved.

Tibby went to the cereal aisle and found a bright yellow box of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries.