Girls in Pants Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

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

  Prologue

  Begin Reading

  Epilogue

  A Readers Guide

  Questions for Discussion

  A Conversation with Ann Brashares

  Related Titles

  Readers Circle Books

  Preview for Forever in Blue

  Also by Ann Brashares

  Copyright

  For Jacob,

  my own worthy boy

  Acknowledgments

  First and always, I would like to acknowledge and thank Jodi Anderson. I also thank, with great warmth, my editorial sisterhood, Wendy Loggia and Beverly Horowitz, and gratefully acknowledge the entire Random House Children’s Books group, with special thanks to Marci Senders, Kathy Dunn, Judith Haut, Daisy Kline, and Chip Gibson. I wish to thank Leslie Morgenstein, who’s been in it from the beginning. And I thank my friend and agent, the incomparable Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.

  I lovingly acknowledge my parents, Jane Easton Brashares and William Brashares, and my brothers, Beau, Justin, and Ben Brashares. And last and most, my small tribe, Sam, Nathaniel, and Susannah.

  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 “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.

  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.

  In summer, the song sings itself.

  —William Carlos Williams

  PROLOGUE

  If you are reading this, you may know about us. Or about our Pants, anyway. If you do, you can skip ahead a few pages. If you don’t, hang here with me for a minute. I’ll try to make it painless.

  You may say, I don’t want to read a book about pants. And I can understand how you feel. (In England, when they say pants, they mean underwear. Did you know that?) But trust me, these are epic Pants. These Pants have the stunning power to transform four ordinary teenage girls into raving beauties living lives of astonishing adventure, not to mention causing delicious young men to fall constantly at their feet.

  Okay, I exaggerate. They don’t actually do that. But they do hold us together when we’re apart. They make us feel secure and loved. They walk us to places we wouldn’t otherwise dare to go. They help us know which boys are worthy and which ones are not. They make us better people and better friends. All this, I swear, is true.

  And they look good along the way.

  Who are we? We are we. We have always been we. Sometimes we are us. (Grammatically, it’s just a fact.) It’s all thanks to Gilda’s gym in Bethesda, Maryland, for offering a prenatal aerobics class roughly eighteen years ago. My mom, Carmen’s mom, Lena’s mom, and Bee’s mom bounded and sweated through a long, pregnant summer and then they each gave birth to a baby girl (plus a baby boy, in Bee’s mom’s case) in September. As far as I can tell, in those first few years our mothers raised us more like a litter of puppies than as actual individual children. It was later that our mothers started to grow apart.

  How can I describe the four of us? Let’s use the metaphor of cars.

  Carmen would be a torqued-up cherry red gas-guzzler with a V-8 engine and four-wheel drive. She can make a mess of things, but she’s a lot of fun, she sticks to the road, and she’s got mad acceleration.

  Lena would get good gas mileage. Like one of those hybrid cars. She would be easy on the environment and, of course, easy on the eyes. She would have state-of-the-art GPS, but it would be wrong sometimes. She would have air bags.

  Bee would have no air bags. She might not have bumpers. She might not even have brakes. She would go a million miles an hour. She would be an ocean blue Ferrari minus the brakes.

  And I, Tibby, would be a…bike. No, just kidding. (I am old enough to drive, damn it!) Hmmm. What would I be? I would be a muscular Plymouth Duster, dark green, with a picky transmission. Okay, maybe that’s just what I’d want to be. But I’m the one writing this, so I get to decide.

  The Pants first came to us at the perfect moment. That is, when we were splitting up for the first time. It was two summers ago when they first worked their magic, and last summer when they shook up our lives once again. You see, we don’t wear the Pants year-round. We let them rest during the year, so they are extra powerful when summer comes. (There was the time this winter when Carmen wore them to her mom’s wedding, but that was a special case.)

  We thought it was a big deal two years ago, our first summer apart. Now we’re facing our last summer together. Tomorrow we graduate from high school. In September we go to college. And it’s not like one of those TV shows where all of us magically turn up at the same college. We are going to four different schools in three different cities (but all within four hours of one another—that was our one rule).

  Bee is the sloppiest student of us four and she got into every school she applied to. (Can you say all-American?) She chose Brown. Lena decided, against her parents’ advice, to go to art school at the Rhode Island School of Design, Carmen is going to Williams just as she always dreamed, and I am starting film school at NYU.

  As life changes go, it’s really, really big. If you’re my dad, you say, “Hey. You’ll see each other at Thanksgiving.” But if you’re me, you realize that life as we’ve known it is over. Our shared childhood is ending. Maybe we’ll never live at home again. Maybe we’ll never all live in the same place again. We’re headed off to start our real lives. To me that is awe-inspiring, but it is also the single scariest thought in the world.

  Tomorrow night at Gilda’s we’ll launch the Pants on their third summer voyage. Tomorrow begins the time of our lives. It’s when we’ll need our Pants the most.

  Afterwards, the universe will explode for your pleasure.

  —Douglas Adams

  “Okay, Bee with Greta and Valia and Lena,” Carmen ordered, shepherding a wandering grandmother with her hand. Bee and Lena intertwined their legs, trying to tip each other over, as Carmen clicked her digital camera.

  “Okay, um. Effie and…um, Perry. And Katherine and Nicky. With Tibby and Lena and Bee.”

  Lena cast her a look. Lena hated pictures. “Are you getting paid or something?” she asked grumpily.

  Carmen pushed her hair off her sweaty neck. The shiny black gown permitted no flow of air. She shook off the mortarboard (who ever thought of that name?) and pressed it under her arm. “Squeeze together, would you? I’m losing Perry.” Tibby’s three-year-old sister, Katherine, bleated angrily as her older brother, Nicky, stomped on her foot.

  It wasn’t Carmen’s fault her friends had large families. But it was graduation, for God’s sake. This was a big day. She wasn’
t going to miss anybody. She didn’t have any official brothers or sisters. She had to make the most of her unofficial ones.

  “There is no shade,” Valia, Lena’s grandmother, noted bitterly.

  It was a football field. Carmen briefly imagined the trouble with an elm or oak planted at the fifty yard line. The thought of this made her turn toward the raucous bunch of graduating football players, their families and admirers. It was one of the many clumps and cliques spread out over the hot field—a last stand for social order.

  Carmen’s grandma, Carmen senior (Seniora, as Tibby called her), cast searing looks at Albert, Carmen’s father, as though blaming him for the merciless heat. Carmen could practically read her grandmother’s mind: If Albert could leave Christina, Carmen’s mother, what couldn’t that man be capable of?

  “Now’s the big one, okay, everybody?” It had been a long morning. Carmen knew she was wearing everyone thin. She was irritating herself at this point. But who else looked out for posterity? Huh? “Last one, I swear.”

  She arranged the dads and full-grown boys in the back. Even Lena’s dad—not because he was tall (Bee had a good three inches on him) but because Carmen was a generally thoughtful person, if she did think so herself.

  Grandmothers and mothers took the next row. Valia, Carmen senior, Tibby’s ancient great-grandma Felicia, who didn’t know where she was, Greta nervously patting her perm. Then there was Ari in her handsome beige suit, Christina constantly looking over her shoulder at her new husband, David, Tibby’s mom with the lipstick on her teeth. And there was Albert’s wife, Lydia, looking eager but also anxious that she might be taking up an extra square inch of space.

  Lastly, Carmen ordered the remaining siblings into place. Effie pulled a dire face about having to kneel on a level with Nicky and Katherine. Tibby coaxed Brian from his spot on the sidelines and arranged him in the back row.

  And now it was the Septembers’ turn. Sitting in the front, they clutched each other in a mass of hot black polyester, leaving a space in the middle for Carmen. “Okay! Great!” Carmen shouted at them all in encouragement. “Just hold on one second.”

  Carmen nearly wrestled Ms. Collings from the dais. Ms. Collings was the teacher who’d sent Carmen out to the hallway the greatest number of times, but she was also the teacher who loved her best.

  “We’re all set,” Carmen said. “Here.” She demonstrated to Ms. Collings the camera placement she wanted. For a moment Carmen studied the viewfinder. She saw them all, encompassed in the little frame—her beloved friends, her mom, stepmom, stepdad, actual dad, grandma. Her friends’ moms, dads, families who felt as close as if they were her own. This was her whole life, right here. Her tribe. Everything that mattered.

  And this moment. This was it, somehow. All of them celebrating a day and an accomplishment that belonged to the four of them equally. This was the culmination of a shared life.

  Carmen threw herself into her pile of friends. She screamed, out of pure emotion, which got them all screaming. She felt the heave of flesh as every layer of their group seemed to sink into the whole more fully—arms wrapped around shoulders and waists, cheeks pressed together, wrinkly and smooth. Then Carmen burst into tears, knowing that in the picture her eyes would look very puffy indeed.

  Granted, Tibby was in a mood. All she could see was change. All anybody talked about was change. She didn’t like Bee’s wearing heels for the second day in a row. She felt peevish about Lena’s getting three inches trimmed off her hair. Couldn’t everybody just leave everything alone for a few minutes?

  Tibby was a slow adjuster. In preschool, her teachers had said she had trouble with transitions. Tibby preferred looking backward for information rather than forward. As far as she was concerned, she’d take a nursery school report card over a fortune-teller any day of the week. It was the cheapest and best self-analysis around.

  Tibby saw Gilda’s through these same eyes. It was changing. Its glory days of the late nineteen eighties were far behind it. It was showing its age. The once-shiny wood floor was scratched and dull. One of the mirror panels was cracked. The mats looked as old as Tibby, and they’d been cleaned much less. Gilda’s was trying to get with the times, offering kickboxing and yoga, according to the big chalkboard, but it didn’t look to Tibby like that was helping much. What if it went out of business? What a horrible thought. Maybe Tibby should buy a subscription of classes here? No, that would be weird, wouldn’t it?

  “Tibby, you ready?” Lena was looking at her with concerned eyebrows.

  “What if Gilda’s closes?” Tibby opened her mouth, and that was what came out.

  Carmen, holding the Traveling Pants, Lena, lighting the candles, Bee, fussing with the dimmer switches near the door, all turned to her.

  “Look at this place.” Tibby gestured around. “I mean, who comes here?”

  Lena was puzzled. “I don’t know. Somebody. Women. Yoga people.”

  “Yoga people?” Carmen asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lena said again, laughing.

  Tibby was the one most capable of emotional detachment, but tonight it all lay right on the surface. Her irrational thoughts about Gilda’s made her feel desperate, like its demise could swallow up their whole existence—like a change in the present could wipe out the past. The past felt fragile to her. But the past was set, right? It couldn’t be changed. Why did she feel such a need to protect it?

  “I think it’s Pants time,” Carmen said. The snacks were out. The candles were lit. The egregiously bad dance music played.

  Tibby wasn’t sure she wanted it to be Pants time yet. She was having enough trouble maintaining control. She was scared of them noticing what all this meant.

  Too late. Out of Carmen’s arms came the artifacts of their ritual. The Pants, slowly unfolding from their winter compression, seeming to gain strength as they mixed with the special air of Gilda’s. Carmen laid them on the ground, and on top of them the manifesto, written on that first night two years before, describing the rules of wearing them. Silently they formed their circle, studying the inscriptions and embroidery that chronicled their summer lives.

  “Tonight we say good-bye to high school, and bye to Bee for a while,” Carmen said in her ceremonial voice. “We say hello to summer, and hello to the Traveling Pants.”

  Her voice grew less ceremonial. “Tonight we are not worrying about good-bye to each other. We’re saving that for the beach at the end of the summer. That’s the deal, right?”

  Tibby felt like kissing Carmen. Brave as she was, even Carmen was daunted by the implications of looking ahead. “That’s the deal,” Tibby agreed heartily.

  The last weekend of the summer had already become sacred in their minds. Sacred and feared. The Morgans owned a house right on the beach in Rehoboth. They had offered it to Carmen for that final weekend, in part, Carmen suspected, because they had gotten an au pair from Denmark and felt guilty about not hiring Carmen to babysit this summer as she had done the summer before.

  The four of them had promised each other in the spring that it would be their weekend. The four of them and nobody else. They all depended upon it. The future was unfurling fast, but whatever happened this summer, that weekend stood between them and the great unknown.

  They all looked ahead to college in different ways, Tibby knew. They all had different amounts to lose. Bee, in her lonely house, had nothing. Carmen did; she dreaded saying good-bye to her mother. Tibby feared leaving the familiarity of her chaos. Lena flipped and flopped—one day she was afraid to cut ties, and the next she was dying to get away.

  The thing they feared equally and powerfully was saying good-bye to one another.

  After drawing for the Pants (Tibby won), reviewing the rules (unnecessary, but still part of tradition), and taking a brief hiatus to chew down some Gummi Worms, it was at last time for the vow. Like they had the summer before, they said it together.

  “To honor the Pants and the Sisterhood

  And this moment and this summer a
nd the rest of our lives

  Together and apart.”

  Only this time, Tibby felt the tears fall when they said “the rest of our lives.” Because in the past that had always seemed like a distant road, and tonight, she knew in her heart, they were already on it.

  Somebody already broke my heart.

  —Sade

  That night Tibby had a dream about taxidermy. In it, her crazy great-grandma Felicia had had the Traveling Pants stuffed as her graduation gift. “It’s just what you wanted!” Felicia shouted at her.

  The stuffing job looked totally professional. The Pants were mounted on a polished marble pedestal and inhabited by fake legs to look as if they were jauntily midstep. As animated as they looked, you had to notice that there was no body or head or even any feet. They were connected to the marble base by a brass pipe sticking out of one pant leg.

  “But they can’t go anywhere,” Tibby pointed out timidly.

  “That’s the point!” Felicia thundered. “It’s just what you wanted!”

  “I did?” Tibby asked, confused and guilty for having maybe wanted it. She found herself wondering if they were too heavy to be circulated among their various dorm rooms.

  Now we really won’t have to worry about washing them, she consoled herself in her dream-reality.

  When Tibby awoke, Katherine was at her side. Katherine’s head as she stood there loomed one inch from Tibby’s as she lay down. “Brian’s visiting.” Katherine loved trying out words. She was happy with herself that she’d said visiting as opposed to just here.

  Tibby groggily sat up. “What time is it?”

  Katherine moved herself in front of Tibby’s clock radio and studied it hopefully.