The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Read online

  “Are you joking?” Tibby barked. “They are beautiful. They look a million times better than those lame-o pants you usually wear.”

  Lena turned to Tibby. “Was that a compliment somewhere in there?”

  “Seriously, you have to have them,” Tibby said. “They’re like . . . transforming.”

  Lena fiddled with the waistband. She was never comfortable talking about the way she looked.

  “You are always beautiful,” Carmen added. “But Tibby’s right . . . you look . . . just . . . different.”

  Lena slid the pants off her hips. “Bee has to try them.”

  “I do?”

  “You do,” Lena confirmed.

  “She’s too tall for them,” Tibby said.

  “Just try,” Lena said.

  “I don’t need any more jeans,” Bridget said. “I have, like, nine pairs.”

  “What, are you scared of them?” Carmen taunted. Stupid dares like that always worked on Bridget.

  Bridget grabbed them from Lena. She took off her dark indigo jeans, kicked them into a pile on the floor, and pulled on the pants. At first she tried to pull the pants way up on her waist, so they would be too short, but as soon as she let go, the pants settled gracefully on her hips.

  “Doo-doo-doo-doo,” Carmen sang, hitting the notes of the Twilight Zone theme.

  Bridget turned around to look at her backside. “What?”

  “They’re not short; they’re perfect,” Lena said.

  Tibby cocked her head, studying Bridget carefully. “You look almost . . . small, Bee. Not your usual Amazon.”

  “The insult parade marches on,” Lena said, laughing.

  Bridget was tall, with broad shoulders and long legs and big hands. It was easy to think she was a big person, but she was surprisingly narrow through her hips and waist.

  “She’s right,” Carmen said. “The pants fit better than your usual ones.”

  Bridget switched her butt in front of the mirror. “These do look good,” she said. “Wow. I think I may love them.”

  “You’ve got a great little butt,” Carmen pointed out.

  Tibby laughed. “That from the queen of butts.” She got a troublemaking look in her eyes. “Hey. You know how we find out if these pants are truly magical?”

  “How?” Carmen asked.

  Tibby jiggled her foot in the air. “You try them on. I know they’re yours and all, but I’m just saying, scientifically speaking, that it is impossible for these pants to fit you too.”

  Carmen chewed the inside of her cheek. “Are you casting aspersions on my butt?”

  “Oh, Carma. You know I envy it. I just don’t think these pants are going to fit over it,” Tibby explained reasonably.

  Bridget and Lena nodded.

  Suddenly Carmen was afraid that the pants that hugged each of her friends’ bodies with loving grace would not fit over her upper thighs. She wasn’t really chubby, but she had inherited her backside directly from the Puerto Rican half of the family. It was very nicely shaped, and most days she felt proud of it, but here with these pants and her three little-assed friends, she didn’t feel like standing out like the big fatso.

  “Nah. I don’t want them,” Carmen said, standing up and getting ready to try to change the subject. Six eyes remained fixed on the pants.

  “Yes,” Bridget said. “You have to.”

  “Please, Carmen?” Lena asked.

  She saw too much anticipation on her friends’ faces to drop it without a fight. “Fine. Don’t expect them to fit or anything. I’m sure they won’t.”

  “Carmen, they’re your pants,” Bridget pointed out.

  “Yeah, smarty, but I never tried them on before.” Carmen said it with enough force to ward off further questions. She pulled off her black flares and pulled on the jeans. They didn’t stop at her thighs. They went right up over her hips without complaint. She fastened them. “So?” She wasn’t ready to venture a look in the mirror yet.

  Nobody said anything.

  “What?” Carmen felt cursed. “What? Are they that bad?” She found the courage to meet Tibby’s eye. “What?”

  “I . . . I just . . .” Tibby trailed off.

  “Oh my,” Lena said quietly.

  Carmen winced and looked away. “I’ll just take them off, and we’ll pretend this never happened,” she said, her cheeks flushing.

  Bridget found words. “Carmen, that’s not it at all! Look at yourself! You are a thing of beauty. You are a vision. You are a supermodel.”

  Carmen put her hand on her hip and made a sour face. “That I doubt.”

  “Seriously. Look at yourself,” Lena ordered. “These are magic pants.”

  Carmen looked at herself. First from far away, then from up close. From the front and then the back.

  The CD they’d been listening to ended, but nobody seemed to notice. The phone was ringing distantly, but nobody got up to get it. The normally busy street was silent.

  Carmen finally let out her breath. “These are magic pants.”

  It was Bridget’s idea. The discovery of magical pants on such a day, right before their first summer apart, warranted a trip to Gilda’s. Tibby got the food and picked up her movie camera, Carmen brought the bad eighties dance music, Lena supplied the atmospherics. Bridget brought the large-sized bobby pins and the Pants. They handled the parents issue in their usual way—Carmen told her mom she’d be at Lena’s, Lena told her mom she’d be at Tibby’s, Tibby told her mom she’d be at Bridget’s, and Bridget asked her brother to tell her dad she’d be at Carmen’s. Bridget spent so much time at her friends’ houses, it was doubtful that Perry would pass on the message or that her father would think to be concerned, but it was part of the tradition.

  They all met up again at the entrance on Wisconsin Avenue at nine forty-five. The place was dark and closed of course, which was where the bobby pins came in. They all watched breathlessly as Bridget expertly jimmied the lock. They’d done this at least once a year for the last three years, but the breaking-in part never got less exciting. Luckily, Gilda’s security remained as lame as ever. What was there to steal anyway? Smelly blue mats? A box of rusty, mismatched free weights?

  The lock clicked, the doorknob turned, and they all raced up the stairs to the second floor, purposefully revving up a little hysteria in the black stairwell. Lena set up the blankets and the candles. Tibby laid out the food—raw cookie dough from a refrigerated tube, strawberry Pop-Tarts with pink icing, the hard, deformed kind of cheese puffs, sour Gummi Worms, and a few bottles of Odwalla. Carmen set up the music, starting with an awful and ancient Paula Abdul tune, while Bridget leaped around in front of the mirrored wall.

  “I think this was your mom’s spot, Lenny,” Bridget called, bouncing again and again on an indented floorboard.

  “Funny,” Lena said. There was a famous picture of the four moms in their eighties aerobics gear with their stomachs sticking out, and Lena’s mom was by far the hugest. Lena weighed more at birth than Bridget and her brother, Perry, put together.

  “Ready?” Carmen turned the music down and placed the Pants ceremonially in the middle of the blanket.

  Lena was still lighting candles.

  “Bee, come on,” Carmen shouted at Bridget, who was laughing at herself in front of the mirror.

  When they were all gathered and Bridget stopped aerobicizing, Carmen began. “On the last night before the diaspora”—she paused briefly so everyone could admire her use of the word—”we discovered some magic.” She felt an itchy tingle in the arches of her feet. “Magic comes in many forms. Tonight it comes to us in a pair of pants. I hereby propose that these Pants belong to us equally, that they will travel to all the places we’re going, and they will keep us together when we are apart.”

  “Let’s take the vow of the Traveling Pants.” Bridget excitedly grabbed Lena’s and Tibby’s hands. Bridget and Carmen were always the ones who staged friendship ceremonies unabashedly. Tibby and Lena were the ones who acted like there was a cam
era crew in the room.

  “Tonight we are Sisters of the Pants,” Bridget intoned when they’d formed a ring. “Tonight we give the Pants the love of our Sisterhood so we can take that love wherever we go.”

  The candles flickered in the big, high-ceilinged room.

  Lena looked solemn. Tibby’s face showed that she was struggling, but Carmen couldn’t tell whether it was against laughter or tears.

  “We should write down the rules,” Lena suggested. “So we know what to do with them—you know, like who gets them when.”

  They all agreed, so Bridget stole a piece of Gilda’s stationery and a pen from the little office.

  They ate snacks, and Tibby filmed for posterity, while they constructed the rules. The Manifesto, as Carmen called it. “I feel like a founding father,” she said importantly. Lena was nominated to write it, because she had the best handwriting.

  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.

  One 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 d
arts 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.