Second Summer of the Sisterhood Read online

  Although Tibby was the least physical of the group, she wished Bee were sitting next to her. And yet she knew intuitively that Bee was sitting on her bureau for a reason. She didn’t want to be sitting on a low, soft place within easy range of comfort. She also knew that Bee had chosen Tibby for this conversation because as much as Tibby loved her, she would listen without overwhelming her.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I think about the person I used to be, and she seems so far away. She walked fast, I walk slow. She stayed up late and got up early, I sleep. I feel like if she gets any farther away, I won’t be connected to her at all anymore.”

  Tibby’s desire to go closer to Bee was so strong she had to clamp her elbows against her legs to make them stay put. Bee’s arms were wrapped around her body, containing her.

  “Do you want … to stay connected to her?” Tibby’s words were slow and quiet, seeming to make their way to Bridget one at a time.

  Bee had made every effort to change herself this year. Tibby quietly suspected she knew the reason. Bee couldn’t outrun her troubles, so she’d entered her own version of the witness protection program. Tibby knew how it was to lose someone you loved. And she also knew how tempting it was to cast off that sad, ruined part of yourself like a sweater you’d outgrown.

  “Do I want to?” Bee thought about the words carefully. Some people (like Tibby, for instance) tended to listen in a muffled, sheltered way. Bee was the opposite.

  “I think I do.” Tears flooded Bee’s eyes, gluing her yellow eyelashes into triangles. Tibby felt tears fill her own eyes.

  “You need to find her then,” Tibby said, and her throat ached.

  Bee stretched out one arm and left it out there, her palm turned up to the ceiling. Tibby got up without thinking and took the hand. Bee laid her head on Tibby’s shoulder. Tibby felt the softness of Bee’s hair and the moisture from her eyes against her collarbone.

  “That’s why I’m going,” Bee said.

  Later, when Tibby pulled away from Bee, she wondered about herself. She wasn’t as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she’d slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts.

  Late that afternoon, Carmen lay in her bed feeling happy. She’d just returned from Tibby’s, where Bee and Lena had turned up too. They would gather again tonight for the second annual Pants initiation at Gilda’s. Carmen had thought she’d be feeling miserable right around now, feeling sorry that she wasn’t going anywhere. But she often found good-byes easier than expected. She took care of most of the dreading beforehand. And besides, seeing Bee had made her happy. Bee had a plan, and Carmen was glad. Carmen would miss her like crazy, but something inside Bee had shifted for the good.

  The summer didn’t look so bad from where she lay. They had drawn straws to determine the route of the Pants, and Carmen would get them first. She had the Pants and a date tomorrow night with one of the best-looking guys in her class. That was fate, wasn’t it? That had to mean something.

  All winter she’d tried to imagine what the Pants would bring her this summer, and now, with the convergence of her date and the Pants, she saw the big clue she’d been hoping for. This summer, they’d be the Love Pants.

  Carmen sat up when she heard a familiar trill from her computer. It was an instant message from Bee.

  Beezy3: Packing. Do you have my purple sock with the heart on the ankle?

  Carmabelle: No. Like I’d wear your socks.

  Carmen looked from her computer screen down to her feet. To her dismay, her socks were two faintly different shades of purple. She rotated her foot to get a view of her anklebone.

  Carmabelle: Ahem. Might possibly have sock.

  The door of Gilda’s Aerobics Studio in upper Bethesda had a lock that was laughably easy to pick. But when they got to the top of the stairs, the smell of old sweat was so pervasive Carmen wondered why anyone besides them would choose to be there, never mind take the trouble to break in.

  They got right to work, with a feeling of grandness in the air. It was already late. Bee was boarding a bus to Alabama at five thirty in the morning, and Tibby was leaving for Williamston College in the afternoon.

  As a matter of tradition, Lena set up the candles and Tibby laid out the Gummi Worms, the deformed cheese puffs, the bottles of juice. Bridget set up the music, but she didn’t turn it on.

  All eyes were on the bag in Carmen’s arms. They had each inscribed the Pants and ceremoniously put them away in September after Carmen’s birthday, the last of the four. None of them had seen them since.

  There was a hush as Carmen opened the bag. She drew out the moment, proud that she was the one who had found the Pants—though, granted, she was also the one who had almost thrown them away. She let the bag fall to the ground as the Pants seemed to flutter open in slow motion, swirling the air with their memories.

  In silent awe, Carmen laid the Pants on the floor, and the girls arranged themselves in a circle around them. Lena unfolded the Manifesto and laid it on top of them. They all knew the rules. They didn’t need to look at them now. They had already diagrammed the route of the Pants, and the logistics were a lot easier this summer.

  They held hands.

  “This is it,” Carmen breathed. The moment was all around them. She remembered the vow from last summer. They all remembered it. They said it together:

  “To honor the Pants and the Sisterhood

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

  Together and apart.”

  It was midnight, the end of together … and in another way, the beginning of it.

  There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

  —Nelson Mandela

  Though the town of Burgess, Alabama, population 12,042, lived large in Bridget’s mind, it didn’t warrant a lot of fanfare as a stop on the Triangle bus line. In fact, Bridget almost slept straight through it. Luckily, when the driver threw the parking brake, it jolted her awake, and she groggily hopped around, grabbing her bags. She raced off the bus so fast she forgot her rain jacket bunched up under the seat.

  She walked along the sidewalk to the town’s center, noticing the fine, straight lines between the paving stones. Most sidewalk cracks you saw were fake joints pressed into wet cement, but these were real. Bee stepped on each crack forcefully, defiantly, feeling the sun beating down on her back and a burst of energy in her chest. Finally, she was doing something. She didn’t know what, exactly, but action always suited her better than waiting around.

  In a quick survey of downtown, she noticed two churches, a hardware store, a pharmacy, a Laundromat, an ice cream place with tables outside, and what looked like a courthouse. Farther down Market Street she saw a quaint-looking bed-and-breakfast, which she knew would be too expensive, and around the corner from that, on Royal Street, a less quaint Victorian with a weather-beaten red sign that said ROYAL STREET ARMS, and under that, ROOMS FOR RENT.

  She walked up the steps and rang the bell. A slight woman in her fifties or so answered the door.

  Bridget pointed up to the sign. “I noticed your sign. I’m looking for a room to rent for a couple of weeks.” Or a couple of months.

  The woman nodded, studying Bridget carefully. It was her house, Bridget could see. It was big and had probably even been grand once, but it, and she, had obviously fallen on hard times.

  They introduced themselves, and the woman, Mrs. Bennett, showed Bridget a bedroom on the second floor at the front of the house. It was simply furnished but big and sunny. It had a ceiling fan and a hot plate and a minifridge.

  “This one shares a bathroom and costs seventy-five dollars a week,” she explained.

  “I’ll take it,” Bridget said. She would have to finesse the issue of ID by putting down a giant deposit, but she had brought $450 in cash, and hopefully she’d find a job soon.

  Mrs. Bennett ticked off the house rules, and Bridget paid up.

&
nbsp; She wondered at the speed and simplicity of the whole transaction as she moved her bags into the bedroom. She’d been in Burgess less than an hour, and she was set up. Itinerant life was easier than it was cracked up to be.

  There wasn’t a phone in the room, though there was a pay phone in the hallway. Bridget used it to call home. She left a message for her dad and Perry that she’d arrived safely.

  She pulled the cord to start up the ceiling fan and lay down on the bed. She found herself banging her heel against the bottom of the white metal frame, thinking about the moment when she would introduce herself to Greta. She had tried to picture that moment so many times, and she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She didn’t like it. The thing she wanted from Greta, whatever unnameable thing it was, would be crushed in the first dutiful embrace. They were strangers, yet they had so much heaviness between them. Brave though Bee was, she was scared of this woman and all the things she knew. Bee wanted to know them and she didn’t want to know them. She wanted to find them out in her own way.

  Bee felt an old familiar buzz of energy in her limbs.

  She got out of bed. She looked in the mirror. You could sometimes see a new thing in a new mirror.

  At first look she saw the usual devastation. It had started when she’d quit soccer. No, really it had started before that, at the end of last summer. She’d fallen for an older guy. She’d fallen harder for him and gone further with him than she’d meant to. The trick Bee always had was to keep moving, moving at a pace so fast it was thrilling and even reckless. But after last summer she’d paused for a bit, and the painful things—old, supposed-to-be-forgotten things—had caught up with her. By November she’d quit soccer, just as the college scouts were swarming around her. At Christmastime the world had celebrated birth and Bee had remembered a death. She’d hidden her hair under a coat of Dark Ash Brown #3. By February she’d been sleeping late and watching TV, resolutely turning bags of donuts and boxes of cereal into personal gravity. The only thing that had kept her in the world was the constant attention of Carmen, Lena, and Tibby. They would not let her be, and she loved them for it.

  But as she looked longer in this mirror, Bridget saw something different. She saw protection. She had a blanket of fat on her body. She had a coat of pigment on her hair. She had the cover of a lie if she wanted it.

  She didn’t look like Bee Vreeland. Who said she had to be her?

  “This is like a preview, isn’t it?” Tibby’s mom said excitedly as her dad pulled the silver minivan into a parking space behind Lowbridge Hall.

  It probably wouldn’t have bothered Tibby so much if it had been the first time her mother had said it.

  Just how excited was she to be shipping Tibby off to college? Did she have to be so obvious about it? Now Alice could enjoy her photogenic young family without the perplexing teenager skulking in the background.

  It was supposed to be that the kid was happy about leaving home and the parents were sad. Instead, Tibby was feeling sad. Her mother’s happiness was forcing a role reversal. We could both be happy, Tibby thought briefly, but the contrarian in her shot it down.

  Carefully Tibby zipped her new iBook back into its case. It was an early birthday present from her parents, another example of being bought off. At first Tibby had felt vaguely guilty about all the stuff: the TV, the separate phone line, the iMac, the digital movie camera. Then she’d figured she could just be ignored, or she could be ignored and have a lot of fancy electronics.

  The Williamston campus was a classic scene of college life. There were the brick paths, the lush grass, the ivy-covered dormitory. The only things that weren’t convincing were the wide-eyed students milling around the lobby. They were like extras turned loose on a very realistic movie set. They were still in high school, and they looked as fraudulent as Tibby felt. It reminded her of the times Nicky marched around the house wearing Tibby’s backpack.

  A paper posted by the elevator listed the room assignments. Tibby scanned it anxiously. A single. Please let it be a single. There she was. Room 6B4. There appeared to be nobody else in room 6B4. She poked the elevator button. Things were looking up.

  “A little over a year from now, we’re going to be doing this all over again. Can you believe it?” her mother asked.

  “Amazing,” said her father.

  “Yeah,” said Tibby, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. Why were they so sure she’d be going to college? What would they say if she stayed home and worked at Wallman’s? Duncan Howe had once told her she could make assistant manager in a few years if she dropped the attitude and let the hole in her nose close up.

  The door of room 6B4 was open, and a key was dangling from a tack on the bulletin board. There was a bunch of papers on the desk welcoming her and so on. Besides that there were a single bed, a nightstand, and a very beat-up wooden bureau. The floor was brown linoleum with vomity white flecks.

  “This is … wonderful,” her mother declared. “Look at the view.”

  In her five years as an agent, Tibby’s mother had mastered the art of real estate spin: When there is absolutely nothing with any charm in a room, point out the window.

  Her father put her bags down on the bed.

  “Hello?”

  All three of them turned.

  “Are you Tabitha?”

  “Tibby,” Tibby corrected. The girl had on a Williamston sweatshirt. Her brown hair frizzed out of her ponytail all around her hairline. She had pale skin and a lot of moles. Tibby counted the moles.

  “I’m Vanessa,” the girl said, giving a big, arcing wave to all of them. “I’m the RA. That stands for resident assistant. I’m here to help out in any way. Your key is there.” She pointed. “Your baseball cap is there.” Tibby winced at the Williamston cap balanced jauntily on the corner of the nightstand. “Orientation materials are on the desk, and instructions for the phone system are on the nightstand. Just let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  She said all this in the rushed, half-memorized manner of a waiter with a lot of specials.

  “Thank you, Vanessa,” her father said. After he’d passed his fortieth birthday, he’d taken to repeating everyone’s name a lot.

  “Terrific,” her mother said. At exactly that moment, her mother’s cell phone went off. Instead of ringing, it played Mozart’s Minuet in G. Tibby felt embarrassed every time she heard it. It didn’t help that it was the last piece of music Tibby had struggled to play before her piano teacher had given up on her completely when she was ten.

  “Oh, no,” her mother said, after listening for a moment. She groaned and glanced at her watch. “In the pool …? Oh, my … Okay.” She looked at Tibby’s dad. “Nicky got sick in swimming class.”

  “Poor kid,” her dad said.

  Vanessa looked trapped and uncomfortable. Nicky getting sick in swimming probably wasn’t covered in her handbook.

  “Thanks,” Tibby said to Vanessa, turning away from her parents’ discussion. “I’ll find you if I, you know, need to ask anything.”

  Vanessa nodded. “Okay. Room six-C-one.” She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. “Right down the hall.”

  “Great,” Tibby said, watching her flee. When she turned back to her parents, they were both facing her. They had that look.

  “Honey, Loretta has to take Katherine to music class at one. I’ve got to dash back to …” Tibby’s mother drifted for a moment. “I’m trying to think…. What did he eat for breakfast …?” Then she remembered she was right in the middle of disappointing Tibby. “Anyway, we’re going to have to postpone our lunch plan. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s fine.” Tibby hadn’t even wanted to have lunch with them until they’d canceled it.

  Her dad turned to her and hugged her. Tibby hugged him back. It was still her instinct. He kissed the top of her head. “Have a great time, sweetie. We’ll miss you.”

  “Okay,” she said, not believing him.

  Alice stopped in the doorway and turned around. “Tibby,” she said, opening
her arms as if she hadn’t been so distracted she’d almost forgotten to say good-bye.

  Tibby went over and hugged her, too. For an instant she allowed herself to sag into her mother’s body. “See ya,” Tibby said, straightening up.

  “I’ll call tonight to make sure you’re settled in,” Alice promised.

  “You don’t need to. I’ll be fine,” Tibby said heavily. She said it for her own protection. If her mom forgot to call, which could happen, both of them would have that as an excuse.

  “I love you,” her mother said on the way out.

  Yeah, yeah, Tibby felt like saying. Parents could feel good by telling their kid that a few times a week. It was nearly effortless and gave them so many parent points.

  She clutched the instruction booklet for the campus telephone system. She bent over it, studying it carefully so she wouldn’t feel sad.

  By page eleven, paragraph three, Tibby had discovered that not only did she have her own voice mailbox and her own password, but she also had five messages in her box. She played them, and smiled as she heard the voices. One was from Brian. One was from Lena. Two were from Carmen. Tibby let out a little laugh. Even Bee had left a scratchy message from a pay phone on the road.

  Fine, blood was thicker than water. But friendship, it struck Tibby, was thicker than both.

  “Honey, I just want to stop in here for a minute.”

  Lena’s mom had recruited her to sit in the car while she picked up a prescription so she didn’t have to park. But inevitably, this led to further errands. This was how her mom secured quality mother-daughter time—through stealth and trickery. Lena would have out-and-out refused, but she didn’t have a job yet, which undercut her sense of self-worth.

  Lena gathered her heavy hair away from her sweaty neck. It was too hot for sunroofs. It was too hot for parking lots. It was too hot for mothers.

  “Fine.” “Here” was Basia’s, a boutique filled with women like her mother. “Do you want me to wait so you don’t have to park?” Lena asked even as her mother swooped into a-wide-open spot smack in front of the store.