Girls in Pants
The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
By Ann Brashares
Rebound by Sagebrush
Copyright © 2006
Ann Brashares
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781417700219
Chapter One
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 and 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.
Continues...
Excerpted from Girls in Pants
by Ann Brashares
Copyright © 2006 by Ann Brashares.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
