The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

by Ann Brashares

  Eight minutes into the second half, Mooresville’s overworked midfielder took to the sidelines and got subbed by the backup goalie, who was at least forty pounds overweight. Bridget knew it was in the bag at that point.

  Billy threw his arms around her after the win and lifted her off the ground. “All right, Coach!” he shouted. They all swarmed around her happily, shouting and yelling and celebrating.

  “Let’s not get cocky,” she said. Then she realized how much she hated it when coaches said that. “Screw that,” she said, laughing. “Get cocky all you want. We’re gonna flatten Athens at four.”

  Burgess didn’t flatten Athens at four, but they did beat them, securing a berth in the final the next day.

  It turned out that the final pitted them against Tuscumbia, all the way from Muscle Shoals. Bridget woke up early and put on the Pants for another spin. She brought her clipboard down to breakfast and detailed her complex strategy to Grandma, who tried very hard to look interested but kept sneaking peeks at an article in Ladies’ Home Journal.

  Billy appeared at the screen door, white-faced, at nine. “We’re dead,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Corey Parks took off for Corpus Christi with his girlfriend last night.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. She threatened she’d break up with him if he didn’t drive her.”

  Bridget grimaced. “Oh, no.” She shook her head. “I never trusted Corey. Not since he faked the knee injury so he could go to King’s Dominion.”

  “Bee, we were six,” Billy said.

  Bridget didn’t back down. “Well, you know. The more things change . . .”

  At the field half an hour later, with the two sides assembled and two towns present to cheer and harangue, the situation didn’t look any better. Burgess was no deeper a team than Mooresville. Bridget surveyed her bench unhappily. Their one reliable sub had left for Auburn two days earlier. Seth Molina had shin splints and refused to wear his game shirt. Rason Murphy had such bad asthma Bridget worried that if she put him on the field on a sultry day like today, he would up and die. She would do better to suit up Greta and throw her into the game.

  She and Billy paced together, considering their options. There weren’t any options.

  They looked toward their sorry bench. “This is hopeless,” Billy said.

  The whistle blew to start the game. Bridget stood frozen on the sidelines as her team filed onto the field—all ten of them.

  Tuscumbia went up by four and stayed there, possibly out of pity, till the half was called. Most of the fans were booing or departing by that point.

  Bridget had nothing to say to her team at the half. They had the wrong number of players; subtle strategy wasn’t really going to make a dent.

  “This is humiliating,” Rusty opined.

  The team trudged back onto the field. The ref was ready with the whistle. Billy was mouthing something to Bridget.

  “Huh?” she shouted at him, moving closer.

  He mouthed it again. He was waving his hands around like mad.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “Honey Bees!” he blasted at her. “I’m saying ‘Honey Bees.’”

  Finally she got it. He was waving her into the game.

  Bridget laughed. Without thinking she ran onto the field beside him.

  Everybody looked confused as she stood there in her jeans and running shoes in the middle of the field.

  “She’s our sub!” Billy shouted to the ref, Marty Ginn, who also happened to own the Burgess Fine Pharmacy. “Rason has asthma,” Billy added, knowing perfectly well that Marty had spent eighteen years filling prescriptions for Rason’s inhalers.

  Marty nodded. He looked to Tuscumbia’s captain. “All right with you?” he asked.

  Tuscumbia’s captain seemed to find the whole thing entertaining. The game was already a farce, so who cared if there was a girl wearing long pants in the middle of it? He shrugged and nodded, as if to say, What next?

  The whistle started the half.

  Bridget began running slowly up the field, just getting her legs under her. She followed the action around at a distance until she felt the adrenaline building and her eyes and her mind and her feet getting that harmonious feeling that lifted her playing up and up. Then she got down to business. She easily stole the ball from a Tuscumbia forward and began to dribble at speed, a touch and three paces, a touch and three paces.

  Nine months away from competitive soccer hadn’t made Bridget worse, it turned out. Also, she was wearing the Traveling Pants. They were the wrong shape and texture for competitive sports, granted, but they made her happy. And Greta had yanked herself off her duff and was tearing along the sidelines, shouting for Bridget like a maniac. That didn’t hurt.

  Bridget rose and rose until she was up in the clouds. She could afford to be generous. She assisted Rusty. She assisted Gary Lee. She assisted Billy twice. She set up the plays and doled them out like Christmas presents until the game was tied, the shouts of protest from the opposing team grew deafening, and the last minute began ticking away. Then she took the last goal for herself. She’d never said she was Mother Teresa.

  Carma,

  I know you needed these especially, so here they are, as fast as I could get them to you. Please note the grass from the soccer field I left for you in the back pocket. A tuft of the sweet homeland for your enjoyment.

  The Pants worked their magic. I’m so happy, Carma. I’m not going to tell you all about it now or even on the phone, because I want to tell you in person. I’m coming home soon. I found everything I needed here.

  Love,

  Bee

  “Outta bed.”

  Christina squinted at Carmen in irritation. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Mamaaaa.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . .” Carmen tapped a little drumroll on her mom’s bureau. “You are going out tonight.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Carmen, I am not going out with your father and Lydia again.”

  “I know you’re not. Anyway, they’re gone. You’re going out with David.” Ha.

  Christina sat up. Her cheeks were pink at the very mention of his name. She tried to look suspicious and mad. “Since when?”

  “Since I called him and set it up.” Carmen opened her mother’s closet and began surveying the shoe options.

  “You didn’t.”

  “Did so.”

  “Carmen Lucille! This is not your business!”

  “He misses you, Mom. You miss him. It’s so obvious. You’re sad. Just go. Be happy.”

  Christina piled pillows onto her lap. “Maybe it’s not that easy.”

  Carmen pointed to the bathroom. “Maybe it is.”

  Christina hesitated. Carmen could close her eyes and plug her ears, and still she would know how much her mom wanted to go. But Christina was trying to be rational and responsible, and Carmen appreciated that.

  “I’m not telling you to lose your head, Mama. I’m not even telling you to take up where you left off with him. I’m just saying, go out to dinner with the guy who loves you.”

  Her mother swung her feet over the edge. This was working.

  “You never have to go out with him again if you don’t want.” Carmen knew the chances of that were zero, but hey.

  Her mother started toward the shower.

  “Wait.” Carmen rushed back to her room. She took the Traveling Pants from the top of her bureau and shook them out gently. She rushed back to her mother.

  “Here.”

  Christina’s eyes got swimmy. She pressed her lips together. “What?” Christina said in a whisper, even though she knew what it meant.

  “These are for you to wear.”

  “Oh, mi nena.” Christina grabbed Carmen and pressed her close. Carmen realized she could lift her chin and rest it on the top of her mother’s head. That was sad, a little.
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  When her mom pulled away, Carmen felt tears on her neck.

  “I can’t take them. If I’m going to try again, I have to be a grown-up this time.”

  “Okay.” Carmen understood that.

  “But Carmen?”

  “Yeah?”

  Her mother’s mouth wobbled and tipped. “It means the world to me that you offered.”

  Carmen nodded. She picked up her mother’s hand and pressed a kiss onto her knuckles. “Go, Mama. Shower. Get dressed. Hurry!”

  Carmen strode back to her own room. “I’ll get the camera all ready for when David gets here!” she called over her shoulder.

  Carmabelle: Tib. I’ll bring the Pants when I come to the screening. Can’t wait to see you.

  Tibby knew she was a true-blue believer in the Pants, because otherwise she could not have put them on today, considering what had happened the last time she had worn them. For her, the Pants were about putting in bad, lame-o stitches and pulling them out again, judging people and being able to change her mind. She could surprise herself, that was what Bailey had said.

  She touched the embroidered heart as she walked into the auditorium. Her own heart felt as if it were beating just beneath her skin. Her bones no longer felt hard and protective.

  For some reason, when she saw the cluster of people waiting for her in a row of seats at the back of the auditorium, she had the strangest sensation that she had died. The world was over, and all the people she had hurt and disappointed had come back to give her a second chance.

  Her mother and father were there. Brian was there. Lena and Carmen, Mr. and Mrs. Graffman. Even Vanessa. I want to deserve all of you, she thought.

  Her movie came first. It started with Bailey in the window and sunlight pouring all around and Beethoven. The picture switched to Wallman’s and Duncan Howe and to Margaret at the Pavillion movie theater and to Brian at the 7-Eleven. She’d interspersed these segments with bits from the home movies she’d gotten from the Graffmans. Bailey taking her first steps as a baby, Bailey running after a butterfly in her backyard, and—this was a hard part—Bailey as a feisty six-year-old with a baseball cap and no hair underneath. The last segment was the interview. Bailey talking and looking, seeming to take as much from the camera as she gave to it.

  The end was the still picture from the 7-Eleven. The one with her looking over her shoulder at Tibby and laughing. The image dissolved slightly as it hung there, and it turned to black and white. It stayed on the screen as the music played on.

  Brian, sitting next to her, reached out and took her hand. She squeezed his in return. She realized he was whistling along with the music, but so quietly she was probably the only one who could hear it.

  At last the music finished and Bailey’s face flickered off. The darkness felt empty without it.

  Mrs. Graffman leaned her head against her husband’s chest. Tibby’s mom reached for Tibby’s hand on one side and Carmen’s on the other. Lena held her head. All of them cried freely.

  Outside in the bright sunlight, Tibby’s parents hugged her. Her mother told her she was proud. Carmen and Lena squeezed her and praised her again and again. Brian had tears in his eyes. Tibby was surprised when Alex came over. She steeled herself for his comment, though she was well beyond taking it to heart.

  “Well done,” he said. His eyes were uncertain; it came out almost like a question. He studied her as though she were a stranger. Which, in a way, she was. He was flattened against the wall, and she could see all around.

  If you are Greek, you know that it is traditionally considered an insult to the ancient gods to think you know when things can’t get any worse. If you make this mistake, then the gods will prove you wrong.

  One week to the day after Lena received the apocalyptic letter from Kostos, Grandma called from Oia and told Lena’s father that Bapi had had a stroke. He was in the hospital in Fira, and he wasn’t doing well.

  Lena’s father, being a lawyer and an American now, demanded to talk to Bapi’s doctors and shouted a lot and wanted to have Bapi airlifted to the research hospital in Athens. The reply came that Bapi was too fragile to be moved.

  Lena only had time to leave messages for Tibby and Carmen about what had happened and to call Basia’s and quit a week early. She was packing her suitcase in a daze along with the rest of her family when she remembered the Traveling Pants. She was supposed to get them that day! It was midafternoon and they still hadn’t arrived. Who had had them last? They’d been moving around so fast lately, Lena couldn’t remember. The flight to New York was leaving in two hours! In spite of the crises around her, this became the most urgent source of her worry. How could she go to Greece without them?

  As the rest of her family scurried around the house, she waited by the front door, hoping for a glimpse of a delivery truck. She dragged her feet in the last minutes before her departure.

  “Lena, come on!” her mother was screaming at her from the car as she paused on the sidewalk, still hoping the Pants would somehow magically appear in time.

  They didn’t, and she took it as a bad omen.

  Lena and her family stood by on the flight to New York, and the following morning on a direct flight to Athens. On the 747 rumbling eastward over the Atlantic Ocean, Lena spent most of the time looking at the seatback in front of her. But a lot of scenes played out on the blue polyester. Bapi and his wrinkly elbows poking out the window on the night of the festival of the Assumption last August. Bapi eating Cheerios in his white tasseled shoes. Bapi looking long and hard at her paintings, taking them as seriously as anyone ever had. It seemed funny, maybe, to find your soul mate in an eighty-two-year-old Greek man, but that was what had happened to Lena last summer.

  Lena’s father wrote in a notebook. Effie slept against his left shoulder. Lena’s mother sat grimly beside her.

  At one point, between the first movie and the second, they caught each other in a grim look and then proceeded to stare at each other grimly.

  I wish we could help each other, Lena thought. I wish that you trusted me enough to tell me important things and that I trusted you. Then she found herself wishing that her mother could be her soul mate and not Bapi, who was probably dying. Then Lena started to cry. She curled up in her seat with her back to her mother and let her shoulders shake and her breath forget all the usual patterns. She blew her nose loudly into a cocktail napkin. She was crying for herself and Bapi and Kostos and her grandma and her father and the Traveling Pants that hadn’t come in time, and then for herself some more.

  And yet, when the captain ordered the flight attendants to prepare for arrival, and Lena saw the ancient and beautiful terrain of her grandmotherland below, she felt a thrill in the bottom of her stomach. Somewhere inside, her irrepressible, naïve heart was leaping with eagerness to see Kostos again, even under these wretched circumstances.

  Bee,

  I wish there was a better way to find you, ’cause I want to talk to you right away. So badly. I just found out Lena’s bapi had a stroke. They all left for Greece yesterday. After everything she’s been through, I feel so horrible. I want to make sure you know.

  Love,

  Tibby

  Lena had reasonably begun to believe that what you least wanted to happen was certainly the thing that would happen.

  When they pulled up in the rental car after a long climb up the cliffs of Santorini to the village of Oia and saw Grandma standing outside her egg-yolk front door, her belief was confirmed.

  Grandma wore black from head to toe, and the lines on her face all seemed to point straight down. Lena heard a small cry leave her chest. Her father leaped out of the car and hugged his mother. Lena saw Grandma nodding and crying. They all knew what it meant.

  Effie put her arm around Lena’s shoulders. Lena’s tears were on call, ready for duty. She had cried so much in recent days, she actually felt thirsty. Lena’s hair mixed with Effie’s hair as they held each other and cried. Then they all took turns hugging Grandma. When Grandma saw Lena she l
et out a moan and seemed to collapse on her shoulders. “Beautiful Lena,” she said, sobbing into her neck. “Vat has happened to us?”

  The funeral was to take place the following morning. Lena woke up and watched the Caldera at dawn, dark gray and pink. The window of her bedroom, now shared with Effie, brought the memories of last summer so close around her she felt as if she could hold them. She remembered sketching Kostos in charcoal from this very spot.

  With a thrum of anticipation and anxiety at seeing Kostos, Lena took extra pains with her appearance. She wore a beautiful sheer black blouse over a camisole borrowed from Effie. She wore pearls in her earlobes. She blow-dried her hair and wore it down around her shoulders, a rare occurrence. She put on the slightest bit of eyeliner and mascara. She knew that even a little makeup set off her celery-colored eyes dramatically, which was why she almost never wore it.

  Lena always downplayed her looks. She wore simple, uninteresting clothes. She hardly ever wore makeup or jewelry and wore her black hair back in a knot or a sloppy ponytail. From when she was a little girl, her mother had always told Lena her beauty was a gift, but as gifts went, Lena compared it to the Trojan horse.

  Her beauty made her feel self-conscious and exposed. It brought her the kind of attention she hated. The very obviousness of it made her feel cheated. Effie, with her big nose, was allowed to be passionate, quirky, wholehearted, and free. Lena, with her small nose, got to be pretty. Lena spent too much of her life making sure none of the people she trusted cared about how she looked, and avoiding the people who did.

  And yet, today, she was polishing up the gift. Today, her hollowness over Bapi, her aching eagerness for Kostos made her desperate, willing to try any power available to her.

  “Oh, my God,” Effie said upon seeing her descend the stairs. “What have you done with Lena?”

  “Duct tape in the closet,” Lena answered.

  Effie admired Lena in seeming awe for a few minutes. “Kostos is going to eat his poor heart out,” she declared.

  And thus, feeling guilty and small, Lena had her private soul read like a poster by her little sister, Effie.