The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

by Ann Brashares

  “Mrs. Graffman, hi,” Tibby said, popping up in Mrs. Graffman’s face. “I’m Bailey’s friend.” Vaguely she remembered her weeks of resistance to letting Bailey call them friends.

  Mrs. Graffman nodded and smiled briefly. “Of course I know who you are.”

  “Is, uh, everything okay?” Tibby asked. She realized her legs were shaking. God, this place was way over-air-conditioned. They’d make you sick here if you weren’t already. “Is she just having a checkup or something?” Tibby was walking right alongside Bailey’s mother, though she hadn’t really been invited to. Who was the stalker now?

  Bailey’s mom stopped short, and Tibby just about ran past her. “Do you want to sit down with me for a second?” Mrs. Graffman asked.

  “Sure. Okay.” Tibby studied the woman’s face. Her eyes were red and tired. Her mouth was a little like Bailey’s.

  Mrs. Graffman led Tibby over to a couple of chairs in a quiet corner. She sat down. There was no chair across from Mrs. Graffman, so Tibby sat right next to her and leaned far forward.

  “Tibby, I don’t know how much you know about what Bailey’s been through. I know she doesn’t talk about it.”

  Tibby nodded numbly. “She doesn’t talk about it.”

  “You know she has leukemia. Cancer of the blood.”

  Tibby nodded again. That seemed like such a bleak way of putting it. “It’s pretty treatable, though, right? Don’t kids get better from that?”

  Mrs. Graffman’s head seemed to loll a bit to the side, like it was getting too heavy to hold up. “Bailey was diagnosed when she was seven. She’s had eight rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant last year. Bailey has spent most of her life in a treatment center in Houston, Texas.” She let out a ragged little gasp and then collected herself. “Whatever we do, it keeps coming back.”

  Tibby was so cold her teeth were chattering. All the little hairs on her arms stood up straight. “Aren’t there more treatments they can try? Aren’t there?” Tibby’s voice came out louder and ruder than she’d intended.

  Bailey’s mom shrugged with pointy shoulders. “We wanted to give her a couple of months to live in the world like an ordinary kid.”

  “Are you saying you’re just letting her die?” Tibby demanded.

  Mrs. Graffman blinked a few times. “We don’t know . . . what else to try,” she said, her voice squeaky. “Bailey has a bad infection now. We pray her body is strong enough to fight it.” She looked up through swollen, teary eyes. “We’re very afraid. You need to know that.”

  Suddenly Tibby’s chest hurt. Her breathing felt wrong. Her heart seemed to be leaping around without any particular rhythm.

  “Bailey adores you,” Mrs. Graffman went on. The lines at the sides of her mouth quivered. “You’ve made these two months the most special time of her life. Her father and I really appreciate everything you’ve done.”

  “I have to go,” Tibby whispered. Her heart was going to explode, and she was going to die herself, and she didn’t want to do it in the hospital.

  On a morning in early August, Lena shared her customary silent breakfast with Bapi, then packed up and scaled the cliff to the flatland. She was going back to her olive grove. No. His olive grove.

  When she reached her spot, she saw that the colors had changed since June. There was more yellow in the grass, different wildflowers. The olives on the trees were grown fatter—they were teenagers now. The breeze was stronger. The meltimi, her grandmother called it.

  She might have come hoping to see him here; she wasn’t sure. But painting stole her thoughts from any other thing. For hours, in deep concentration, she mixed and painted and squinted and painted. If the sun was hot, she stopped knowing it. If her limbs were tired, she stopped feeling them.

  When the shadows grew too long, she came back to regular life. Now she looked at her painting through critical, earthbound eyes. If she hadn’t been herself she would have smiled, but as it was, she just felt the smile.

  Now she knew what the work had been for. She would give this, her best painting, to Kostos.

  She despaired of ever having the courage to tell him how she felt. She hoped this painting would say to him in Lena-language that she recognized that it was his special place, and that she was sorry.

  Tibby called in sick to Wallman’s. She had a cramp in her foot. She had a twitch in her eye. Her nose ring was getting infected. She just wanted to go to sleep.

  She didn’t want to be at work and have Bailey be in the hospital. She didn’t want to forget even for a moment and have to remember again when Bailey didn’t come at four. The forgetting and having to remember again was the very worst part.

  She looked longingly into Mimi’s glass box. Mimi was sleepier than ever. She hadn’t even touched her food. Mimi lived so slowly, and yet her life cycle was progressing much faster than Tibby’s. Why was that? Tibby expected her to keep pace.

  Tibby went over and tapped the glass wall. She felt an unexpected surge of frustration that Mimi could just snooze through all this distress. She reached into her box and nudged Mimi’s soft stomach with her index finger.

  Something was wrong. Mimi wasn’t right. She wasn’t warm. She was room temperature. With a jolt of panic, Tibby grabbed her too roughly. Mimi flopped between Tibby’s hands. She didn’t stir. “Mimi, come on,” Tibby urged her tearfully, like Mimi was playing a stupid guinea pig joke. “Wake up.”

  Tibby held her up high, in one hand. Mimi hated that. She usually scrambled her sharp little nails against Tibby’s wrist.

  Dawning on her both slowly and panic-fast was the knowledge that this wasn’t Mimi anymore. This was leftover Mimi.

  Somewhere in her brain a wall formed, a wall that kept out further consideration about what was happening here. Tibby’s thoughts were confined to the small area of her brain that was left. They felt more like commands from a control tower than actual thoughts.

  Put Mimi back in her cage. No, don’t. She might start to smell. Take her to the backyard.

  No way. Tibby bristled at the control tower. She was not doing that.

  Should she call her mom at work? Should she call the vet? No, she knew what they would say.

  She had a different idea. She marched downstairs. For once in her life her house was quiet. Without thinking any more than was strictly necessary, she put Mimi in a brown lunch bag, crumpled down the top so she was snug, and stuck her in the freezer.

  Suddenly Tibby flashed on the horrible image of Loretta defrosting Mimi and dumping her into a roasting pan. Tibby threw open the freezer door again and hid Mimi behind the frozen remains of Katherine’s baptismal cake, which no one would ever eat or throw away.

  There. Fine. Mimi wasn’t . . . whatever. She was just on ice. There was technology for this kind of thing. There was a whole science, Tibby was pretty sure. It might take a decade to perfect the science, but Tibby wasn’t going to be impatient about it. There was time.

  Upstairs she collapsed on her bed. She took a pen and notepad from her nightstand to write a letter to Carmen or Bee or Lena, but then she realized she had nothing to say.

  Carmen,

  Every day I’ve been in Greece I’ve eaten breakfast with my grandfather, and we’ve never had a single conversation. Is that weird? Does he think I’m a freak? Tomorrow, I swear, I’m going to memorize at least three sentences in Greek and say them. I’ll feel like a failure if the summer ends and we still haven’t said a word to each other.

  When we get back, do you think you could give me a few pointers on how to be a normal person? I don’t seem to get it.

  Love,

  Lena

  Raw and open, Carmen collapsed on her mother’s bed and let her mother rub her back.

  “My baby,” Christina murmured.

  “I am mad at Dad,” Carmen announced, half into the quilt.

  “Of course you are.”

  Carmen flipped over onto her back. “Why is that so hard for me to say? I have no trouble being mad at you.�
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  “I’ve noticed that.”

  Carmen’s mom was silent for a while, but Carmen could tell she had something to say.

  “Do you think it’s easier to be mad at people you trust?” her mom asked very softly.

  I trust Dad, Carmen was about to say without thinking. Then she tried thinking. “Why is that?”

  “Because you trust that they’ll love you anyway.”

  “Dad loves me,” she said quickly.

  “He does,” her mother agreed. She waited some more, but with a look of purpose in her eyes. She lay down beside Carmen on her bed. She took a long breath before she started in again.

  “It was very hard on you when he moved away.”

  “It was, wasn’t it?” Carmen remembered her seven-year-old self, aping the words her father told her when anyone asked. “He has to go for his job. But we’re going to see each other as much as ever. It’s the best thing for all of us.” Did she really believe those words? Why did she say them?

  “You once woke up in the middle of the night and asked me if Daddy knew you were sad.”

  Carmen rolled onto her side and propped her cheek on her palm. “Do you think he knew?”

  Christina paused. “I think he told himself you were okay.” She was quiet again. “Sometimes you tell yourself the things you need to hear.”

  “Tibby, dinner!” It was her dad’s voice. He was home.

  It was freezing. Tibby shivered in her flannel shirt and pajama bottoms. Her dad must have turned the a/c up again. Ever since her parents had central air-conditioning installed in the house, they had kept the place hermetically sealed four to five months of the year.

  “Tibby?”

  Dully she realized that she would have to answer him eventually.

  “Tibby!”

  She opened her door a crack. “I ate already,” she yelled through it.

  “Why don’t you join us anyway,” he called. He phrased it like a suggestion, so she figured she could ignore it. She closed her door. She knew that in a few seconds, Nicky would start flinging peas and Katherine would emit one of her arcing vomits—she had baby reflux—and her parents would forget about Tibby, the sullen teenager.

  She touched her hair. It wasn’t just greasy at the scalp. It was greasy all the way to the ends. She would be leaving a slick on the pillowcase.

  “Tibby, honey?” It was her dad still. He wasn’t giving up so easily.

  “I’ll come down for dessert!” she bellowed. Her chances were good he would forget by then.

  It was seven. She could watch game shows until the WB shows started. Then those could take her right through ten o’clock. Unlike those emergency room shows, she knew, the WB shows would have no relationship to your actual life. Then there were hours of pompous rockumentaries on VH1 of bands that had died of drug overdoses before she was born. Those were good for putting her to sleep.

  The phone rang. The first time Tibby’s mom got pregnant, Tibby got her own phone line. The second time, Tibby got her own TV. When the phone rang in here, she knew it was for her. She crawled deeper under her covers.

  The times you were in the kitchen and wanted Carmen to call you back, the answering machine picked up after three seconds. When you were screening calls less than two feet from the phone, it rang for hours unanswered. At last the machine clicked on.

  “Hi, Tibby? This is Bailey.”

  Tibby froze. She shrank from the phone.

  “My number here is 555-4648. Call me, okay?”

  Tibby shivered under the covers. She focused on the commercial about erectile dysfunction. She wanted to go to sleep.

  She thought of Mimi downstairs freezing in her little box and her up here freezing in her big one.

  Bridget took a long time getting dressed for the big game. Other girls had decorated their shirts with pictures of taco fixings. It was the kind of thing Bridget would have loved if she hadn’t run out of steam.

  Both teams had strung paper streamers along their goals. There was a table piled with watermelons at the side of the field.

  Her cleats felt too loose. Bridget knew she’d lost some weight. Her metabolism required constant feeding. But could you lose weight in your feet?

  “Bridget, where’ve you been?” Molly asked. Bridget knew there’d been some kind of unofficial kick-around this morning.

  “Resting up for the big game,” Bridget said.

  Molly wasn’t sensitive enough to detect anything else, and Bridget didn’t want her to.

  “All right, Tacos,” Molly said. “We’ve got a tough game here. Los Cocos are on a roll. As you all saw yesterday, they are clicking. We are going to have to max it out to win this.”

  Bridget made a mental note never to say “max it out.”

  Molly turned to her, her face full of giving. “You ready, Bee? You do your thing. You go all out today.”

  The rest of the team cheered at that. Bridget just stood there. She’d been stuck on defense. Stuck in the goal. Screamed at when she dribbled the ball more than two yards. “I don’t know if I remember how,” she said.

  From the first moment, Bridget was slow. She was tentative. She didn’t go after the ball. When it came to her she kicked it away. It made her team confused and listless. They were used to building on her intensity. Los Cocos scored twice in the first five minutes.

  Molly signaled to the ref for time. She looked at Bridget like she was a stranger. “Come on, Bridget. Play! What’s the matter with you?”

  Bridget really hated Molly right then. She’d never been great with authority. “You wasted me when I was good. Right now I’m not. Sorry.”

  Molly was furious. “Are you punishing me?”

  “Were you punishing me?”

  “I’m the coach, goddammit! I’m trying to turn you from a showoff into a real player.”

  “I am a real player,” Bridget said, and she walked off the field.

  First Tibby brought up the box of Entenmann’s crumb donuts, but then the crumbs reminded her of rodent pellets, so she ran back to the kitchen and shoved them into the back of the cabinet.

  Then she thought of ice cream, but she didn’t want to go where the ice cream was. Instead she grabbed a box of dinosaur fruit snacks—Nicky’s favorite—and brought them upstairs. Her eyes fixed on Ricki Lake, she systematically chewed through eight packages of garish gummy dinosaurs, tossing eight silvery wrappers on the floor.

  For Jerry Springer she drank two liters of ginger ale. After that she threw up in fizzy Technicolor. After that she watched the shopping network for a while.

  Three-quarters of the way through Oprah, her phone rang. Tibby turned the volume way up. She hated to miss even one word. Oprah was very sympathetic.

  Try as she did to avoid it, Tibby could still hear the voice on her answering machine. “Uh, Tibby. This is Robin Graffman, Bailey’s mom.” Long pause. “Do you think you could call or come by? The number is 555-4648. Room 448. Fourth floor, make a left when you get off the elevators. Bailey would really like to see you.”

  Tibby felt the pain invading her chest again. Her heart was not right. Pain exploded in her temple. She was having a heart attack and a brain aneurysm at the same time.

  She looked at Mimi’s box. She wanted to curl up in those soft wood shavings and breathe in Mimi’s salty rodent smell and sleep until she died. It didn’t look hard.

  Carmen dialed the numbers. She half expected to hang up when she heard a woman’s voice pick up, but she didn’t. “Lydia, this is Carmen. May I speak to my father?”

  “Of course,” Lydia said hastily. Did Carmen seriously think that Lydia would bring up anything unpleasant?

  Her father’s voice came quickly. “Hello?” She heard both relief and fear in his voice.

  “Dad, it’s Carmen.”

  “I know. I’m glad you called.” He sounded mostly like he really was glad. “I got the package. I appreciate your thought.”

  “Oh . . . good,” Carmen said. She felt herself being tugged into the
comfort zone. She could apologize. He would be overly understanding. In under two minutes, all would be shiny again. Life would go on.

  She had to fight on. “Dad, I need to tell you something.”

  She felt his silent pressure not to do it. Or was it her own pressure? “Okay.”

  Go go go, she commanded herself. Don’t look back. “I’m mad at you,” she said a little brokenly. She was glad he stayed quiet.

  She took a breath and dug into the skin around her thumbnail. “I’m . . . disappointed, you know. I thought we’d be spending the summer together, me and you. I really, really wish you’d warned me about moving in with Lydia’s family.” Her voice was shaky and raw.

  “Carmen, I’m . . . sorry. I wish I’d warned you. That was my mistake. I really am sorry.”

  He finished with a note of finality. He was closing it off again. Cauterizing the wound before there could be any more bleeding.

  She wasn’t cooperating. “I’m not finished,” she declared. He was silent.

  She gave herself a few moments to steady her voice. “You’ve found yourself a new family, and I don’t really fit into it.” Her voice came out squeaky and bare. “You got yourself this new family with these new kids. . . . B-But what about me?” Now she was completely off the road and driving fast. Emotions she hadn’t even realized she felt were flying past. “What was the matter with me and Mom?” Her voice cracked painfully. Tears were falling now. She didn’t even care if he was listening anymore; she had to keep talking.

  “Why wasn’t your old family good enough? Why did you move away? Why did you promise me . . . we’d be closer than ever?” She broke off so she could try to catch her breath. “W-Why did you keep saying we were, even though it wasn’t true?” She was flat-out sobbing now. Her words rose and fell on waves of crying. She wondered if he could even understand what she was saying.

  “Why does Paul visit his drunk father every month, and you visit me two or three times a year? I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?”