The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

by Ann Brashares

  She stopped using words at all and just cried, maybe for a long time; she wasn’t sure. At last she got quieter. Was he even there?

  When she pressed the receiver to her ear and listened, she heard a muffled sound. Breaths. Not dry, wet.

  “Carmen, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She figured she might believe him, because she realized that for the first time in her life he was crying too.

  Tibby was sinking into sleep the next afternoon when a knock came at the door. “Go away!” she barked.

  Who could it be? Her parents were both at work, and Tibby had scared Loretta sufficiently to keep her away forever.

  “Tibby?”

  “Go away,” she said again.

  The door opened partway. Carmen’s head appeared. As she took in Tibby’s horrific appearance and the mounds of crap on the floor and bed, Carmen’s face grew pointy with concern. “Tibby, what’s going on?” she asked in a soft voice. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Tibby snapped, sinking back under her covers. “Please go away.” She turned up the volume. Oprah was coming back after a short commercial break.

  “What are you watching?” Carmen asked.

  With the shades pulled down, there wasn’t much to look at besides the TV and the hulking piles of mess.

  “Oprah. She’s very sympathetic, you know,” Tibby snapped.

  Carmen waded through the piles and sat on Tibby’s bed. It was testament to her concern, because Carmen hated any mess she herself hadn’t made. “Tibby, please tell me what’s going on. You’re scaring me.”

  “I don’t want to talk,” Tibby said stonily. “I want you to go away.”

  The phone started ringing again. Tibby glared at it as though it were a rattlesnake. “Don’t touch it,” she ordered.

  Beeeep, went the answering machine. Suddenly Tibby dove for it, furiously searching for the volume dial. She dropped the whole thing on the carpet.

  Still the voice on the machine came through loud and clear. “Tibby. It’s Bailey’s mother again. I want you to know what’s happening here. Bailey’s not doing so well. She has an infection and . . .” Tibby could hear the woman sucking in air. Her lungs sounded like they were full of water. “We—we’d just really like you to come. It would mean a lot to Bailey.” She sobbed a little and then hung up.

  Tibby couldn’t look at Carmen. She didn’t want to see anything. She could feel Carmen’s eyes digging little tunnels into her brain. She felt Carmen’s arm come around her shoulders. Tibby looked away. An infinite number of tears hovered behind her eyelids.

  “Please just go.” Tibby’s voice wobbled.

  Carmen, being Carmen, kissed the side of Tibby’s head and got up to leave.

  “Thanks,” Tibby whispered after her.

  Unfortunately, Carmen, still being Carmen, arrived back in Tibby’s room about an hour later without being invited. This time she didn’t even knock. She just appeared.

  “Tibby, you have to go see her,” Carmen said softly, floating in Tibby’s half dream at the side of her bed.

  “Go away,” Tibby ordered groggily. “I can’t move.”

  Carmen let out a long breath. “You can so. I brought you the Pants.” She laid them down over Tibby’s feet. It was the only place in the room where they wouldn’t be swallowed by ravenous mess. “Put them on and go.”

  “No,” Tibby rasped.

  Carmen disappeared out the door.

  Tibby chattered and shivered. Didn’t Carmen understand that her heart wasn’t working and her brain had an aneurysm and her nose ring was getting infected?

  She fell into comatose sleep for hours and awoke to see the Pants glowing at her in the bluish light of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The Pants were telling her that she was an awful person, and they were right. She sank back down, feeling the weight of them on her feet and ankles. They seemed to weigh about fifty pounds. Who could walk in such heavy pants? “Surprise yourself,” Jay Leno told her. She stared at him. He had not just said that.

  She leaped out of bed, scared, her arrhythmic heart racing. What if there was no time left? What if it was already gone?

  She pulled off her pajamas and pulled on the Pants. She stuck her feet in a pair of wool clogs. Her hair was so dirty it had gone around the bend. It looked clean again.

  She realized once she was out on the sidewalk that it was almost midnight and she was still wearing her pajama top. Who at the hospital would let her in to see Bailey at midnight? Didn’t visiting hours end by eight?

  She backtracked and got her bike from the open garage. She didn’t have very much time. Bailey was afraid of time.

  She raced through the streets. The traffic lights on Wisconsin Avenue were flashing yellow.

  The regular entrance to the hospital was mostly dark, but the emergency entrance was alight. Tibby walked in and past the assortment of miserable people in plastic chairs. Even emergencies grew boring after people waited for a few hours in this place.

  Luckily the woman in the reception box had her head tilted down. Tibby walked right by. She struck out for an elevator.

  “Can I help you?” a passing nurse asked her.

  “I’m, uh, finding my, uh, mom.” Tibby lied badly. She kept walking. The nurse didn’t come after her. She took fire stairs up to the main floor, hovered in the stairwell until the coast was completely clear, then sped to the elevator.

  There was a tired-looking doctor in the elevator. Tibby rummaged around her brain for excuses, until she realized he really didn’t care what she was doing. Obviously he had better things to think about than hospital security.

  She got off at the fourth floor and immediately ducked into a doorway. The floor was very quiet. The reception area was to the left, but a sign indicated that room 448 was to the right. There was a nurses’ station farther down the hall to the right. She barely breathed as she moved along the wall like a spider. Thank goodness, room 448 was close. The door was partially open. She slipped inside.

  She stalled in the little vestibule. From there she could see Jay Leno up on the ceiling-mounted TV doing his shtick in silence. She could see no parents in the chairs by the windows. She had to make herself go in.

  She was afraid she would see a different Bailey, a leftover Bailey. But the girl sleeping in the bed was the same as the girl she knew. Only she had tubes sticking out of her wrist and a tube in her nose. Tibby heard a high-pitched little gasp escape her own throat. There was more emotion bubbling around in there than she could hold back.

  Bailey was so tiny under the covers. Tibby saw the flutter of pulse at her neck. Gently Tibby reached for Bailey’s hand. It was made of bird bones. “Hi, Bailey, it’s me,” she whispered. “The girl from Wallman’s.”

  Bailey was so small there was enough extra room for Tibby to sit on the bed next to her. Bailey’s eyes stayed shut. Tibby brought Bailey’s hand to her chest and held it there. When her own eyelids started to droop, she lay back gingerly, resting her head on the pillow next to Bailey’s. She felt the soft tickle of Bailey’s hair against her cheek. Tears slipped out of her eyes and went sideways into her ears and onto Bailey’s hair. She hoped that was okay.

  She would just stay here holding Bailey’s hand for all time, so Bailey wouldn’t be afraid that there wasn’t enough of it.

  That night was the celebration of Koimisis tis Theotokou, the Assumption of the Virgin. It was the biggest Greek Orthodox holiday after Easter. Both Lena and Effie joined their grandparents in the small, plain, lovely church for the liturgy. Afterward there was a small parade, and then the whole town got busy eating and drinking.

  Grandma was on the dessert committee, so she and Effie made dozens of trays of baklava with every conceivable kind of nut in the filling for the delicate pastries. Grandma had intensified Effie’s training now that the summer was almost at an end.

  Lena had one glass of strong, rough-tasting red wine, and it made her feel tired and sad. She went up to her room and sat by her windo
w in the dark, where she could watch the festivities from a bit of a distance. This was the way she liked to enjoy a party.

  Down on the sidewalk and in the little plaza a few yards down from Kostos’s house, the celebration became more boisterous after sunset. The men drank loads of ouzo and got very expansive once the music began. Even Bapi wore a big, silly smile.

  Effie drank a few glasses of wine herself. There was no official drinking age in Greece. In fact, even their grandparents pushed wine on Effie and Lena on special occasions, which probably made Effie much less interested in drinking than she would have been otherwise. Tonight, though, Effie was flushed and exuberant. Lena watched her sister dance to a few songs with Andreas the waiter and then sneak off into an alleyway with him. Lena wasn’t worried. Effie was carbonated, but under that she was possibly the most sensible person Lena knew. Effie adored boys, but even at fourteen, she didn’t abandon herself for them.

  Oia, tonight, had two equally vivid full moons, one in the sky and one in the sea. If Lena hadn’t known better, she wouldn’t have been able to pick the original.

  In the moonlight she saw Kostos’s face. He didn’t notice Lena’s absence or care. She felt sure of it.

  I wish you cared, Lena told him telepathically, and then wanted to take it back.

  She watched Kostos approach her grandmother. On her tiptoes, Valia hugged him and kissed him so hard, Lena wondered if she might strangle him. Kostos looked joyful. He whispered something in Valia’s ear that made her smile. Then they began dancing.

  Dinky, small-town fireworks erupted from the plaza. In a way, those were the most awe-inspiring kind, Lena decided with a tiny chill. Unlike the Disney World variety, these homemade ones had a sweet crudeness you could respond to. They showed the effort and the danger, while more polished presentations hid it.

  Kostos spun Grandma around. Laughing, she managed to keep her feet under her. He ended the song with a dramatic dip, bending Grandma practically in two. Lena had never seen her grandmother look so happy.

  Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldn’t spend on their own absent children and grandchildren. It was just a poignant fact of island life that whole generations left to set up real lives in other places.

  Lena let the tears dribble past her chin and down her neck. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was crying for.

  Even after the late hour at which the party ended, Lena couldn’t sleep. She sat by her window watching the moon. She waited for breezes to feather the edges of the sea-moon. She imagined all the happy inhabitants of Oia falling into deep, drunken sleep.

  But as she craned a little out the window, she recognized another pair of elbows in the far window of the second floor. They were Bapi’s wrinkly elbows. He was sitting at his window, staring at the moons, just like she was.

  She smiled, both inside and out. She’d learned one thing in Santorini. She wasn’t like either of her parents or her sister, but she was just like her Bapi—proud, silent, fearful. Lucky for Bapi, he had found the courage once in his life to seize a chance at love from a person who knew how to give it.

  Lena prayed on these two moons that she would find that same courage.

  Lena slept in the next morning. Well, she didn’t sleep in. She stayed in bed hours after she woke, because she couldn’t figure out what to do with herself. She was fitful, both energized and apathetic.

  Effie ended the morning when she banged in, needing to raid Lena’s closet for something or other. “What’s the matter with you?” Effie asked over her shoulder while rummaging shamelessly through Lena’s things.

  “I’m tired,” Lena claimed.

  Effie looked suspicious.

  “How was last night?” Lena asked to deflect attention.

  Effie’s eyes brightened. “It was unbelievably great,” she gushed. “Andreas is the best kisser. Much better than any American boy.”

  “You mentioned that,” Lena pointed out sourly. “Besides, you’re fourteen.”

  Suddenly Effie stopped jangling hangers. She was completely motionless.

  “What?” Lena demanded. Effie made her nervous whenever she was quiet.

  “Oh my God,” Effie breathed.

  “What!” Lena shouted.

  She cringed when she heard the rustle of paper and saw what Effie was holding. It was the drawing she’d made of Kostos.

  “Oh my God,” Effie repeated, slower this time. She turned to Lena, as though seeing her sister through new eyes. “I can’t believe you.”

  “What?” Lena’s vocabulary seemed to have come down to that one word.

  “I cannot believe you.”

  “What?” Lena shouted again, sitting up in bed.

  “You are in love with Kostos,” Effie accused.

  “No I’m not.” If Lena hadn’t known she was in love with Kostos before, she did now. Because she knew what a lie felt like.

  “You are too. And the sad thing is, you are too much of a chicken to do anything about it but mope.”

  Lena sank into her covers again. As usual, Effie had summed up her complex, anguished mental state in one sentence.

  “Just admit it,” Effie pressed.

  Lena wouldn’t. She crossed her arms stubbornly over her pajama top.

  “Okay, don’t,” Effie said. “I know it’s true anyway.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” Lena snapped babyishly.

  Effie sat down on the bed. Her face was serious now. “Lena, listen to me, okay? We don’t have much more time here. You are in love. I’ve never seen anything like this before. You have to be brave, okay? You have to go and tell Kostos how you feel. I swear to God if you don’t, you will regret it for the rest of your cowardly life.”

  Lena knew this was all true. Effie had hit the mark so blatantly, Lena didn’t even bother refuting it. “But, Ef,” she said, her voice belying her raw agony, “what if he doesn’t like me back?”

  Effie considered this. Lena waited, expecting, hoping for reassurance. She wanted Effie to say that of course Kostos liked her back. How could he not? But Effie didn’t say that.

  Instead she took Lena’s hand in hers. “That’s what I mean about being brave.”

  Bailey was looking at Tibby when she woke up in the hospital bed. So was the nurse carrying Bailey’s breakfast tray. Bailey looked pleased. The nurse looked slightly annoyed.

  “I hope you enjoyed your rest,” the nurse said, looking up at Tibby from under her eyebrows and giving her a small half-smile.

  Tibby slid off the bed. “Sorry,” she said groggily. She’d left a spot of drool on Bailey’s pillow.

  The nurse shook her head. Her face wasn’t mean. “Mrs. Graffman was quite surprised to find you here last night,” she said to Tibby. “Next time I suggest you try coming during regular visiting hours.” She looked from Tibby to Bailey. “I hear you know this young lady.”

  Bailey nodded. She was still lying back, but her eyes were alert.

  “Thanks,” Tibby said.

  The nurse checked the chart at the bottom of Bailey’s bed. “I’ll be back in a few minutes in case you need any help with that.” She gestured with her eyes toward the breakfast tray.

  “I don’t,” Bailey said.

  The nurse gave Tibby a stern glance before she left the room. “Don’t eat her breakfast.”

  “I won’t,” Tibby promised.

  “Come back,” Bailey said, bouncing her hand slightly on the bed.

  Tibby got back on. “Hi,” she said. She almost said, “How are you feeling?” but she managed not to.

  “You’re wearing the Pants,” Bailey observed.

  “I needed help,” Tibby explained.

  Bailey nodded.

  “Mimi died.” Tibby could not believe she’d said those words. Without warning she started to cry big,
sloppy tears.

  One delicate tear trailed down Bailey’s face. “I knew something was wrong,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Tibby said.

  Bailey shook her head to fend off the apology. “I knew you were here last night. It gave me good dreams.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Bailey looked at the clock. “You have to go. Your shift is starting in thirteen minutes.”

  “What?” Tibby was genuinely confused.

  “Wallman’s.”

  Tibby brushed it aside with her hand. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Bailey looked serious. “It does too matter. It’s your job. Duncan counts on you, you know. Go.”

  Tibby looked at her in disbelief. “You really want me to go?”

  “Yes.” She softened a little. “I want you to come back, though.”

  “I will,” Tibby said.

  When she got to the lobby, Carmen was sitting there. She got up when she saw Tibby and hugged her. Tibby hugged back.

  “I have to go to work,” Tibby said numbly.

  Carmen nodded. “I’ll walk you.”

  “I have my bike.”

  “So I’ll walk you and your bike,” Carmen said.

  “Oh, wait.” Carmen stopped just inside the automatic doors. “I need the Pants.”

  “Right now?”

  “I think so,” Carmen said.

  “I’m kind of wearing them,” Tibby pointed out.

  Carmen took her arm and pulled her into the bathroom. She took off her baby-blue flares and offered them to Tibby.

  It was further proof of the magic of the Pants, how fantastic Carmen looked in them and how laughably dumb Tibby looked in Carmen’s baby-blue ones.

  Though Carmen had slept in every morning until at least ten o’clock for the past two weeks, on the morning of August 19, she sprang out of bed with the sun. She knew what she was going to do. She pulled on the Pants, loving the snug, perfect fit around her hips. It felt like they loved her. She pushed her feet into leopard-print slides and quickly fastened the pearl buttons of a black collared shirt. She shook out her voluminous hair, still clean from being washed last night. She jabbed silver hoops through her earlobes.