Girls in Pants

by Ann Brashares

  You call this food?

  Vhat is the green mess? This is not spinach.

  As the moments passed, Carmen felt worse and worse. Why did she have such stupid ideas? More than that, why did she actually carry them out?

  Valia held the plate up close to her face. She looked like she was going to take a bite, and then she stopped. Carmen watched in wonderment as Valia put it down on the table and bent her head.

  Valia just sat like that with her head bent for many long moments, and then Carmen saw the tears. Lines of tears bumped down Valia’s wrinkly face. Carmen felt her own throat constricting. She watched as Valia’s face slowly collapsed into pure sorrow.

  Carmen was up and out of her chair. Without thinking, she went to Valia and put her arms around the old lady.

  Valia was stiff in Carmen’s arms. Carmen waited to be pushed away, or for some other signal of Valia not wanting to be hugged anymore, especially not by Carmen.

  But instead, Valia’s head got heavier as it sank into Carmen’s neck. Carmen felt the soft, saggy skin against her collarbone. She hugged a little harder. She felt Valia’s tears, damp on her neck. She realized, sort of distantly, that Valia’s hand had made its way to her wrist.

  How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.

  Carmen tenderly patted Valia’s hair, surprised that for once that it wasn’t she who was acting awful. It wasn’t Carmen who was being needy, but rather feeling needed.

  She thought about Mr. Kaligaris and all of his theories about protecting his mother. Yes, smelling Greek food made Valia sad. He was right about that. And being held by another human seemed to make her sad too. But sometimes, Carmen knew, being sad was what you had to do.

  “I vant to go home,” Valia croaked into Carmen’s ear.

  “I know,” Carmen whispered back, and she understood that Valia wasn’t talking about 1303 Highland Street, Bethesda, Maryland.

  “Have fun with Michael.” Bridget lifted her eyebrows suggestively. “But not too much fun.”

  As she helped Diana put her duffel bag into her car, Bridget felt a strange rolling sensation under her eyeballs. Her head was aching and she was tired. She was happy for Diana that she was going back to Philadelphia to spend the weekend with her boyfriend, and she was sorry for herself that she was staying here.

  She decided against stopping in the dining hall. Friday night dinner was one of the better meals, involving an ice cream sundae buffet where she was always happy to return for seconds and thirds. But tonight she wasn’t hungry. “I gotta go to bed,” she muttered to herself, trudging through the parking lot and past the equipment sheds.

  The camp felt strangely empty. It was middle weekend, so the vast majority of campers went home. Only about a quarter of the staff remained to keep an eye on things.

  As she pulled off her clothes and crawled under her covers, Bridget was grateful that her cabin was quiet for once. She bundled herself up as tight as she could. It was at least eighty degrees outside; why was she so cold? The tighter she bundled, the colder she felt. She was shaking. Her teeth were chattering. The more she focused on it and tried to stop, the more they chattered and clacked. Her cheeks burned.

  She was getting a fever, she concluded. She meant to do something about this. Maybe she could steal a couple of Advil from Katie. She kept imagining herself doing this, without actually doing it. She passed, gradually, into a state between awake and asleep. She imagined getting another blanket. She imagined drinking a glass of water. She could not figure out whether she was doing it or not. She puzzled and tortured her brain trying to figure out what was and wasn’t real. She must have drifted like that for a long time, because it was dark when she was startled by the presence of somebody next to her.

  “Bee?”

  She tried to orient herself. It was Eric’s face, floating near hers.

  “Hi,” she said softly. She didn’t want to pull the blankets from around her chin, because she hated the idea of a draft reaching her hot skin.

  “Are you okay?

  “I’m okay,” she said. Her teeth were chattering again.

  He looked worried. He pressed his hand to her forehead. “God, you’re hot.”

  She meant to laugh and make a joke about this, but she couldn’t summon it. She was too tired. “I think I got the flu.”

  “You got something.” Tenderly, almost automatically, he pushed her hair back from her forehead. It was so nice, how he did it. She felt strangely cozy and happy inside her fever.

  He moved his hand to touch her flushed cheek. His hand felt remarkably cold. “Do you want to take something? Should I see if the nurse is around?” His eyes were fixed on her, full of concern.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal.” Her fatigue made her talk extra slow. “I always run high fevers. My mom used to say”—she had to take a break to work her energy back up—“I’d get to a hundred and six degrees with just a little cold.” She didn’t mean to sound tragic when she said this, but she must’ve, because Eric looked distraught. He knew about her mother. She had told him almost the first time they’d met.

  “I’m not sure if the nurse is here, but I’m going to get you something. Do you take Tylenol or Motrin or something like that?”

  “Anything,” she said.

  “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere, okay? Promise?”

  She coughed up a tiny laugh. “That I can promise.”

  “You have to let Valia go home,” Carmen said to Ari, following her into the Kaligarises’ kitchen.

  First she’d had to get Lena’s blessing. Then it had taken Carmen two days to get Ari alone in a room, but Carmen was nothing if she wasn’t dogged.

  Ari put the mail down on the kitchen counter and turned to Carmen in surprise. “I’m sorry?” Ari’s eyes were large and lovely like Lena’s, but dark and indefinable, where Lena’s were fair, green, and fragile.

  “I know it’s none of my business,” Carmen backtracked, “and I know you and Mr. Kaligaris probably don’t want to hear my opinion.” Carmen always called Ari Ari and she always called Mr. Kaligaris Mr. Kaligaris. She couldn’t remember a time when it was different.

  Ari nodded slightly, inviting her to pursue that unwanted opinion.

  “I really think that you and Mr. Kaligaris should let Valia go back to Greece.” Tears welled in Carmen’s eyes, and she felt so annoyed by her ready-to-wear emotions. “She’s dying here.”

  Ari sighed heavily and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands. At least this wasn’t entirely news to her. “How can Valia take care of herself? Especially now, with her knee? Who is going to look out for her if not us?” She didn’t sound like she was voicing her own conviction, but more like she was reciting somebody else’s.

  “Her friends? She has her friends, and they are like her family. I can understand that. The only time I’ve ever seen her look happy is when she’s IMing Rena.” Carmen kneaded her hands, sort of amazed to hear herself take on Ari like another adult. “Valia is too depressed to get herself a glass of water, but I swear she could have programmed the computer herself if it meant making a connection to home.”

  Ari looked at her, pained and tired, but with tenderness, too.

  Couldn’t Ari see that Valia wasn’t the only one suffering? Carmen had never seen Ari so tense, and Mr. Kaligaris hadn’t always been as angry and rigid as he was now. Couldn’t Ari see the toll it took not only on her, but also on her daughters?

  Carmen knew she wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation if Mr. Kaligaris were here. But she trusted Ari to love her. Ultimately she trusted Ari to read her good intentions and, hopefully, the truth.

  “Carmen, sweetheart, I’m not saying you aren’t r
ight. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But it’s complicated. Really, how can Valia go back to that house she shared with Bapi for fifty-seven years? How could she tolerate the pain of living there without him? Sometimes change is the right thing.”

  Carmen couldn’t help looking sour. She was no friend of change. “I know that. I know being back in her house on the island will make her sad. Of course she’ll be sad. But that’s her home. That’s her life. She can handle being sad. I’m sure of that. What she can’t handle is being here.”

  There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

  —Norman Mailer

  Tibby couldn’t fall asleep. She sat in her bed and looked out the window at the hazardous apple tree. The apples were growing plump and red now. How had she never even tried one?

  She associated them with having fallen, that was part of it. She could viscerally recall the smell of the oversweet, rotting, fermenting apples from seasons past that fell without ever being picked. That smell and the sight of the marauding worms and beetles nauseated her. She loathed the apples wounded on the ground, but she had never thought to pick one from a branch.

  The tree seemed to be considering her just as she considered it. She felt its judgment. It wasn’t judging her for leaving the window open. That wasn’t her crime. Her crimes were deeper and more numerous: She wasn’t big enough to love Katherine as Katherine deserved. She wasn’t brave enough to love Brian as he deserved. She wasn’t strong enough to keep the things she loved alive (Bailey, Mimi), nor was she wise enough to grasp the meaning of their deaths.

  Tibby was good at hiding. It was the one thing she knew how to do. She was good at sealing herself in a little box and waiting it out. But waiting for what? What was she waiting for?

  She thought she’d learned a lesson from Katherine’s fall out the window. The lesson was: Don’t open, don’t climb, don’t reach, and you will not fall. But it was the wrong lesson! She had learned the wrong lesson!

  The real lesson embodied in Katherine’s three-year-old frame was the opposite: Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.

  Flexing her feet under the covers, Tibby thought of a corollary to this lesson: If you don’t try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.

  Time passed for Bridget in the strangest way, a little forward, a little back. She was vaguely aware of Katie and Allison returning to the cabin. They probably assumed she was asleep, but that didn’t stop them from flipping on the light and gabbing noisily and turning on music. She suspected they’d been partying with the other remaining staff. They smelled like it, anyway.

  Sometime after that, Eric returned. He sized up the situation with Katie and Allison. He was furious. “Can’t you see that Bee is sick? Why are you making all this noise? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  Even through her haze, Bridget could tell this was not a side of Eric she’d seen before.

  “Dude. Back off,” Katie snapped. “Why are you barging into our cabin and telling us what to do?” She was too drunk to yield her ground, even if Bee was sick.

  Eric knelt next to Bridget. He put his hand on her forehead again. He bent down close to her ear. “I don’t really want to leave you in here with the two of them. You want to come back with me? My cabin is empty this weekend. You can sleep.”

  She nodded gratefully. She was only wondering how she was going to get from here to there without freezing to death. She wasn’t wearing anything but her underwear under the blankets.

  He had an idea for that, too. He put his arms under her and scooped her up, still tucked inside her blankets. He carried her out of the cabin and into the night, with Katie and Allison watching his back in surprise and indignation.

  She felt light in his arms. She rested her burning face against his neck. She was shivering again. He pulled the blankets closer around her and rested his chin lightly on the top of her head.

  She was trying her hardest to remember each of these things he did, to mark them in her brain permanently, because they were immeasurably sweet. Maybe they were the sweetest things that had ever happened to her or ever would. She kept hoping that this, unlike all those blankets she imagined getting and glasses of water she imagined drinking, that this was real. Please let it be real, she thought wistfully. And if it’s not, let me just stay here anyway.

  He pushed open the door of his cabin with his back and put her very gently into a bed—his bed, she hoped. She wanted to smell his smell. He was careful to tuck her blankets around her snugly. She tried to stop shivering.

  “I’d put another blanket on you, but I don’t want you to get overheated, you know?”

  She nodded. She noticed he’d been carrying a bag, also, looped around his wrist. “Here.” He unloaded a bottle of Advil, a bottle of aspirin, a bottle of water, a bottle of orange juice, a thermometer, and a paper cup. “The nurse isn’t back till Sunday, but I got into the infirmary in case we need anything else.”

  She fluttered her eyes, trying to focus on his solemn face. “It was unlocked?”

  He shrugged. “Now it is.”

  He filled the cup with water and poured two pills into his palm. “Ready?” He helped her to sit up in bed.

  She tried to figure out how to get her hand out without letting any cold air in. She stuck her hand out up by her neck, keeping the rest of the blanket tight around her. She thirstily drank the water and another cup and another with her little T. rex arm.

  “Poor thing. You were thirsty,” he said.

  She took the pills, wincing as they went down. Her throat felt swollen.

  “Thank you,” she said, lying back down. She felt tears fill her eyes at the extravagance of his kindness to her.

  He put his cool hand on her cheek again. “I am worried about you,” he said quietly. And looking at his face, she could never again question whether they had really become friends.

  He took the thermometer out of its case. “Open up.”

  “Are you sure you want to know?” she asked. She knew she was hot.

  He nodded, so she opened her mouth. He waited for the mercury to settle. It didn’t take very long. He studied it with his eyebrows furrowed. “God, it’s 104.7. Is that safe?”

  “I’ve been there before,” she said faintly. Why did she have to do everything in such dramatic fashion?

  “Should I call a doctor?” he asked.

  “I think I’m going to be okay,” she answered truthfully. “I’m not scared or anything.”

  He lay on the bed opposite her, propped on his side, watching her carefully.

  “I’m going to call your dad,” he announced, sitting up. He got his cell phone from the top drawer of his bureau.

  “Don’t call my dad,” she said softly. “He’s not…there.”

  “It’s midnight. Where would he be?”

  “No. I mean.” She took a break. “He’s just not there. In that way.” She was too tired to explain any better.

  He looked at her, the corners of his mouth turned down. He looked deeply troubled about that.

  He lay down across from her again.

  The more she wanted to stop shivering, the more she shivered. She didn’t want him to worry about her.

  He couldn’t stand to watch her shake. He got up and came over to her. He picked her up inside her ball of covers and moved her over on the bed. To her great astonishment and joy, he lay down alongside her. He put his arms around her and tucked her face into his neck, and she felt as though her fevered heart might burst.

  He held her as though he thought he could absorb her fever and her sickness and her sadness at not having a mother or even a father she could count on. He stroked her hair and lay with her like that for hours.

  And maybe he did absorb her ache, because in his arms she finally fell asleep.

  By four A.M., daylight was beginning to haunt the sky. Tibby did not want the sun to rise without some real measure of awa
kening.

  After these hours she felt as though she knew the tree in a new way and the tree knew her. It wasn’t an unfriendly tree, but it did pose a challenge to her.

  Somewhere around two o’clock, Tibby had remembered she had the Traveling Pants. They had been sitting for a shameful number of days under her bed. She’d been hiding from them. Somewhere around three, she put them on.

  She hoisted up the window sash and sat with her elbows on the sill, resting her chin in her hands. The tree waved. Katherine had thought she could reach it from the window but, in fact, she couldn’t. Tibby could reach it but thought she couldn’t. Tibby’s mother’s ovaries seemed to produce a heartier strain of egg as they got older.

  Tibby put one foot out the window and then the other. She sat on the sill. She looked down. It was far. She would feel incredibly stupid if she fell. She and Katherine could wear matching hockey helmets. Tibby smiled in spite of herself, knowing what a huge kick that would give Katherine. She wondered if Nicky would be similarly willing to help with the stickers.

  Tibby caught a sturdy branch with two hands and held it tight. She knew just where she needed to put her feet. She tried to figure out how to do it so that her weight would not at any time be up for grabs. Then she remembered that this was kind of the point.

  When she hoisted herself off the window, she would have to transfer her weight completely to her hands for a second or two until she could place her feet. She would just have to do that.

  Okay.

  Yes.

  Like, now.

  Tibby looked at the ground. She could already see a couple of wormy apples languishing in the dark grass. The ground was psyching her out, so she looked at the sky.

  She lifted; she swung. She actually screamed in that moment. But before her scream had gotten all the way out of her mouth, her feet were on the lower branch. She was balanced. She was safe.

  She passed herself down slowly, branch by branch. She had a bit of the monkey in her after all. She hung from a low branch by both hands, skimming above the ground with her feet. Then she let go.