Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [1]
Lena would get good gas mileage. Like one of those hybrid cars. She would be easy on the environment and, of course, easy on the eyes. She would have state-of-the-art GPS, but it would be wrong sometimes. She would have air bags.
Bee would have no air bags. She might not have bumpers. She might not even have brakes. She would go a million miles an hour. She would be an ocean blue Ferrari minus the brakes.
And I, Tibby, would be a…bike. No, just kidding. (I am old enough to drive, damn it!) Hmmm. What would I be? I would be a muscular Plymouth Duster, dark green, with a picky transmission. Okay, maybe that’s just what I’d want to be. But I’m the one writing this, so I get to decide.
The Pants first came to us at the perfect moment. That is, when we were splitting up for the first time. It was two summers ago when they first worked their magic, and last summer when they shook up our lives once again. You see, we don’t wear the Pants year-round. We let them rest during the year, so they are extra powerful when summer comes. (There was the time this winter when Carmen wore them to her mom’s wedding, but that was a special case.)
We thought it was a big deal two years ago, our first summer apart. Now we’re facing our last summer together. Tomorrow we graduate from high school. In September we go to college. And it’s not like one of those TV shows where all of us magically turn up at the same college. We are going to four different schools in three different cities (but all within four hours of one another—that was our one rule).
Bee is the sloppiest student of us four and she got into every school she applied to. (Can you say all-American?) She chose Brown. Lena decided, against her parents’ advice, to go to art school at the Rhode Island School of Design, Carmen is going to Williams just as she always dreamed, and I am starting film school at NYU.
As life changes go, it’s really, really big. If you’re my dad, you say, “Hey. You’ll see each other at Thanksgiving.” But if you’re me, you realize that life as we’ve known it is over. Our shared childhood is ending. Maybe we’ll never live at home again. Maybe we’ll never all live in the same place again. We’re headed off to start our real lives. To me that is awe-inspiring, but it is also the single scariest thought in the world.
Tomorrow night at Gilda’s we’ll launch the Pants on their third summer voyage. Tomorrow begins the time of our lives. It’s when we’ll need our Pants the most.
Afterwards, the universe will explode for your pleasure.
—Douglas Adams
“Okay, Bee with Greta and Valia and Lena,” Carmen ordered, shepherding a wandering grandmother with her hand. Bee and Lena intertwined their legs, trying to tip each other over, as Carmen clicked her digital camera.
“Okay, um. Effie and…um, Perry. And Katherine and Nicky. With Tibby and Lena and Bee.”
Lena cast her a look. Lena hated pictures. “Are you getting paid or something?” she asked grumpily.
Carmen pushed her hair off her sweaty neck. The shiny black gown permitted no flow of air. She shook off the mortarboard (who ever thought of that name?) and pressed it under her arm. “Squeeze together, would you? I’m losing Perry.” Tibby’s three-year-old sister, Katherine, bleated angrily as her older brother, Nicky, stomped on her foot.
It wasn’t Carmen’s fault her friends had large families. But it was graduation, for God’s sake. This was a big day. She wasn’t going to miss anybody. She didn’t have any official brothers or sisters. She had to make the most of her unofficial ones.
“There is no shade,” Valia, Lena’s grandmother, noted bitterly.
It was a football field. Carmen briefly imagined the trouble with an elm or oak planted at the fifty yard line. The thought of this made her turn toward the raucous bunch of graduating football players, their families and admirers. It was one of the many clumps and cliques spread out over the hot field—a last stand for social order.
Carmen’s grandma, Carmen