Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [31]
From his face, he seemed to recognize that he had already shoved them into slightly awkward territory.
She cleared her throat. “How was it?”
He was uncomfortable. “We stayed with my grandmother in Mulege. And then we traveled down to Los Cabos and ended up in Mexico City for a few days.”
Bridget heard one word louder than the others. He was doing that we thing. What was we? Who was we? She wasn’t going to stand here wondering.
“Who is we?”
He paused. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. “We? Oh, uh, me and Kaya. My girlfriend.”
Bridget nodded. His girlfriend. Kaya. “Wow. Good for you.”
Had he wanted to tell her this? Had he not wanted to tell her?
“See you,” Bridget said numbly, walking away to stake a place for her team to gather. She wished she could have blasted those buzzing, swarming expectations with a can of bug spray.
You had hopes, admit it. She hated dishonesty, especially in herself. You know you did.
Lena stared out the window of the bus. It was empty, so she pulled her legs up onto the seat and hugged them, loving the feeling of the Traveling Pants against her skin. It had been a wonderful afternoon of drawing, almost magical. Partly because of wearing the Pants, partly because she felt she was really making progress.
She pictured the last pose of the day—twenty minutes. She loved the long pose best. They had a new model now, Michelle. She had round hips and long, hyperextending arms. Lena had no thought of assessing the model in terms of beauty. Michelle represented a series of drawing challenges. Lena looked out the window of the bus, but she saw Michelle’s elbows.
Lena liked her time on the bus, and the slow walk from the bus stop to her house in the sweet end-of-day light. It gave her a transition between the meditation of her class and the sharpness of home.
This night she was greeted sharply. Her father was yelling before she could put her bag down.
“Where have you been?” He hadn’t changed out of his suit yet. He did not look relaxed.
She kept her mouth shut. She had a feeling he knew where she hadn’t been.
“I dropped by the restaurant on my way home from work to say hello and you were not there,” he rumbled.
She shook her head. She felt the dull thud starting in her chest. She would wait to find the extent of his knowledge before trying any damage control.
“You don’t work the dinner shift, do you?”
She shook her head again.
“You were at that art class, weren’t you?”
Was there any point in denying it? There were many stated rules of the Pants, but she realized there was an unstated one too: You couldn’t lie in the Pants. At least, she couldn’t.
She needed to start breathing again. “Yeah.”
His face moved and twitched in anger. His eyes bulged. That was the thing she always dreaded. She and Effie knew that when his eyes went like that they were in serious trouble. It had happened very rarely throughout their childhood. But in these long months since he’d brought his unwilling mother to live with them, it happened a lot more often.
Lena’s mother appeared in the front hall behind him. She was distressed. “Let’s talk about this in a calm way. George, why don’t you change before dinner. Lena, get yourself settled.” She had to pull George away like a coach walking a prizefighter back to his corner.
Lena ran upstairs and closed her door. She waited to see if she needed to cry. She endured a couple heaves. A tear soaked into the knee of the Pants. Her cheeks were blazing and her pulse was throbbing all around her body.
Dinner was a quiet, tense affair. Effie was at a friend’s house. Valia’s complaints—freshened by her knee injury—actually broke the tension rather than added to it, so thick was the air. At least someone was talking.
Afterward, Lena and her mother and father closed themselves up in the den.
Her father’s anger wasn’t as hot, but it seemed to have gotten deeper. “I’ve done some thinking, Lena.”
She was sitting on her hands.
“I