Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [4]
“But they can’t go anywhere,” Tibby pointed out timidly.
“That’s the point!” Felicia thundered. “It’s just what you wanted!”
“I did?” Tibby asked, confused and guilty for having maybe wanted it. She found herself wondering if they were too heavy to be circulated among their various dorm rooms.
Now we really won’t have to worry about washing them, she consoled herself in her dream-reality.
When Tibby awoke, Katherine was at her side. Katherine’s head as she stood there loomed one inch from Tibby’s as she lay down. “Brian’s visiting.” Katherine loved trying out words. She was happy with herself that she’d said visiting as opposed to just here.
Tibby groggily sat up. “What time is it?”
Katherine moved herself in front of Tibby’s clock radio and studied it hopefully.
“God, it’s almost eleven,” Tibby answered herself.
She was about to head directly down the stairs, but then she decided to brush her teeth first. When she arrived in the kitchen, Brian was at the table setting up dominos with Nicky.
“Let’s try to set up a few at once,” Brian counseled patiently, arranging them in a snaking row.
Nicky only wanted to knock them over.
“Hey,” Tibby said.
“Hey.”
“Did you eat breakfast?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. Yeah.” He seemed a bit nervous for some reason, the way his shoulders were rising toward his ears.
“What’s up?” she asked him. She went to the refrigerator to inspect.
“Just, uh…Can I talk to you for a second?”
She closed the refrigerator and stood up straighter. She looked at him. “Sure.”
“In…there?” He gestured toward the living room.
Tibby’s eyebrows nearly joined over her nose. “In there?”
Nobody ever did anything in the living room in her house. Loretta ventured in once a week to clear out the cobwebs. And every few months her parents had a party and acted like they relaxed on those perfect sofas all the time.
Mystified, she followed him. They posed on the sofa like cocktail party guests.
“So…what?” she asked him, a sprout of worry in her chest. It was slightly funny how they were sitting next to each other and both facing forward.
He rubbed both palms against the denim covering his thighs.
Tibby pulled her legs up onto the sofa so she could turn to him. “Everything okay?”
“I wanted to ask you something.”
“Okay. Ask.”
“You know the thing tonight?”
“Uh…you mean the senior party?”
“Will you go with me?”
Her eyebrows compressed even further. “We’re all going. Right? Lena…Bee…”
He waved a hand to acknowledge all that. “But will you go with me?”
She was utterly perplexed. “You mean like a date?” She blurted it out because it sounded so ridiculous.
“Kind of. Yeah.”
Suddenly, it seemed mean to snort or laugh at the preposterousness of this concept. She tilted her head. He was very brave to keep looking at her eyes the way he did.
She clasped her hands. It dawned on her that she was wearing a tank top and her pajama bottoms. Tibby spent an unusual amount of time in her pajamas, so it wasn’t like Brian hadn’t seen her in them hundreds of times. But here, in this stage-set living room, under the glare of this weird question, it only accentuated the weirdness.
“A kind of date?” she asked slowly.
“Kind of.”
She wouldn’t hurt his feelings. She just wouldn’t. It didn’t matter where this would lead them. She nodded. “Okay.”
She felt raw sitting with him on the sofa. When he leaned toward her she had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. His body moved in slow motion, and she seemed to see herself and Brian from some distant spot in the room. He possessed a new kind of confidence, a deliberateness. She was both terrified and eerily calm.
So she sat still, looking into his eyes as he reached toward her face. He didn’t kiss her or anything like that. But what he did felt just as shockingly intimate. The first