Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [6]
“Brian! Brian’s here!” Katherine threw open the front door and shouted the news to the top of the house.
Brian clearly longed for a real live date. He presented flowers to Tibby and a box of chocolates to Alice for the family. It was as though he’d read about dating in a manual somewhere. Nonetheless, he didn’t seem to mind that his real live date was wearing jeans while he was wearing a suit jacket and tie.
“You look beautiful,” he said, taking in the look of her, from the Traveling Pants, to the filmy iris blouse that showed what cleavage she had to its best possible effect, to the antique rhinestone clip in her hair, to the kohl shading along her upper eyelids. She really had tried to look pretty.
One thing about Brian was, he understood the Pants. Just like Bailey, two summers before, had understood them implicitly. The Pants, in a way, were like the ultimate litmus test, separating the worthy from the unworthy. And no matter how he looked, Brian was the most worthy guy she’d ever known.
Few people in the course of history had ever transformed, even just physically, as much as Brian had since the afternoon two years before when Tibby and Bailey first filmed him at the 7-Eleven.
It was great and all. A supreme dork with a golden heart whom you befriend because you love him grows to six feet two, gets his dental hygiene together, accidentally breaks his hideous glasses, and morphs into a virtual heartthrob before your eyes. It was like dumbly buying a share of stock at one dollar and watching it soar to one hundred. Tibby still observed in stupefaction how girls whispered and flirted around Brian these days.
But on the other hand, it seemed to Tibby like another example of destiny’s strange sense of humor. The single safest guy in Tibby’s life had turned imposing. He didn’t impose on purpose, she knew. He didn’t desire her to be mean to her. He didn’t plant these feelings in her heart to make her sad. But desire was there, his and hers, and as a consequence, it wasn’t a safe relationship anymore.
“Brian, Brian, Brian!” Katherine and Nicky were literally dancing around him. Brian had earned their love the hard way, not by being their peevish older sister, but by playing every endless, tedious game they could devise and listening carefully to every harebrained thing they could think of to say. They were a lot more demonstrative than his real live date, come to think of it.
Brian’s innocence gave him a funny kind of confidence. It was hard to explain. He didn’t care that he had walked all the way to her house because he had no car. He wasn’t self-conscious that their date car was her car. Once outside, he gallantly opened the door for her. On the driver’s side. He didn’t care, so it didn’t matter.
Inside the car, it was private. So dark and private. He touched his hand to the inside of her elbow. She got scared, and fumbled the key into the ignition.
They were growing up. That was a fact she had to face. He had grown from a kid to nearly a man. He was eighteen years old. He wanted Tibby in a different way than he used to. He looked at her differently. He wasn’t pushy or gross, but his eyes did linger on her breasts. When he put his hand on her, she could tell he was feeling the curve of her waist. And when he looked at her like that, she felt different too. It was natural, right?
In the school parking lot he reached for her hand. Hers was clammy.
What about friendship, though? What about the ease between them? Where was that going to go? And if they let it go, could they ever get it back?
That was the thing about this summer. With everything that was happening, she wondered, was there any going back?
The auditorium was dark and the DJ was loud and grating like at every school social function, but this was their last one, and for that reason, Tibby couldn’t bring herself to hate it quite as much.
Brian held her hand fast. He was declaring their couplehood. Ironically, he did her more credit than himself. This spring his social star had certainly risen past hers. Not that he noticed or cared. In spite