Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [64]
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 awakening.
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.
The fall was small, but it was grand. Her hands hurt like crazy. Her whole body was shaking with nervousness and pleasure. Her chest was so full she could barely fit a breath into it. She felt like she was living someone else’s life.
She crept around the house to let herself in the front door. Before she even turned the knob, she realized it would be locked. And so would the back door. And so would the side door. She was locked out of her house.
This struck her as so unbearably funny that she rolled around on the grass and laughed until she cried.
Sometime toward morning, Bridget’s fever broke. As dramatically as it had gone up, it came down. She was hardly aware of what was happening when the air around her suddenly turned from bone-cold to sweltering hot. The sweat seemed to pour from every inch of her skin. When she awoke with a start, she realized she had thrown off all her covers in her sleep. More alarmingly, she was lying in her underwear, still circled in the arms of Eric’s sleeping body. Now she was afraid to move. Whether Bee was sick or not, this would not look good to Kaya, for example. She didn’t want Eric to wake up and see how it was.
She thought she could very carefully untangle the sheet from the bottom of the bed and cover herself with it before he woke up. She was feeling remarkably lucid as she grasped