Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [8]
He realized what she was up to. He smiled and shrugged at her under the pulsing lights of the store. He went obligingly toward Dragon Master and fished around in his pockets for change. Even as she watched him she knew he would play their old game to please her, but his life was outside of the screen now.
“Never mind,” she said. She was skittish. Her legs were jumpy. A drop of sweat rolled down her spine. She couldn’t figure out where to be. She was on the run.
They got back into the car. She drove to a small neighborhood park equidistant from their houses. It was another of their places.
They got out of the car and sat on a picnic table. It was quiet and dark. She was just going to have to stay still and let it catch her. She knew it.
She hopped off the table. She stood in front of him. With her standing and him sitting, their faces were at the same level. She put her clammy hands on his knees. He scooted toward her, to the very edge of table, and pulled her into his arms. He held her like that for a long time while her heart slammed out a beat.
When she looked up he kissed her first on the forehead and then on the lips. It was such a kiss. Full of pent-up desire and no uncertainties at all, he put his hands under her hair, supporting the back of her head. He paused the kiss for only a moment to say something in her ear. “I love you” was what he said.
It was beautiful to her, unlike anything she had ever felt before. It brought tears to her eyes and still more warm blood to her face.
Tibby felt the odd sensation of a wind blowing through her mind, alternately hot and sultry, then cold and bracing. And when the wind subsided, she realized that the friendship, as it had been, was gone.
Someday somebody’s going to ask you a question that you should say yes to.
—Old 97’s
Carmen was on a supremely important mission: She needed to steal her mother’s fake eyelashes and she needed to do it now.
She’d gotten up early to say good-bye to Bee one last time before Bee left for camp in Pennsylvania. She’d eaten breakfast with her mom, and spent a few minutes feeling guilty about not having a job as she watched Christina trundle off to work. She’d written a long e-mail to her friend and stepbrother, Paul.
Then she’d started to feel sad about saying good-bye to Bee and it reminded her of good-byes generally. So Carmen turned to the most recent issue of CosmoGIRL! for solace, as she often did in moments like these. And voilà, she was swept away by the imperative need to copy the innovative use of fake eyelashes on page 23. Sometimes it paid to be shallow.
It was so different for Carmen these days, walking into her mother’s room. The reason was obvious: It wasn’t her mother’s room anymore. It was her mom and David’s room. A woman’s room was so different than a woman’s room together with a man. It was utterly different when the woman was your mother and the man was her spanking-new husband, whom you’d met less than a year before.
Carmen wasn’t grateful for her parents’ divorce. There were so many things she’d lost. But it took David’s presence now to show her what remarkable access and role-defying closeness she’d shared with her mother for all those years when it had been just the two of them.
When her father had first left, a lot of the usual boundaries had come down. She’d slept in her mother’s bed almost every night for a year. Was it for Carmen’s sake? Or for Christina’s? Once there was no dad coming home after a hard day of work, “we girls,” as her mother called them, had eaten Eggo waffles or scrambled eggs for dinner many nights. Carmen had considered it a treat, not having to saw through some hunk of flank steak and stomach the obligatory vegetables.
Carmen used to feel an easy ownership of this room. Now she treaded uncertainly. She used to flop at will on her mother’s bed. It was a different bed now. Not literally a different bed, but in every other way different. She steered wide around it now.
It wasn’t just that