Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [9]
The bathroom used to bloom with female stuff—creams, lotions, makeup, tampons, and perfume. Now, in deference to them, Christina kept it all mostly stowed in the cabinet. Even seeing David’s shaving cream can lined up next to Christina’s nail polish remover made Carmen feel like she’d just crawled between them in bed.
The false eyelashes weren’t in the medicine cabinet, Carmen quickly discovered. When you lived with your daughter, you left things like that in easy view. When you lived with your brand-new husband, you hid the evidence.
Carmen already knew that most of the stuff Christina didn’t want David to see, she stored in the cabinet above the toilet. Yes, this was the right department, Carmen realized as soon as she’d jiggled open the sticky door. There was wart remover, there was mustache bleach, there was bikini wax and hair straightening balm and a box of Nice ’n Easy in Deep Mahogany. Carmen snaked her hand toward the back, knocking over appetite suppressants and a pack of laxatives. A plastic bottle was set rolling by the falling laxatives. Carmen watched in displeasure as it fell off the shelf and…splash, into the toilet. Damn.
She watched it bobbing in the toilet water. She could see it contained some kind of vitamins. She really hoped the cap was watertight.
While she delayed reaching her hand into the toilet—who hurried to do a thing like that?—she absently wondered why her mother kept vitamins in the cabinet of shame. David was all about vitamins. He ate them for breakfast. He talked about various herbal supplements like they were his best friends. What kind of vitamins would Christina keep from her dashing nutrition-man?
Carmen’s curiosity was always her best motivator. She stuck her hand in the toilet and plucked out the bottle, tossing it directly into the sink and running hot water over it. She added some liquid soap. Once the bottle and her hand were sufficiently clean, she turned it over to satisfy her questioning mind.
Her head grew chill and fuzzy. The fuzz invaded her chest and expanded in her lower abdomen. The front of the label communicated precisely why this bottle lived between the laxatives and the Preparation H. But it wasn’t David her mom was trying to hide them from. At least, that was what Carmen powerfully suspected.
They were prenatal vitamins. The kind you took when you were having a baby. And Christina was almost certainly hiding them from Carmen.
Tibby squinted in the morning sunlight. She was groggy and disoriented, her lips were swollen, and her eyes felt puffy. She felt like she had a hangover, but not because she’d had any alcohol.
It was one of those mornings when you come to terms with a strange new reality. You ask yourself, Did I dream that? Did I actually do that? Did he really say that? Reality comes back in bits and pieces, and you experience the novelty of it all over again. You wonder, Will this day and this night and tomorrow and all the rest of the days be different because of what happened last night? And in Tibby’s case, she knew the answer.
She put her fingers on her lips. Could you get a hangover from kissing?
Was Brian awake yet? She pictured him in his bed. She pictured him in her bed. She got the shivery feeling in the bottom of her stomach, so she stopped picturing him in her bed. Was he regretting anything? Was she regretting anything?
What would they say when they saw each other again?
Would he just drop by during pancakes the way he often did? Would he plant a wet one on her lips and wait to see if anyone noticed?
She stood up and looked at herself in