Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [91]
Last time they had started at the end. This time they started at the beginning. You couldn’t erase the past. You couldn’t even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.
Maybe tomorrow they would kiss. Maybe in the next weeks and months they would figure out how to touch each other, to translate their feelings into gestures of every kind. Someday, she hoped, they would make love.
But for now, all she wanted was this.
Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.
—Christopher Columbus
The Morgans’ beach house had sandy carpets. The fridge was empty but for one half-loaf of moldy Wonder bread. The pots and pans looked as though they had been washed most recently by Joe, their almost-two-year-old.
It was also staggeringly beautiful, pitched on the sea grass in a low field of dunes set just eighty yards or so back from the Atlantic Ocean.
The first thing they did when they got there was to tear off their clothes (by previous agreement they’d all worn bathing suits under them) and run yelling and screaming straight into the ocean.
The surf was big and rough. It clubbed, tackled, and upended them. It might have seemed scary, Tibby thought, except that they were all holding hands in a chain so the undertow couldn’t drag them down the beach. And that, in addition to all the hollering and taunting and shrieking, made it fun.
The second thing they did was collapse on the warm sand. The afternoon sun dried their backs as they lay there, shoulder to shoulder. Tibby’s heart still pounded from the thrill of the water. She had pebbles in her bathing suit. She loved the feeling of the sand under her cheek. She felt happy.
She wanted to let this happiness be her guide. She wouldn’t look forward with trepidation. She wouldn’t rev her brain like that.
There would be the inescapable good-byes. The nitty-gritty ones. Like when she would watch Lena and Bee drive away to Providence in the U-Haul on Thursday. She could picture Bee laying on the horn for the first five miles away from home. Then there would be the moment on Friday when she’d kiss Carmen and watch her roll off to Massachusetts with her dad and all fifty million of her suitcases. There would be the good-byes at the train station on Saturday morning when she and her mom would board the Metroliner for New York City. Her father would clap her on the back and Katherine’s chin would tremble and Nicky would shuffle and not kiss her back. Tibby could picture it if she tried. And the good-bye to Brian. She knew that one wouldn’t stick for long. Brian was supposed to go to Maryland, because it was almost free, and yet she suspected he hadn’t gotten an 800 on his math SAT for nothing. He would find his way to her. She knew he would. It was a good thing she had scored a single room.
But this moment was for the Septembers and for them alone. This was their weekend out of time. She would live in the happiness of each one of these moments, no matter how finite. Together, the Septembers could just be.
They all showered (the hot water ran out after Carmen’s and before Lena’s) and made a late lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches and brownies, feeling sun-tired and extra hungry, the way the ocean makes you feel.
The first cell phone rang just after lunch.
“Really? How great!” Carmen was laughing into the phone. She moved it a few inches from her mouth. “Win saw Katherine in the kids’ lounge at the hospital today,” she explained to Tibby. “The hockey helmet is off!”
“I know. She misses it.” Tibby smiled appreciatively. She liked Win. She gave Win the big thumbs-up. But she found herself wishing that he weren’t joining them just now.
The second call came from Valia. Valia apparently couldn’t find the photocopy of the drawing Lena had made of her, and wanted urgently to bring it back to Greece. Valia had new life in her—and she was putting it all into packing. Valia then insisted on getting Carmen