Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [93]
Tibby remembered her dream about taxidermy and understood in a new way the beauty of the Pants. The Pants could move along with them.
“Whatever happens,” Bridget said, “we will find each other. We always will.”
I’m going back to the start.
—Coldplay
EPILOGUE
For our last hour at the beach, we exchanged gifts instead of saying good-bye. We didn’t plan it that way, exactly. It just kind of fell into place, like us all finding each other on the beach in the middle of the night. We each wanted a few things we could hold on to.
The sun streamed pink and orange behind our heads, and the ocean churned dark. The sand felt softer in the sweet light. The air was warm and comforting.
I can’t tell you all that was said and what was felt. I just can’t. But I’ll tell you what happened and you can imagine it. You’ll do better with your imagination than I could with my words.
Carmen got to go first, because she is the least patient. Not about getting, about giving. “For the walls of our dorm rooms,” she announced, handing them out.
Carmen had found four long, vertical frames and pasted three photographs into each of them. The first photo, on the top, was the one of our mothers, as young, happening, late-eighties moms sitting on a wall, arms around each other’s shoulders, wearing jeans. The photo was familiar to us now. A little speckled. A little old. A little heartbreaking to remember Marly, as it always was. The next photo, in the middle, was also old, one I barely remembered ever seeing. It was the four of us as toddlers, our faces peeking over a couch. We looked like a miniature girl band. Carmen looked like the singer. I, small and confused, looked like the one who plugged the instruments into the amplifiers. It made me laugh. The bottom photo was from graduation, the four of us in the same order, the same faces, the same expressions.
The crying started for each of us around then. It was inevitable. It was like that feeling of being outside in a rainfall without a raincoat or umbrella. You fight getting wet for a while and then you just surrender to it and you realize it feels pretty nice. You wonder, why do we fight the things we fight when giving in to them isn’t so bad at all?
Bee went next. She passed out tiny jewelry boxes. We pulled the tops off all at once.
On four delicate silver chains dangled four tiny, identical charms. Of pants. They were tiny silver charms in the shape of pants, just like our Pants. Now they were our Pants, in a new and different way.
Bee explained how Greta first spotted one in a jewelry kiosk in the middle of the mall in Huntsville, Alabama. And how she and Greta made a joint project of hounding the jeweler, Mr. Bosely, until he came up with three more.
We all put them on each other, fiddling with clasps, holding up hair. I pressed the tiny charm flat against my sternum, knowing it would live there now. We couldn’t look at each other except in little bits. It was hard to feel so much.
Lena handed hers out next. She had even wrapped them. We tore the paper off with different degrees of care: I folded the wrapping paper for future use, Bee tore at hers savagely and sat on the crumpled paper so it wouldn’t blow down the beach.
Lena had made four nearly identical drawings and framed them, one for each. She’d drawn the Traveling Pants twice, front and back. But she’d drawn them upside down and side by side so that together they formed a big W. Next to it Lena added the letter e. The picture said We.
I went last. I handed out videocassettes with specially decorated labels. “We have to go inside for this,” I said.
I had already made sure the Morgans’ VCR was in working