Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [94]
It was short. Just ten minutes. Most of it was stuff from my own parents’ collection, but I’d managed to get stuff from Tina and Ari too. I’d even given the two of them and my mom a little preview a few nights before in our den, though I made them keep it a secret. The three of them wept while I crowded up all close to the TV and pretended not to. The three moms hugged afterward. That made me feel happy.
The first part was on old-fashioned Super 8 film, atmospheric and a little jerky, showing us crawling around in Lena’s backyard. Well, Lena was timid about crawling, so we mostly nudged and rolled her. I was a stringy baby, bald and purposeless. Bee’s hair looked like white feathers adorning her head. She was a fast crawler. Her mother had to pull her away from the side of the pool. Bee’s brother, Perry, made a brief appearance. He didn’t move much, but he did find a bug in the grass. Carmen had perfect brown ringlets, giant eyes, and a very loud voice with which to coax inert baby Lena.
By the time we were two, some parent or other had sprung for a real video camera. The next part showed the four of us girls lined up on four plastic potties. Lena sat patiently, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her palm. I was tiny and seemed to be falling into mine. Carmen was trying to yank a Mary Jane off her foot. Bee finished first. “I’m done!” She stood up and shouted at someone off camera.
The next bits were fast takes, a catalog of joint birthday parties, bad haircuts, and complex orthodontia. Siblings, parents, grandparents, and other relatives filtered through in various fashion mishaps.
The last one was a long shot, taken when we were about seven. I didn’t even understand the significance of it when I’d picked it out and smoothed it into the end of the movie.
It was taken at Rehoboth Beach, probably within a mile of this very place. The camera showed the four of us holding hands in the rough surf, jumping waves, shouting and screaming.
It was just like now. Exactly as we had done the afternoon before and early that morning. As I looked at the screen I could feel the cold, salty water covering my hands, linked with Bee’s on one side and Lena’s on the other. I could hear Carmen’s shrieks of joy in my ear. Different times we lined up in a different order. It didn’t matter the order.
The image stayed on the screen and we all watched it, even when it went still.
Back then was exactly the same as now. To brave the undertow, we had learned to hold hands.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The novel opens with a first-person narrative by Tibby. Why do you think the author selected this character to frame the story? Would you have selected another character, and if so, what would he or she say?
2. Epigraphs (short quotations) from a variety of sources—song lyrics, remarks by real-life personalities, fictitious sayings by the novel’s characters—are used to separate sections of the book. Which one is your favorite? Why?
3. Of the four girls, whom are you most like? Whose first year of college would you most like to follow?
4. “Our shared childhood is ending. Maybe we’ll never live at home again. Maybe we’ll never all live in the same place again. We’re headed off to start our real lives. To me that is awe-inspiring, but it is also the single scariest thought in the world” (prologue). The girls realize that leaving for college is much bigger than leaving each other for just a summer. Do you think each of the girls is prepared to be away from her friends for an entire year? Whose first year do you most worry about? How would you prepare to leave your friends?
5. In the prologue, Tibby compares each of the girls to a car. What kind of car would you be? Why?
6. “Tibby was a slow adjuster. In preschool, her teachers had said she had trouble with transitions. Tibby preferred looking backward for information rather than forward. As far as she was concerned, she’d take a nursery school report card over a fortune-teller