Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [28]
Carmen stared out the window of the taxicab, chewing through an expensive manicure and absently spitting out bits of fingernail as she hadn’t done since middle school. The taxi took them along the coast road, delivering them to the plane that would take them away from here. For the first day she could remember on this island, the sun wasn’t shining. The clouds came down low and the wind blew hard and erratically. She tried to orient herself with a glimpse of the Caldera—she knew it should be just outside her window—but she couldn’t see it.
Instead she pictured the heavy envelope now sitting in her bag with her name written across the front in Tibby’s scrawl. It had been in Tibby’s duffel bag. There had been one for each of them, with a few words of instruction written on the backs, including dates on which the envelopes were supposed to be opened. Lena had distributed them before she’d closed up the suitcase for good, as mystified as Carmen and Bridget were. She said she was going to take the bag back to her parents’ house and leave it in the basement unless anybody had another idea, which no one did.
As she thought of the suitcase, Carmen’s inner eye turned to another paper in there; the famous rules of the pants—the Manifesto, they had grandly called it. How splendid they thought they were. With an uncharacteristic feeling of scorn, she couldn’t help but consider now: how many of those rules had she broken? They had never enumerated the consequences of breaking the rules, but maybe they should have.
Were four fifteen-year-old girls so powerful that they got to make the rules? Was it because of the broken rules that the pants had been lost, and the sisterhood along with them? Was it because Carmen had taken a wet washcloth to the pants several times in defiance of rule #1? Was it because she’d thought I am fat in the pants many, many times, in defiance of rule #3? She’d certainly picked her nose in them, who was she kidding, and a couple of times at least, she had worn them with a tucked-in shirt and a belt. So much for rules #5 and #9.
But it was rule #10 that genuinely burned in front of her eyes as she imagined it. It was #10 where she had truly failed. They had all failed. And that was the one that actually mattered, the unforgivable, unthinkable root of their loss.
10. Remember: Pants = love. Love your pals. Love yourself.
But why would you wanna break
a perfectly good heart?
—Taylor Swift
After Carmen and Bridget left in the taxi, Lena sat at the little white Formica table in the kitchen of her grandparents’ house. This was where she’d sat eating cereal with Bapi the summer she’d turned sixteen. He’d sat in the chair across from this one, day after day, and quietly eaten his Cheerios.
It didn’t look the same as it had back then. Not this room or any other part of the house. It was faded and indistinct. She could barely make herself think of it as the same house. But everything was like that now. Even her own wrists and feet seemed strangely foreign to her. Maybe it was her eyes where the problem lodged.
Sometimes she would sink so deeply into her mind—no particular thoughts, no particular narrative, just mud and murk—that it would take her a bewilderingly long time to remember where she was and why. It was almost like she was falling asleep and waking up so many times a day, forgetting and remembering, that she was starting to live in between.
The phone rang and she picked it up. It was the woman from the coroner’s office again. The woman talked rapidly about paperwork and signatures and schedules, and though Lena listened as carefully as she could, she kept getting lost. She heard the words and knew the words and forgot them and tried to remember them, and by then the woman had already leapt ahead by dozens more words.
Over the past few days, Lena had tried, she really had. She knew the Rollinses, Bridget, and Carmen were counting on her. It was her place where this had happened. But her Greek wasn’t up to it. She wasn’t up to it. It was possible her brain wouldn’t process what had