Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [64]
Until the night she came home from drinks with her publicist, having had a gin and tonic and two glasses of wine on an empty stomach.
She’d eaten so little for three days in a row, she felt fierce and impermeable. She hadn’t said or thought anything substantial in over a week, so she felt shallow. And Jones wasn’t home, so she felt sort of like an adult. She felt like nothing could hurt her. Or she felt like nothing could hurt her for a few more drunken minutes, at least.
She got the envelope out of her underwear drawer and pulled it open. Hit me with your best shot, she thought, so shallow she could only think in Pat Benatar lyrics. She dumped the contents out on the bed.
To her amazement an iPhone dropped out. She looked it over quickly. It was the newest kind, with the biggest memory, the fastest processing, the better camera with video. It was exactly the one she’d been yearning to get but hadn’t, because she wasn’t eligible for an upgrade yet and it cost six hundred bucks. Here she’d been girding to have her heart broken more and instead she got an iPhone.
There was a brief note with it.
Carma,
Brian got this for me and I have no use for it, but I thought you might.
Love,
Tibby
That was it? That was too easy. There was another note folded up in the envelope. She opened it.
Carmen,
I’m keeping this short, my dearest Carma Carmeena, because I can’t make the feelings I have for you fit on this page, I can’t even try, so I’m just going to ask you one thing. Will you come to the address written below on or soon after April 2? Of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I know you’re really busy. But it’s less than an hour and a half from NYC. Come if you can, because there’s someone I want you to meet.
Love,
Tibby
Carmen looked in the envelope for something else, but there was nothing. There was nothing to wallow in, nothing to cry over. She was so hyped up and drunk and hungry and prepared to cry she put her head down on the bed and cried anyway.
Bridget had used one of the kiosks at SFO airport to buy the cheapest plane ticket to Sydney, Australia.
She got a flight out early the next morning. She looked down at the last bit of coast as it disappeared into seven thousand miles of water. Checking out her window every few hours of daylight made her wonder whether the earth was really made of anything besides water. She didn’t know what she’d find where she was going. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. It was a long way to go for nothing. But it felt good to be moving hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet up in the air.
She remembered again that juncture of uncertainty starting around age twenty-five, after they’d had to give up the apartment on Avenue C, where she’d been happy. That was one place she could remember that she hadn’t wanted to leave.
Tibby had moved in with Brian. Carmen had gotten her fancy agent and started getting real parts. Lena had gotten promoted to a teaching gig that kept her in Providence five days a week. Eric had graduated from NYU law school and gotten a job that kept him busy twelve hours a day. And what had Bridget been doing? Moving from one temporary living situation to another, walking dogs for money, working for a city landscape company in good weather, learning how to dance on Rollerblades from a dazzlingly crazy man in Central Park—nothing that was remunerative or ambitious, anything that kept her outside.
Leaving that apartment had clearly been a moment to grow up, but had she looked at her options and thought them all through? Had she searched for a job or a living situation that would suit her needs? Nope. She’d managed to amble from couch to floor, from apartment to apartment, from one impulse to the next for a year and a half, before she hopped on a plane and moved across the country. When in doubt, keep moving.
She looked down at the ocean.