The Second Summer of the Sisterhood (2 page)

“Lenny, I’ll miss you,” Bee said quickly, tenderly, as startled as Lena was by the ready emotion in Lena’s voice.

Bee had changed so much in the last year, but a few things had stayed the same. Most people, including Lena herself, backed away when they sensed some out-of-control emotion. Bee went right out to meet it. Right now, that was a thing Lena loved.

Tibby was leaving the next day, and she hadn’t finished packing or begun shopping for their biannual break-and-enter at Gilda’s. She was madly packing when Bridget appeared.

Bridget sat atop Tibby’s bureau and watched her throw the entire contents of her desk on the floor. She couldn’t find her printer cable.

“Try the closet,” Bridget suggested.

“It’s not there,” Tibby answered gruffly. She couldn’t open her closet because it was jammed with things she could neither keep nor throw away (like her old guinea pig’s cage). Tibby feared that if she even cracked open the door, the whole mountain would tumble and crush her to death.

“I bet Nicky took it,” Tibby muttered. Nicky was her three-year-old brother. He took her stuff and broke her stuff, usually the moment before she really needed it.

Bee didn’t say anything. She was being awfully quiet. Tibby turned to look at her.

If a person hadn’t seen Bee in a year, they might not have recognized her sitting there. She wasn’t blond and she wasn’t thin and she wasn’t moving. She had tried to dye her hair really dark, but the dye she’d used had barely conquered the famous yellow struggling underneath. Bee was normally so thin and muscled that the fifteen or so pounds she’d gained over the winter and spring sat heavily and obviously on her arms and legs and torso. It almost looked like her body wasn’t willing to incorporate the extra fat. It just let it sit there, right on the surface, hoping it would go away soon. Tibby couldn’t help thinking that what Bee’s mind wanted and what her body wanted were two different things.

“I may have lost her,” Bee said solemnly.

“Lost who?” Tibby asked, looking up from the mess.

“Myself.” Bee bounced one heel against a closed drawer.

Tibby stood. She abandoned her mess. Gingerly she backed toward her bed and sat down, keeping an eye on Bee. This was a rare mood. Month after month Carmen had subtly tried to pry introspection out of Bee, but it hadn’t come. Lena had been maternal and sympathetic, but Bee hadn’t wanted to talk. Tibby knew this was important.

Although Tibby was the least physical of the group, she wished Bee were sitting next to her. And yet she knew intuitively that Bee was sitting on her bureau for a reason. She didn’t want to be sitting on a low, soft place within easy range of comfort. She also knew that Bee had chosen Tibby for this conversation because as much as Tibby loved her, she would listen without overwhelming her.

“How do you mean?”

“I think about the person I used to be, and she seems so far away. She walked fast, I walk slow. She stayed up late and got up early, I sleep. I feel like if she gets any farther away, I won’t be connected to her at all anymore.”

Tibby’s desire to go closer to Bee was so strong she had to clamp her elbows against her legs to make them stay put. Bee’s arms were wrapped around her body, containing her.

“Do you want . . . to stay connected to her?” Tibby’s words were slow and quiet, seeming to make their way to Bridget one at a time.

Bee had made every effort to change herself this year. Tibby quietly suspected she knew the reason. Bee couldn’t outrun her troubles, so she’d entered her own version of the witness protection program. Tibby knew how it was to lose someone you loved. And she also knew how tempting it was to cast off that sad, ruined part of yourself like a sweater you’d outgrown.

“Do I want to?” Bee thought about the words carefully. Some people (like Tibby, for instance) tended to listen in a muffled, sheltered way. Bee was the opposite.

“I think I do.” Tears flooded Bee’s eyes, gluing her yellow eyelashes into triangles. Tibby felt tears fill her own eyes.

“You need to find her then,” Tibby said, and her throat ached.

Bee stretched out one arm and left it out there, her palm turned up to the ceiling. Tibby got up without thinking and took the hand. Bee laid her head on Tibby’s shoulder. Tibby felt the softness of Bee’s hair and the moisture from her eyes against her collarbone.

“That’s why I’m going,” Bee said.

Later, when Tibby pulled away from Bee, she wondered about herself. She wasn’t as destructive as Bee. She had never been as dramatic. Rather, she’d slipped carefully, stealthily away from her ghosts.

Late that afternoon, Carmen lay in her bed feeling happy. She’d just returned from Tibby’s, where Bee and Lena had turned up too. They would gather again tonight for the second annual Pants initiation at Gilda’s. Carmen had thought she’d be feeling miserable right around now, feeling sorry that she wasn’t going anywhere. But she often found good-byes easier than expected. She took care of most of the dreading beforehand. And besides, seeing Bee had made her happy. Bee had a plan, and Carmen was glad. Carmen would miss her like crazy, but something inside Bee had shifted for the good.

The summer didn’t look so bad from where she lay. They had drawn straws to determine the route of the Pants, and Carmen would get them first. She had the Pants
and
a date tomorrow night with one of the best-looking guys in her class. That was fate, wasn’t it? That had to mean something.

All winter she’d tried to imagine what the Pants would bring her this summer, and now, with the convergence of her date and the Pants, she saw the big clue she’d been hoping for. This summer, they’d be the Love Pants.

Carmen sat up when she heard a familiar trill from her computer. It was an instant message from Bee.

Beezy3:
Packing. Do you have my purple sock with the heart on the ankle?

Carmabelle
: No. Like I’d wear your socks.

Carmen looked from her computer screen down to her feet. To her dismay, her socks were two faintly different shades of purple. She rotated her foot to get a view of her anklebone.

Carmabelle
: Ahem. Might possibly have sock.

The door of Gilda’s Aerobics Studio in upper Bethesda had a lock that was laughably easy to pick. But when they got to the top of the stairs, the smell of old sweat was so pervasive Carmen wondered why anyone besides them would choose to be there, never mind take the trouble to break in.

They got right to work, with a feeling of grandness in the air. It was already late. Bee was boarding a bus to Alabama at five thirty in the morning, and Tibby was leaving for Williamston College in the afternoon.

As a matter of tradition, Lena set up the candles and Tibby laid out the Gummi Worms, the deformed cheese puffs, the bottles of juice. Bridget set up the music, but she didn’t turn it on.

All eyes were on the bag in Carmen’s arms. They had each inscribed the Pants and ceremoniously put them away in September after Carmen’s birthday, the last of the four. None of them had seen them since.

There was a hush as Carmen opened the bag. She drew out the moment, proud that she was the one who had found the Pants—though, granted, she was also the one who had almost thrown them away. She let the bag fall to the ground as the Pants seemed to flutter open in slow motion, swirling the air with their memories.

In silent awe, Carmen laid the Pants on the floor, and the girls arranged themselves in a circle around them. Lena unfolded the Manifesto and laid it on top of them. They all knew the rules. They didn’t need to look at them now. They had already diagrammed the route of the Pants, and the logistics were a lot easier this summer.

They held hands.

“This is it,” Carmen breathed. The moment was all around them. She remembered the vow from last summer. They all remembered it. They said it together:

“To honor the Pants and the Sisterhood

And this moment and this summer and the rest of our lives

Together and apart.”

It was midnight, the end of together . . . and in another way, the beginning of it.

T
hough the town of Burgess, Alabama, population 12,042, lived large in Bridget’s mind, it didn’t warrant a lot of fanfare as a stop on the Triangle bus line. In fact, Bridget almost slept straight through it. Luckily, when the driver threw the parking brake, it jolted her awake, and she groggily hopped around, grabbing her bags. She raced off the bus so fast she forgot her rain jacket bunched up under the seat.

She walked along the sidewalk to the town’s center, noticing the fine, straight lines between the paving stones. Most sidewalk cracks you saw were fake joints pressed into wet cement, but these were real. Bee stepped on each crack forcefully, defiantly, feeling the sun beating down on her back and a burst of energy in her chest. Finally, she was doing something. She didn’t know what, exactly, but action always suited her better than waiting around.

In a quick survey of downtown, she noticed two churches, a hardware store, a pharmacy, a Laundromat, an ice cream place with tables outside, and what looked like a courthouse. Farther down Market Street she saw a quaint-looking bed-and-breakfast, which she knew would be too expensive, and around the corner from that, on
ROYAL STREET ARMS
, a less quaint Victorian with a weather-beaten red sign that said royal street arms, and under that,
ROOMS FOR RENT
.

She walked up the steps and rang the bell. A slight woman in her fifties or so answered the door.

Bridget pointed up to the sign. “I noticed your sign. I’m looking for a room to rent for a couple of weeks.” Or a couple of months.

The woman nodded, studying Bridget carefully. It was her house, Bridget could see. It was big and had probably even been grand once, but it, and she, had obviously fallen on hard times.

They introduced themselves, and the woman, Mrs. Bennett, showed Bridget a bedroom on the second floor at the front of the house. It was simply furnished but big and sunny. It had a ceiling fan and a hot plate and a minifridge.

“This one shares a bathroom and costs seventy-five dollars a week,” she explained.

“I’ll take it,” Bridget said. She would have to finesse the issue of ID by putting down a giant deposit, but she had brought $450 in cash, and hopefully she’d find a job soon.

Mrs. Bennett ticked off the house rules, and Bridget paid up.

She wondered at the speed and simplicity of the whole transaction as she moved her bags into the bedroom. She’d been in Burgess less than an hour, and she was set up. Itinerant life was easier than it was cracked up to be.

There wasn’t a phone in the room, though there was a pay phone in the hallway. Bridget used it to call home. She left a message for her dad and Perry that she’d arrived safely.

She pulled the cord to start up the ceiling fan and lay down on the bed. She found herself banging her heel against the bottom of the white metal frame, thinking about the moment when she would introduce herself to Greta. She had tried to picture that moment so many times, and she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She didn’t like it. The thing she wanted from Greta, whatever unnamable thing it was, would be crushed in the first dutiful embrace. They were strangers, yet they had so much heaviness between them. Brave though Bee was, she was scared of this woman and all the things she knew. Bee wanted to know them and she didn’t want to know them. She wanted to find them out in her own way.

Bee felt an old familiar buzz of energy in her limbs.

She got out of bed. She looked in the mirror. You could sometimes see a new thing in a new mirror.

At first look she saw the usual devastation. It had started when she’d quit soccer. No, really it had started before that, at the end of last summer. She’d fallen for an older guy. She’d fallen harder for him and gone further with him than she’d meant to. The trick Bee always had was to keep moving, moving at a pace so fast it was thrilling and even reckless. But after last summer she’d paused for a bit, and the painful things—old, supposed-to-be-forgotten things—had caught up with her. By November she’d quit soccer, just as the college scouts were swarming around her. At Christmastime the world had celebrated birth and Bee had remembered a death. She’d hidden her hair under a coat of Dark Ash Brown #3. By February she’d been sleeping late and watching TV, resolutely turning bags of donuts and boxes of cereal into personal gravity. The only thing that had kept her in the world was the constant attention of Carmen, Lena, and Tibby. They would not let her be, and she loved them for it.

But as she looked longer in this mirror, Bridget saw something different. She saw protection. She had a blanket of fat on her body. She had a coat of pigment on her hair. She had the cover of a lie if she wanted it.

She didn’t look like Bee Vreeland. Who said she had to be her?

“This is like a preview, isn’t it?” Tibby’s mom said excitedly as her dad pulled the silver minivan into a parking space behind Lowbridge Hall.