Katherine moved herself in front of Tibby’s clock radio and studied it hopefully.
“God, it’s almost eleven,” Tibby answered herself.
She was about to head directly down the stairs, but then she decided to brush her teeth first. When she arrived in the kitchen, Brian was at the table setting up dominos with Nicky.
“Let’s try to set up a few at once,” Brian counseled patiently, arranging them in a snaking row.
Nicky only wanted to knock them over.
“Hey,” Tibby said.
“Hey.”
“Did you eat breakfast?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. Yeah.” He seemed a bit nervous for some reason, the way his shoulders were rising toward his ears.
“What’s up?” she asked him. She went to the refrigerator to inspect.
“Just, uh…Can I talk to you for a second?”
She closed the refrigerator and stood up straighter. She looked at him. “Sure.”
“In…there?” He gestured toward the living room.
Tibby’s eyebrows nearly joined over her nose. “In there?”
Nobody ever did anything in the living room in her house. Loretta ventured in once a week to clear out the cobwebs. And every few months her parents had a party and acted like they relaxed on those perfect sofas all the time.
Mystified, she followed him. They posed on the sofa like cocktail party guests.
“So…what?” she asked him, a sprout of worry in her chest. It was slightly funny how they were sitting next to each other and both facing forward.
He rubbed both palms against the denim covering his thighs.
Tibby pulled her legs up onto the sofa so she could turn to him. “Everything okay?”
“I wanted to ask you something.”
“Okay. Ask.”
“You know the thing tonight?”
“Uh…you mean the senior party?”
“Will you go with me?”
Her eyebrows compressed even further. “We’re all going. Right? Lena…Bee…”
He waved a hand to acknowledge all that. “But will you go with me?”
She was utterly perplexed. “You mean like a date?” She blurted it out because it sounded so ridiculous.
“Kind of. Yeah.”
Suddenly, it seemed mean to snort or laugh at the preposterousness of this concept. She tilted her head. He was very brave to keep looking at her eyes the way he did.
She clasped her hands. It dawned on her that she was wearing a tank top and her pajama bottoms. Tibby spent an unusual amount of time in her pajamas, so it wasn’t like Brian hadn’t seen her in them hundreds of times. But here, in this stage-set living room, under the glare of this weird question, it only accentuated the weirdness.
“A kind of date?” she asked slowly.
“Kind of.”
She wouldn’t hurt his feelings. She just wouldn’t. It didn’t matter where this would lead them. She nodded. “Okay.”
She felt raw sitting with him on the sofa. When he leaned toward her she had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. His body moved in slow motion, and she seemed to see herself and Brian from some distant spot in the room. He possessed a new kind of confidence, a deliberateness. She was both terrified and eerily calm.
So she sat still, looking into his eyes as he reached toward her face. He didn’t kiss her or anything like that. But what he did felt just as shockingly intimate. The first three fingers of his right hand landed lightly on her warm face and smoothed out the rumple of consternation in the center of her forehead.
“Okay,” he said.
One day in the early spring when Lena stayed home sick from school, she watched a young woman on a daytime talk show who’d written a book about being adopted. This woman had never met or been contacted by her birth mother, and yet she spent her whole life wishing and hoping her birth mother would find her. She talked about how she didn’t want to move from the home where her parents had first adopted her. She didn’t like to take long trips. She always left explicit forwarding instructions when she moved. She made sure her phone was listed under her own name. She left her little trail of bread crumbs. She wanted to make sure she could be found.
Since then, Lena had thought about this woman many times, and she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t dwell on it. Minds worked in weird ways. Like how Lena always thought of Ritz crackers when she shaved her legs. Who knew why? And did it even matter?
But now, as she lay on her bed, filling out forms for school in September, Lena thought about the woman on the talk show again. She filled out a roommate questionnaire and she kept flashing on the woman’s sad gray eyes. She filled out the dorm preference sheet and she saw the woman’s twitching lower lip.
And as Lena lay back on her bed and put her hands over her face, it finally dawned on her. This woman reminded Lena of herself.
Without even realizing it, Lena had subtly resisted the idea of going away this summer. Even a week away from home made her feel slightly unglued. The thought of moving to another city in September, thrilling as it was, was also a source of agony.
Lena wanted to leave home. For one thing, she was ready. For another thing, since her dad had forced Valia, his widowed mother, to leave her beautiful Greek island and relocate to suburban Maryland, the Kaligaris house had been full of tension.
Lena looked forward to RISD. She wanted to be an artist, she was almost sure of it. Her art class this summer was the single joy in her life, apart from her friends.
And yet. And yet Lena didn’t want to go. And the reason was that she didn’t want to leave the place where Kostos could find her. And on a deeper level, she didn’t want to put more distance—in time or in space—between now and the time when he’d loved her. She didn’t want to become a different girl from the one whom he had loved.
The phone rang and Lena snatched it up before Valia could get it and yell at the innocent caller.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Carma. Hi. What are you doing?”
“Getting dressed. I had another waxing fiasco. What are you wearing?”
Lena cast her eye at the clock. She was supposed to meet everybody at the senior party in half an hour. She was bringing Effie as her date, because she had no other date and because Effie was spocking on some senior guy or other.
Lena then cast her glance on her open closet. She had no excitement in getting dressed. Her wardrobe had two categories: the clothing she had worn with Kostos—filled with memories—and the clothing she hadn’t—empty. She didn’t want either.
“I don’t know. I didn’t pick yet.”
“Lenny, it’s a big night,” Carmen cajoled. “Get dressed. Wear something great. Put on makeup. Do you need me to come over?”
“No. I’m all right.” She didn’t feel like setting Carmen loose in her closet.
“Don’t wear that khaki skirt,” Carmen warned.
“I’m not,” Lena said defensively, even though it was exactly what she had planned to wear.
Unfortunately, Lena’s wardrobe represented her life. It was binary, like a computer with its universe of zeros and ones. Lena had two settings: 1. Thinking about Kostos. 2. Avoiding thinking about Kostos.
Lena deeply empathized with the adopted woman on the talk show. Lena too had been abandoned by the person she thought loved her best of all. And without meaning to or wanting to, she harbored a passive, unquenchable hope that someday he would come for her.
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
—Willa cather
“Brian! Brian’s here!” Katherine threw open the front door and shouted the news to the top of the house.
Brian clearly longed for a real live date. He presented flowers to Tibby and a box of chocolates to Alice for the family. It was as though he’d read about dating in a manual somewhere. Nonetheless, he didn’t seem to mind that his real live date was wearing jeans while he was wearing a suit jacket and tie.
; “You look beautiful,” he said, taking in the look of her, from the Traveling Pants, to the filmy iris blouse that showed what cleavage she had to its best possible effect, to the antique rhinestone clip in her hair, to the kohl shading along her upper eyelids. She really had tried to look pretty.
One thing about Brian was, he understood the Pants. Just like Bailey, two summers before, had understood them implicitly. The Pants, in a way, were like the ultimate litmus test, separating the worthy from the unworthy. And no matter how he looked, Brian was the most worthy guy she’d ever known.
Few people in the course of history had ever transformed, even just physically, as much as Brian had since the afternoon two years before when Tibby and Bailey first filmed him at the 7-Eleven.
It was great and all. A supreme dork with a golden heart whom you befriend because you love him grows to six feet two, gets his dental hygiene together, accidentally breaks his hideous glasses, and morphs into a virtual heartthrob before your eyes. It was like dumbly buying a share of stock at one dollar and watching it soar to one hundred. Tibby still observed in stupefaction how girls whispered and flirted around Brian these days.
But on the other hand, it seemed to Tibby like another example of destiny’s strange sense of humor. The single safest guy in Tibby’s life had turned imposing. He didn’t impose on purpose, she knew. He didn’t desire her to be mean to her. He didn’t plant these feelings in her heart to make her sad. But desire was there, his and hers, and as a consequence, it wasn’t a safe relationship anymore.
“Brian, Brian, Brian!” Katherine and Nicky were literally dancing around him. Brian had earned their love the hard way, not by being their peevish older sister, but by playing every endless, tedious game they could devise and listening carefully to every harebrained thing they could think of to say. They were a lot more demonstrative than his real live date, come to think of it.
Brian’s innocence gave him a funny kind of confidence. It was hard to explain. He didn’t care that he had walked all the way to her house because he had no car. He wasn’t self-conscious that their date car was her car. Once outside, he gallantly opened the door for her. On the driver’s side. He didn’t care, so it didn’t matter.
Inside the car, it was private. So dark and private. He touched his hand to the inside of her elbow. She got scared, and fumbled the key into the ignition.
They were growing up. That was a fact she had to face. He had grown from a kid to nearly a man. He was eighteen years old. He wanted Tibby in a different way than he used to. He looked at her differently. He wasn’t pushy or gross, but his eyes did linger on her breasts. When he put his hand on her, she could tell he was feeling the curve of her waist. And when he looked at her like that, she felt different too. It was natural, right?
In the school parking lot he reached for her hand. Hers was clammy.
What about friendship, though? What about the ease between them? Where was that going to go? And if they let it go, could they ever get it back?
That was the thing about this summer. With everything that was happening, she wondered, was there any going back?
The auditorium was dark and the DJ was loud and grating like at every school social function, but this was their last one, and for that reason, Tibby couldn’t bring herself to hate it quite as much.
Brian held her hand fast. He was declaring their couplehood. Ironically, he did her more credit than himself. This spring his social star had certainly risen past hers. Not that he noticed or cared. In spite of her beautiful friends, Tibby was identified more with the disaffected artist types. Bee was a glamour jock. Carmen had turned into quite the babe, the target of a lot of underclassman fantasies, though she’d never curried favor with the ruling set. Lena flew under the social radar. And Brian, oddly, had become a darling of the social whirl—even they needed new blood occasionally—getting invitations none of the rest of them got. Tibby was one of those who sat on the sidelines in dark clothes, making cynical observations with other self-designated misfits who were too cautious to jump into the fray.
Of all the boys in school, only Brian seemed to notice how Tibby’s hair had grown out, how her delicate shoulders looked in a tube top, how the Pants made her small behind look especially nice. She loved being noticed like this. And also, she didn’t.
Bee and Carmen found them right away. Lena and Effie hadn’t arrived yet. Effie was an infamously slow and primping date. Bee was wearing a white halter dress and her hair was brighter than the tea lights. She looked like an extremely fit Marilyn Monroe. Carmen wore a siren red slip dress, to which the boys were already flocking. As stunning as they looked in their finery, Tibby was still grateful it was she who had drawn for the Pants.
Bridget and Carmen hustled Tibby off to the bathroom in their time-honored way. The cavernous girls’ bathroom was always the most happening spot at a school party. “You both look unbelievable,” Tibby said along the way.
“You, Tibby, are luscious,” Carmen responded. “Brian looked like his heart was going to break when we took you away.”
An army of gussied girls were perfecting makeup, smoking, and gossiping in front of the mirrors.
Bee took out her lip gloss. She put some on and shared it around.
“Hey, Bee?” Carmen said.
“Yeah?”
“If you ever meet a guy and you fall in love with him, but because of some weird genetic mutation he doesn’t seem to return the feeling?”
Bee always went patiently along with Carmen’s counterfactuals. “Yeah?”
“Wear that dress.”
Bee laughed. “Okay.”
Lena arrived a few minutes later, dressed down as usual, in an olive green cargo skirt and a black shirt.
“Lenny, did you have to wear the ponytail?” Carmen asked fake-irritably.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Come on, it’s our last high school party,” Bee said.
Together, they put some mascara and lip gloss on her and coaxed the elastic out of her hair.
Looking at their faces in the mirror, Tibby felt as though she might cry. This was the place where they’d spent the majority of school events these last four years. They had had more fun here, together, than anyplace else. This, on some level, was their real high school experience.
Carmen caught her look. “It’s sad, I know.”
“Let’s get back out there,” Tibby said. She didn’t want to feel these things right now.
Back in the auditorium, they dispersed. Brian was waiting eagerly. “Do you want to dance?” he asked Tibby.
Was she allowed to say no? Was a real live date allowed to say no? As he took her hand and led her to the floor, the fast song changed into a slow one. Was that better or worse? She couldn’t decide.
It would have taken her an hour to figure out how to get her arms around Brian, but he went right for it. He closed in and held her tight.
So here it was. This was a first. She had, admittedly, thought a lot about Brian’s body and how it would feel. Friendship seemed to fuzz at the edges as this new thing happened.
He was so much taller than her now, her head barely reached his chest. His hands were on her waist, her hips, her back. Slowly touching the places he’d looked at for so long. She felt a lightness in her lower abdomen, a wobbliness in her legs.
This was going too fast. It was getting away from her. She couldn’t do it.
Her cheeks were deeply flushed as she pulled away. “Can we go?” she asked.
“Where?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.” She took his hand and led him out of the auditorium and toward the parking lot.
She suddenly had her idea. She’d get them back to basics.
He followed her into the car without complaint. In silence she drove to the seminal 7-Eleven on River Road.
He realized what she was up to. He smiled and shrugged at her under the pulsing lights of the store. He went obligingly toward Dragon Master and fished around in his pockets for c
hange. Even as she watched him she knew he would play their old game to please her, but his life was outside of the screen now.
“Never mind,” she said. She was skittish. Her legs were jumpy. A drop of sweat rolled down her spine. She couldn’t figure out where to be. She was on the run.
They got back into the car. She drove to a small neighborhood park equidistant from their houses. It was another of their places.
They got out of the car and sat on a picnic table. It was quiet and dark. She was just going to have to stay still and let it catch her. She knew it.
She hopped off the table. She stood in front of him. With her standing and him sitting, their faces were at the same level. She put her clammy hands on his knees. He scooted toward her, to the very edge of table, and pulled her into his arms. He held her like that for a long time while her heart slammed out a beat.
When she looked up he kissed her first on the forehead and then on the lips. It was such a kiss. Full of pent-up desire and no uncertainties at all, he put his hands under her hair, supporting the back of her head. He paused the kiss for only a moment to say something in her ear. “I love you” was what he said.
It was beautiful to her, unlike anything she had ever felt before. It brought tears to her eyes and still more warm blood to her face.
Tibby felt the odd sensation of a wind blowing through her mind, alternately hot and sultry, then cold and bracing. And when the wind subsided, she realized that the friendship, as it had been, was gone.
Someday somebody’s going to ask you a question that you should say yes to.
—Old 97’s
Carmen was on a supremely important mission: She needed to steal her mother’s fake eyelashes and she needed to do it now.
She’d gotten up early to say good-bye to Bee one last time before Bee left for camp in Pennsylvania. She’d eaten breakfast with her mom, and spent a few minutes feeling guilty about not having a job as she watched Christina trundle off to work. She’d written a long e-mail to her friend and stepbrother, Paul.