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“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.
