Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood Read Online Free PDF Page A

dig in this room and probably unearth her Fisher-Price farm if you tried hard enough. What was the matter with her?
    It was dusty and stuffy and it bothered her. It was always dusty and stuffy. It didn’t always bother her. In an uncharacteristic move, she walked over to the window and forced it open. It was hard going, because she had not opened this room to actual air in as long as she could remember. The paint stuck a bit as she wrenched up the sash. Oh.
    The air came in and it did feel good. It was nice, open like this. The breeze blew around some of the papers on her desk, but she didn’t mind.
    She heard her mother downstairs in the kitchen. She thought of telling her about Brian. A part of her really wanted her mom to know. Alice would be excited. She would make a big deal about it. She loved Brian. She would love the idea of her daughter telling her about a juicy milestone like this one. It was her mother-daughter fantasy—the very thing Tibby so often denied her.
    As Tibby left her room she registered the sound of the rustling leaves of the apple tree, so little heard here, and she liked it.
    Tibby watched her mother in her usual morning flurry. Would she be able to slow down for Tibby’s news? Tibby tried to formulate the opening sentence. “Brian and I…Me and Brian…”
    Tibby opened her mouth, but Alice got there first.
    “Tibby, I need you to stay with Katherine this morning.” Alice already sounded mad and Tibby hadn’t even refused yet.
    Tibby’s words dried up.
    Alice wouldn’t look in Tibby’s eyes, indicating that she felt guilty somewhere down deep, but the guilt only made her less patient. “Loretta has to take her sister to the doctor and she can’t be back till after lunch.” Alice snatched the juice boxes from the shelf and shoved one at Nicky. “Or that’s what she says, anyway,” she added ungenerously.
    “Why does her sister have to go to the doctor?” Nicky asked.
    “Sweetie, she has some kind of infection, I don’t know.” Alice gestured the whole issue away with a sweep of her arm, as if it might or might not be true, but she couldn’t spend any more time thinking about it.
    Alice was flinging things into and out of her purse. “I have to take Nicky to camp and then go to the office.”
    “I’m not doing it,” Tibby said. Not only had she lost all desire to tell her mother about Brian, she never wanted to tell her mother about anything she cared about ever.
    Alice gave her a look. “Excuse me?”
    “I’m not the babysitter. I’m sick of you dumping the job on me every time it’s convenient.”
    “You’re living in this house, and that means you have to help out, just like everybody else.”
    Tibby rolled her eyes. This fight was nasty, but it had taken place so many times they might as well have been following lines of a script.
    Katherine stirred her Cheerios around in her bowl. She slopped some of the milk onto the kitchen table.
    Tibby always felt distantly guilty for refusing to babysit Katherine in Katherine’s presence, but she managed to get over it.
    “I can’t wait to go to college,” Tibby muttered, as though to herself, but not really. The statement was untrue, and she said it only to make her mother unhappy.
    Half an hour later, Tibby sat on the back deck with a pile of papers and brochures from NYU, while Katherine careened around the backyard. The fight with her mom had shaken all the magic right out of her. She was back on the ground, looking down at the bugs rather than up at the sky.
    Eventually Katherine’s appetite for independent play ran out. She appeared in Tibby’s face.
    “You want to climb the tree and pick apples?” This currently represented Katherine’s greatest fantasy.
    “Katherine, no. Anyway, why do you want those apples so bad? They’re not good. They’re not ripe yet. And even if they were ripe, they’d be hard and sour.” Tibby had fallen into that shameful parent-ennui where you said no before you even listened