Sisterhood Everlasting
Read Sisterhood Everlasting Online
Authors: Ann Brashares
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Family Saga, #United States, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Domestic Life, #Friendship, #Contemporary Fiction, #Family Life, #Sagas, #Literary, #Romance, #Teen & Young Adult
Also by Ann Brashares
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
The Last Summer (of You and Me)
3 Willows
My Name Is Memory
Sisterhood Everlasting
is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents
are the products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual events, locales, or persons, living
or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Ann Brashares
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Liveright Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint three lines from “I like my body when it is with your” by E. E. Cummings from
Complete Poems: 1904–1962
by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, copyright © 1923, 1925, 1951, 1953, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brashares, Ann.
Sisterhood everlasting : a novel / Ann Brashares.
p. cm.—(Sisterhood of the traveling pants ; 6)
eISBN: 978-0-679-60509-6
1. Female friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R385S57 2011
813′.6—dc22 2010043106
Jacket photograph: © Junichi Kusaka/Getty Images
v3.1
For my three amazing brothers,
Beau Brashares, Justin Brashares, and Ben Brashares, with love.
The closest thing I have to a sisterhood is a brotherhood.
Contents
If you are not too long,
I will wait here for you
all my life.
—Oscar Wilde
Prologue
Once upon a time there were four pregnant women who met in an aerobics gym. I’m not joking; that’s how this story begins. These large, fit, sweatband-sporting women bore four daughters, all born in and around the month of September. These girls started out as babies together and grew to be girls and then women. A sisterhood, if you will.
As I look back on them—on us—I realize that though we aren’t related by blood, we are like four siblings. The Septembers, as we called ourselves, are governed by the laws of birth order, even though we are all basically the same age.
Lena is the oldest. She is responsible, rule-abiding, selfless whenever required, steady as a metronome, and not always a thrill a minute, to tell you the truth. She knows how to take care of you. She knows how to be an adult, and she knows how to be serious. She doesn’t always know how not to be serious.
I admit that I, Carmen, am a classic youngest child—compounded by the fact that I grew up as an only child. There’s no end to my self-centeredness when I get going. I can be bratty and tempestuous, but I am loyal above all. I am loyal to who we are and what we have. I am worshipful of my sisters and worshipful of our sisterhood. I am not cool: you heard it here first. I feel like a mascot sometimes—the guy in the giant-headed fuzzy animal getup at football games, melting away inside his suit. When it comes to us, I’ll throw anything in.
Bee is our true middle child—free as a butterfly. She loves you, but she doesn’t care what you think. She’s not afraid; she’s got the rest of us holding that down. She’s free to compete, free to kick ass, free to fail and laugh about it. She can be reckless. She’s got less to lose; it’s been a long time since she had a mother. She’s such a force you forget she gets injured. You’ll see her stagger and realize she needs help long before she does. Your heart goes out to her. She doesn’t know how to feel her own pain, but she can feel yours.
Tibby is our younger middle child, our sly observer. She’s the quiet kid in the big Irish family who only wears hand-me-downs. She can be cynical, instantly judgmental, and devastating in her cleverness. She can also, as an old friend memorably put it, “change her mind.” She has a gift for exposing the lies—the lies we tell other people, the lies we tell ourselves. All of this is a casing around an exquisitely sensitive heart. She doesn’t turn her wit against us, almost ever. She entertains us with it, and uses it in her scripts and short films. If only anybody would produce any of them. Sometimes Tibby’s wit sweetens into wisdom. I think that’s what she gives us.
There was a significant epoch in our lives when we organized our friendship around a pair of pants we shared. Really, pants. We called them the Traveling Pants, and according to our mythology, they had the power to keep us together when we were apart.
Our pants were lost in Greece almost exactly ten years ago. How have we fared at keeping together since we lost them, you ask? That is a question.
Growing up is hard on a friendship. There’s no revelation in that. I remember my mom once told me that a good family is built for leaving, because that is what children must do. And I’ve wondered many times, is that also what a good friendship is supposed to be built for? Because ours isn’t. We have no idea how to cope with the leaving. And I’m probably the worst of all. If you need a picture, picture this: me putting my hands over my eyes, pretending the leaving isn’t happening, waiting for us all to be together again.
To make a prairie it takes
a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
—Emily Dickinson
Once, when she was thirteen, Carmen remembered turning to
Tibby with her
CosmoGirl
magazine in one hand and her eye pencil in the other and declaring that she could never, ever get sick of doing makeovers.
Well, it turned out she could. Sitting in the makeup chair in early October in a trailer parked on the corner of Bleecker Street and the Bowery in the East Village of Manhattan, getting her hair blown out for the seven millionth time by a girl named Rita and the foundation sponged onto her face for the eight millionth time by a girl named Genevieve, Carmen knew it was just another mile on the hedonic treadmill. You could get sick of anything.
It was true. She’d read an article in
Time
magazine about it. “You could even get sick of chocolate,” she’d told her mother on the phone the night before.
Her mother had made a doubting sound.
“That’s what I read anyway.”
Being an actress on a TV show, even a moderately good and successful TV show, involved a few minutes of acting for every few hours you spent in the makeup chair. And even when you were done with the makeup—temporarily, of course; you were never done with the makeup—there was still a whole lot of sitting around drinking lattes. That was the dirty secret of the entertainment industry: it was boring.
Granted, Carmen didn’t have the biggest part in the show. She was Special Investigator Lara Brennan on
Criminal Court
. She showed up at least briefly at a crime scene in almost every episode and sometimes got to appear as a witness on the stand.
“Eyes up,” Genevieve said, coming in with a mascara wand. It was rare that Carmen needed a prompt. She knew exactly which way to turn her eyes for each portion of the mascara application. If she didn’t stay ahead of it, Carmen feared she’d end up like one of the many dolls she’d mangled as a child with her constant brutal efforts at grooming.
Carmen studied her hair in the mirror. She’d never thought she’d get sick of that either. She squinted down the highlights. They were a little brassy, a little bright this time. She would have liked to go darker, but the director wanted her light. Probably because her character’s surname was Brennan and not Garcia.
Carmen jiggled her phone in her hand and thought of who to call. She’d already spoken to Lena once and her agent twice. Her mind summoned a glimpse of Tibby’s face, more out of loyalty than an expectation of actually talking to her. Since Tibby had moved to Australia with Brian almost two years before, Carmen had almost given up hope of reaching her in real time. Tibby’s move had been hasty, somewhat disorganized, and just … far. The sixteen-hour time difference was a constant impediment. Tibby had gone from place to place at first and didn’t get a landline until long after Carmen had given up on the idea. International calls between their cellphones were plagued by stupid complications, mostly on Tibby’s side. In a couple of weeks. In a month. By next spring. Those were the times when Carmen told herself they’d resume regular contact. Carmen often thought of hauling over there for a visit. This past June she’d staked out a date on the calendar, and Bee and Lena had instantly agreed to the scheme. When she’d emailed Tibby about it, Tibby’s return had come more quickly than usual. “Now’s not a good time.”
Carmen took it personally for once. “Did I do something?” she’d asked in her next message.
“Oh, Carma, no. You did nothing wrong.
Nothing
. Just busy and unsettled here. It’ll be soon. I promise. I want to see you and Len and Bee more than anything else in the world.”
And there was Bee. Carmen hadn’t seen her since Bridget’s last swing through New York over the Christmas holidays, but there were long periods when Bridget and Carmen talked every day—that is, as long as Bee hadn’t lost her phone or neglected to pay her bill for too long. Bee was the best possible distraction from an hour in the makeup chair. But Carmen hesitated to call her now. It had been awkward between them for the last few weeks, since Bee had effectively called Jones an asshole.
Well, to be fair, Bee hadn’t just come out and said “Your fiancé is an asshole.” In fact, to be fair, it was Carmen who’d called him an asshole and Bee who’d lost no time in agreeing with her. But Carmen was
allowed
to say Jones was an asshole. She was the one marrying the asshole.
Carmen’s phone rang, saving her the trouble of dialing anyone, and she snapped it up. The earphones were already stuck in her ears. She was one of the few people she knew who answered the phone
as
she checked the caller ID, not after.