Free Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares Page B

lassitude she could barely recognize.
    It didn’t dawn on Carmen until they were gathered around Tibby’s duffel bag and the bag was open and they were surrounded by the boxes of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts, bags of Cheetos, and Ziplocs of sour gummy worms and unlit candles what thing this was meant to be and what perverse thing it actually was.
    It was the last night—Carmen and Bridget were leaving the next day. They couldn’t have left it any longer. The suitcase was in the middle of them. How else could they have looked at it all at once? These were the things in the suitcase. There wasn’t much choice about taking them out. Carmen took out the CD, a relic of sorts, and it was all she could do to look at the names of the songs in Tibby’s boyish handwriting. The terrible, ritual-sweet, late-eighties dance stylings of Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, and George Michael.
    It must have taken some doing to get real American Pop-Tarts all the way to Australia and then here.
    Tibby, who had smirked, mugged, and grimaced her way through the Traveling Pants ritual, had come here to stage a Traveling Pantsritual, even with no pants. Under the first layer of snacks and atmospherics, Carmen’s hand came upon a stratum of papers, envelopes, and packages. The first was a true artifact. “Oh, my God,” Carmen murmured, her heart trying to beat its way out of a thick sludge. “I didn’t know Tibby had this.” She could hear the same kind of wetness at the bottom of Bridget’s breathing. For a moment they were tricked out of their stupor.
    There it was. Lena’s careful fifteen-year-old handwriting on Gilda’s Aerobics Studio letterhead.
We, the Sisterhood, hereby instate the following rules to govern the use of the Traveling Pants .
    It was not right. It was a cruel trick to have to see this and remember. Carmen wanted to scrabble back into the stupor as fast as she could. They couldn’t look at one another. She anchored the piece of paper under a box of Pop-Tarts. She couldn’t stand to see it any longer.
    There was a second sheet of paper. It was covered in Tibby’s writing, looser and messier than it had once been. Carmen saw all of their names written at the top. She handed it directly to Lena without reading anything else.
    Lena read for a moment. Her face turned a deeper red and then went to no color at all. She looked up. “I don’t know what this means.” Something about the way she said it made Carmen feel scared.
    Bridget got to her feet and started pacing in a tight loop behind the sofa. “What does it say?”
    Lena glanced away. She put the paper down and her hands were shaking.
    “Can you tell us what it says?” Carmen pressed, not wanting to know but needing to know.
    “I can’t. I don’t understand it.” Lena’s hands looked like skeleton hands grasping at her own face.
    “Then just read it.” Carmen felt panicked. She needed to get this over with.
    Lena turned to her with a glare she’d never seen. “I don’t want to.” Her voice was biting and cold, as Carmen had never heard it.
    Bridget stuck her arm in and took it. She walked back behind the sofa, jiggling on the balls of her feet as she looked at the paper. She began reading aloud in a deliberate way, as though she weren’t even listening to what she was saying.
“I’m writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don’t think I can say it. I’m not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I’m doing it to say thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you.”
    Bridget’s voice shook and broke and then stopped. She put the paper down on the coffee