Free Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares

responsible. He also wanted—or did she imagine this?—to convey to her that what had happened between them had really happened, that he meant what he had said to her.
    She wanted something too. Just one little thing: for them to go back to how they were before.
     
    Carmen lay on her bed thinking about Katherine, worrying about Tibby, and generally wondering things. Her mother was sleeping even though they’d finished dinner only an hour before. Once again, David had not made it home in time for dinner.
    David was working on a big case. Seeing his schedule up close convinced Carmen that she did not ever want to become a lawyer. At least, not the kind David was. For a few weeks he’d come home by seven most nights for dinner, but in the last month he never came home before eleven, and even at that hour he was fielding calls on his cell phone. A few times he’d left home for the office one morning and hadn’t come home until the next morning. Then he’d taken a shower and gone back again. Carmen had always suspected that people who worked that hard secretly didn’t want to come home, but she knew that wasn’t true of David. He was desperate to be home with Christina. He adored her. Carmen could see that he felt genuinely guilty and sad for every dinner he missed. And that was pretty much all of them.
    According to Christina, he was working on a “big deal.” One gigantic company gobbling up a different gigantic company, as Carmen understood it. And all David wanted to do was finish this “big deal” before the baby came. Which was why he worked twenty hours a day.
    Carmen studied her ceiling, dotted with the glowing constellation stickers she’d excitedly arranged there when she was eight. There should be a law disallowing eight-year-olds from decorating their rooms, especially where stickers were involved. Why had her eight-year-old self saddled her seventeen-year-old self with so many dumb decals and see-through unicorn window appliqués? They were impossible to get off.
    The truth was, she continued to have a soft spot for the glowing stars, but tonight they made the ceiling seem closer rather than farther away.
    Thinking about her eight-year-old self reminded her of her four-year-old self, who was responsible for packing her closet with so many beautified (er, mangled) dolls. And that reminded her of her baby self, who had also inhabited this very room. And that, of course, reminded her of babies again.
    She wanted to leave a hole when she left for college. That was selfish, maybe, but she did. She wanted to step out of the picture of her old life and leave a big, generous cutout waiting for her return. Giving her the chance , at least, to come back.
    But now it felt like the minute she stepped out of her life, it was going to close up around her as if she’d never been there at all. The picture would re-form almost instantly with a new family in the place of her old one, and she could never come back again. That was how it felt to her. She was scared to disappear. She was scared to lose her place.
    The ceiling was pushing down on her. The pressure beneath her eyes was pushing up. She felt like her eyeballs were in a vise. She got out of bed and turned on the light. She wiggled her mouse to wake her sleeping computer. She went online, and without really planning to, she brought up the Web site for the University of Maryland. Slowly she clicked around inside the site. It was the usual higher-education propaganda. She found herself clicking on the admissions link, and from there to the online application. The university offered rolling admissions. She wondered if they were still rolling. Her hand caused her to click on the Print icon.
    Her eyes lighted ever so briefly on the stack of booklets and papers from Williams College. Health forms, dorm info, a course guide, a map showing the leafy spot in western Massachusetts where the campus lay, more than seven hours north of home.
    She listened to the buzz and spit