Free The Second Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares Page B

course. I mean, where else are you going to go?”
    He looked a little uncertain. “Are you sure it’s okay?”
    When she stopped to think about it, Tibby realized it was pretty profound having a boy stay all night in your room. It was really like college in that way.
    But then again, Brian wasn’t a boy. Well, he was, technically speaking. But Tibby didn’t act or feel around him the way she did around any other boys she had ever known. Much as she loved him, Brian was about as sexy as tube socks.
    She studied him for a moment. It was funny how much he had changed since the day she met him. He was much taller. (It helped that he’d been eating dinner at her house two or three nights a week.) He washed his hair sometimes. (Tibby was always taking showers; she suspected he had learned by example.) He wore a belt. (Okay, so maybe she had bought him one.) But still he was Brian.
    “I could get in trouble, though,” Tibby said. “If the RA or anybody sees you.”
    Brian nodded solemnly. “I thought of that too. I’ll make sure nobody sees me.”
    “Okay.” She knew her parents wouldn’t get mad about it. That wasn’t the issue.
    He sat down on her night table.
    “I saw Nicky and Katherine yesterday,” he told her.
    “Yeah?”
    “Katherine fell down the steps. She wanted you to fix it.”
    “She wanted me?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Tibby felt her cheeks warm. Mostly she kept those two small creatures at bay. She knew how much her parents wanted her to interact with them. Every time Tibby let Katherine climb on her lap, she felt her mother’s opportunism, her constant desire for free baby-sitting. When Bugs Bunny looked at Daffy Duck on the desert island, he saw a big, juicy roasted duck. When Alice looked at Tibby, she saw an able-bodied teenage baby-sitter.
    “I played Dragon Spots with Nicky.”
    “He must have loved that.” Brian was fostering in Nicky an early love of video games.
    She felt a little bit uneasy that Brian was still going to her house when she wasn’t there. Was it really Tibby he liked or was it the Rollinses’ tinies?
    “How’s it going here?” Brian asked. He looked at the sketches and notes scattered over her desk.
    “Pretty good.”
    “How’s your movie? Did you decide what it’s going to be about yet?”
    Tibby had spoken to Brian many times since she had decided and started working on the movie. But for some reason she hadn’t told him about it. She gathered the sketches into a pile. “I think so.”
    “What?”
    “Maybe about my mom.” She didn’t feel like elaborating.
    His face lit up. “Really? That’s a great idea.”
    Brian had an annoying tendency to like Alice.
    “Yeah.”
    “How are your friends?” Brian asked. “I mean, those new ones you met.” His eyebrows peaked over his nose in that earnest way he had.
    “They’re . . .” She was going to say
nice,
but the word didn’t fit.
Great
seemed to carry the wrong connotation too. “. . . all right.”
    “I’ll meet them tomorrow, hopefully.” Brian began unrolling his sleeping bag.
    “Sure,” she said. She wasn’t quite sure about that.
    He kept his toothbrush and toothpaste in a crumpled plastic Wallman’s bag. Her bathroom kit was made of thick, see-through blue plastic with a zipper. “You can go first,” she offered. She peered out the door. The bathroom was only a few yards down the hall. “Go ahead,” she said.
    While she waited for him, she decided to fish her extra blanket down from the closet shelf to give him a little extra padding on the hard floor. A big Jiffy envelope with Lena’s handwriting on it came down with the blanket.
    The envelope seemed to stare at her critically. She knew the Pants were in there, and yet she hadn’t even opened it. Why not?
    She knew why, really. When she opened the Pants, she would remember about last summer and Bailey and Mimi and everything else. She would have to see the crooked red heart she’d embroidered onto the side of the left knee. She would