Second Summer of the Sisterhood (Sisterhood 2)

In those last hours in Santorini, Lena had certainly believed she loved him. But what lunatic would base her whole life on a few hours? And anyway, she knew better than to trust her desire-drenched memory. The Kostos she remembered probably had less and less in common with the actual Kostos as the months passed.

She pictured the two Kostoses as being like the film-strip of mitosis she’d watched in ninth-grade biology. The film had started with the one cell that spread and expanded, stretching and pulling apart until—foop—two cells. And the more time those two cells spent apart (one going off and helping make a brain, maybe, and the other going off and helping make, say, a heart) the more different they became….

Yes, her answer was a resounding C.

Lena signed the letter Yours, folded it carefully, and slid it into its envelope.

On her way down the hall with Porter, Carmen reviewed the major points of the evening so she could answer what were sure to be a million questions from her mother.

“Hello?” she said quietly as she opened the door.

There she was, Carmen Lucille, sixteen, almost seventeen, in her darkened apartment with a date. She waited for her mother to pad around the corner, all worried about catching them kissing.

Carmen waited. What was going on? Had her mother fallen asleep in front of Friends reruns again?

“Mom?” Carmen checked her watch. It was after eleven.

“Sit down,” she invited Porter, pointing to the sofa. “I’ll be right back.”

She checked her mother’s room. To her astonishment, she wasn’t there. Carmen was starting to feel slightly afraid when she flicked on the light in the kitchen. Her mother was not there, but a note was sitting in the middle of the table.

Carmen,

I went out to dinner with a friend from work. Hope you had a fabulous time.

Mama

A friend from work? Fabulous? Had her mother mistakenly switched bodies with a different person? Christina didn’t say fabulous. She didn’t have any friends from work.

Stunned, Carmen walked back to the living room. “Nobody here,” she said, not recognizing the possible implications of her words until she looked at Porter.

He didn’t look lecherous exactly, but he was probably wondering what she meant. She had invited him to come up, after all.

Her mother had left the apartment to Carmen on the night of her first actual, official date? What was she thinking?

Carmen could march Porter right into her bedroom and go the whole damn way if she felt like it. Yes, she sure could.

She looked at Porter. His hair was sticking up a little at the back. The soles of his tennis shoes were oddly wide and flat. She looked through the open door of her bedroom. It made her vaguely uncomfortable to think that Porter could see her bed from where he sat on the sofa. Hmm. If a guy seeing your bed made you feel embarrassed, it was probably a sign that you were not ready to get in it with him.

“Listen,” she said. “I have to get up early to go to church tomorrow morning.” She yawned for effect. It started out fake but turned real in the middle.

Porter stood quickly. The combination of God and the yawn had done the trick. “Okay. Yeah. I better get going.”

He looked slightly disappointed. No, maybe he looked relieved. Was it possible she couldn’t tell the difference between disappointed and relieved? Maybe he didn’t like her. Maybe he was glad to be getting out of there. Maybe he thought the storied Pants on her short legs looked like the weirdest thing he’d ever seen.

He had a very, very nice nose, she realized as it came toward her. He was standing close and hunching over a bit as they stood together in the doorway. “Thanks a lot, Carmen. I had a great time.” He kissed her on the lips. It was quick, but it wasn’t disappointed or relieved. It was nice.

Did he have a great time? she wondered, musing at the closed door, or was he just saying that? Was his idea of a great time different from her idea of a great time? Sometimes Carmen marveled at the sheer volume of thoughts cramming her head. Did other people think this much?

The success of any date was all about expectations, really, and Carmen possessed a singular genius for stacking hers straight up to the sky.

She turned to face the empty apartment. Where the hell was Christina? What in the world was her mother thinking? How was Carmen supposed to transform raw experience into a good story without her mother here to tell it to? What was the deal?

She went into the kitchen and sat restlessly at the small Formica table. When her parents had still been together, they’d lived in a small house with a yard. Since then, she and her mother had lived in this apartment. Her mother seriously believed that you couldn’t have a lawn without a man to mow it. The kitchen window looked at three other kitchen windows. The area between them was what real estate agents called a courtyard but what ordinary people called an airshaft. Carmen had long ago gotten into the habit of not picking her nose or anything when she sat in the kitchen.

This wasn’t right. She couldn’t just go to bed. This night was crying out for narration. She couldn’t call Bee in Alabama. She tried Tibby’s dorm room, feeling as though she were calling a different universe, a future universe. It rang and rang. In this future universe, it appeared, you weren’t there to pick up your phone at eleven thirty. She was hesitant to call Lena at this hour in case she woke up Lena’s dad, and his temper along with him, but she went ahead and did it anyway.

She braced herself for two long rings.

“Hello?” It was Lena’s whisper.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” Lena sounded sleepy. “Hi. Hi. How was your date?”

“It was … good,” Carmen pronounced.

“Good,” Lena said. “So … so do you like him?”

“Like him?” Carmen repeated this as though the question were not entirely relevant. She had thought about many things over the course of the evening, but she hadn’t really thought about that.

“Do you think he has short legs?” Carmen asked.

“What? No. What are you talking about?”

“Do you think I have short legs?” This was clearly the more tender question.

“Carma, no.”

Carmen was thoughtful for a minute. “Len, did you ever run out of things to say to Kostos?”

Lena laughed. “No. I had more the problem of not being able to shut up. But we only got together at the very end of last summer, after a lot of crazy stuff had happened.”

Usually Carmen spoke to Lena as freely as she spoke to herself, but for some reason she felt shy about admitting that her famously big mouth had shriveled in the presence of an actual boy. Instead, she launched into a long consideration of the whereabouts and motivations of her mother.

Lena was silent so long Carmen suspected she’d fallen asleep. “Len? Len? So what do you think?”

Lena yawned. “I think it’s nice that your mom is out having fun. You should go to bed.”

“Fine,” Carmen said sulkily. “It’s obvious who needs to go to bed.”

After that Carmen still couldn’t fall asleep, so she wrote an e-mail to Paul. Paul was so sparing with words that writing to him was somewhat like writing to nobody, but she did it often even so.

Then she decided to e-mail Tibby. She began by describing how Porter had looked. She was going to say something about the color of his eyes, but when she stopped and tried to picture Porter’s eyes, she realized that she hadn’t really looked at them.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

—Jack Handey

“Tomko-Rollins, Tabitha.” Tibby winced. Silence. She wished she could change her birth certificate. And her school transcript and her social security card.

“That’s, uh, just Rollins. Tibby Rollins,” she said to the screenwriting instructor, Ms. Bagley.

“What’s Tomko?”

“My … middle name.”

Ms. Bagley checked her list again. “So what’s Anastasia, then?”

Tibby s

ank down in her seat. “A typo?” She heard laughter around her.

“Okay. Tibby, you said? Fine. Tibby Rollins.” Bagley wrote a note on the list.