Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood (Sisterhood 4)

“I found it,” she said less than a minute later.

He hopped back down again, mirth spread over his features. She was glad to provide so much entertainment.

“Well done, Bee.” He raised a hand to whack her on the shoulder, but put it down again without making contact. “Do your recording and bring it to Maxine. She’ll be happy to have a whole one.”

“Love’s Labour’s Lost is such a great play,” Carmen declared. “You were awesome reading the speech of Lady What’s-Her-Name.”

“Rosaline,” Julia said flatly.

Carmen was trying to cheer Julia up about the fact that she’d gotten called back for the community production, the least desirable in her mind, and not the other two. But Julia wasn’t having it.

“Rosaline. Right. You have to admit the play’s a whole lot funnier than Richard the Third.”

Richard III was the production on the Second Stage. Carmen could already perceive a hierarchy developing between the kids who’d gotten called back for Second Stage and the larger number who’d gotten called back for the Community Stage.

“Yeah. But they don’t even sell tickets. It’s, like, free. It’s outdoors. It’s not even real.”

“How can you say that? Of course it’s real. Andrew said it’s the best attended of all of them, by far.”

“That’s because it’s free,” Julia said. “Anyone can go.”

“That’s a good thing. Anyway, at least you got called back,” Carmen said. She wasn’t even sure why she said this. She had made up her mind not to tell Julia about her ludicrous tryout, but here she was eager to debase herself to make Julia feel better.

“Everyone got called back,” Julia said.

“That’s not true.”

“What are you talking about? Melanie Peer said that everyone who tried out got called back for something.”

“No, they didn’t.”

“How do you know?” Julia was sitting up straighter now.

“I didn’t get called back,” Carmen said, with a perverse note of triumph.

Julia looked at her in outright astonishment. “You tried out?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It was kind of a joke, but no. I really tried out.”

“Really? Why?”

“I have no idea. It was kind of a mistake, actually.”

“Who did you read?”

“Perdita.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

Julia looked like she might laugh, but she made a wince of sympathy. “You didn’t get called back.”

“No way.”

“Oh, well. It was brave of you to try.”

“That and stupid.”

Julia patted Carmen on the arm and laughed. It looked like this method of cheering her up really was working.

Lena wasn’t sure how much of it was attributable to Leo, but she knew that every hour she wasn’t in her painting class she wished she were.

“Hi, Lena,” he said to her on Thursday as she was leaving painting class, girding herself for three long, bleak days of not painting and not getting to see Leo.

“Hi,” she said, taking almost absurd pride in the fact that he still knew her name.

“How’s it going?” he said.

“Pretty good,” she said blandly. She smiled blandly. “How are you?” she asked blandly.

“Just fine.”

Please be interesting, she begged of herself.

She was wearing her hair down and had put on mascara for the fourth day in a row. She was boring as crap, but at least she looked good.

“I don’t know if I can make it to Monday,” Leo said. He distractedly pushed his hand around in his hair and made it stand up more.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean no painting. I’m right in the middle of this thing I’m trying to figure out. It’ll be gone by Monday. It’s too long to go, you know?”

She nodded. Oh, how she knew. She wasn’t sure her reasons were quite as pure as his, but she was taken aback to think they felt exactly the same way.

“I’m thinking of seeing if Nora would work extra hours over the weekend. I’d have to ask Robert, I guess.” He pushed his hair around again despondently. “Would you want to go in on it with me?”

She was nearly frozen by the thought. She cherished his phrasing. “Uh.”

She tried to figure. She’d have to come up with around eight or nine dollars an hour. How could she do that? She had no money. She ate Cup O’ Noodles almost every night from the twenty-four pack she’d bought at Costco with her parents’ membership. That was as close as her father got to financial aid. Her mother had slipped her eighty dollars at the beginning of the summer, and she’d made it last for almost three weeks.

But how could she say no? She couldn’t. She’d pawn her watch. She’d steal her mother’s diamonds. She’d borrow money from Effie, for God’s sake.

She swallowed. “I’d love to go in with you,” she chirruped.

“Are you Carmen Lowell?”

Carmen looked up from the table at the canteen to see a guy she didn’t know staring at her with odd intensity.

She was so surprised she didn’t answer. A year ago she might have imagined he was staring at her like that because he thought she was cute, but now she was so conditioned to invisibility she found his gaze disturbing. Suddenly she worried she’d set off all the sprinklers in her dorm or something.

“Yes, she’s Carmen Lowell,” Julia said, looking mildly impatient with both of them.

“Well, dude. Congratulations. Sophia over there thought it was you, but I said I didn’t think you were trying out.”

Carmen could not have been more mystified. She would have liked to say something, but she just gaped like a hooked fish.

“Congratulations for what?” Julia asked.

“The callback,” he said.

Julia put her fork down. She cast a protective look at Carmen. “She didn’t get called back.”

Carmen nodded.

“I’m pretty sure you did.” Why did this guy proceed to talk as if to Carmen and not to Julia, who was the one conversing with him? This added another unsettling layer. “Didn’t you check the list?”

“She did check it,” Julia said, almost combatively.

“Then maybe you should check it again,” the guy said to Carmen.

“He has no idea what he’s talking about,” Julia muttered once he’d left, resuming her dinner of salad and Diet Coke.

Carmen stood up. She had an odd idea blossoming in her mind and she needed to choke it off before it really started to get to her.

“You said you checked, right?” Julia asked.

“Yeah. I might go check again, though.” Carmen picked up her tray with the remnants of her dinner on it.

Julia stood too. “I’ll come with you. I’m done.”

As they walked toward the Main Stage, Julia talked and Carmen fretted.

“That guy probably looked at one of the tech lists and got confused,” Julia said.

“Yeah, probably.”

But the thing Carmen was thinking when she pushed open the doors to the lobby was that she had checked the lists, but only two of them. She hadn’t thought to check the third, because it was somewhere else, she didn’t know where, and it just seemed too preposterous to go around looking for it.

Wordlessly, both she and Julia walked to the lists and ran their eyes along the columns. Indeed, Carmen’s name was not there.

“One thing,” Carmen murmured on the way out. She bent her steps to the other side of the entrance, where she now saw a much smaller list posted.

“That’s the Main Stage list,” Julia said.

Even so, Carmen walked up to it and looked. There were seven names on the list, and hers was one of them.

To:

From:

Subject: dirt + me = love

* * *

Carma,

r />   I have a new love. Don’t tell Hector.

I have fallen in love with a dirt floor. I am obsessed. I am devoted. I am its humble servant.

I am going to marry it.

I am going to have dirty, flat children with it. But fear not, Carma. I’ll still love you guys even though you’re rounded and clean. Just, you know, not in that way.

Love,

Mrs. Bee Vreeland Dirtfloor

After the initial shock wore off, Julia wanted to talk about it.

“It’s unbelievable, Carmen, it really is,” she said.