Second Summer of the Sisterhood (Sisterhood 2)

She could avert her eyes, but she hadn’t thought to plug her ears. She heard a snuffle from her left. She wished and hoped she had imagined it. She squeezed her eyes shut. If she could ever in her life have transported herself from one place to another, she would have done it then.

She moved her head ever so slightly to the left and did the rest with her eyeballs. She needed to see her mother, but couldn’t face her, even in the dark. Straining her eyeballs to the far corner of her vision, she could see that her mother’s head was bent.

Tibby’s hands found her face. What had she done?

Alex was snickering at something on the screen. Tibby was lost. She was somewhere else. She didn’t look up again until the lights were on and half the people had left.

“Tibby?” Alex was looking at her.

“Yes?”

“You coming?” She was looking into Alex’s face, but she wasn’t seeing it.

She turned in one direction, and Brian was standing at the end of her row, waiting for her. When she turned in the other direction, she saw that her mother had gone.

Christina didn’t stray more than five feet from the phone. She actually carried it with her when she went to the bathroom. She waited until two in the afternoon to suck up her pride and ask Carmen if anyone had called while she was out that morning.

Carmen shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “The machine picked it up,” she said. It wasn’t a lie.

“The message from Mr. Brattle?” Christina asked.

Carmen shrugged again.

Christina nodded, her fragile hopes dashed.

It was such pathetic female behavior, Carmen felt the anger churning in her stomach again. “Are you waiting for a call in particular?” Carmen asked.

Christina looked away. “Well, I thought David might …”

Her voice was faint. Her sentence died off rather than came to a stop.

Mean things filled Carmen’s mouth. Somewhere up in a lofty part of her mind, she told herself to go into her room and shut the door. Instead, she opened her mouth.

“Is it impossible for you to go one day without David?” she snapped.

Christina’s cheeks turned pink. “Of course not. It’s just—”

“You’re setting a horrible example, you know. Throwing your entire life away for some guy. Mooning over the phone all day, waiting for him to call.”

“Carmen, that’s not fair. I’m not—”

“You are!” Carmen insisted. She’d just had that first tantalizing drink, and there was no stopping her now. “You go out every night. You dress like a teenager. You borrow my clothes! You make out in restaurants! It’s embarrassing. You’re making a huge fool of yourself, don’t you know that?”

For days now Christina’s happiness had lifted her into a state of benevolence in which she had absorbed Carmen’s anger with patience and understanding. Now Carmen could feel her mother sinking back down to earth, and it was satisfying.

Christina’s cheeks were no longer sweetly pink; they were red and patchy. Her mouth made a grim line. “That is a nasty thing to say, Carmen. And it isn’t true.”

“It is true! Melanie Foster saw you making out at the Ruby Grill! She’s been telling everybody about it! Do you know how that makes me feel?”

“We weren’t making out,” Christina defended herself hotly.

“You were! Do you think I don’t know you’re sleeping around? Doesn’t the church say you’re supposed to get married before you do that? Isn’t that what you’ve always told me?”

It was a calculated guess, and by the stricken look on Christina’s face, Carmen knew she’d guessed right. It was the equivalent of dropping the H-bomb, and Carmen had done it without preparing for the consequences. She felt nauseated as she stared at Christina. A big part of her wanted her mother to deny it, but she didn’t.

Christina looked at the floor and kneaded her hands. “I don’t think that is any of your business,” she whispered savagely.

“It is my business. You’re supposed to be my mother,” Carmen replied. Her mother was now angry enough for both of them.

“I am your mother,” Christina shot back.

Carmen felt tears flooding her eyes. She wasn’t ready to be vulnerable to her mother yet. Instead, she took her very full heart into the privacy of her room, where she could consider what was in it.

“Hey,” Brian said from the aisle just beyond where she was standing. He looked sad. He tried to hold Tibby’s eyes for an extra moment to figure out what was going on with her.

She dropped her gaze. She didn’t want him to see anything.

Brian stood there. He was going to wait for her, of course. Alex and Maura were looking at him, obviously wondering who the loser with the Star Wars T-shirt and the bad glasses was.

Tibby took a breath. She needed to say something.

“Uh, this is Brian,” she said flatly. Her voice sounded as if it came from a different body than hers.

She pointed to Alex. “This is Alex.” She pointed to Maura. “This is Maura.”

Brian didn’t seem to care about Alex and Maura. He was still gazing solemnly at Tibby with his dark brown eyes. She wished he would go away.

“’Sup,” Alex said fleetingly to Brian, turning his back before he’d even finished greeting him. He faced Tibby. “Let’s go.”

Numbly she nodded and began to follow Alex and Maura out of the auditorium. She wasn’t thinking. Naturally Brian followed her.

The four of them somehow ended up in a Mexican restaurant two blocks away. Alex looked annoyed that he hadn’t shaken Brian off. Maura made no secret of rolling her eyes in displeasure.

This would have been a good moment for Tibby to explain that Brian was not actually a psychotic stalker but one of her very best friends, who not only hung out at her house all the time but was currently living in her dorm room. She didn’t. She couldn’t make herself look at Brian, let alone say his name.

They stood awkwardly at the noisy bar. Alex successfully ordered three Dos Equis with his fake ID. He leaned in close to Tibby and clinked his bottle against hers.

“Well, done, Tomko. You stole the show.”

Tibby knew he was trying to congratulate her, not to make her cry.

“It was awesome,” Maura agreed.

“It wasn’t,” Brian said, sticking close to Tibby’s side. “Her mom was in the audience.” Brian seemed to feel that if these were Tibby’s friends, they needed to know this. His hand found Tibby’s elbow. He was suffering for her.

The bit about her mom didn’t seem to register as Alex drank down most of his beer. “You’re saying her movie wasn’t good? It was freakin’ hilarious.”

Brian shook his head. “It wasn’t.” He was honest, after all.

Alex squinted. “What’s your problem?”

Brian didn’t look at Alex. “I’m worried about Tibby.”

“You’re worried about Tibby?” The derision was so thick in the air Tibby could practically smell it. “Gosh, what a pal. Why don’t you go worry about her someplace else?”

Brian looked at Tibby. The look said, Come on, Tibby, come back to me. We’re friends, aren’t we?

But Tibby just stood there gaping, as though someone had taken a machete to her vocal cords.

Alex stepped in closer. He was getting puffed up and martial. “What part of ‘Go away’ don’t you understand?”

Brian saved a last, agonizing look for Tibby; then he left.