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

She had that frustrating dreamlike confusion of racking her brain for the answer and then forgetting what the question was. There was a question, wasn’t there? She thought of asking him.

“I should have called first,” he murmured.

She recognized that her heart was beating either many more times or many fewer times than it was meant to. She considered. Maybe it would stop altogether. Then what was she supposed to do?

For some reason she pictured her chest opening like a cupboard door and her heart sproinging out at the end of a coil.

Was she awake? She could have asked him, but he was the last person who would know, having no place in reality himself.

“I think I might sit down,” she said faintly. She was like a corseted girl in an old movie, taking the big things sitting down.

He stood in her doorway with the question on his face of whether he should come in. He looked worn out and rumpled. Maybe he really had come all the way here.

“Maybe you could come back later,” she said.

He wore the look of being tortured. He didn’t know what to make of her. “Can I come back this evening? Maybe around eight?”

She found herself wondering, did he mean eight her time or his time? She only confused herself. “That would be fine,” she said politely. Could they really be in the same time?

If he came back at eight, she decided, listening to the door close, tipping over onto her pillow, that would strengthen the case for his being here.

On that same scorching Thursday at the end of July, the security guard called up to Tibby’s room and told her she had a visitor.

Immediately she thought of Brian, even though she hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since she’d returned from Bethesda. She felt her heart quicken. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Hold on.” Tibby heard muffled conversation. “It’s Effie.”

“Who?”

“Effie. Effie? She says she’s your friend.”

Tibby’s heart changed its stride. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said.

She wet her hair down and pulled on a tank top and a ragged pair of shorts. Suddenly she was worried something might be wrong with Lena. She flew down the hall to the elevator.

Effie was practically in her face when the elevator door opened in the lobby. She backed up quickly, stumbling as Tibby burst out of it.

“Is everything okay?” Tibby asked.

Effie raised her eyebrows. “Yes. I mean, I think so.”

“Where’s Lena?”

“She’s in Providence.” Effie acquired that subtly damaged look she got when confronted with the reality that Lena’s friends were not equally her friends.

“Oh. Right.” Tibby realized it might sound mean to say So what are you doing here? Rather, she waited patiently for Effie to explain what she was doing there.

“Are you busy right now?” Effie asked.

“No. Not really.”

“You’re not like, rushing off anywhere or anything.”

“No.” Tibby was imploding with curiosity, with the sense that something was afoot. She’d been alone a lot.

“Do you want to go get a cup of coffee? Is there a place around here?”

Effie looked a bit nervous, Tibby decided. She was jumpy. Of her total of four hands and feet, not one was staying still. She was wearing a short strawberry pink wrap dress, which revealed an impressive amount of cleavage.

“There are a million places around here.” Tibby counseled herself not to be impatient or mean. It was actually really sweet that Effie had come all the way here to see her. Did she want advice on something? Was she suddenly interested in film as a potentially glamorous career? Did she hear there was a disproportionate number of cute boys at NYU maybe? Not that there were. “We can get iced coffee at a place on Waverly.”

“That sounds great,” Effie said. She wiped a coat of sweat off her upper lip.

“Are you in New York for a while?” Tibby asked as they walked along, fishing for clues.

“Just the day,” Effie said.

At last, equipped with a two-dollar iced coffee for Tibby and a five-dollar raspberry white mocha frappuccino for Effie, they sat at a dim, cool table in the back of the café. An opera in Italian was playing over the speaker to the left of Effie’s head.

Effie’s drink was so thick she had to really suck to get any of it. Tibby watched and waited.

“So you and Brian broke up,” Effie said finally.

“Right.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I first heard it.”

Tibby shrugged. Was this the preamble? Where was it going?

“Do you think you’ll get back together?” Effie asked. Her expression was not demanding. In fact, she mostly fiddled with the paper from her straw.

“I don’t think so.”

“Really?”

Tibby tried not to be irritated. Was Effie just trying to make pleasant conversation? Because it wasn’t all that pleasant.

“Really.”

“Huh. Do you think you are over him?”

Tibby looked at her carefully. “Do I think I am over him?”

Effie opened her hands as though to show there wasn’t anything in them. “Yeah.”

“I’m not sure I would even know.”

Effie shrugged lightly. She sucked on her drink. “I mean, like, would you be upset if you found out he was going out with someone else?”

As Tibby replayed those words, she felt her brain turning inside out like a salted slug. Her vision grew distorted and she blinked to get it back into focus. She tried to keep her face on, to remain calm.

What did Effie know? Had she seen Brian with another girl? Was Brian fooling around with some girl all over Bethesda? What had Effie seen? What was going on?

Tibby drank her coffee. She breathed the air. She listened to a tenor hollering just over Effie’s head. She could not lose it in front of Effie. Effie, no matter what her cup size, was still a little sister.

She desperately wanted to ask Effie what she knew, but how could she without seeming like it bothered her? Like she was upset and disturbed and blindsided by the thought of it? She couldn’t.

“You would be upset,” Effie concluded.

Tibby had her pride, if nothing else. “No,” she said finally. “I would be a little surprised, maybe. But look. I was the one who broke up with him, right? It wasn’t like I didn’t know what I was doing. I totally did. I didn’t have any doubt that it was time for us to break up and that, for me, it was the right thing to do.” Suddenly Tibby realized that talking felt better than thinking.

“Really?”

“Sure. I mean, it was really over. For me, it was over. Brian should do whatever he wants to do. He’s totally free to go out with anybody he wants. Really, he probably oughta go out with somebody else if that’s what he wants to do.” Tibby felt like her head was teetering slightly on her neck. Like one of those dumb bobble-head figures people put in their car.

Effie nodded and sucked on her so-called coffee, her eyes wide, listening intently. “Would it matter if it was someone you knew?”

Never had Tibby imagined pure torture in the guise of Effie Kaligaris in a wrap dress sucking a pink drink. Someone Tibby knew? Who was it? Who was Brian with? Someone she knew? Brian was hooking up with someone she knew? Who was it? How could he do that to her? Tibby racked her brain to think of who it could be.

How could she ask and not betray her abject misery? How could she not ask and continue to suffer like this?

“It would,” Effie proposed solemnly.

Once again, Tibby gathered herself. She could fall apart later. She could call Lena and get the truth. She could even call her mother if it came to that.

“Why should it?” Tibby said, tapping her fingers in a poor facsimile of nonchalance. “Why should it really matter if I knew the person?”

Suddenly every damn singer in the opera seemed to be screaming at the top of their lungs. “The point is that Brian is n

o longer my boyfriend and I am not his girlfriend.” Tibby was almost shouting. “Who he goes out with is totally his business. Who I go out with is totally mine.”

Effie nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”