“Lena told you.” Bridget’s agitation was big and her dorm room felt tiny.
“Yeah.” They had deliberated waiting until after Carmen’s last performance on Wednesday.
“What are we gonna do?”
“What can we do? Hope Effie isn’t blinded by anger and jealousy.”
Bridget paused. “I kind of wish we had someone else looking.”
“Yeah. But who else have we got?”
“Grandma.”
“Ugh.”
Lena called Effie every hour for twenty straight. Grandma was getting annoyed, but what could she do? She let Effie take the blame.
“I’m trying. I’m trying everything.” That was all Effie would say.
Lena even wished she could call Kostos to see if he was there and could help. But unfortunately, that was a bridge she had burned.
“I think I know what the problem is,” Tibby said to Lena on the phone from her room in New York.
They called each other so often, they hardly bothered hanging up anymore. “What?”
“The Pants don’t want Effie to find them.”
“Oh, my gosh. You could be right.”
“They’re scared of her.” Tibby suspected that she was possibly overidentifying with the Pants, but still.
“Maybe that’s it.”
“So what should we do?”
Lena waited for twenty-two more hours and made another uncharacteristically rash decision.
“I’m going to go,” she said to Carmen on the phone.
“What?”
“I’m going to Greece. I’m online as we speak. I’m buying a ticket.”
“No.”
“Yes.” She had made up her mind. It was her fault, really. The Pants had been in her possession. It was her lunatic sister who had taken them. She was the one with the crabby grandma in Oia. Who could find them but her?
“When?”
“Thursday is the soonest I could get.”
“Whoa.”
“I just pressed the button, Carma. I bought it.”
“You are fearsome. With what?”
“A credit card.”
“Whose?”
“My mother’s.”
“Does she know?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, Lenny.”
“You can’t put a price on the Traveling Pants.”
“Yeah, but maybe your mom can.”
Lena started to get suspicious when Bee called on Tuesday and asked her for her flight number for the third time. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Bee said.
When Lena arrived at the gate at Kennedy Airport in New York for her flight to Athens on Thursday, she was surprised to see Bee standing there with her duffel bag over her shoulder, but she was not stunned. She was stunned to see Tibby and Carmen standing beside Bee.
She laughed out loud. The first time in days. It was cathartic. “Did you come to say good-bye?” she asked, full of happy suspicions.
“No, baby, we came to say hello,” Carmen said.
Bee said she’d borrowed the money for her ticket from her dad. According to Carmen, David had about a billion frequent flyer miles, so he gave her some when she pleaded. Tibby’s parents had given her an open ticket voucher for her graduation present last June. They’d also loaned her a hundred bucks to get an expedited passport, which was going to be hard to repay since she’d given notice of exactly one hour at her job.
“Call us Beg, Borrow, Steal and…?” Bee looked at Tibby.
“Use,” Tibby said.
“I wish I was Steal,” Carmen said.
“I wish I was Borrow,” Lena said.
“Nobody wants to be Beg,” Bee pointed out.
They had to argue at the ticket desk to get their seats together, but when the plane took off for Greece, all four of them were sitting side by side.
Lena looked right and looked left and laughed again. How much it sucked to be traveling under these circumstances. But how exquisitely great it was to be doing it together.
“Are you worried they’re going to kick you off the team?” Tibby asked.
As the plane soared through space, as their reckless energy dissipated and the hours stretched, they began to calculate the number of things they had blown off and people they had upset by doing this.
“Not unless they can do without a center forward.” Bee explained that the coach would be furious and threaten her a lot, but then he would forgive her in time to start her in the first league game.
Tibby realized they could not talk about the length of this trip. They couldn’t cast their minds forward to an outcome other than finding the Pants and bringing them home, and who could say how long that would take? But they were heading into the third week in August. It was hard not to recognize the fact that most schools started in a week and a half.
“I’m going to take an incomplete in my screenwriting class,” Tibby said. In the three days she’d spent in New York since her reunion with Brian, she’d made gigantic strides on her love story, but she hadn’t quite gotten to the end of it.
“I was supposed to pack up my room this week. My mom and David are moving into the new house the day after Labor Day. I’ll just have to do it later.”
“Eric said he’d forgive me for leaving if I wore a burka and promised not to flirt with any Greek boys,” Bee said.
“Greeks do like blondes,” Lena said.
“Brian offered to come and help us search,” Tibby said.
“How about Leo?” Carmen asked.
“He called last night,” Lena said. “I think he’s going to Rome for most of next semester.”
“That’s sad,” Carmen said.
Lena shrugged. “It’s not, really. It’s all right. I kind of knew it wasn’t going to turn into a long-term thing.”
Tibby noticed how different Lena looked from the old days of Kostos, when every time she proclaimed equanimity, she looked as if she had stolen a car.
“It’s for the best,” Carmen consoled her. “Lena. Leo. Your names don’t sound good together anyway.”
Tibby laughed and hugged Carmen’s arm. “Well, thanks, Carma. That about settles it.”
Lena laughed too.
“Have a thorny relationship problem? Just ask Carma,” Bee said.
“You should get a column.”
“Start a blog.”
“I think I should,” Carmen agreed. “Hey, did I tell you who came to the final performance last night?”
“Who?”
“Well, my mom and David…”
“Right,” Lena said.
“And my dad and Lydia.”
“Really?” Bee said. “All four of ’em.”
“Yep. They were surprised to see each other at first, but they all had such a great time together I told them they should get a room.”
Tibby laughed and listened to her friends laugh and then just sat back and listened to the flow of their familiar voices. As unhappy as she was about the Pants, she was joyful that the four of them
were finally together. She felt a little guilty about it, like she was laughing at a funeral. And then she realized that the Pants wouldn’t want her to feel that way.
“Do you guys realize this is the first time we’ve really been together since the beach at the end of last summer?” Tibby said, unable to keep her appreciation to herself.
“Yes, I thought of that too,” Lena said a little sadly.
“How could we go so long?” Carmen asked.
“You’re one to ask,” Tibby said, but even as she said it she was filled with gratitude to have their regular Carmen restored to them.
“You know what?” Bee said.
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s just that the Pants are scared of Effie.”
“Then what?” Lena asked.
Bridget looked at each of her friends in turn. “Look at us. I think the Pants are smarter than we even know.”
It was late when they got to Valia’s house, and the four of them were so tired and punchy, so confused as to their whereabouts in time and space, they felt like they’d been inhaling from a whipped cream can.
Lena was earnestly happy to see her grandmother and surprised not to see Effie. She had been girding herself for an uneasy reunion.
“Effie left for Athens today,” Valia told them impassively, but a few minutes later she pulled Lena aside. “She tried her hardest, you know. She tried to find those pants all day and night.”
“I know, Grandma,” Lena said.
Tired as they were, they knew their purpose. Lena found two flashlights and they set out with them on the narrow cobblestone roads and paths beneath the perch of Valia’s terrace.
“It’s all up and down here,” Tibby pointed out, waving her hand down the cliff to the dark water below. “No flat.”
That made it harder to find things, Lena acknowledged to herself. Gravity always played its advantage here.
Valia shook her head at them, making no secret of her doubts, and after a while even Lena realized the futility of their method. Why struggle to light up tiny patches of the world when the sun would do the job so effectively in a few hours?