Table of Contents
ALSO BY ANN BRASHARES
For Adults
The Last Summer (of You and Me)
For Young Adults
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
The Second Summer of the Sisterhood
Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows
For my dearest Nate, who has a gift for remembering
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely for ever.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
I HAVE LIVED more than a thousand years. I have died countless times. I forget precisely how many times. My memory is an extraordinary thing, but it is not perfect. I am human.
The early lives blur a bit. The arc of your soul follows the pattern of each of your lives. It is macrocosmic. There was my childhood. There have been many childhoods. And even in the early part of my soul I reached adulthood many times. These days, in every one of my infancies, the memory comes faster. We go through the motions. We look oddly at the world around us. We remember.
I say we and I mean myself, my soul, my selves, my many lives. I say we and I also mean the other ones like me who have the Memory, the conscious record of experience on this earth that survives every death. There arent many, I know. Maybe one in a century, one born out of millions. We find one another rarely, but believe me, there are others. At least one of them has a memory far more extraordinary than mine.
I have been born and died many times in many places. The space between them is the same. I wasnt in Bethlehem for Christs birth. I never saw the glory that was Rome. I never bowed to Charlemagne. At that time I was scratching out a crop in Anatolia, speaking a dialect unintelligible to the villages north and south. Only God and the devil can be counted on for all the thrilling parts. The great hits of history go along without the notice of most. I read about them in books like everybody else.
Sometimes I feel more akin to houses and trees than to my fellow human beings. I stand around watching the waves of people come and go. Their lives are short, but mine is long. Sometimes I imagine myself as a post driven into the oceans edge.
Ive never had a child, and Ive never gotten old. I dont know why. I have seen beauty in countless things. I have fallen in love, and she is the one who endures. I killed her once and died for her many times and I still have nothing to show for it. I always search for her; I always remember her. I carry the hope that someday she will remember me.
HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2004
SHE HADNT KNOWN him very long. Hed shown up there at the beginning of eleventh grade. It was a small town and a small school district. You kept seeing the same kids year after year. He was a junior when he came, the same as her, but he seemed older somehow.
Shed heard many things about where and how he had spent the previous seventeen years of his life, but she doubted any of them were true. He was in a mental institution before he came to Hopewood, people said. His father was in jail and he lived by himself. His mother was killed, they said, most likely by his father. He always wore long sleeves, somebody said, because he had burns on his arms. Hed never defended himself against these stories, as far as she knew, and never offered any alternatives.
And though Lucy didnt believe the rumors, she understood the thing they were getting at. Daniel was different, even as he tried not to be. His face was proud, but there was a feeling of tragedy about him. It seemed to her as though no one had taken care of him and he didnt even realize it. One time she saw him standing in the cafeteria by the window while everyone else was jostling past him with their clattering trays, yakking a mile a minute, and he just looked completely lost. There was something about the way he looked at that moment that made her think he was the loneliest person in the world.
When he first appeared at school there was a lot of commotion about him because he was extremely good-looking. He was tall and strong-boned and self-possessed, and his clothes were a little nicer than most other kids. At first the coaches were sniffing around for him to play football because of his size, but he didnt pursue it. As it was a small town and a bored town and a hopeful town, kids talked and rumors started. The rumors were ennobling at first, but then he made some mistakes. He didnt show up at Melody Sandersons Halloween party, even though she invited him personally in the hallway, and everybody saw it. He talked to Sonia Frye straight through the annual junior/senior picnic, even though she was an untouchable freak to people like Melody. It was a delicate social ecosystem they lived in, and most people got scared off him by the first winter.
Except Lucy. She herself didnt know why not. She didnt respect Melody or her posse of yeah-girls, but she trod carefully. She had marks against her to begin with, and she didnt want to be an outcast. She couldnt do that to her mother, not after what shed already been through with her sister. Nor was Lucy the kind who liked difficult boys. She didnt.
She had the weird ideakind of a fantasy, actuallythat she could help him. She knew what it was like on the outside and the inside at this school, and she knew what it took to maintain yourself through both. She sensed that he bore a heavier weight than most other people, and it gave her a strange, aching empathy for him. She honored herself with the idea that maybe he needed her, that maybe she was the one who could understand him.
He showed no sign of sharing this view. In almost two years he hadnt spoken to her once. Well, one time shed stepped on his shoe-lace and apologized to him and hed stared at her and muttered something. Shed felt nagging and uneasy afterward, and her mind kept going back to it, trying to figure out what hed said and what hed meant, but she finally decided that she hadnt done anything wrong and it was his problem going around with his shoe untied in the senior hallway at three in the afternoon.
Do you think Im overthinking this? shed asked Marnie.
Marnie looked at her as though it took restraint not to claw at her hair. Yes, I do. I think you are overthinking this. If there was a movie about you it would be called I Am Overthinking This.
Shed laughed at the time and worried later. Marnie wasnt trying to be mean. Marnie loved her better and more honestly than anyone else in the world, with the possible exception of her mother, who loved her intensely if not honestly. Marnie hated to see her spend so much of herself on someone who didnt care.
Lucy suspected he was some kind of genius. Not that he did or said anything to let you know. But once shed sat beside him in English class, sneaking looks when the class was discussing Shakespeare. Shed seen him, his big shoulders huddled over his notebook, writing sonnets from memory, one after the other, in beautiful slanting script that made her think of Thomas Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence. He had a look on his face that made her believe he was as far as he could be from the small, boxy classroom with the stuttering fluorescent light, the gray linoleum floor, and the one tiny window.
