Ann Brashares - Sisterhood Everlasting

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
The Last Summer (of You and Me)
3 Willows
My Name Is Memory

Sisterhood Everlasting is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents
are the products of the authors imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual events, locales, or persons, living
or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Ann Brashares

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Liveright Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint three lines from I like my body when it is with your by E. E. Cummings from Complete Poems: 19041962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, copyright 1923, 1925, 1951, 1953, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, copyright 1976 by George James Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brashares, Ann.
Sisterhood everlasting : a novel / Ann Brashares.
p. cm.(Sisterhood of the traveling pants ; 6)
eISBN: 978-0-679-60509-6
1. Female friendshipFiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R385S57 2011
813.6dc22 2010043106

www.atrandom.com

Jacket photograph: Junichi Kusaka/Getty Images

v3.1

For my three amazing brothers,
Beau Brashares, Justin Brashares, and Ben Brashares, with love.
The closest thing I have to a sisterhood is a brotherhood.

If you are not too long,

I will wait here for you

all my life.

Oscar Wilde

Once upon a time there were four pregnant women who met in an aerobics gym. Im not joking; thats how this story begins. These large, fit, sweatband-sporting women bore four daughters, all born in and around the month of September. These girls started out as babies together and grew to be girls and then women. A sisterhood, if you will.

As I look back on themon usI realize that though we arent related by blood, we are like four siblings. The Septembers, as we called ourselves, are governed by the laws of birth order, even though we are all basically the same age.

Lena is the oldest. She is responsible, rule-abiding, selfless whenever required, steady as a metronome, and not always a thrill a minute, to tell you the truth. She knows how to take care of you. She knows how to be an adult, and she knows how to be serious. She doesnt always know how not to be serious.

I admit that I, Carmen, am a classic youngest childcompounded by the fact that I grew up as an only child. Theres no end to my self-centeredness when I get going. I can be bratty and tempestuous, but I am loyal above all. I am loyal to who we are and what we have. I am worshipful of my sisters and worshipful of our sisterhood. I am not cool: you heard it here first. I feel like a mascot sometimesthe guy in the giant-headed fuzzy animal getup at football games, melting away inside his suit. When it comes to us, Ill throw anything in.

Bee is our true middle childfree as a butterfly. She loves you, but she doesnt care what you think. Shes not afraid; shes got the rest of us holding that down. Shes free to compete, free to kick ass, free to fail and laugh about it. She can be reckless. Shes got less to lose; its been a long time since she had a mother. Shes such a force you forget she gets injured. Youll see her stagger and realize she needs help long before she does. Your heart goes out to her. She doesnt know how to feel her own pain, but she can feel yours.

Tibby is our younger middle child, our sly observer. Shes the quiet kid in the big Irish family who only wears hand-me-downs. She can be cynical, instantly judgmental, and devastating in her cleverness. She can also, as an old friend memorably put it, change her mind. She has a gift for exposing the liesthe lies we tell other people, the lies we tell ourselves. All of this is a casing around an exquisitely sensitive heart. She doesnt turn her wit against us, almost ever. She entertains us with it, and uses it in her scripts and short films. If only anybody would produce any of them. Sometimes Tibbys wit sweetens into wisdom. I think thats what she gives us.

There was a significant epoch in our lives when we organized our friendship around a pair of pants we shared. Really, pants. We called them the Traveling Pants, and according to our mythology, they had the power to keep us together when we were apart.

Our pants were lost in Greece almost exactly ten years ago. How have we fared at keeping together since we lost them, you ask? That is a question.

Growing up is hard on a friendship. Theres no revelation in that. I remember my mom once told me that a good family is built for leaving, because that is what children must do. And Ive wondered many times, is that also what a good friendship is supposed to be built for? Because ours isnt. We have no idea how to cope with the leaving. And Im probably the worst of all. If you need a picture, picture this: me putting my hands over my eyes, pretending the leaving isnt happening, waiting for us all to be together again.

To make a prairie it takes

a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do

If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

Once, when she was thirteen, Carmen remembered turning to Tibby with her CosmoGirl magazine in one hand and her eye pencil in the other and declaring that she could never, ever get sick of doing makeovers.

Well, it turned out she could. Sitting in the makeup chair in early October in a trailer parked on the corner of Bleecker Street and the Bowery in the East Village of Manhattan, getting her hair blown out for the seven millionth time by a girl named Rita and the foundation sponged onto her face for the eight millionth time by a girl named Genevieve, Carmen knew it was just another mile on the hedonic treadmill. You could get sick of anything.

It was true. Shed read an article in Time magazine about it. You could even get sick of chocolate, shed told her mother on the phone the night before.

Her mother had made a doubting sound.

Thats what I read anyway.

Being an actress on a TV show, even a moderately good and successful TV show, involved a few minutes of acting for every few hours you spent in the makeup chair. And even when you were done with the makeuptemporarily, of course; you were never done with the makeupthere was still a whole lot of sitting around drinking lattes. That was the dirty secret of the entertainment industry: it was boring.

Granted, Carmen didnt have the biggest part in the show. She was Special Investigator Lara Brennan on Criminal Court. She showed up at least briefly at a crime scene in almost every episode and sometimes got to appear as a witness on the stand.

Eyes up, Genevieve said, coming in with a mascara wand. It was rare that Carmen needed a prompt. She knew exactly which way to turn her eyes for each portion of the mascara application. If she didnt stay ahead of it, Carmen feared shed end up like one of the many dolls shed mangled as a child with her constant brutal efforts at grooming.