Prologue

Once upon a time there were four girls. Young women, you might even say. And though their lives traveled in different directions, they loved each other very much.

Once upon a time before that, these same girls found a pair of pants, wise and magical, and named them the Traveling Pants.

The Pants had the magic of teaching these girls how to be apart. They taught them how to be four people instead of one person. How to be together no matter where they were. How to love themselves as much as they loved each other. And on a practical level, the Pants had the magic of fitting all four of them, which is hard to believe but true, especially considering only one of them (the blonde) was built like a supermodel.

Okay. Full disclosure. I am one of these girls. I wear these Pants. I have these friends. I know this magic.

I am in fact the blonde, though I was kidding about the supermodel part.

But anyway, as it happens with most kinds of magic, these Pants did their job a little too well. And the girls, being extraordinary girls (if you don't mind my saying so), learned their lesson a little too well.

And so when the girls' lives changed that final summer, the Pants, being wise, had to change too.

And that is how this tale of sisterhood began, but did not end.

Gilda's was the same. It always was. And what a relief too, Lena found herself thinking. Good thing you could count on human vanity and the onward march of fitness crazes requiring mats and mirrors.

Not much else was the same. Things were different, things were missing. Carmen, for instance, was missing.

"I can't really see how we can do this without Carmen," Tibby said. As was the custom, she'd brought her video camera for posterity, but she hadn't turned it on. Nobody was quite sure about when posterity started, or if maybe it already had.

"So maybe we shouldn't try," Bee said. "Maybe we should wait until we can do it together."

Lena had brought the candles, but she hadn't lit them. Tibby had brought the ceremonial bad eighties aerobics music, but she hadn't put it on. Bee had gamely set out the bowls of Gummi Worms and Cheetos, but nobody was eating them.

"When's that going to be?" Tibby asked. "Seriously, I think we've been trying to get together since last September and I don't think it has happened once."

"What about Thanksgiving?" Lena asked.

"Remember I had to go to Cincinnati for Great-grandma Felicia's hundredth birthday?" Tibby said.

"Oh, yeah. And she had a stroke," Bee said.

"That was after the party."

"And Carmen went to Florida over Christmas," Lena said. "And you two were in New York over New Year's."

"All right, so how about two weekends from now? Carmen will be back by then, won't she?"

"Yeah, but my classes start on June twentieth." Lena clasped her hands around her knees, her large feet bare on the sticky pine floor. "I can't miss the first day of the pose or I'll end up stuck in a corner or staring at the model's kneecap for a month."

"Okay, so July fourth," Tibby said reasonably. "Nobody has school or anything that Friday. We could meet back here for a long weekend?"

Bee untied her shoe. "I fly to Istanbul on June twenty-fourth."

"That soon? Can you go later?" Tibby asked.

Bridget's face dimmed with regret. "The program put us all on this charter flight. Otherwise it's an extra thousand bucks and you have to find your own way to the site."

"How could Carmen miss this?" Tibby asked.

Lena knew what she meant. It wasn't okay for any of them to miss this ritual, but especially not Carmen, to whom it had mattered so much.

Bee looked around. "Miss what, though?" she asked, not so much challenging as conciliating. "This isn't really the launch, right?" She gestured to the Pants, folded obediently in the middle of their triangle. "I mean, not officially. We've been wearing them all school year. It's not like the other summers, when this was the huge kickoff and everything."

Lena wasn't sure whether she felt comforted or antagonized by this statement.

"Maybe that's true," Tibby said. "Maybe we don't need a launch this summer."

"We should at least figure out the rotation tonight," Lena said. "Carmen will just have to live with it."

"Why don't we keep up the same rotation we've had going till now?" Bridget suggested, straightening her legs in front of her. "No reason to change it just because it's summer."

Lena bit the skin around her thumbnail and considered the practical truth of this. Summer used to be different. It was the time they left home, split up, lived separate lives for ten long weeks, and counted on the Pants to hold them together until they were reunited. Now summer was more of the same. Being apart wasn't the exception, Lena recognized, it was the rule.

When will we all be home again? That was what she wanted to know.

But when she thought about it logically, she knew: It wasn't just the answer that had changed, it was the question. What was home anymore? What counted as the status quo? Home was a time and it had passed.

Nobody was eating the Gummi Worms. Lena felt like she should eat one or cry. "So we'll just keep up the rotation," she echoed wanly. "I think I get them next."

"I have it written down," Tibby said.

"Okay."

"Well."

Lena looked at her watch. "Should we just go?"

"I guess," Tibby said.

"Do you want to stop at Tastee Diner on the way home?" Bridget asked.

"Yeah," Tibby said, gathering the effects of a ritual that hadn't quite happened. "Maybe we can see a late movie after. I can't handle my parents tonight."

"What time are you guys taking off tomorrow?" Bee asked.

"I think our train's at ten," Tibby said. Lena and Tibby were taking the train together: Tibby was getting off in New York to start film classes and her Movieworld job, and Lena was heading up to Providence to change dorm rooms for the summer. Bee was spending a few days at home before she left for Turkey.

Lena realized she didn't want to go home just yet either. She picked up the Pants and cradled them briefly. She had a feeling she could not name exactly, but one she knew she had not had in relation to the Pants before. She had felt gratitude, admiration, trust. What she felt now still contained all that, but tonight it was mixed in with a faint taste of desperation.

If we didn't have them, I don't know what we would do, she found herself thinking as Bee pulled the door of Gilda's shut behind them and they walked slowly down the dark stairs.

Copyright © 2007 by Ann Brashares. All rights reserved.