Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares Read Free Book Online Page A

afternoon, so Lena borrowed her father’s car on Friday and dropped him at work on her way to drawing class. It was easily on the way. In fact, as she drove away from her father, who was already sweating through his white shirt, she considered absently that it was only a short walk from his office building to her class. But at the time, it didn’t signify anything.
    By midmorning she was deeply immersed in her drawing. At Annik’s instruction, the model, Andrew, took five-minute poses. For the first few poses Lena felt so harried she could barely get a gesture out of the tip of her charcoal. But then those five minutes began to stretch out for her. The intensity of hurrying stayed, but the consciousness of time dropped away. Just as her awareness of the model’s nakedness had completely bewitched her during the first few days and subsequently floated off. (In hindsight she felt ashamed of her juvenile, red-faced self. To the seasoned artists in the class, Andrew’s nudity was about as sexually charged as Lena’s coffee cup.)
    Lena now observed Andrew’s body in extreme detail, staring without a vestige of shyness at the hollow inside his hip and the sharp ridge of his shin. When she passed deeply into this creative state, she didn’t really have thoughts anymore. The muscles that controlled her arm bypassed her thinking brain, linking directly to her autonomic system. The usual Lena was just along for the ride.
    She jumped when the timer rang out for the long break. A shiver radiated from her shoulders. She hated coming up to the surface like this. She didn’t want to hear Phyllis’s newspaper rustling and Charlie’s heels slapping around in his sandals. She didn’t want Andrew pulling on his robe. Not for the reasons you might think. No, really. (Though the truth was, she did regain the awkward mindfulness of Andrew’s bare skin in that second when he’d pull on the green kimono and again in that second when he’d take it off.) She just wanted to draw. She just wanted to stay in that place where she understood things without thinking about them.
    As Lena stared wistfully at her empty coffee cup, she recognized—almost abstractly—her happiness. Leave it to her to detect happiness rather than actually feel it. Maybe it wasn’t happiness, precisely. Maybe it was more like…peace. At the end of the previous summer her peace had been sliced up like roast beef. The tumult had brought with it a certain strange exuberance, a feeling of living more extravagantly than ever before. But it had also sucked.
    She thought back to the end of that summer, when she had first met Paul Rodman, Carmen’s stepbrother. Her response to him had taken her by surprise. She had never experienced such an instant physical attraction to anybody—not even Kostos. In Paul’s presence, that first time, she had spun these out-of-character fantasies about what she could mean to him, and he to her. But after he left, she retreated, as was her wont. Her romantic side went back into hiding, and after some time, her timid side took over, timidly, again.
    Now when she thought about him she felt ashamed. He was one of the many things she’d been hiding from this year. He was one of the people she’d been avoiding.
    In February, she had first heard from Carmen that Paul’s father was sick. She felt awful about it. She had thought about Paul. She had worried for him. But she hadn’t called him, or written, as she’d meant to. She had learned since, from Carmen, that Paul’s father was sicker and would likely not be getting better. She didn’t know what to say to Paul.
    She was afraid of his sadness. She was afraid to elicit his feelings. She was also afraid not to. She was afraid she would bring it up, and there would fall that most inept failure between them: total silence.
    It wasn’t until this class, this feeling, that she had regained a sense of balance. The time she spent with her charcoal and her fingers and her broad pads of paper