Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares Read Free Book Online Page A

through tomorrow, please, and then he could do whatever he wanted with her.
    Two decades had passed since then, yet she lay in her bed on the night of October 27 with the exact same feeling. She wriggled and turned and stuck various limbs outside the covers to cool down, asking God to please just look after her until she was reunited with her friends in Santorini the following day. If she could just get to that, she would be happy. He could do whatever he wanted with her after that.
    What could she offer in return? She’d be a better person. She’d spend less money on shoes. She’d play in the network’s charity softball game. She’d mentor a high school student. She would call her father twice a week absolutely and without fail. She would read the editorial page of The New York Times every day. She would nolonger search the Internet for cellulite photos of actresses who got the roles she was rejected for.
    Though Carmen felt foolish, she also felt lucky that she was bargaining with God, who was all-forgiving, as opposed to somebody who would surely come back to collect on her wager.
    Lena prided herself on her capability as an abstract thinker, but sometimes her brain was as concrete as a lizard’s. It took the actual sight of Bridget and Carmen, flesh and warmth and flying hair, racing toward her through the international terminal at JFK in New York City, to make her understand how terribly much she had missed them.
    Bridget reached her first and grabbed her without entirely braking. Lena felt herself pulled into the familiar momentum.
    Carmen in her tall cork sandals got there a few seconds after. She squeezed Lena’s forearm so hard it would make a bruise. She screamed so loudly in Lena’s ear she left it ringing. She stepped on Lena’s toes without thinking. Lena felt tears pricking in her eyes and she laughed. It was so good to feel these things, even the ones that stung.
    Bee made it a huddle. She tried to pick the two of them up off the ground, and Lena drew in the familiar stimuli: Bridget’s peppermint shampoo, the delicate sponge-cake texture of her skin against Lena’s cheek, Carmen’s grapefruit-scented hair junk and sticky lips. The smells on them were deeper, the colors brighter, than on other people.
    Lena liked them to stay the same, and they were awfully obliging about it. In recent years her joy at seeing them was always mixed with anxiety that there would be some telltale change. She wasn’t sure what it would be: a supercilious brow, the forgetting of some little ritual, a set of crow’s-feet, a this or a that, that would separate one of them from the rest, or from their bond or from their past.
    Bee was especially accommodating. She was practically a Bee museum. Her faded lavender T-shirt had been gathering snags and extra stitches since ninth grade. Her yellow hair was long and messy as ever, the flow of it interrupted by skinny braids here and therethat reminded Lena of Bee’s cornrow phase in sixth grade. She dragged along the shiny airport floor the same worn-out Israeli clogs she’d bought with Lena on a jaunt along Eighth Street the summer after college. Lena amply forgave her for the drooping blue socks, which she’d shamelessly stolen from Lena on the last trip to Greece.
    Well, Carmen did show some signs of change, even in the two months since Lena had seen her: her highlights were slightly lighter, her jeans slightly tighter, her eyebrows slightly thinner. But she was the makeover queen, so what would you expect? With Carmen they were always the same category of cosmetic changes that did nothing to mask the eager animation of her face. Change was the weather with Carmen. It would be weird if she stayed the same.
    Tibby would be waiting for them at the airport in Fira. “She texted me that she got there yesterday morning. She opened up the house,” Lena told them excitedly, though they already knew, because she’d texted them too.
    Lena settled into a bouncing stride between