Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares Read Free Book Online Page B

Carmen and Bridget, unabashedly clutching their hands through the long terminal. She had a magazine under her arm, candy in her bag, and an unaccustomed feeling of robust hunger in her stomach. She was looking forward to her life with brazen joy, and that was a gift she almost never gave herself. She looked forward to every single piece of it, from the airplane food to flying through the night under shared blankets, to Carmen’s sleep-sputtering (God help you if you called it snoring) in her ear, to the first sight of the Caldera from the air.
    Most of all she looked forward to seeing Tibby when they landed. With an ache she pictured Tibby’s freckled, heart-shaped face, lost to her for almost two years. The last time she’d seen it, it was framed in the door of their old neighborhood bar on East Fifth Street, where the four of them had met to celebrate Carmen’s first getting cast on Criminal Court . Tibby had been looking over her shoulder, a final glimpse as she said goodbye. Lena hadn’t known it was goodbye at the time, but maybe Tibby had. Tibby had always been awkward about showy rituals. And she wouldn’t have wanted to take anything away from Carmen’s big night. But within a week Brian had gotten some tremendous opportunity and the two ofthem were rushing off to Australia. Just for a few months, Tibby had thought at the time. But it had been two long years, and even Lena’s lizard brain could sense that expanse, now that their reunion was so close. Seeing Tibby would make her joy complete.
    Lena was good at convincing herself of things, and dangerously good at thinking she could be herself without these friends of hers. As the three of them yapped contentedly all the way to the gate, through the lengthy boarding process, onto the plane with its blankets and pillows that gave it the atmosphere of an international slumber party, she felt her face opening into expressions she’d forgotten how to make. Lena remembered herself in all the old familiar things they said. She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she’d forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.
    Blinking in the artificial morning light with her weary, late-night eyes, Carmen could read the same tired bewilderment on her friends’ faces. Their plane had carried a big bellyful of America, which had dissipated the moment they stepped into this bustling, overheated little airport.
    “Are we late, do you think?” Lena asked.
    Bee squinted at the board showing arrivals. “Are we early?”
    “I’m not sure my phone has the right time,” Carmen said, studying it.
    Carmen had geared herself up for seeing Tibby first thing off the plane. They had all calibrated their patience to that moment and no further. So after ten minutes of swinging heads and darting eyes and thudding under ribs, Carmen was fairly sure that Tibby had not yet arrived at the gate, and the excitement started to wear on them.
    “Maybe she’s at the baggage claim.”
    “Yeah. Probably.”
    “These things are always confusing.”
    “Maybe that’s Tibby.” Bridget pointed to a corpulent middle-aged woman in a blue head scarf.
    Carmen laughed. “Well, it has been a while.”
    Carmen’s eyes were still darting. She studied every face throughthe glass wall of the arrivals area. She wished she had not been so vain as to pack away her distance glasses.
    “Let’s go to baggage claim.”
    “She’ll be there.”
    They moved as a tired six-legged creature toward the sign that said Baggage Claim, all of them scanning the crowd for a freckled, wiry, much-missed American.
    The smell of cigarette smoke was strong, and the amount of sunshine in the airport felt out of step with the notion of nighttime still lagging in their bodies. It had seemed a lot more important to talk through the flight than sleep. At the time it had. Carmen felt a slight sick feeling of exhaustion starting in the bottom of her stomach.
    They stood in the baggage claim. They