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Ages 12 and up. Best buds Tibby, Carmen, Lena and Bridget are back with their
magical pair of shared jeans in Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the
Sisterhood. Each summer brings new and difficult challenges, as the
perennially separated friends discover afresh this last season before college.
Tibby struggles with the idea of close friend Brian becoming her boyfriend, and
their fragile relationship is soon tested by a tragedy in her immediate family.
Carmen doesn’t know how to react when she finds out that her middle-aged mom is
pregnant, and Bridget is unpleasantly surprised to be reunited with the boy who
broke her heart two summers ago. Finally, Lena, still coming to terms with the
loss of her first love, tries to convince her strict father that art school is a
better career path than Greek restaurant management. But through every crisis,
each girl is assured of the love and support of the created sisterhood when she
pulls on the denim armor of the cherished, and by now, a bit fragrant ("Rule #
1. You must never wash the Pants.") Traveling Pants.

Chapter One


Granted, Tibby was in a mood. All she could see was change. All anybody talked about was change. She didn't like Bee's wearing heels for the second day in a row. She felt peevish about Lena's getting three inches trimmed off her hair. Couldn't everybody just leave everything alone for a few minutes?
Tibby was a slow adjuster. In preschool, her teachers had said she had trouble with transitions. Tibby preferred looking backward for information rather than forward. As far as she was concerned, she'd take a nursery school report card over a fortune-teller any day of the week. It was the cheapest and best self-analysis around.

Tibby saw Gilda's through these same eyes. It was changing. Its glory days of the late nineteen eighties were far behind it. It was showing its age. The once-shiny wood floor was scratched and dull. One of the mirror panels was cracked. The mats looked as old as Tibby, and they'd been cleaned much less. Gilda's was trying to get with the times, offering kickboxing and yoga, according to the big chalkboard, but it didn't look to Tibby like that was helping much. What if it went out of business? What a horrible thought. Maybe Tibby should buy a subscription of classes here? No, that would be weird, wouldn't it?

"Tibby, you ready?" Lena was looking at her with concerned eyebrows.

"What if Gilda's closes?" Tibbyopened her mouth, and that was what came out.

Carmen, holding the Traveling Pants, Lena, lighting the candles, Bee, fussing with the dimmer switches near the door, all turned to her.

"Look at this place." Tibby gestured around. "I mean, who comes here?"

Lena was puzzled. "I don't know. Somebody. Women. Yoga people."

"Yoga people?" Carmen asked.

"I don't know," Lena said again, laughing.

Tibby was the one most capable of emotional detachment, but tonight it all lay right on the surface. Her irrational thoughts about Gilda's made her feel desperate, like its demise could swallow up their whole existence-like a change in the present could wipe out the past. The past felt fragile to her. But the past was set, right? It couldn't be changed. Why did she feel such a need to protect it?

"I think it's Pants time," Carmen said. The snacks were out. The candles were lit. The egregiously bad dance music played.

Tibby wasn't sure she wanted it to be Pants time yet. She was having enough trouble maintaining control. She was scared of them noticing what all this meant.

Too late. Out of Carmen's arms came the artifacts of their ritual. The Pants, slowly unfolding from their winter compression, seeming to gain strength as they mixed with the special air of Gilda's. Carmen laid them on the ground, and on top of them the manifesto, written on that first night two years before, describing the rules of wearing them. Silently they formed their circle, studying the inscriptions and embroidery that chronicled their summer lives.

"Tonight we say good-bye to high school, and bye to Bee for a while," Carmen said in her ceremonial voice. "We say hello to summer, and hello to the Traveling Pants."

Her voice grew less ceremonial. "Tonight we are not worrying about good-bye to each other. We're saving that for the beach at the end of the summer. That's the deal, right?"

Tibby felt like kissing Carmen. Brave as she was, even Carmen was daunted by the implications of looking ahead.

"That's the deal," Tibby agreed heartily.

The last weekend of the summer had already become sacred in their minds. Sacred and feared. The Morgans owned a house right on the beach in Rehoboth. They had offered it to Carmen for that final weekend, in part, Carmen suspected, because they had gotten an au pair from Denmark and felt guilty about not hiring Carmen to babysit this summer as she had done the summer before.

The four of them had promised each other in the spring that it would be their weekend.

The Pants first came to us at the perfect moment. That is, when we were splitting up for the first time. It was two summers ago when they first worked their magic, and last summer when they shook up our lives once again. You see, we don’t wear the Pants year-round. We let them rest so they are extra powerful when summer comes. (There was the time this spring when Carmen wore them to her mom’s wedding, but that was a special case.)

Now we’re facing our last summer together. In September we go to college. And it’s not like one of those TV shows where all of us magically turn up at the same college. We’re going to four different colleges in four different cities (but all within four hours of one another?that was our one rule). We’re headed off to start our real lives.

Tomorrow night at Gilda’s we’ll launch the Pants on their third summer voyage. Tomorrow begins the time of our lives. It’s when we’ll need our Pants the most.