Sunday afternoon, Tibby changed into the Travelling Pants before walking to the auditorium in the arts center. Brian wasn’t there, and she was relieved. She planned to go out and celebrate after the festival with Maura and Alex. She’d wavered between inviting Brian along and making some excuse to get out of having to bring him.

She put on the Pants without letting herself look too hard or think too much. These were the Pants , after all, and she was lucky, very lucky, to have them for the first-ever public showing of one of her films. If things in her life worked out, it would be the first of many. She stood in front of the long mirror, admiring the fit and ignoring the inscriptions. It was hard to figure out how, but her hair actually looked better when she wore the Pants. Even her breasts looked a little bigger—or at least like they existed.

Her heartbeat sped up when she saw the crowd in the auditorium. Most kids were sitting with their parents. Tibby took a seat by herself in the back with two empty seats next to it. When she saw Alex and Maura in the aisle, she waved them over, feeling slightly guilty about not leaving a seat for Brian. After that she kept her head down. Maybe he wouldn’t see her.

First, Professor Graves, the head of the film program, welcomed everybody; then they got rolling. Among the first six movies were a couple of short family dramas, a long interview of a filmmaker’s grandmother, an adventure story clearly shot on campus but attempting to look like wilderness, and an embarrassing romantic film.

Alex was fidgeting and making wry comments throughout. Tibby was laughing at them at first, but then she realized Maura was also laughing on the other side, so she stopped. It struck her that Maura was a yeah-girl. Pink glasses or no, she was a follower, an inconsequential person, and Tibby felt herself acting just like her.

The lights went up. Tibby knew her movie was coming in the second of three batches.

 

“Tibby!” She heard a hissing whisper.

 

She looked around almost frantically.

 

“Tibby!”

 

The voice was coming from a middle row on the left side of the auditorium, and it belonged unmistakably to her mother.

 

Tibby felt a jolt inside her chest. She forgot about breathing.

 

Her mom was waving madly. She had a huge smile on her face. She was obviously excited to be there, and so pleased that she had pulled off this surprise.

And what a surprise. Tibby made herself smile too. She waved. “That’s my . . . ,” she began numbly. She let her voice peter out. She stood, with the thought that she would somehow go and sit with her mom, but there were no free seats, and the lights were dimming for the next set of movies.

At that moment, Tibby’s eyes also fell upon Brian, sitting on the right side, almost equidistant from her mother. He was looking at her like he’d known exactly where she was the whole time. Did he also know her mother was there?

She’d told Brian it was fine if her mother saw her movie, that she didn’t care. But from the lurch and sprawl of her stomach, it was seeming like maybe she did care.

 

Her mother had come all this way for a happy surprise. With a sense of doom in her heart, Tibby waited for the next surprise to come.

 

Two films came before Tibby’s, but she didn’t register one thing about either of them.

Hers began slowly, with a close-up of an innocent cherry red lollipop. Then the music kicked up and the lollipop turned evil. The shot widened to reveal it adhered to the back of a well-coiffed brown head. The audience burst into laughter, just as Tibby had hoped they would. But the laughter fell like shards of glass pelting down upon her.

One after another, each of the segments connected with the audience, just the way any filmmaker would dream they would. The laughter rose to near hysteria when the camera followed the back of the elegant pump-shod heel trailing the diaper wipe through the house.

Tibby couldn’t make herself turn her head in the direction of her mother’s seat until the end, after it was over and a new movie started and, Tibby prayed, began to change the mood. Tibby felt like a pure coward as she stared at the screen ahead.

She could avert her eyes, but she hadn’t thought to plug her ears. She heard a snuffle from her left. She wished and hoped she had imagined it. She squeezed her eyes shut. If she could ever in her life have transported herself from one place to another, she would have done it then.

She moved her head ever so slightly to the left and did the rest with her eyeballs. She needed to see her mother, but couldn’t face her, even in the dark. Straining her eyeballs to the far corner of her vision, she could see that her mother’s head was bent.

Tibby’s hands found her face. What had she done?

 

Alex was snickering at something on the screen. Tibby was lost. She was somewhere else. She didn’t look up again until the lights were on and half the people had left.

 

“Tibby?” Alex was looking at her.

 

“Yes?”

 

“You coming?” She was looking into Alex’s face, but she wasn’t seeing it.

 

She turned in one direction, and Brian was standing at the end of her row, waiting for her. When she turned in the other direction, she saw that her mother had gone.

Christina didn’t stray more than five feet from the phone. She actually carried it with her when she went to the bathroom. She waited until two in the afternoon to suck up her pride and ask Carmen if anyone had called while she was out that morning.

Carmen shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “The machine picked it up,” she said. It wasn’t a lie.

 

“The message from Mr. Brattle?” Christina asked.

 

Carmen shrugged again.

 

Christina nodded, her fragile hopes dashed.

 

It was such pathetic female behavior, Carmen felt the anger churning in her stomach again. “Are you waiting for a call in particular?” Carmen asked.

 

Christina looked away. “Well, I thought David might . . .” Her voice was faint. Her sentence died off rather than came to a stop.

 

Mean things filled Carmen’s mouth. Somewhere up in a lofty part of her mind, she told herself to go into her room and shut the door. Instead, she opened her mouth.

 

“Is it impossible for you to go one day without David?” she snapped.

 

Christina’s cheeks turned pink. “Of course not. It’s just—”

 

“You’re setting a horrible example, you know. Throwing your entire life away for some guy. Mooning over the phone all day, waiting for him to call.”

 

“Carmen, that’s not fair. I’m not—”

“You are!” Carmen insisted. She’d just had that first tantalizing drink, and there was no stopping her now. “You go out every night. You dress like a teenager. You borrow my clothes! You make out in restaurants! It’s embarrassing. You’re making a huge fool of yourself, don’t you know that?”

For days now Christina’s happiness had lifted her into a state of benevolence in which she had absorbed Carmen’s anger with patience and understanding. Now Carmen could feel her mother sinking back down to earth, and it was satisfying.

Christina’s cheeks were no longer sweetly pink; they were red and patchy. Her mouth made a grim line. “That is a nasty thing to say, Carmen. And it isn’t true.”

 

“It is true! Melanie Foster saw you making out at the Ruby Grill! She’s been telling everybody about it! Do you know how that makes me feel?”

 

“We weren't making out, ” Christina defended herself hotly.

 

“You were! Do you think I don’t know you’re sleeping around? Doesn’t the church say you’re supposed to get married before you do that? Isn’t that what you’ve always told me?”

It was a calculated guess, and by the stricken look on Christina’s face, Carmen knew she’d guessed right. It was the equivalent of dropping the H-bomb, and Carmen had done it without preparing for the consequences. She felt nauseated as she stared at Christina. A big part of her wanted her mother to deny it, but she didn’t.

Christina looked at the floor and kneaded her hands. “I don’t think that is any of your business,” she whispered savagely.

 

“It is my business. You’re supposed to be my mother,” Carmen replied. Her mother was now angry enough for both of them.

 

“I am your mother,” Christina shot back.

Carmen felt tears flooding her eyes. She wasn’t ready to be vulnerable to her mother yet. Instead, she took her very full heart into the privacy of her room, where she could consider what was in it.

“Hey,” Brian said from the aisle just beyond where she was standing. He looked sad. He tried to hold Tibby’s eyes for an extra moment to figure out what was going on with her.

 

She dropped her gaze. She didn’t want him to see anything.

 

Brian stood there. He was going to wait for her, of course. Alex and Maura were looking at him, obviously wondering who the loser with the Star Wars T-shirt and the bad glasses was.

 

Tibby took a breath. She needed to say something.

 

“Uh, this is Brian,” she said flatly. Her voice sounded as if it came from a different body than hers.

 

She pointed to Alex. “This is Alex.” She pointed to Maura. “This is Maura.”

 

Brian didn’t seem to care about Alex and Maura. He was still gazing solemnly at Tibby with his dark brown eyes. She wished he would go away.

 

“’Sup,” Alex said fleetingly to Brian, turning his back before he’d even finished greeting him. He faced Tibby. “Let’s go.”

 

Numbly she nodded and began to follow Alex and Maura out of the auditorium. She wasn’t thinking. Naturally Brian followed her.

The four of them somehow ended up in a Mexican restaurant two blocks away. Alex looked annoyed that he hadn’t shaken Brian off. Maura made no secret of rolling her eyes in displeasure.

This would have been a good moment for Tibby to explain that Brian was not actually a psychotic stalker but one of her very best friends, who not only hung out at her house all the time but was currently living in her dorm room. She didn’t. She couldn’t make herself look at Brian, let alone say his name.

They stood awkwardly at the noisy bar. Alex successfully ordered three Dos Equis with his fake ID. He leaned in close to Tibby and clinked his bottle against hers.

 

“Well, done, Tomko. You stole the show.”

 

Tibby knew he was trying to congratulate her, not to make her cry.

 

“It was awesome,” Maura agreed.

“It wasn’t,” Brian said, sticking close to Tibby’s side. “Her mom was in the audience.” Brian seemed to feel that if these were Tibby’s friends, they needed to know this. His hand found Tibby’s elbow. He was suffering for her.

The bit about her mom didn’t seem to register as Alex drank down most of his beer. “You’re saying her movie wasn’t good? It was freakin’ hilarious.”

 

Brian shook his head. “It wasn’t.” He was honest, after all. Alex squinted. “What’s your problem?”

 

Brian didn’t look at Alex. “I’m worried about Tibby.”

 

“You're worried about Tibby?” The derision was so thick in the air Tibby could practically smell it. “Gosh, what a pal. Why don’t you go worry about her someplace else?”

 

Brian looked at Tibby. The look said, Come on, Tibby, come back to me. We’re friends, aren’t we?

 

But Tibby just stood there gaping, as though someone had taken a machete to her vocal cords.

 

Alex stepped in closer. He was getting puffed up and martial. “What part of ‘Go away’ don’t you understand?”

 

Brian saved a last, agonizing look for Tibby; then he left.

Tibby felt tears fill her eyes. What had she done? She cupped her hand on her thigh. Under her fingers was the denim of the Travelling Pants with the careful stitches she’d made at the end of last summer. She looked down and ran her index finger around the outline of the heart she’d sewn in red yarn. Her eyes were too full to read the words she had embroidered below it. She could feel the weight of her body sitting hour after hour on the back porch in the late-summer swelter, her legs falling asleep as she made thousands and thousands of stitches—pulling them out, putting them in—with her stubborn, clumsy fingers. The product of all that toil was a shabby heart and three crooked little words. Bailey was here.

Had Bailey been there? Had she? What evidence was there of that?

 

Tibby’s heart felt bereft of her just now.

 

She put both hands to her cheeks. She needed to steady her head.

 

Alex was still snarling after Brian. He turned to look irritably at Tibby.

 

“So, Tibby.” His voice was leaded with criticism. “What’s with the pants?”