Tradition called for our annual late-night celebration at Gilda's to fall on the middle day between birthdays—nine days after Lena's and nine days before mine, two days after Bridget's and two days before Tibby's. I always find comfort in numbers. I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny. So today it felt like God Himself practically wrote it into my Day Runner. The celebration this year happened to fall the night before school started again, which was significant too, if not in a happy way.

Like salmon swimming back to the tiny tributary where they were spawned, we returned to Gilda's as the honorary birthplace of the Septembers and now of the Sisterhood.

As usual, Tibby and Bee collaborated on the birthday cake, and Lena and I created the mood with decorations and music. Bee always got to do the breaking and entering.

Usually by this time in the summer, we were as worn in to one another as pebbles in a riverbed. For three months we'd had complete togetherness and not much outside stimuli. What few stories we had, we'd considered, analyzed, celebrated, cursed, and joked into sand.

Tonight was different. I felt like we were each separate and full to our edges with our own stories, mostly unshared. In a way it scared me, having a summer of experiences and feelings that belonged to me alone. What happened in front of my friends felt real. What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.

The Pants were the only witness to all of our lives. They were the witness and the document too. In the last few days we'd made our inscriptions, telling a little of the story with pictures and words that stood out bright against humble denim.

Tonight I looked around at my friends, sitting on a red blanket, surrounded by candles in the middle of a crummy aerobics studio.

Usually the centerpiece was the cake, but tonight it was pushed off to the side in deference to the Pants. Two tan faces and Tibby's pale one looked back at me. Their eyes were all the same color in this light. Tibby gamely wore the sombrero from Mexico and the T-shirt Lena had painted for her showing the harbor at Ammoudi. Lena wore shoes she'd borrowed from Bridget, and Bridget stuck her bare feet toward the center, displaying toenails bright with my favorite turquoise polish. Tibby's and Lena's knees touched. We were settling into one another again, sharing our lives.

But we were quieter tonight. There was more care and less ordinary teasing. In a way, we were still strange to one another, I realized, but there was comfort in the Pants. The Pants had absorbed the summer. Maybe it was better that they couldn't talk. They would let us remember more how we had felt, and less what had actually happened. They would let us keep it all and share it.

It wasn't that we hadn't shared the big outlines of our stories. Of course we had. I told them all about how Al's wedding was. We knew that Bee had messed herself up over Eric. We all saw Lena talk about Kostos in a way she'd never talked about a boy before. We knew about Bailey, and we knew intuitively to be careful when we asked Tibby questions. But there were a million little lines of shading that we couldn't convey so easily. They were the subtle things, and understanding them, even knowing when you missed them, was what separated other friends from real friends, like we were.

Still, the Pants promised us there was time. Nothing would be lost. There was all year if we needed it. We had all the way until next summer, when we would take out the Traveling Pants and, together or apart, begin again.

The End