Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Read Online Free Page A

unpinned from her arm and bounced on the street. She nearly rode into a moving car. She stopped again and retrieved her wallet.
    With a quick look around, she determined she’d see no one she knew in the four blocks between here and Wallman’s. She pulled the smock over her head, stuck the wallet in the pocket, and rode like the wind.
    “Yo, Tibby,” she heard a familiar voice call as she turned into the parking lot. Her heart sank. She longed for the wood shavings. “Whassup?”
    It was Tucker Rowe, who was, in her opinion, the hottest junior at Westmoreland. For the summer he’d grown an excellent soul patch just under his lower lip. He was standing by his car, an antique seventies muscle car that practically made her swoon.
    Tibby couldn’t look at him. The smock was burning her body. She kept her head down while she locked her bike. She ducked into the store, hoping maybe he’d think he’d been mistaken, that maybe the loser girl in the polyester smock with the little darts for breasts was not the actual Tibby, but a much less cool facsimile.
     
    Dear Bee,
    I’m enclosing a very small square cut from the lining of my smock. In part, I enjoyed maiming the garment, and in part, I just wanted you to see how thick 2-ply polyester really is.
    Tibby
     
    “Vreeland, Bridget?” the camp director, Connie Broward, read off her clipboard.
    Bridget was already standing. She couldn’t sit anymore. She couldn’t keep her feet still. “Right here!” she called. She hitched her duffel bag over one shoulder and her backpack over the other. A warm breeze blew off Bahía Concepción. You could actually see the turquoise bay from the central camp building. She felt the excitement rising in her veins.
    “Cabin four, follow Sherrie,” Connie instructed.
    Bridget could feel lots of eyes on her, but she didn’t dwell on it. She was used to people looking at her. She knew that her hair was unusual. It was long and straight and the color of a peeled banana. People always made a big deal about her hair. Also she was tall and her features were regular—her nose straight, all the things in the right places. The combination of qualities made people mistake her for beautiful.
    She wasn’t beautiful. Not like Lena. There was no particular poetry or grace in her face. She knew that, and she knew that other people probably realized that too, once they got over her hair.
    “Hi, I’m Bridget,” she said to Sherrie, throwing her stuff down on the bed Sherrie pointed to.
    “Welcome,” Sherrie said. “How far did you come?”
    “From Washington, D.C.,” Bridget answered.
    “That’s a long way.”
    It was. Bridget had awoken at four A.M . to catch a six o’clock flight to Los Angeles, then a two-hour flight from LAX to the minuscule airport in Loreto, a town on the Sea of Cortez on the eastern coast of the Baja peninsula. Then there had been a van ride—just long enough for her to fall deeply asleep and wake up disoriented.
    Sherrie moved on to the next arriving camper. The cabin contained fourteen simple metal-frame twin beds, each with one thin mattress. The interior was unfinished, made of badly joined planks of pine. Bridget moved outside to the tiny porch at the front of the cabin.
    If the inside was standard-issue camp, the outside was magical. The camp faced a wide cove of white sand and palm trees. The bay was so perfectly blue, it looked like it had been retouched for a tourist brochure. Across the bay stood protective mountains, shoulder to shoulder, across the Concepción peninsula.
    At the back of the camp buildings stood shorter, craggier hills. Miraculously, somebody had managed to carve out two beautiful full-sized soccer fields, irrigated to an even, glowing green, between the beach and the arid hills.
    “Hi. Hi.” Bridget waved to two girls lugging their stuff into the cabin. They had tan, muscular soccer-player legs.
    Bridget followed them into the cabin. Almost all the beds were claimed. “You want to go