Read Online The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares - Free Book Online

that she was lying unconscious in the middle of Wallman's.
    There was a library card. A handy horoscope card cut out from a magazine. Some girl's toothy school picture with the name Maddie and a lot of Xs and Os on the back. Four one-dollar bills. How completely useless. It was just the kind of stuff Tibby had carried in her wallet when she was that age.
    At that moment three EMS guys carrying a stretcher stormed the aisle. Two of them started poking at the girl, and the other studied a silver medical bracelet encircling her left wrist. Tibby hadn't thought about checking the girl's wrist.
    The third guy had questions for Tibby. “So what happened?” he asked. “Did you see?”
    â€œNot exactly,” Tibby said. “I heard a noise, and I turned around and I saw her crashing into the display there. She hit her head on the floor. I guess she fainted.”
    The EMS guy was no longer focused on Tibby's face, but on the wallet she held in her hands. “What's that?” he asked.
    â€œOh, uh, her wallet.”
    â€œYou took her wallet?”
    Tibby's eyes opened wide. She suddenly realized how it looked. “I mean, I was just—”
    â€œWhy don't you go ahead and give that back to me,” the man said slowly. Was he treating her like a criminal, or was she being paranoid?
    Tibby didn't feel like ridiculing him with her famous mouth. She felt like crying. “I wanted to find her phone number,” she explained, shoving the wallet at him. “I wanted to tell her parents what was going on.”
    The man's eyes softened. “Why don't you just sit tight for a second while we get her into the ambulance. The hospital will take care of contacting her parents.”
    Tibby clutched the wallet and followed the men and the stretcher outside. In seconds they'd loaded the girl up. Tibby saw by the stain on the girl's jeans and the wetness left behind that she'd peed on herself. Tibby quickly turned her head, as she always did when she saw a stranger crying. Fainting and whacking your head seemed okay to witness, but this felt like too much information.
    â€œCan I come along?” Tibby didn't know why she'd asked. Except that she was worried the girl would wake up and only see scary EMS guys. They made room so that Tibby could sit close to the girl. She reached out and held the girl's hand. Again, she wasn't sure why, except that she had a feeling that if she were zooming down Old Georgetown Road in an ambulance, she would want somebody to be holding her hand.
    At the intersection of Wisconsin and Bradley, the girl came to. She looked around blinking, confused. She squeezed Tibby's hand, then looked to see whose hand it was. When she saw Tibby, she looked bewildered and then skeptical. Wide-eyed, the girl took in Tibby's “Hi, I'm Tibby!” name tag and her green smock. Then she turned to the EMS guy sitting on her other side.
    â€œWhy is the girl from Wallman's holding my hand?” she asked.
    There was a knock. Carmen glanced at the door and sat up on the rug. Her suitcase was open, but she hadn't put anything away. “Yes?”
    â€œCould I come in?”
    She was pretty sure it was Krista.
    No, you can't.
“Uh, yeah.”
    The door opened tentatively. “Carmen? It's, um, dinnertime? Are you ready to come down?”
    Only Krista's head came through the doorway. Carmen could smell her lip gloss. She suspected Krista was an uptalker. Even declarative statements came out as questions.
    â€œI'll be down in a minute,” Carmen said.
    Krista retreated and closed the door.
    Carmen stretched back out on her floor for a minute. How did she get here? How had this happened? She pictured the alternate-universe Carmen, who was polishing off a burger with her dad at a downtown restaurant, before challenging him to a game of pool. She was jealous of that Carmen.
    Carmen trudged downstairs and took her place at the elaborately set table. Multiple forks were fine at a