Four Girls, One Pair of Pants, Zero Chill

Four girls, one pair of jeans, and a summer apart

Here’s the setup, and it really is this simple: Lena, Tibby, Bridget, and Carmen have been best friends since before birth, literally, their moms did a pregnancy aerobics class together. Now it’s the summer before sophomore year and for the first time ever they’re not spending it together. Lena’s off to Greece to stay with her grandparents. Bridget’s headed to soccer camp in Baja. Carmen’s visiting her divorced dad in South Carolina. Tibby’s stuck at home working a retail job and being miserable about it. Then, at a thrift store, they find a pair of jeans that somehow fits all four of them despite their totally different bodies, and they decide to mail them to each other all summer, one week at a time, as a way of staying connected.

Yes, it’s a gimmick. I’ll say that upfront. Magic pants is a silly premise on paper. But Brashares barely leans on the magic part, the pants are mostly just an excuse to structure four parallel coming-of-age stories, and the stories themselves are where the book earns its keep. Bridget goes to camp and throws herself at an older coach in a storyline that is genuinely upsetting once you’re old enough to clock what’s actually happening. Lena falls for a boy named Kostos in Greece while working through grief she doesn’t fully understand yet. Carmen watches her dad’s new blended family and feels like a stranger in a house that used to be half hers. And Tibby, stuck filming her cynical little documentary at the Wallman’s, ends up befriending a twelve year old named Bailey who has leukemia.

What actually works, and the one thing that doesn’t

The Tibby and Bailey storyline is the best thing in the book, full stop. Bailey is sharp and funny and refuses to be a sad sick kid in anyone’s story, and Tibby, who starts the summer as a certified teenage cynic who thinks everything is stupid, gets cracked open by this kid in a way that never feels manipulative. When it ends the way you know it has to end from about halfway through, it still gets me. I read this book the first time on a friend’s bottom bunk during a sleepover in probably 2003, and I remember both of us going quiet and pretending we weren’t crying, then giving up and just crying.

Bridget’s storyline is the one that hasn’t aged well, and I want to be honest about that instead of pretending it’s all charming nostalgia. What happens with her and Eric, the college age coach, reads very differently now than it did when I was thirteen and thought it was romantic. It isn’t romantic. It’s an adult exploiting a grieving, reckless teenage girl, and the book mostly frames it as a mistake Bridget made rather than something that was done to her. I don’t think Brashares was trying to endorse it, but the narrative distance is off, and it’s worth naming that plainly rather than glossing over it because the rest of the book is good.

Carmen’s arc I have more complicated feelings about than I did at eleven. Her jealousy toward her dad’s fiancée and future stepsister curdles into something genuinely embarrassing at a wedding, and at the time I read it as understandable teenage hurt. Rereading it as an adult, I flinched a little at how long the book lets her be awful before anyone, including her, really reckons with it. Maybe that’s the point, that being a hurt teenager makes you capable of being unfair to people who don’t deserve it. Or maybe it’s a subplot that needed one more pass. I go back and forth.

Lena’s story is the quietest of the four and I used to think that made it the weakest, but I’ve come around on it. Not every arc needs a crisis. Sometimes the whole story is a girl learning she’s allowed to want something and be scared of it at the same time.

Is this book a little dated? Sure. The digital cameras, the payphones implied by how hard it is for anyone to reach anyone, the way “fat” gets thrown around casually about Carmen’s body in ways that made me wince rereading it as an adult. But the emotional core, the specific ache of watching your people become slightly different people over one summer, that part hasn’t dated one bit.

Growing up doesn’t happen on one dramatic night. It happens in a hundred small ones, usually while you’re not paying attention.

About Ann Brashares

Ann Brashares worked in publishing before she started writing, which maybe explains why this book has the structural discipline of someone who understood exactly how a chapter should end. She wrote four more Sisterhood books plus a couple of adult novels, but this is the one people press into each other’s hands at sleepovards decades later. She’s said the idea came partly from wanting to write about how friendships survive distance, which tracks, because that’s the only thing this book is actually about underneath the pants.

If this wrecked you, read these next

Try Now and Then, well, actually try the rest of the Sisterhood series first if you haven’t, because Bailey’s story especially deserves the follow through. Beyond that, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky for that same feeling of a formative summer cracking someone open. Y: The Last Man readers, skip that, go instead to Sisters by Raina Telgemeier for a younger, quieter version of the same sibling and friendship ache. And if you want the grown up version of watching friends drift and reconnect, The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer does that with adults instead of teenagers. You can find the original on Amazon here if you want your own copy to underline.

For your book club

1. Which of the four storylines hit you hardest, and has that changed if you first read this book as a teenager and are rereading it now?
2. Does the book let Bridget’s storyline with Eric off the hook too easily, or does it handle the aftermath more seriously than it gets credit for?
3. Why do you think Brashares chose four girls instead of two or three? What does each friendship reveal that the others can’t?
4. Is the pants device actually necessary to the story, or could this book have worked as four separate summer narratives with no magic object at all?
5. What does Tibby’s friendship with Bailey teach her that her actual friends couldn’t have taught her that summer?