Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares Page B

don’t mean a personal reason. I don’t accept personal reasons.”
    “Oh.” She racked her brain for something that sounded medical or professional. Oozing sores? Would those help? Contagious foot fungus? Multiple personalities? She could make a case for that last one.
    “Good. Stick with your partner. Everybody always wants to change at first.” He piled up his papers and stood to leave. “You’ll do fine.”

 
    God is subtle. But not malicious.

—Albert Einstein

 
    T he ferocity was back on Valia’s face, and it was more ferocious than ever. They were due in the hospital again, this time for the double whammy of blood testing for Valia’s kidneys and physical therapy for her knee. She’d refused to get into the car with Carmen, on account of Carmen’s allegedly holding the steering wheel wrong. So Carmen was steering Valia down the sidewalk in her wheelchair, much like a mother pushing the stroller of a very grumpy baby.
    Ashes to ashes, diapers to diapers, strollers to strollers, gums to gums , Carmen mused as she pushed Valia along. Who said she hadn’t gotten a babysitting job this summer?
    There was a reason she was breezing along the two-plus miles to the hospital in the very teeth of the mid-July heat, but she did not yet know his name. And anyway, how much better it was to be outside, sharing Valia with the universe rather than having her in a small dark room, all to herself.
    With one hand on the wheelchair, Carmen opened her phone with the other hand and pushed the Lena button.
    “Hi,” Carmen said when Lena answered. “Are you done work?”
    “I have lunch and dinner shifts,” Lena said. “I’m on break.”
    “Oh. Listen—”
    Carmen broke off, because Valia had snapped her head around and was scowling, the lines around her mouth deepening. “I don’t vant to hear you talk on the phone,” Valia declared. “And how you can push with vun hand?”
    “You have to go,” Lena said knowingly, sympathetically.
    “Oh, yes.” Carmen snapped the phone shut. Ferocity was etching lines on her face too. One of the advantages of a baby over Valia, say, was that not only were babies considerably cuter but also they couldn’t talk.
    Carmen pushed the last mile with a clenched jaw. At the hospital she went first to the kidney floor, number eight. As Valia barked at other, non-Carmen people who were trying miserably to help her, Carmen got to roam around in the hallway. In forty minutes she saw many faces pass, but not the one she wanted to see.
    It wasn’t until they reached the knee floor, number three, and Carmen had been prowling that hallway for twenty minutes that she saw the guy whom she did not yet hate poke his head around the corner. When he saw her, the rest of his body came too.
    “Hey!” he said, striding toward her and smiling. God, he could wear a pair of jeans. Had he grown even better-looking in the days since she had seen him?
    “Hey!” she said back. Her stomach reacted forcefully to the sight of him.
    “I realized I forgot to ask you your name last time,” he said. “I’ve been wondering for a week.”
    “Did you come up with any ideas?” Carmen asked.
    He thought. “Um…Florence?”
    She shook her head.
    “Rapunzel?”
    “Nope.”
    “Angela?”
    She squinched up her nose in displeasure. She had a very fat second cousin named Angela.
    “Okay, what?” he asked.
    “Carmen.”
    “Oh. Hmmm. Carmen. Okay.” He tilted his head, fitting her to her name.
    “What about you?”
    “My name is Win.” He said it sort of loud, as though he were expecting an argument.
    Carmen narrowed her eyes. “Win?…As opposed to lose?”
    “Win as opposed to…” He had a slightly pained look on his face. “Winthrop.”
    “Winthrop?” She smiled. Had she known him long enough to tease him?
    “I know.” He winced. “It’s a family name. I hated it from the beginning, but I didn’t learn to talk till I was two, and by that time it had stuck.”
    She laughed. “Why do we