Sports and Games
Sports and games punctuate the summer for Bridget, Carmen,
and Tibby and help them learn some lessons about growing up. Soccer plays
an important role in Bridget’s summer at soccer camp in Mexico.
Bridget is a star player, but she doesn’t always understand the value
in letting other people shine sometimes. Irrepressible and competitive,
Bridget plays soccer like she pursues Eric: with wild abandon and
no desire—or ability—to hold back. She must learn to ease up in
her soccer, as her coach Molly says, if she ever wants to be a true
star on a team. Carmen doesn’t play tennis competitively, but it’s
very meaningful to her, because tennis is something she and her father
do together. In South Carolina, their plans to play tennis are ruined
several times, and Carmen must accept that her father’s attention
is divided now. For Tibby, the video game Dragon Master comes
to teach her a valuable lesson about life. At first, she dismisses the
game as ridiculous, and she doesn’t understand how anyone—like Brian
McBrian—can get so wrapped up in it. However, as her own perspective
begins changing, she understands the value in the small pieces of
happiness Brian finds as he racks up successes in the game.
Letter-Writing
Letter-writing occurs throughout the novel as the girls
keep one another updated on the important things taking place in
their lives. The girls send letters separately and to accompany
the Pants as they make the journey from girl to girl. The letters
allow us as readers to keep track of the girls as we become engaged
with one girl’s story at a time. They also help to remind us that
the girls’ stories are taking place simultaneously all over the
world. The letters help the girls to keep in touch, but they also
reveal how much of the summer cannot be translated into words, or
even shared among the friends. For example, Bridget never reveals
in her letters what, exactly, happened with Eric, and Tibby never
fully tells her friends how important a role Bailey is playing in
her life. The girls are still connected to one another, but they
are also facing a lot of new experiences on their own in an adultlike
way.
Death
All four girls encounter death in ways that shape their
lives as well as their summers. Bridget’s mother died when Bridget
was young, and Bridget still struggles with her feelings of abandonment.
In Greece, Lena learns about the death of Kostos’s parents and little
brother. Seeing how Kostos has dealt with this tragedy helps Lena
learn that love is a risk worth taking. Tibby faces two deaths during
the summer: Mimi’s and Bailey’s. Mimi, Tibby’s pet since childhood,
was a reliable companion, just as Bailey turns out to be. In a way,
Tibby takes both for granted, only realizing their true importance
once they are suffering or finally gone. Tibby doesn’t know how
to deal with her feelings of grief and loss. At first, she denies
death entirely, putting Mimi in a freezer and ignoring Bailey’s
pleas to visit her in the hospital. Through her sadness, though,
she eventually gathers the courage to face the fact of death, and
she finds a new motivation to make her own life count. Although
she doesn’t face a physical death this summer, Carmen must deal
with the death of her fantasy relationship with her father. Carmen
had built the relationship into a fantasy, deliberately avoiding
all conflict. The relationship falls apart when Carmen can’t tell
her father how she really feels and what she needs. Only by being
honest with each other can they revive their relationship and grow
closer. Death forces all the friends to reconsider their perspectives
on life.
Family
Family plays an important role in shaping the girls and
their summers. Bridget has been shaped by a family tragedy: her
mother’s death. We don’t learn many details about this death, but
we do learn that it was related to depression—and thus the death
was probably a suicide. Bridget’s ups and downs are intimately connected
to her mother’s death, as she has struggled to find ways to cope
with her grief throughout her life. Tibby finds her family confusing
and chaotic. She has two baby siblings, and her parents are completely
different than they were when Tibby was a child. They’re still Tibby’s family,
but Tibby has had to struggle to maintain her own sense of identity
amidst so much change.
Lena and Carmen’s summers are focused on family, with
both of them traveling to new places to live with relatives. Lena
learns a lot about how she fits into her family, from whom she’s
often felt very different. She is quiet while her sister, Effie,
is outgoing, and she looks different from her sister and her parents.
But when she realizes how alike she and her grandfather are, in
appearance as well as temperament, she understands her unique place
in her family and accepts that she really does belong. Carmen expects
the summer to strengthen her relationship with her father—which
it does, although in a different way than she expected. In the process
of reevaluating her place in her father’s life, she gains a wider
perspective on what family can be. Even though Lydia, Krista, and
Paul are blond and different from her, Carmen learns to accept them
as her family, because her father loves them. The definition of family,
Carmen learns, can be fluid.
