Magic Pants and Stories

I’m reading the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Years ago I read the first one, but after having finished the second one today I think I’m in new territory. I know I stopped reading the series after my sister spoiled it for me, but for the second time this week I finished a book in tears.

“What is it about those books that makes you cry?” my husband asked. (He’s naturally suspicious and distrustful of anything and anyone who makes me cry.) “It’s a story about four girls.”

“What’s with the pants?” (Every book has a picture of a pair of pants on the cover.) “They’re magic pants,” I said. “Magic pants?” His dislike goes up a notch.

I told him that I’m thinking of writing a New Adult series about four girls who, when they graduate from high school, bury a time capsule under a tree on their high school campus. I remind him of my daughter and her group of friends who did the same thing. For three years the girls met for lunch under a tree they named Fred and when they graduated from middle school, they made a time capsule, buried it and dug it up when they graduated from high school. I know this because I drove them to the middle school at midnight the night of middle school graduation. They ran onto the campus armed with shovels and came back in tears.

I remember that I wanted to tell my daughter and her friends that in teenage time, four years is forever. Acne fades, breasts grow, love sweeps in and blows away—a lot happens and people change in the four years between the onset of puberty and graduation.

But even more can happen and change during the college years and that’s what I want to write about. Maybe it’s because my baby daughters are about to start college in a school far from home…maybe this is my way of joining them… I don’t know, but I do know I have four girls in my head, each with a different story waiting to be told.

“You won’t write about magic pants, will you?” my husband asked.

“No magic pants,” I assured him.

“Good,” he said—confirming the fact that he can’t see the magic, although, if he could only remember—there really was something magical about our college years, when we met and married.