Hoodie Sisters

Prologue

There once was a hoodie. It was an essential kind of hoodie—cotton, naturally, orange but not dull orange you see all over the place at Halloween time. It was a bright, neon orange with a little fraying at the wrists and collar.

I liked to believe that it had a good life before us. I guess a thrift shop is like the pound in some ways. Whatever you get there owes a lot to its previous owners. Our hoodie wasn't like the energetic puppy whose family wasn't prepared for the challenge of training a pet. It was more like the grown-up dog whose family loved it but had to move to an apartment building where you can't have pets.

I could tell the hoodie hadn't come to our lives because of anything tragic. It had witnessed a painful but necessary life transition. That, it turns out, is just the purpose of the hoodie.

It was a very eyecatching hoodie, but you could glance over it if you weren't particularly fond of shopping. It didn't force you to admire it. It was happy just doing its basic job of covering your upper half without making you look fat.

I got it at a thrift shop near the Dairy Queen. I was tagging along with Wallie and her younger brother, Alfie, and their mom. Alfie was there to buy a dress for the junior prom. Alfie isn't the kind of boy who just gets a basic colored spaghetti-strap thing at the mall like everybody else. He has to get something vintage.

Mainly I got the hoodie because Wallie's mom hates secondhand clothing stores. "I think that's dirty, Alfie," she kept saying every time Alfie pulled something off a hanger. I secretly agreed with Mrs. Gardner, which made me feel ashamed. I felt like I had to buy something just to make myself feel better. The hoodie was folded innocently on a shelf by the cash register. I figured maybe it had been washed. Also, it was only $5.00 including tax. I didn't even try it on, so you can tell I wasn't that invested in owning it. My boobs had specific requirements for all things that covered them.

Alfie picked out a little flapper dress that was aggressively against the prom theme of futuristic chic, and Wallie found a pair of beat-up cowboy boots that looked like they belonged in an old western movie. Wallie has big feet, like size nine. She ended up loving those boots even more than the hoodie. I couldn't help wincing at those boots, though. It's bad enough to buy used clothes, which are washable, but used shoes? Yuck.

When I got home I hung the hoodie in the back of my closet and forgot about it.

It came out again the afternoon before we all went our separate ways for the summer. I was going to Tennessee to hang out with my dad, Wallie and Alfie were spending two and a half months in Ireland with their grandparents, Free was flying off to camp out on a beach in Hawaii. Luna was staying home. This was our first summer apart, and I think it gave us all a strange, unsettling feeling.

For some reason, it seemed like our lives were marked by summers. While Wallie and I went to public school, Free went to a private school with a bunch of other sports stars, and Luna went to an alternative school where the kids sat in beanbag chairs instead of desks and nobody got pressured to get good grades. Summer was the time when we could all come together, when we all had our birthdays, and when really important things happened. Except for the year Free's mom ran off. That happened around Easter.

We started being 'we' before we were born. We were all four born at the end of summer, within six days of one another: Free first, in the middle of August, and me last, on the first of September.

The summer we were born our mothers took a class in water aerobics for pregnant women at this place called Bliss; they were the August group, I came a little late. I guess the other members of the class weren't due to pop till the spring or winter, but the Augusts were so noticeably pregnant, the teacher was worried they might give birth at any moment. The teacher would alter the routines for them. "Augusts!" she would bellow, according to my mother. "Just do two reps; easy now! Watch it!" The water aerobics instructor's name happened to be Autumn, and as my mother tells it, they despised that woman.

The Augusts started hanging out after class, complaining about their swollen feet and how big they were and making jokes about Autumn. After we were born—miraculously all girls, they formed their own little sisterhood and let us all squirm on a blanket together while they complained about not sleeping and how big they still were. The sisterhood disbanded after Free's mom ran away.

The friendships between our moms sort of deteriorated after that. Maybe they blamed themselves for her leaving or something like that. They all went back to work. Luna's parents moved to that farm on the outskirts of the city. But I think our moms never really had much in common besides being pregnant at the same time. Luna's mom, 20 years old and still carefree; Wallie's mom, the ambitious African American putting herself through school and working on her passion of making picture frames on the side; Free's mom, the Tennessee pageant queen; and my mom, the all American girl with the stagnant marriage. But for a while there, they were friends.

Nowadays our moms act like friendship isn't a priority. That's not how it is for us. My mom tells me that it won't last forever. But she's wrong. We won't let our friendship slip away.

Eventually, our moms' friendship became ours. It was like they couldn't be friends if we were. To tell you the truth, they were awkward around one another—especially after Free's mom left. It's like they know each other's disappointments and secrets, so they just stay on the surface and never dig back into the past.

We're the Augusts now. We are everything to each other. We settled into types—Free the sports star, Wallie the shy beauty, Luna the odd one, and me, Flower, the . . . what? The passive one. But the one who cares the most. The one who cares that we stick together no matter what.

I know my mom says it can't stay like this, but I believe it will. The hoodie was like a sign. It stood for our bond and it would help us keep in touch while we were apart. We were going to be challenged but we would come back stronger and together.

I guess I could pretend to be a faithful and instant believer in the hoodie, but I'll just be honest and tell you that I was the one who almost threw it away. And that is where our story begins.