You had hopes, admit it. You know you did.

Excerpt from Girls in Pants by Ann Brashares:

Do I want you to notice me? She wondered, leaning so close to the mirror that her eyes formed one large Cyclops eye.

The mirror in the cramped cabin was speckled with gray and only showed the story from mid-hip to mid-forehead. If she backed up, she'd be sitting on Katie's messy bunk.

She shouldn't care about this so much. She felt an annoying buzzing around her head: expectations, clustering like so many mosquitos. she did not like those. She refused to have them.

She would just...throw on the first pair of shorts she found. And okay, so they were the really nice short blue Adidas ones. And the first top. Well, the second, because that was the white tank with the racing back, and it looked better than the first one. And the hair. She'd just leave it down. She was not setting a trap. She was not! She was just....in a hurry. A coach could not be late. She pulled a hair elastic around her wrist just in case.

She loped our of the cabin barefoot, swinging her cleats by the laces. She'd grown so much, she would probably be taller than Eric in her cleats.

Five coaches were already milling around on the center field. One of them happened to be Eric. Not that her eyes went there first.

...Bridget sat down in the middle of the field and plucked out the socks she'd balled up in her shoes. She pulled them on and laced up her cleats. She felt the warm sunshine on the top of her head.

It's different now. It's all different, she was telling herself. But she was not sure her self was listening. Eric circled close to her, with the slightly bemused expression he had often worn around her two summers before. She followed him with her eyes.

...She ended up at Eric's side as the director called out the teams. Not entirely on purpose. He was the only one she knew. (How strangely she knew him.) And it was a perfectly natural place to stand.

It'd not like I'm going to do that again, she promised herself.

Sometimes when she though of Eric, and now more powerfully when she was him, she felt some achy nostalgia for her old self. For the dauntless, daring soul she used to be. There was something vaguely enchanted about that time. There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone. The very act of caring made them impossible to regain.

Not all of that spirit was gone. She still had it, but had a more tempered version. That time with Eric in Baja had been both the height of that magic and its calamitous end. He had managed to inspire both.

She was a bit more fragile now. Or no. Maybe she was less fragile. Maybe she had come to terms with her injuries and knew how to protect them. She was more self-protective, that was true. But she was a girl without a mother. She had to protect herself.

Bridget had the sense that she was already popular among her constituency. The boys assigned to her made a big thing about it among themselves. As they gathered around her now, some looked boldly admiring and others just looked terrified. She had several capable, well-muscled kids. One of them, a blond, spoke English with an accent. For some reason, the face that drew her belonged to broad-faced, freckled, sharp featured kid with long, gangly legs and extremely large feet. He had a great face--all eagerness--but even just standing still made him look uncoordinated. He was going to be a project, she could tell.

While their teams put on their jerseys she found herself standing near Eric again. "Your popular, aren't you? I've never felt like such a letdown." Eric said, laughing, and she was pleased if he meant what she thought he meant.

"So how's it going?" She asked him coolly. She wanted him to know she was different now. "You look tan."

"I just got back from two weeks in Mexico"

Bridget felt her face strain. What was he trying to say to her? She'd never been the kind of person who'd over-thought people's motives, and she didn't feel like starting now.

From his face, he seemed to recognize that he had already shoved them into slightly awkward territory.

She cleared her throat "How was it?"

He was uncomfortable. "We stayed with my grandmother in Mulege. And then we traveled down to Los Cabos and ended up in Mexico City for a few days."

Bridget heard one word louder than the others. He was doing that we thing. What was we? Who was we? She wasn't going to stand here wondering.

"Who is we?"

He paused. He wasn't looking at her anymore. "We? Oh, uh, me and Kaya. My girlfriend."

Bridget nodded. His girlfriend. Kaya. "Wow. Good for you."

Had he wanted to tell her this? Had he not wanted to tell her?

"See you" Bridget said numbly, walking away to stake a place for her team to gather. She wished she could have blasted those buzzing, swarming expectations with a can of bug spray.

You had hopes, admit it. She hated dishonesty, especially in herself. You know you did.