Borrow-A-Bridesmaid (18 page)

One of the staff walks to the edge of the platform with a silver tray of mimosas. The bride wrinkles her nose. “No,
no
,
NO! Something hydrating.”

Her use of Billy's catchphrase makes my gut contract. She narrows her eyes, and my first impulse is to dive behind one of the red velvet chairs and rock back and forth, whimpering. But I've been spotted.

“Is this the girl?” She addresses Susan, who gives a quick nod.

Susan whispers, “Piper, this is Holly, the bride.”

Holly beckons me, and I take a cartoonishly large gulp. Before I reach the edge of the lighted stage, the shop door bursts open, sunlight invading the space once again, a rush of heat coating my back.

Upon seeing whoever has walked in the door, the bride's eyes widen, and she drops whatever hydrating bevvy she's just been handed. “What the hell are you doing? You can't be here!”

Susan turns to see who's intruded—I'm guessing the hapless groom—but I'm more interested in watching this bridal creature, who's beautiful even in her anger. She reminds me of
The Little Mermaid
, when octo-witchy Ursula turns herself into a young beautiful human to ensnare Prince Eric. Yes, this woman may be evil, but she's hot as balls. I watch as she disappears back into the dressing room, followed by a couple of supplicant staff members holding bottles of Perrier and cooling hand cream. I smile to myself, hoping to catch a purple tentacle slithering under the dressing room door as it closes. Then I stop smiling. This is my new boss.
What
Inferno
circle am I in now? Wrath? Pride?

Susan catches up to me. “He's here. I should have prepped you—I know you two got pretty cozy at my wedding. I had no idea he'd show up here.”

A strange feeling revs in my gut, like someone trying to start a lawn mower. The cord is taut, there are some grumbling noises, but the engine hasn't quite turned over.

That's when I turn around and see a man standing at the store entrance. A beautiful, beautiful man wearing an “I Love Yeats” tie.

Twenty-Two

B
efore I can even think to be mad at him—before I can wonder whether he was engaged when he kissed me—I think about how he's a total sexpot. Big brown anime eyes, dimples, tie askew. Oh, Charlie.

But that's me thinking with my ovaries: my own little minions, all clamoring and giggles and mischief. Poking each other, they say: “Should we hump him? Let's hump him! Evolution favors dimples!”

I put a hand on my abdomen.
Silence!

After the hormone cloud passes, I close my eyes and breeze through the first four stages of grief.

Denial: Maybe I haven't had enough coffee today and this isn't even real. I'm hallucinating. If I'm not hallucinating, maybe I'm dead. Maybe I was tragically killed in a fit of Billy rage, and my body is lying behind the scanner while my soul lingers in this strange brand of purgatory.

Anger: Check out this smooth talker! Had me in his clutches one minute, engaged the next. God, maybe I was his last hurrah before tying the knot! Reassuring himself that he still had the old charm before locking it down under the heel of Holly's Golden Goddess Shoes.

Bargaining: I'll be the best bridesmaid ever, just please don't let this be the groom. Let Billy be the groom. Anyone but Charlie.

Depression: Maybe I'll sit in one of those red velvet chairs and never get up again.

I linger in this fourth stage. In slow motion, all the thoughts and feelings I've carried around in my heart in the month since we kissed flash before my eyes. I summoned a Ghost of Relationships Future: the two of us at coffee shops, me doodling a heart at the top of his notebook while he hashes out dialogue. Getting to know his body's personality. Finding his fault lines of sensitivity—I guessed he liked to be touched in unexpected places: the arch of his foot, behind his ear.

All this longing exits my heart through a trapdoor and spills into my gut, where it makes my intestines spasm. I try to reconcile my feelings about him with the reality of his being engaged to octo-witchy.

Susan squeezes my hand. I forgot she was here. I open my eyes, and we exchange a brief ocular conversation. Mine says:
WTF times infinity?!

And hers:
I know. This is total shit. There's more to the story. I'll tell you soon.

I risk glancing at Charlie again to find myself in the headlights of his gaze.

I shrug and turn my palms up—a reprise of
WTF times infinity
combined with a plea for him to flash his dimples three times and magically whisk us back to the Portrait Gallery.

The dimples are nowhere in sight. He stares at me for about ten seconds with no apparent recognition. As if he's staring at one of those visual puzzlers with all the blurred colors, waiting for a 3D image to pop out.

And then, oh yeah, it pops.

His eyebrows fly low and draw together, prompting a worried crease between them. He looks almost desperate.
We need to talk,
he mouths.

Before I can respond, Holly stalks up to him in a pair of skinny jeans, a lacy tank top, and a string of pearls. The attendants follow with her dress, which is zipped away from his prying eyes in a large plastic carrying bag.

He takes a few steps toward her, hands shoved in his pockets.

She's fuming. “I don't believe you. You knew I didn't want you to see it until the wedding day!”

They're standing near me now, and I can smell his smoky scent. It rolls into the corners of my mind, unfurling with the memories.

“And you've been smoking again!” she screeches. “We talked about this, Charlie.”

I back away from them and park my butt in a chair. I am melting. Simply melting in this velvet chair.

After a month of not seeing him, I started to remember his hotness in a conceptual way, but I'd forgotten the details: the crooked slope of his nose, the full lips. He's wearing his red Chucks and his hair is artfully disheveled. I'd forgotten how my entire being seemed to vibrate with electricity in his presence. This time, though, the electricity is mixed with anger and disbelief. How could he be with Holly? And never mention he was engaged?

“Oh,” Holly says, catching me in the net of her peripheral vision. “You should meet my—my bridesmaid.”

“Hi, Piper.” Charlie's voice is quiet, the color gone from his face. “Good to see you.”

“You know her?” Holly sounds incredulous. She probably thinks she conjured me into existence for the sole purpose of doing her bidding. I think I've actually downgraded from the accounting firm and the airport. Well done, me.

I want to leap into his arms, kiss him all over his face, taste his lips again, but I can't move. It's like in a bad dream when you're about to be eaten by a giant squid, or when a guy is coming at you with a massive spork, but you can't move an inch.

“Helloooo?” Holly puts her hands on her hips. The gesture causes the long string of pearls to sway, grazing the top of her chest. I can't help but envy her frame, which is slim but shapely enough to make me appear prepubescent in comparison. “You two know each other?”

“Yeah, from Susan's wedding,” Charlie says.

“Oh, right.” Holly takes the dress from the attendants, who are giving her instructions about keeping it in a cool, dry place.

As soon as she's out of earshot, Charlie turns to me. “Listen, there's a lot you don't know—”

“You're engaged?” I whisper, half to myself, half to him.

“I need to talk to you,” he says, his voice low and urgent.

“We don't have anything to talk about.” I fold my arms across my chest and wait for a giant anvil to drop on my head.

“Piper!” Holly pauses her conversation with the attendants to bark at me. “Fetch the rest of my stuff from the dressing room.”

I spin on my heel and begin marching out her orders. Behind me, Charlie says, “I'll help her.”

He catches up with me and we traipse toward the dressing room in silence, crossing over the lighted platform. When shielded by the propped dressing room door, we face each other in the little enclave of mirrors. The mirror behind him reveals that the back of his neck is blooming with splotches: One particularly large splotch is shaped like Texas.

Holly's bride-white lingerie hangs from a golden hook, as if she's presiding over this moment. Reminding me that I might never be alone with him again. I scoop up her veil, which is draped over the back of a chair. I can't bear to touch the lingerie, but I don't want Charlie to, either. I tentatively reach for it, but he catches my arm. “I was going to tell you.”

I wrench out of his grip and take a step away from him. Our eyes lock, and I search his for sincerity. The gold flecks are muted by the soft light of the store. The kind of light that makes everyone appear soap-opera-esque.

“I meant to tell you that time—when we were on the phone at Starbucks—but then—” He sighs. “Then I thought in person might be best. But I never meant for it to be like this. I had no idea you'd be here today. In my wedding party.” He rakes a hand up the side of his head, letting his palm rest on his temple.

Texas has ripened in its redness, and my anger ripens, too. “What, you were going to see how long you could lead me on? Were you with her when we met? You scum bastard.”

He shakes his head. Maybe it's my imagination, or a trick of the soap-opera lighting, but his eyes look watery, pleading. “I wasn't with her then. I swear.”

I think back over the past month in time-lapse, the signs like so many flashing-red-light intersections I blazed through. Flash: He signed his e-mail “Your friend.” And then flash: On the phone, he said, “There's something I've been meaning to tell you.”

Texas is turning purple. Chameleon Charlie. Is he stringing me along even now? If so, why do I get the uncanny sense that within Texas, there are emotions warring against one another, Santa Anna's troops scaling an Alamo defended by Texans and
Tejanos
?

“Piper!” Holly's voice carries across the store. “Make sure you get my tiara!”

I turn away from Charlie and pluck her princess tiara off a velvet chair.

“That night at the Portrait Gallery meant a lot to me. Meeting you meant a lot to me,” he says, his voice husky.

“Oh, really? How so? I made you realize you were ready to commit to someone else?”

“You don't understand. Holly and I have a complicated past.”

I close my eyes. Furious but also trying not to cry. “And between you and me, it's simpler, right? Just—over.”

“Piper,” he tries again, “hey—”

My eyes fly back open. “Like I said, we don't have anything to talk about. Happy engagement, Charlie.”

I carry the veil and the tiara out of the dressing room, leaving him to put Holly's lingerie into her pink shoulder bag.

While Holly finishes chatting with the attendants, he noiselessly joins us, the pink bag slung over his shoulder. He stands next to me, far enough to be innocent but close enough that I catch a whiff of smoke. He's watching Holly with exasperation, the way you'd look at a screaming child who won't let you sleep. Texas has disappeared. All that remains is a tiny flaming archipelago just below his hairline.

Holly motions for us to follow her to the exit. The perky bob of her blond ponytail mocks me.
Please let the anvil drop on me now. Please? I've never asked for much, God, besides the Barbie Dream House, a passing grade in
physics, and revival from that one hangover where I did shots of cheap vodka after a six-pack of Keystone Ice.
Please. Please don't let this be real.

As if to offer proof, Holly stops at the door and hands her bags back to the attendants. “Do you mind?” she asks them, her voice suddenly sweet.

She puts her hands on Charlie's shoulders, stands on tiptoe, and plants a long kiss on his mouth. It's a strange kiss, a frozen kiss during which neither of them moves. A seventh-grade kind of kiss, the kind where you have to lock lips for two minutes straight, only you haven't figured out foreplay or tongue kissing yet, so you just maintain painstaking contact. Lips mashed awkwardly onto lips. A few seconds into it, Holly cocks back one ballet-shoe-clad foot behind her, fifties-housewife style.

Something about the kiss gives me the serious heebie-jeebies. It's the feeling I get at the zoo when I watch the black bears—a hair-raising feeling that the bears are really people in bear suits. Only now I've got the reverse feeling: Holly seems like a bear, or an octo-witchy, in a person suit. An alternate species come to claim Charlie. I gauge Susan's reaction. She's totally a bear in a person suit: a millisecond away from mauling Holly.

I don't turn back until I hear the commotion of Charlie collecting Holly's things from the attendants, who ooh and aah over the kiss. Charlie's gone splotchy again, this time on his neck and cheeks, as he's slowly buried in plastic and lace.

Holly appraises me, an afterthought. “We're going to get something to eat. Make sure you get fitted, and I'll text you later about the shower plans.” They walk out the front door and into the heat. Charlie looks back one last time, and a flicker of our Tesla electricity passes between us. But this time it hurts, so I look away.

As soon as they're out of sight, Susan wheels on me. “Oh my God. I had no idea he was going to be here. Are you okay?”

I'm several galaxies away from Planet Okay, but I'm not sure how to articulate that, so I just shrug.

“Here's the story.” She speaks fast, her curls shaking, her speech clipped. She gives it to me metronomic, pausing between each measure as if giving me time to digest this horrifying news. “He and Holly broke up before my wedding.
Before
he met you. Anyway, a couple weeks after my honeymoon, he tells me he's moving home. That he has news. I'm out of the loop for days, have to hear it from Mom and Dad because I can't get ahold of him. I don't know the whole story, but I will. That's where you come in.”

I'm shaking my head. “You want me to be a bridesmaid in Charlie's wedding?” My mental metronome is teetering, stuck. Defeated by heat, humidity, and humiliation.

She grips the back of a chair, drumming her fingers on the wooden frame. “No! I mean yes. Undercover.”

“Still not following.” I sit in one of the chairs, and Susan paces back and forth, talking at breakneck speed.

“Holly had me come here to give an opinion on her gown fitting, aka to have me be one of the many people telling her how
hah-mah-zing
she looks in her dress. So when we arrive, I happen to slip in how helpful you were in my wedding. Surprise, surprise, she doesn't have any girlfriends. So I suggested you could help her out with stuff. She, ah, didn't say she wanted a bridesmaid, exactly, so in desperation, I may have used the word ‘servant.' This is all in the last”—she checks her watch—“hour and a half. She says, ‘Fine, okay' ”—Susan says this part in imitation of Holly's high-pitched voice—“but that you have to be here today so you can get fitted for a bridesmaid dress. The whole thing's so rush-rush.”