You’re Invited Too (16 page)

Mrs. Marks puts the last cake in front of Alexandra this time, like she knows we're basically not even needed here. Alexandra takes one bite, then puts down her fork. She turns to Sadie and says, “What's the status on those éclairs we talked about? Have you found someone to go to Paris and get them yet?”

Paris?

“Paris?” I ask. I sit way up in my seat because PARIS. Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysées, most amazing place on Earth (I'm pretty sure).

Sadie kicks me under the table. “I thought we had abandoned that idea, Miss Worthington. I was going to ask our friend Philippe to look into a recipe, remember?

“Philippe?” I ask. I sit
way
up in my seat because PHILIPPE. Floppy hair, adorable accent, most amazing boy on Earth (I'm pretty sure). It sounds like I should have been sitting in on more of these wedding-planning meetings. I'm just saying.

“Right,” Alexandra says. “But if we get them, will we have too much chocolate if I go with this last cake?” Before anyone can answer her, she butts in on her own question and answers, “No. That's just silly. There's no such thing as too much chocolate. Maybe we should do a chocolate fountain, too. Write that down, Sadie-babe.” She turns to Mrs. Marks and passes her a half-eaten cake. “We'll take the chocolate peanut butter.”

Mrs. Marks smiles a huge smile that's totes real this time. “Perfect. This is a crowd-pleaser, I promise. Let me get the order form.”

She turns to walk away and Alexandra calls after her, “Oh, and I need it to be nut-free. My fiancé is deathly allergic to peanuts.”

Mrs. Marks pauses right in the middle of a step and turns around extra slowly. “Uh, you do realize this is a
peanut
-butter cake. It's made with real peanut butter. I can't see any—”

“Bride's day, bride's way!” Alexandra interrupts. She turns to me. “Am I right, Red? You look like someone who gets her way a lot.”

I'm, like, totally incapable of speech (which, if you ask Daddy, never ever happens).

Mrs. Marks resumes trying to explain to Alexandra how it's not possible to make a nut-free peanut-butter cake, but she is so not having that. Nope. Not one bit.

Alexandra says, “Maybe you could hunt down some nut-free peanut-butter flavoring you could use instead.” Then she turns to Sadie and adds, “E-mail my cousin Trent at his lab and ask him to invent something that would work here. And don't let him tell you he can't spare a day away from his infectious-disease study. He can. Tell him the wedding is in just over two weeks, so he needs to get a move on. And keep me updated. I'll get you his e-mail.”

With that Alexandra stands up, flips the tail of her long sweater, and flounces out, with a little fluttery hand-wave thing.

Oh. My.

Vi and Sadie are about as tongue-tied as I am, so I do the only thing I can possibly think of. I pull the carrot-cake plate over to me, spin it to find an untouched sliver, then stab it with a fork, and stuff a piece in my mouth.

Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

SUPER-EASY GRANOLA BARS

Ingredients:

1 cup dates (pitted)

1 cup almonds (unsalted, roasted, chopped)

1
¹
/
₂
cups rolled oats

¹
/
₄
cup peanut butter

¹
/
₄
cup honey

Put the dates into a food processor and chop them for about one minute. Then put them into a bowl with the oats and almonds. Warm the peanut butter and honey in a small pot on the stove (use low heat). Stir the warm peanut butter and honey, and then pour the mixture on top of the oats, almonds, and dates. Mix all the ingredients together (you might have to break up the dates). Put the mixture into an 8" x 8" dish or a small pan (hint: line the dish with parchment paper so the bars don't stick to the bottom). Flatten the mixture by pushing down on it. You want the mixture to be as even-looking as you can get it. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and place it in the refrigerator for at least 15–20 minutes. Once the mixture has hardened, you can remove it from the pan and cut it into approximately 10 bars.

**This is my favorite after-soccer snack!

**They're also really yummy with chocolate chips, raisins, or dried cranberries.

W
e have problems,” Lauren announces the second we're all gathered around the bouquet of flashlights in the
Purple People Eater
.

“Tell me about it,” Becca says. “My face hurts and it's freezing in here. I thought my teeth were going to fall out when that wind started blowing outside. So basically I can't open my mouth all winter. Can't we, like, run an extension cord out and plug in a space heater or something?” She shivers and grimaces for extra effect.

“Fire hazard,” Lauren replies. “And that's not what I'm talking about.”

“Did you get grounded
more
?” I ask. If it were my dad who got a call from the cops in the middle of the night, I'd still be in my room. Heck, he'd probably sit with me in class, which would seriously compound the Linney problem. So basically, while I feel bad for Lauren and Sadie, I'm really glad it wasn't me.

“No! I mean this wedding.” Lauren whips out a stack of paper from her backpack. She spreads the pages across the floor and under the glow of the flashlights.

I peer over Sadie's knee at pages and pages of spreadsheets, all printed on this tan-and-pink shell paper. It's So Very Lauren.

Becca recoils from the papers. “What
is
that? It's like math homework gone wild.”

“Well, this one shows how much time Sadie's put into this wedding. If you calculate the total time with Sadie's portion of the payment, she's making like, six cents an hour. You know that's breaking approximately ninety labor laws, right?”

“And probably the Geneva Convention.” Becca's got this super-serious look on her face. I have no idea what the Geneva Convention is, but from the expression Lauren gives Becca, it has nothing to do with planning Miss Worthington's wedding.

“This one”—Lauren points at a pie chart—“shows how much time we've spent on all aspects of this wedding. Seventy percent—seventy!—is in the category I call ‘Dealing with the Crazy.' ”

“She's not crazy,” Sadie says.

We all look at her.

“She's just . . . picky. And maybe a little, um . . .”

“Crazy?” I suggest.

“Indecisive,” Sadie says.

“She's a total bridezilla.” Becca reaches over and twirls a strand of my hair. I've got it pulled back in my used-to-be-usual ponytail because I've got a soccer match later on today. “I mean, she pretty much
ordered
Vi to dye her hair! Who does that?”

“Crazy people,” Lauren answers. “Which is why I called this meeting. We need to seriously discuss what to do about this. And, Sades, I know you're not going to like this, but I think we should bail. She's wasting our time, and the money isn't worth the hassle.”

Sadie's mouth makes a little O.

“Come on, what do y'all think?” Lauren crosses her arms and waits. “Becca?”

Becca runs her tongue over her braces. “Um . . .”

Lauren shifts her gaze to me. “Vi?”

“Uhhh . . . This is like a come-to-Jesus moment, isn't it?” That's what Meemaw would call it. As in the truth comes out and we all have to face it. “In that case, this whole thing with the cluck hats?”

“Cloche,” Becca corrects.

“Yeah, those. And the old-fashioned clothes. See, there's this whole group of Ike's family that lives in Wheatfield Corners, Iowa. And I looked it up on the map, and it's not close to anything. At all. So, like, I don't know where they'd go to buy this kind of stuff.” Becca was all into looking up these stores for the guests, but the list had gotten so long that I offered to take part of it. I don't know exactly what I was thinking, since hours and hours of looking up weird little stores that sell ancient clothes isn't exactly my idea of a good time.

“They can order online,” Sadie says.

“And this thing with the non-nut peanut-butter cake?” Lauren says. “I think that's kind of impossible. Right, Vi?”

“Um . . . probably.” I hate feeling like the one who's so down on the wedding. But Lauren's right. It has been every free hour of the day, and whenever we feel like we've gotten something done, Miss Worthington seems to change her mind.

But quitting? I don't really know about that. If we drop Miss Worthington now, these last two months of running around and planning and putting up with her will have been for nothing. Kind of like me dealing with Linney every day at school and never graduating.

And if I'm being honest, I kind of like having something that I can throw myself into to forget about Dad's job and Linney's nasty comments. That thing used to be soccer—until everything got weird with Lance, and Linney made the cheerleading team. Now she's at the games and even a lot of the practices.

“I'm still weirded out by the hair-dyeing thing,” Becca says. “And she called me Red. What does that mean, exactly? Is she gonna ask me to change my hair? Because nuh-uh. No way. No how.” She runs a hand over her shampoo-commercial-smooth hair. “Although . . . I have been wondering what I'd look like with bangs. . . . Maybe it would distract from the braces. What do y'all think? Bangs? No bangs?” She fans out the ends of her hair across her forehead.

“Bec-
ca
!” Lauren picks up the spreadsheets and taps the edge of the stack so they all line up neatly. “You can talk about your hair later. Right now, we need to decide: Wedding or no wedding? Just think about everything else we could've been doing! Not only could we have booked some parties with normal people and made money by now, but we wouldn't have gotten in trouble. I might not have gotten that B. Becca might have written twenty songs about Philippe—”

“Hey! Who says I want to write about Philippe?” Becca says.

Lauren ignores her. “And, Sadie, things might not be so weird between you and your mom.”

“And that's why we can't quit! I mean, not the only reason, but I can't let Mom think we aren't able to handle this. We have to show her that we're just as good at making a wedding happen as she is.” Sadie's got her hands flat on the floor on either side of her.

“We have put a lot of work into it already,” I add. “And we've only got a couple weeks left, right?”

Lauren turns to Becca. “Don't you want more time to write songs? I
know
I need more hours to study.”

“What are you talking about?” Becca asks. “Studying is practically all you've been doing since you got arrested and thrown in the clink by the po-po.”

“Becs, we didn't get arrested. It was just a headlight thing,” Sadie says before she turns to Lauren. “Even if we were planning other parties, you'd still have to take time away from school stuff. And besides, since when does Lauren Simmons quit
anything
? Did you quit It's All Academic when Anna got named captain and you didn't?”

“Well, no. But that's not the same—”

“What about when that summer weekly came in and demanded a tour of the marina for, like, a whole day and then didn't even end up docking his fancy-pants yacht here after all?” Becca says. “You didn't tell your dad that you weren't going to work there anymore.”

“Wait, I thought you were on my side. You
like
working for Miss Worthington?” Lauren asks Becca. “What about the hair-dye thing?”

Becca waves her hand. “She can talk all she wants. None of us are changing our hair for her. What I know is that we'll be washing our hands of her in two weeks. After she pays us, good riddance.”

“No quitting now, Lauren.” I jump in. I can't stand Miss Worthington either, but no way did I just spend hours and hours researching silly hats for nothing. And if I had all that free time back, I'd probably be thinking too much. About Lance. About Linney. About the dance. About Lance-and-Linney. About Linney hanging on Lance like a shadow ever since the dance. And about Dad, who hasn't mentioned that I asked him to quit his job, even though it's been two weeks. He's just been acting normal, which means he's not going to change his mind and quit. I feel like I should understand that, especially after Lauren brought up the possibility of us quitting the wedding. But I've tried, and I still don't understand it. Even though it's nice to have him around more, I'm miserable at the same time.

“We're in this till the end.” I put my hand over the flashlights, palm down.

Sadie and Becca stack their hands on top of mine.

“Come on, Lo,” Becca says.

“Tough it out,” I add. Like I'm toughing out my school/Dad situation.

Slowly, as she rolls her eyes, Lauren drops her hand on top of Sadie's. “Fine. But I have to devote at least three hours per night to school, okay? I don't care if Miss Worthington is floating out to sea with those six hundred paper lanterns she was dead set on last week and I'm the only one who can throw her a life vest. I
can't
get another B.”