I took a deep breath and exhaled through my mouth, trying to fight off the impending panic attack.
Becca excused herself when I said I needed to go through my voicemails, and I climbed back into bed to listen.
The first one was from Megan. “I don’t even know what to say right now. You just—you put my business out there in a blog? What were you thinking? Don’t call me back yet, I don’t think I’m ready to talk to you.”
Could have been worse, all things considered.
Caryn’s was next and her voice quivered with anger. “How could you do this to me the week before my wedding? Everyone is mad at me because you published what I said about them! What kind of person does that?”
Amy didn’t leave a message. She clearly listened to my outgoing greeting and then hung up instead of saying anything.
Sharon’s message was hard to hear through her tears, but what I could make out was: “Tell me that wasn’t you. My mom is mortified. I’m mortified. I told her it couldn’t actually be you and that you’re going to sue Buzzfeed. Just—tell me you didn’t do that. You didn’t say that.”
Megan’s second message began slightly more measuredly. “I appreciate that you didn’t sleep with Alex,” she began. “But is that really what you think of me? I come across like such a raging bitch and you don’t even begin to address that you might have done anything wrong in this situation? You aren’t exactly a saint here. Plus Tim’s sister says she’s not going to be in the wedding anymore if you are, which maybe I should thank you for, but it’s still a mess I have to clean up. And seriously? Why haven’t you called me back?”
I took the phone away from my ear and switched to the text messages.
Becca had texted asking where I was, but I skipped over that thread. There was one message from Alex. My heart in my throat, I clicked it.
After all of this, you slept with Justin? You got a couple things wrong though: I’m not perfect, and I definitely don’t know who you are.
A sob rose up in my throat. I deserved everything I got from my friends and then some, but this? Alex was the last person I wanted to hurt and now—well, now he was gone.
But oh God, he wasn’t. I still had to see all of these people again. Assuming any of them still wanted me at their weddings, let alone in them.
I went back to my computer. There had to be an option to delete the blog. There it was, under settings. I clicked “Delete Blog” and got a prompt asking me to type in my password to confirm the deletion. I hesitated a moment—the text in the box said this was permanent and the material could not be recovered if I deleted it.
I had enjoyed the blog more than any other hobby I had ever picked up. True, I was the worst version of myself on there, but I was also writing. Really writing. For the first time since college. And it had felt like—like I had found myself for the first time. Even if I was being horrible, just the act of putting those words into the world had been a rebirth of sorts. Could I really just throw that all away?
Yes, it needed to be done. And it needed to be done before I could apologize to anyone. Before I even listened to the rest of the messages. I typed my password and kissed my first attempt at personal writing in more than a decade goodbye.
I picked my phone back up, then put it down without unlocking it. Instead I opened my email on my laptop, letting the now 1,963 emails download. Most were comments on the blog. I skimmed through a couple dozen, which were split pretty evenly between encouraging responses, similar horror stories, or compliments on my humor or writing, and negative responses. The negative half were more in the vein of what I deserved, wondering why anyone liked me enough to want me in their weddings in the first place. I concurred wholeheartedly.
When I filtered out the WordPress notifications, there were two from Buzzfeed writers, one from someone at AOL News (which I didn’t know was still a thing), and one from a Washington Post reporter trying to confirm my identity as the author of the blog. That last one scared me. A lot. If Buzzfeed figured out who I was because I posted from work, this could have negative splash-back there. Could I get fired? I was supposed to represent the public image of the foundation, and my own public image had just gone viral for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t imagine that going over well. And while yes, I had contemplated quitting over Caryn, I hadn’t been serious. How would I pay my rent? I put my head in my hands again and tried to get my breathing under control.
What had I done?
The worst of the voicemails was my mother’s. “I don’t even know what to say to you. How could you do this to your brother and sister and to me? Your grandmother saw what you wrote about her. And about that—man—who you—your father read that. Is this who I raised? What am I supposed to tell people? Amy is saying she doesn’t want you in her wedding and how will we explain that? I don’t know what to say.”
There’s something about a mother’s disappointment that cuts you to the bone, no matter how old you are. That’s not to say I wasn’t used to disappointing her, but I wanted to crawl into a hole to live out the rest of my days among the grubworms when she told me my father had read the post about Justin. And when she mentioned my grandmother, I realized I had to start an actual list of people I had wronged. Because she hadn’t even crossed my mind. Granted, if I lost my job, I was about to have nothing but time to make it up to them and would probably wind up moving in with my grandma because there was no way my mother would take me now. Grandma, well, she would probably get over it.
Jake’s voicemail was concise, at least. “Madison has been crying for an hour. Why can’t you just be a normal sister and make her feel welcome? I can’t believe how selfish you are.”
I grabbed a notepad and started my apology list. Caryn had probably gotten the worst of it in the blog and I was sure her friends were giving her holy hell, so she belonged at the top. Then I wrote Amy’s name above hers. I had forgotten to check if I had called her out about that Luke guy before hitting “Delete,” but if I had, that was actually the worst. Sharon was next, then Jake and Madison. Megan came fifth. She would forgive me no matter what, in the end. Then, after I had made amends with all of the brides, next up were my mother, my grandmother, and my father. I didn’t even write Alex’s name on the list. I was beyond salvation there.
It was one o’clock, and I had a lot of work ahead of me.
I tried Amy’s cell phone. She let it ring twice and then sent it to voicemail. I pressed the call button again. Same result. She picked up the third time, however. “What, Lily?”
“Don’t hang up,” I said quickly. “Amy, I’m so, so sorry.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. “Is that all?”
“No. I didn’t have any right to—”
“No, you didn’t have any right! If you hated me that much, you didn’t have to be in my wedding at all!”
I hesitated. “I don’t hate you, Ames. If anything, I think I’m jealous. Everything always comes so easy to you.”
“Nothing comes easy to me! I’m working a part-time job and lived at home until two weeks ago! I took five years to graduate college and can’t find an actual career. You walked out of college into a job, you never had to move back home, and all anyone does is talk about how successful you are. But me? No one has ever said anything like that about me. I’m the screw-up baby sister. And God forbid one good thing happens—I find a great guy—and you try to ruin that just because I was talking to someone I knew in college?”
“I didn’t try to ruin—”
“Then why would you say that on the internet, Lily? Do you know how hard that was to explain to Tyler?”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I can talk to Tyler and explain it wasn’t like that.”
“I already talked to Tyler. He loves me, and he trusts me. Which is way more than I can say for you.”
“I—” I took a deep breath. “I’m not going to make any excuses. I was wrong. What can I do to make this right?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “It�
�s not my job to tell you how to fix it when you mess up. You have to figure that out.”
I paused, taken aback. Of all the people to hit me with that truth bomb, she was the last one I would have expected. Which just showed how wrong I had been all along.
“Do you want me to drop out of the wedding?” I asked quietly. “I will if it’s what you want.”
She hesitated. “No. I want you to be my big sister and be happy for me, which you haven’t done yet.”
I felt my shoulders slump. She was right. Not once in this whole crazy year had I taken a moment to be happy that my little sister was happy. I said she was too young, and I said I didn’t think she would actually get as far as a wedding, let alone spending her life with someone, and I was snarky about much of it, even to her face. And if what she said earlier was true, about thinking everything came so easily to me—wow.
“You’re right. And I’m so sorry. I got so wrapped up in feeling like the victim because I was in so many weddings and am so much older and have no prospect of getting married anytime soon that I didn’t think about what was actually important.” She didn’t say anything. “You. Being happy. That’s what’s important. If that wasn’t clear. Because you’re my sister, and I love you, and—I—I—” Tears were flowing down my cheeks and I trailed off, unable to say more.
Amy let me cry for a couple of minutes, and I heard her sniffle. “I love you too. I still hate you right now, but I love you. Don’t you know how jealous I always was of you? You were off living this glamorous life and you didn’t need any guy to make you whole. I—I don’t know who I am if I’m not with someone. And that’s scary because I love Tyler so much and what if it doesn’t work out? You, at least, know how to be on your own.”
“Not entirely by choice,” I admitted quietly. “I want to find all of that. I just—can’t.”
“What about that Alex guy?”
“He—well, he saw the blog too.”
“And—?”
I sniffed hard, trying not to lose it completely. “No, that’s done now.”
“I’m sorry,” Amy said.
“Me too.”
“You know what could start making it up to me?”
“What?”
“Let me be there when you explain this to Grandma. I’m dying to know what she says about the sleeping-with-that-other-groomsman thing after the post you did about her at Jake’s wedding.”
I laughed through my tears. “Okay.”
“I’m not serious—well, a little. Just tell me what she says.”
“I will.”
“Lily?”
“Yeah?”
“It was good. I mean, not the parts where you made fun of me. But the writing was really good.”
I thanked her and got off the phone before I started to cry in earnest again. I wasn’t even sure which part I was crying over anymore, but I cried harder than I had after telling Alex I couldn’t be with him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I tried calling Caryn, but she sent me to voicemail each time. Eventually, I left her a message. “It’s Lily. Please call me back. I want to apologize and figure out how to make this right. I—I’m really sorry. Please call me.”
If she didn’t call back, I didn’t know how I was going to face her at work on Tuesday. And it didn’t help not knowing if it would be my last day. I had spent ten years at the foundation; my résumé was pretty dusty.
I looked at Megan’s name on my list and considered letting her jump the line. She should be one of the easier calls, but I hesitated. I wasn’t ready to talk to her. Was I in the wrong? Absolutely. But I had also just made a huge sacrifice for her, bigger than any I had ever made in my life. And the fact that none of her messages acknowledged that beyond saying she was glad that I hadn’t slept with Alex—did she even read the post? It was never about sleeping with him. I mean, yes, that probably would have happened if I hadn’t said no, but this wasn’t a hookup.
I felt terrible about hurting her, but I also felt terrible that she didn’t realize she had hurt me. And I couldn’t talk to her until I could make the conversation not be about me losing one of the most important people in my life because I was trying to do right by her. Which I couldn’t do yet.
No. It was better to go in order. It was time to call Sharon. With the exception of saying she needed to be brave enough to stand up to her mom, I didn’t think my posts about her were that bad. I mean, I was saying what she wished she had the courage to say to her mother. But her tear-filled voicemail told me that her mother was going to make her life miserable over this, and that was my fault.
“It wasn’t you, right?” she said by way of a greeting.
I paused. “No. It was me.”
There was a sharp intake of breath past her teeth. “I see,” she said, echoing her mother’s censure of choice. A tiny piece of my heart that hadn’t yet shattered fell apart. Despite it all, Sharon still wanted to please her mother, even if doing so meant becoming her.
“I’m so, so sorry.” She was silent. “I never wanted to hurt you—please know that. The whole thing started because of Caryn’s friends, but without the context of the five weddings, it didn’t make sense why I was so—God, I don’t even know—jaded? Cynical?”
“Mean?” she supplied.
“Yes. Mean too.” The Buzzfeed post said I might just be the snarkiest person in the world, which I hoped was hyperbolic. “But I tried to focus on the people who were making my life difficult, and you never once did that.”
“Lily, you called my mother a Japanese horror monster and said her skin was pulled so tight from plastic surgery that you were worried it would split open during the wedding and all of the demons inside her would come spilling out.”
Crap. I did say that, didn’t I?
But Sharon wasn’t done. “Not to mention you called me spineless when it came to her and said I would throw myself off a bridge if she told me to.”
“I didn’t say ‘spineless,’ but—I mean, you didn’t even want this wedding.”
The next thing she said was so quiet that I almost couldn’t hear it. “I did, actually.”
“You told me you wanted to elope and your mother was forcing you to have a wedding.”
I heard her start to cry. Which didn’t mean she was upset; Sharon cried when she was angry instead of yelling. “She ‘forced’ me because I wasn’t brave enough to do it if she didn’t push me. I’ve been in therapy for eight years to deal with my social anxiety issues, and I said I wanted to elope because I didn’t think anyone would actually come if I had a real wedding.”
“I—didn’t know any of that.”
“Of course you didn’t. I hide it. Not that you ever asked if I was okay when I didn’t go out to things. You just stopped inviting me.”
I stopped inviting her because she always said no. She was busy, or tired, or had other plans. But wasn’t that the hallmark of social anxiety? Struggling to say yes to social outings?
Sharon and I had lived together for two years. She usually went out when I did in college, but she almost always had a drink or two at home first. But after college, she moved home to save money for a couple years, and I moved to Bethesda, first with Megan, then with Becca, when Megan switched jobs and wanted to move farther north. When Sharon stopped coming out, I just assumed her mother was exerting her domineering force over Sharon’s social life and that I had been cut out.
If that wasn’t the case—what had I just done to my friend?
“So you—wanted the big wedding with the white dress and the whole nine yards?”
“Yes. I want to get to do everything that everyone else does too.”
“But you always said—”
“I didn’t think anyone would want to marry me, so I pretended I didn’t want any of it.”
I stopped again. Did I think anyone would ever want to marry me? Well, not today, obviously, but I always assumed it would happen someday. Kids too, even though my mother might be right that at thirty-two, per
haps I was cutting it close on that one. I joked that I would be a crazy cat lady who hated cats, but I never for a moment thought I was truly destined to be alone.
I was quiet and humbled when I replied. “I’m sorry, Sharon.”
She was still crying, but the tone had changed. “I don’t think that’s enough.”
I started to ask what I could do, but Amy’s words rang in my ears. “I know. And I’ll do whatever I need to do to make this right.”
“I don’t know if you can. How am I supposed to make my mother look at you in all of my wedding pictures, knowing what you said about her?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either.”
There was a long pause. “Do you want me to not be in your wedding anymore?”
Another pause. “I have to think about it.”
“Okay,” I said quietly. “I’ll do whatever you want. And I really am sorry.”
I wasn’t crying when I hung up the phone—I honestly didn’t know if my eyes were capable of producing more tears. But I was shaken to the core. What kind of friend was I? What kind of person?
It had never once occurred to me to stop and look at Sharon’s behavior through any lens other than my own. I thought, after knowing her for so many years, that Sharon was like me. Which, saying that now, sounded like an insult. But I thought all of my friends were like me. I couldn’t fathom why Caryn cared what Caroline thought, even after she told me about the circumstances of her dad’s death, because I didn’t care about money or social status. I thought Megan was being unreasonable about Alex, but I hadn’t once let her know how I felt about him. She wasn’t a mind reader any more than I was.
Buzzfeed was wrong. I wasn’t the snarkiest person in the world. I was just one of the least self-aware. I thought everyone else was the problem, but it had been me all along. Okay, not entirely me. Caryn’s physical demands had gotten ridiculous, and Megan was probably the most like me in that she wasn’t exactly examining my motives either.
For the Love of Friends Page 25
