by Kieran Scott
Denise Zeldina turned momentarily white. Clearly she had not been expecting a comeback. But she recovered soon enough.
“I wasn’t talking about you,” she said. “God. Self-absorbed much?”
“Oh, really?” Chloe’s eyebrows shot up. “Then who were you talking about?” she asked loudly. “I’m just curious which one of our classmates you think is in need of a double XL gradu-ation gown. Because I’m sure that whoever she is, she would love to hear your opinion on her body.”
Everyone around us swiveled to stare at Denise. She turned beet red and sunk down in her seat.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought,” Chloe said.
“I think that’s enough, Miss Appleby,” Dr. Giles said as he strolled by.
Chloe crossed her legs casually, smoothing her skirt over her knees, not the least bit thrown by the vice principal calling her out.
“Oh, I’m done,” she replied. She fished a pen out of her leather bag and put a big check mark inside the SIZE: S box.
I couldn’t stop smiling. Looked like Chloe Appleby was officially back.
“All right, that’s it for today,” Mr. Giles announced. “Next week we’ll start practicing the processional, but for now you can go to the cafeteria until first period is over.”
The room filled with voices and laughter, everyone giddy with an overwhelming sense of entitlement. The casual way in which we’d just been dismissed said a lot. It said we were out of here. That it didn’t entirely matter what we did from here on out. Thirty minutes of hanging out in the caf instead of going back to class? That was a gift only the seniors could be given.
“I’ll be right back.” Chloe slipped out of her seat and jogged up the aisle ahead of us. I assumed she was going to catch up with Will, and I almost tripped when I saw her grab Jake’s arm. The two of them turned and walked out into the lobby together, talking quietly. I would have basically killed to know what they had to say to each other. I mean, had she seriously forgiven him for everything? Had he finally forgiven her? I’d been wondering about it ever since he’d called me to get Will’s number that night, ever since he’d shown up at the hospital the next day. What, exactly, had gone on between those two?
“Please tell me you’re not paranoid about them coupling up again,” Annie said under her breath. “Because that is so not happening.”
“I know,” I replied, feeling warm all over. “And even if it is, who cares? We broke up, remember?”
“Yeah. Right. Who cares?” she said, flicking a blue nail polish chip at Denise Zeldina’s hair.
As we approached the doors, Jake walked off and we caught up with Chloe. “What was that all about?” I asked casually, even though my heart was pitter-pattering with curiosity.
“Nothing.” She lifted her shoulders. “He texted me this morning that he wanted to help decorate for the prom, so I was just telling him I’d e-mail him the meeting schedule.”
My brow knit. Jake had volunteered for prom committee? When? And why volunteer to help Chloe? She hadn’t even attended a meeting yet. Not that I thought for a second he’d come to me, but he could have talked to Faith. She was, after all, in charge.
“Um, okay.” We turned and walked slowly toward the caf with the throng. “So you two are, like … okay?”
Chloe tugged open the door and let Annie and me pass through first. “Pretty much.”
I couldn’t take it. She was talking about this way too simply. I stopped by the bathrooms and she and Annie stopped with me, letting the rest of the senior class file by.
“Seriously? Even after everything he did? Everything he said? That crap he—”
Chloe lifted a hand. “He apologized for that. That’s why he was at my house when my water broke,” she added under her breath.
I felt like someone had just spun me around five times fast and left me to try to focus. How had I never heard about this before? This was monumental. “Wait. He apologized? What … what did he say?”
She looked down at the floor and shrugged. “He said he was sorry. For everything. Like, everything he’d said or done to make me feel bad. He said he still thought he had a right to be mad, but that he shouldn’t have been such a jerk about it.”
I leaned back against the cool cinderblock wall, trying to process this information. Jake had apologized. He had realized he was wrong. Finally. This was amazing. He had actually dropped the negativity. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, he was still the Jake I’d known and loved.
So why wasn’t I more relieved? More excited?
I glanced across the cafeteria to where Jake was sitting with the rest of the guys, and my heart felt sick. I knew why I wasn’t relieved. Because he hadn’t apologized to me. If he was back to his old self, and he knew I’d broken up with him because I missed who he’d been, then why hadn’t he come to me?
Because he was really done with me. He didn’t love me anymore. When I’d ended things with him, I guess I’d really ended things. For good.
“I mean, what am I supposed to do, hate him forever?” Chloe continued, following my gaze. “I was scared, so I told a lie and totally ruined his senior year. Then he was pissed and he mocked me out for a couple of months. Honestly? I don’t even know if we’re even.”
“Man,” Annie said.
“What?” Chloe snapped, expecting an insult, I’m sure.
“You are just way more enlightened than I thought,” Annie said.
Chloe and I both blinked. “Um, thank you?” she ventured.
I shook my head and started walking again, but my steps were slow. My heart felt like a cement ball inside my chest. I couldn’t think about the fact that Jake was ignoring my existence right now. If I did, I would cry right in the middle of our free period, which was so not cool. Instead, I decided to focus on Chloe.
“I just don’t know if I could do it,” I said. “Forgive someone after something like that.”
Not that anyone felt the need to give me a chance.
“Right,” Chloe said, sliding into a chair at the end of a table and pulling out her laptop. “And who was the first person around here to start talking to Shannen again?”
Annie laughed and dropped into a seat at the opposite end. “She got you there.”
“Who got who where?” Shannen asked, shrugging out of her denim jacket as she and Faith arrived.
“Long story,” Chloe and I said at the same time.
Shannen narrowed her eyes at us. “Okay. I’m getting us all doughnuts now. I’ll be back.”
“Just a banana for me!” Faith shouted. “Gotta fit into that prom dress.” She started pulling out her prom planning notes and catalogs, laying them out on the table.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“We’ve got to catch Chloe up on what we’ve got planned,” Faith replied.
Chloe sighed as she watched the materials pile up in front of her. “I’m just saying, Ally, if we can all forgive Shannen for what she did to us last year, then you can forgive Jake for what he did to me.”
“Omigod! Are we getting back together with Jake?” Faith squealed, clasping her pink pen between both hands.
“Shhhhh!” we all admonished her. I looked around quickly, but no one seemed to have noticed her outburst.
“No one is getting back together with anyone,” I whispered.
Annie cracked open a can of Pringles and popped one into her mouth with a smirk. She muttered something under her breath that sounded a lot like “Or so you think,” but she was too far away and her mouth was too full for me to be sure.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said with a shrug.
Then Faith dragged Chloe and me down into Springtime in Paris hell, and by the time the bell rang, Annie was long gone.
ally
On the morning of the wedding, I woke up facing the bay window at the back of the house. The sun was predictably shining, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue. I could only imagine the pure insanity that had taken over the first
floor, but I couldn’t make myself move. I just lay there, gazing out that window, motionless, until my eyes started to sting.
My mother was getting married. Today. To someone who was not my father. My family was officially over.
And Jake wasn’t even going to be there.
I sat up straight the second I thought about him. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about him? He’d barely even blinked when I’d broken up with him, and that had been months ago now. He hadn’t bothered to tell me he had a change of heart and had apologized to Chloe. He hadn’t called me, hadn’t texted, had barely looked at me in the halls. And everyone was talking about the slutty sophomore he was apparently taking to the prom. So why did I care? Why could I not stop caring?
Sometimes I wished Chloe had never told me that Jake had finally said he was sorry. Maybe then I could still be so mad at him I wouldn’t care what he was doing. Or who he was doing it with.
I looked over at my laptop, the screen playing my slideshow screen saver. At least I’d finally finished my speech last night. Ironically, thanks to Jake and his advice.
“Ally? Are you up?” Quinn shouted from down the hall. “Our stylists are here!”
“I’ll be down in a few minutes!” I shouted back.
I took a deep breath and held it. This was not about Jake. This was not about my dad and our former life as a family. It was about my mom. And as heavy as my heart and head and limbs felt at that very moment, I was going to put on a happy—no, a jubilant, ecstatic, blissful face—and be the best maid of honor ever. I flung the covers off my legs and hit the showers.
As I lathered my hair and scrubbed my face, I recited my speech over and over again in my mind. It was short and sweet, per Jake’s tips, and I had it down—flawless—but even so, I felt panicked every time I thought about getting up there in front of the crowd. One more reason to wish Jake was going to be there.
I groaned and yanked on my hair extra hard as I rinsed it. Suddenly I remembered that song Quinn had spent half of last summer practicing, getting ready for this year’s musical auditions: “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.” If only that were possible.
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in an actual salon chair set up in front of a huge mirror in the middle of the room that used to be Quinn’s mom’s gift-wrapping room. Quinn, at least, didn’t seem to care that my mother had taken over the space. She sat at a manicurist station behind me, wearing a short pink robe, her blond hair already styled into a classic bun. Some dude with a Mohawk worked on the nails of her left hand while she chatted on her cell phone in her right.
“So, you want it exactly like we did your other daughter’s?” my mom’s stylist, Marta, asked her.
My heart sort of stopped. My eyes met my mom’s in the mirror. Her hair was long and natural down her back and her makeup had yet to be applied, as Marta insisted that the bride should have the last turn in the chair. There were little frown lines around her mouth, and I could tell she was waiting for me to correct Marta about Quinn’s status.
“Whatever my mom wants,” I said with a smile.
I felt her sigh of relief on the back of my neck. “You can wear it down if you want to, Ally,” she said. “Or in a ponytail.” She looked at Marta. “She practically lives in ponytails.”
“No, it’s fine,” I told Marta. “Do it like Quinn’s. It’ll look better in pictures.”
My mom gave me a proud look and kneaded my shoulders. Then she grabbed a chocolate croissant off a tray of food near the door and handed it to me. We exchanged a smile, and as Marta began to tug and yank and curl I chomped into my breakfast.
“Hang on, Lindsey. I just got a text,” Quinn said.
As she turned her phone to look at it, it slipped from her palm and bounced along the carpet toward my feet. I couldn’t move to get it, since half my head of hair was clutched in Marta’s iron fist grip, but I looked down. The screen read:
ANNIE J.
I blinked as Quinn pounced on her phone. I couldn’t have just seen that right. There may have been some odd relationships popping up over the last year, but Quinn and Annie? I was pretty sure they’d never even occupied the same airspace.
“Who’s that?” I asked as she perched onto her chair again.
“Just a friend. Someone from ballet,” she said, texting back quickly.
When Quinn was done, she told Lindsey she had to go and she set the phone aside, giving her manicurist both hands. She didn’t meet my eyes again, but that was nothing new. But the longer I looked at her, the harder she started to blush. What was going on here? Were Quinn and Annie talking? And if so, why?
“Face forward, please,” Marta said, giving my hair a yank.
“Ow!” I complained with a wince.
“Price of beauty, hon!” she trilled.
Once Marta was done making my scalp feel so tight I thought it might start to tear off, she affixed Quinn’s pillbox hat to her head. I cringed, just watching the thing go on. I was going to look ridiculous in that. Like, Halloween-costume ridiculous. As Marta removed the white tissue paper from my own hat, I caught my mom’s eye in the mirror. She was chewing on her lip like she hadn’t eaten in days.
The hat floated down toward my head. I closed my eyes and told myself it was just one day. Just a few hours …
“Stop!”
Everyone jumped. I turned and looked at my mom. “No. I can’t do it to you, Ally. You don’t have to wear that.”
“But, Mom—”
“No.” She turned around and plucked a couple of yellow gardenias from one of the flower arrangements decorating the room, then handed them off to Marta. “Use these,” she said. “They’re more her.”
I was touched, but still. I didn’t want her to change her wedding just for me. “Mom, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll wear the hat.”
“Yeah. What about the pictures?” Quinn put in, turning in her chair.
“Ten years from now when I look at the wedding album, I’m not going to care what you girls were wearing,” my mom said, looking into my eyes. “All that’s going to matter is that you were there.”
I smiled up at her, my eyes filling with tears. Maybe this day wouldn’t be so bad after all.
jake
I was so nervous walking up to the church, you’d think I was trying to crash an NFL draft party or something. There were tons of people milling around outside. My eyes darted to anyone wearing a dark suit. Were any of them bouncers? Was there a guest list? If there was, I bet the words “Keep Jake Graydon Out” were written across the top.
My shoes crunched on the brick steps. Some guy who looked a lot like Dr. Nathanson, but wasn’t, gave me the stink eye. I attempted to smile and somehow tripped myself in the process.
“There you are.”
Annie grabbed my arm. She was wearing a dark blue dress with a wide neck, black fishnet stockings, and high heels. With her hair back from her face, she actually looked kind of … pretty.
“Get inside. They’re gonna be here any minute.”
Pretty but WWE-wrestler strong. She yanked me through the double, arched door and shoved me into a corner. The church was small and white with lots of stained-glass windows and a ton of flowers. She pushed me half behind a tall vase with sticks and blooms coming out of it in every direction.
“Stay there until they’re pronounced man and wife. Then go out that door right there, get in your car, and wait until Quinn gives you the signal. Got it?”
“Yeah! Yes. Got it,” I whispered, smoothing my suit jacket. She was so intense there was no point questioning her.
“And do not let her or her mother see you,” she ordered, lifting a finger at me.
“I won’t.” I raised my hands in surrender.
“Good.” Annie turned to walk away.
“Hey, Annie,” I said, stopping her in her tracks.
She gave me this exasperated sigh as she faced me again. “What? Do you need me to write it down for you?”
I shook my head. “N
o, I just wanted to tell you … you look really nice.”
Annie’s mouth fell open slightly. Her face turned pink. “Um. Thanks?”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
She turned and slowly walked away, and I swear she swung her hips a little bit. I laughed to myself. Over the past couple of weeks I’d finally sort of started to get why she and Ally were friends. Even I kind of liked hanging out with her. Which maybe I’d get to do more. If everything went like it was supposed to.
Please let it go like it’s supposed to.
Suddenly people started filing into the church in a crowd. My heart started to pound and I ducked in farther behind the flowers. Before long, the music started and Dr. Nathanson walked down the aisle with two people who must’ve been his parents. Next up was Quinn. She totally milked it, walking as slowly as possible, giving little flirtatious smiles to the people in the pews. She got to the front. I held my breath.
And there she was. Ally looked gorgeous. She was wearing more makeup than I was used to, but in a good way. Her lips were red and shimmery and her eyes looked huge. The dress was black, and she wore yellow flowers in her hair. On her feet were these red high heels—pretty much the sexiest shoes ever.
She paused inside the door, right across from me. She was, like, ten feet away, and for a split second I was terrified that she was going to turn and look right at me. But instead, she lifted her chin and walked down the aisle with a smile on. I knew that part of her was sad about this. That her heart was breaking right now, knowing her parents were never going to get back together. But you never would have known it.
And in that moment I felt this whole new respect for her. I felt proud. I felt unworthy. Like maybe I didn’t even deserve to be here. Like maybe she was way too good for me.
I glanced at the doors as the pastor welcomed everyone to the wedding of Melanie and Gray, my toes itching inside my socks. What if I ruined her day just by being here? What if she said, “no”? What if this whole thing was just one giant mistake?
Annie sat near the front, her back to me. Quinn stood next to Ally, watching the pastor. Before I could double-think it, I walked quietly to the door and slipped out.
