Bree gave up on her phone and tossed it into a leather bag that looked like it was black with white polka dots — but as I walked up next to her, I could see the white dots were actually skulls.
“Why did you agree to be a bridesmaid anyway?” I asked. “You look so miserable.”
“Because my mom made me and, like a moron, I thought it would be no big deal. I didn’t realize it was going to be the disaster of the century.”
I tilted my head. “What do you mean?”
Bree made another snorting sound, and I wondered if maybe she had allergies like Burton. “Please,” she said. “It’s so obvious that these guys are about to make a dumb but legally binding mistake. If Burton and Lily want a happily-ever-after, they should call off the wedding, because they won’t find it with each other.” Her eyes met mine. “Sorry. I know she’s your sister.”
“Doesn’t bother me,” I said. “We don’t even want Lily to marry your cousin.” I put my hands on the ground and kicked up my legs until I was doing a handstand against the wall.
Bree leaned over to look me in my upside-down face. “You don’t?”
“Nope,” I said — only, it came out sounding like “dope” because I was straining to hold myself up. As soon as I felt my shirt about to come untucked, I flipped back down. “We want her to marry Alex.”
“Who’s Alex?”
“Lily’s old boyfriend. You might get to see him tonight.”
“He’s coming?” Bree hadn’t looked or sounded this much alive since I’d met her.
“We hope,” I said. “Speaking of … I should go back in. I don’t want to miss him.”
Bree followed me back inside the restaurant.
“You owe us,” Dawn muttered as she saw me come in.
“Sorry. The wiggles were at critical mass. I had to do something.”
I joined them in line, but it wasn’t much of a line anymore. People were standing around in clusters, talking, and there was very little movement. Dawn, being Dawn, was getting surly and kept complaining about the air being hot and stuffy and stinking of perfume. Darby, being Darby, was feeling shy and kept hiding behind Dawn. I was starting to feel antsy again and wondered if I could sneak out to do one more cartwheel.
Eventually, Mrs. Caldwell said that people could follow her into the dining room. “The bride and groom and their attendants will stay in here and continue to greet guests.”
“Are we attendants?” I asked Bree.
She nodded and rolled her eyes. Then suddenly, her eyes got wide and a small smile crept across her face.
“Who’s the hunk?” she asked.
I turned around and there was Alex standing just inside the door. I quickly nudged Dawn and Darby. We all smiled at him — Bree, too — but he walked right past us and looked at Lily.
“Hi, Lily,” he said.
Lily turned. As soon as she saw him, she turned a very patriotic red color and her eyes got huge. “H-hi.”
Alex cocked his head. “You seem surprised to see me.”
“Oh no. No no. Not surprised really, just … um … I mean …”
Dawn squeezed my arm. I know she was thinking the same thing I was: that we were about to be found out. I could feel the energy building up inside me again.
“I’m sorry. I mailed my RSVP late. It probably didn’t arrive yet,” Alex said. “Is it still okay if I’m here?”
I held my breath.
“Of course,” Lily said. And she smiled at him — a big, beautiful, Lily-rific smile.
“It’s good to see you,” Alex said.
I’m lousy with time, so I have no idea how long they stood there looking at each other, but it felt like fourscore and seven years. Or at least an hour. Then Burton made a loud sniffling sound, and it seemed like Lily burst out of a trance.
“You know Burton, right?” she said, putting a hand on Burton’s arm.
“Burton.” Alex nodded at him.
“Hi,” Burton said, and sniffed a couple more times.
Another moment passed. But unlike the previous one, when Lily and Alex were lost in each other’s eyes, this one was long in a squeamish kind of way. I thought I was going to have to turn cartwheels right there in the foyer.
Just then, Aunt Jane walked up and stood right between Alex and Burton. “Dinner is about to be served,” she said. “Hello, Alex. May I escort you to your seat?”
“Thank you, Jane.” He offered his elbow, and Aunt Jane took it with a grin. “It’s good to see you back in town.”
“Man,” Bree whispered to me as we all headed into the main dining room. “I totally get why you guys are rooting for him.”
“Yep,” I said. “He’s nice and funny and he loves Presidential Trivia.”
It took forever to find our places. Dawn, Darby, and I were sitting in the back with Bree and some seven-year-old boy who was playing a handheld game.
“Great. Why do I have to sit at the kid table? I’m older than Mavis,” Bree grumbled. She narrowed her eyes at the head table, where Mavis and Felicia were sitting, along with Mrs. Caldwell, Lily, Burton, Mom, Dad, and Aunt Jane.
“Aw, man, why didn’t Aunt Jane let Alex sit with us?” Dawn said.
“Because she sat him where he and Lily could see each other,” Darby pointed out.
She was right. Aunt Jane had placed him right up near the front, in clear view of Lily. Lily seemed to be aware of this because she rarely looked straight ahead, which was right toward Alex. And when she did, she turned the color of a strawberry.
Come to find out, the boy at our table was supposed to have been the ring bearer, but Mrs. Caldwell fired him because she thought his style of walking was too dangerous for carrying fine jewelry. “I don’t care,” he said, concentrating on his game. “Weddings are boring.”
“You did the right thing,” Dawn said. “The ring looks like a toilet seat anyway.”
At this, the fired ring bearer looked kind of interested, but when he found out the ring was toilet-seat shaped and not toilet-seat size, he went back to his game.
The waiter brought out our dinner — a gooey-looking gray-colored loaf with orange sauce on top, a whole pile of steamed asparagus and carrots, and a little bowl of mixed berries — but even though it tasted okay, I couldn’t really eat it. I was too busy focusing on Lily and Alex. Plus, all the trapped squirminess inside me was interfering with my appetite.
“But where’s the food?” Mrs. Caldwell kept asking this one poor waiter, loud enough for us and pretty much everyone else to hear. “This can’t be all the food. The newspaper is coming and we’ve got to be eating real food!”
My nerves were so jangly, I couldn’t even stay sitting anymore. I bounced higher and higher in my chair until I ended up standing.
“What are you doing?” Dawn asked in a loud whisper.
“I need to do an emergency cartwheel!” I whisper-shouted back.
I started to head outside, but Dawn pulled me back down. “There’s no time.”
Sure enough, the lights were dimming. Our main plan was about to be set in motion. I wriggled in my seat as the music started up and the slide show came into view on the screen near the main table.
The first part was all Burton and the song about hero birds. Then came our part — the section on Lily.
We opened with “You Are My Sunshine” — one of Lily’s favorite songs. Then came the pictures. The first photo was one of Lily as a baby, followed by Lily as a two-year-old, a four-year-old, and a pigtailed six-year-old. In each picture, she was all round-eyed and beaming. People kept saying “awww.” I saw Mom look over at Daddy, and they smiled at each other.
“Did you see that?” Dawn said, nodding toward Mom and Dad. Darby and I nodded. We had.
Next came a hilarious photo of ten-year-old Lily surrounded by three screaming babies. Everyone laughed — Daddy loudest of all. Several people glanced over at us. Darby started to duck under the table, but Dawn patted her arm very sweetly.
Lily covered her face when her
seventh-grade yearbook photo came on the screen. I know she’s embarrassed by the braces and crooked bangs, but she still looks adorable. Next came Lily in ninth grade, then tenth grade, and then …
Then came Lily and Alex, and Lily and Alex, and LilyandAlex. Going to homecoming, throwing a Frisbee with us, going to prom, playing with Quincy, and just sitting side by side on the porch swing. In each one, Lily is smiling the way we never see her smile anymore — with her eyes bright and her cheeks pushed up and rounded, making her face all heart-shaped. That or her mouth is wide open in a laugh.
“Wow,” said Bree beside me.
The Alex on the screen was dimpled and grinning, but the Alex in the room, watching the slide show, looked kind of sad. Lily was staring down at her plate. The whole room was hushed except for a distant twittery sound, which I soon realized was Mrs. Caldwell. She was over by Aunt Jane, trying to get her to turn off the projector.
Brisk movement caught my attention. I turned and saw Mom heading straight for us.
“Hoo boy,” Dawn said. “We’re in for it now.”
“You will apologize to Lily, then you will apologize to Alex, and then Aunt Jane will drive you girls home. You will not be staying for the rest of the dinner.” Mom’s whisper was like the angry hiss of a venomous snake.
“Yes, ma’am,” we said.
“Now!” she added and then walked over to Mrs. Caldwell.
“Oooh. You girls are in big trouble,” said the fired ring bearer. But he sounded impressed, not mean. And it was the first time he’d set down his game since we saw him.
“Good luck,” Bree said.
“Thanks,” I said back. For someone who tries hard to look scary and tough, she really was pretty nice.
Daddy was already talking to Lily, so we decided to talk to Alex first. But when we looked over at his chair, it was empty.
“Oh no!” I said. I ran toward the foyer and collided with a tall man — only, it wasn’t Alex. This man had a beard and mustache.
“Whoa there,” he said. “You all right?”
“Uh-huh,” I said impatiently, trying to peer around him into the foyer.
“Well, I’ll be dogged. What’s going on here?” the man asked, surveying the scene in the dining room. That’s when I noticed that he was holding a camera. It was the newspaper reporter, come to cover the event. But instead of a proper dinner party, all he could see was a bunch of people gossiping, Mrs. Caldwell pitching a fit at the waiters, Mom and Aunt Jane comforting Lily, Dad comforting Darby (who’d crawled under the table), and the fired ring bearer with an asparagus spear up each nostril.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, and continued running after Alex.
I raced into the foyer, but by the time I made it to the door, Alex’s car was already pulling onto the street.
“Is he gone?” Dawn asked, coming up behind me.
“Yep,” I said, all forlorn. “Do you think he’s mad?”
“Beats me,” she said, pressing her nose against the glass door. “It might be worth it if our plan worked. Maybe now the wedding will finally be called off.”
“I sure hope so,” I said. “Because if it isn’t, I’ll probably be turning cartwheels forever.”
Unfortunately, the wedding was not called off that night. Neither was the big lecture from Mom or the “I’m very disappointed in you girls” speech from Dad or the forty-five minutes of hiccups from Darby.
Aunt Jane did her best to defend us. “They were including photos from Lily’s past. Alex is part of her past. No one told the girls to leave him out. Right?”
The worst part, though, was seeing Lily afterward. She looked … heartbroken. Her forehead was all crisscrossed and her voice was wobbly and she kept staring down at the floor. When we apologized to her before leaving the restaurant, she just nodded. She wouldn’t even look us in the eyes.
Later that night, we piled up beside the swinging kitchen door and eavesdropped as Lily sat at the breakfast table, talking with Mom and Aunt Jane. This is what we heard:
Mom said, “Are you upset that Alex was there? Or that he left early?”
Lily said, “I don’t know. Both maybe. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve made my choice. I’m getting married tomorrow. I have to forget the past and move forward.”
Then Aunt Jane said, “Hmmm. Well, now, if you were a history buff like your sisters, you’d know that it’s important to move forward, but you should never forget the past.”
And that’s all we heard. Because then, Delaney got wiggly and knocked over a picture frame on the shelf nearby. Mom came out and gave us yet another lecture about privacy and sent us to the Triangular Office to sleep.
Only, we didn’t sleep. Instead, I called a meeting to review the evening’s events. Delaney got out a flashlight and we sat cross-legged on the floor between my and Darby’s beds. We spoke in hushed voices and didn’t dare turn on the computer, because if we got in trouble one more time that night, Mom would ground us till retirement age.
We discussed the slide show and how everyone reacted. We discussed how fragile Lily looked afterward. But most of all, we discussed that moment in the restaurant foyer when Lily and Alex were staring at each other.
“I’m telling you, they’re still in love,” Delaney said. “No matter what else happened, tonight was worth it because of that.”
“But Lily isn’t calling off the wedding. You heard her,” Darby said. “Maybe we just need to accept things.”
Darby’s always surprising us with wild, harebrained stunts and schemes, but nothing shocked us more than what she’d just suggested.
“You don’t mean —” I started.
“Yes, I do,” Darby said. “I’m saying we should get used to the idea of Lily marrying Burton.”
I shook my head. “But Alex —”
“Alex left,” Darby said. “He didn’t even finish eating his mock duck à l’orange.”
“Is that what that was?” Delaney said. “I wondered.”
“You’ll see,” I said to Darby. “Tomorrow, when Alex shows up at the wedding —”
“I don’t think he’s coming,” Darby said.
I let out a grunting noise. I was frustrated with her attitude and fed up at being interrupted. “Sure he is.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Darby said.
“She’s right,” Delaney said. “What if he doesn’t show up? What if he hates us now and never speaks to us again? What if we lose Lily and lose Alex, and Aunt Jane goes back to Boston and no one ever plays Presidential Trivia with us ever again? What if the best days of our lives are over forever?”
I let out another, louder grunt, this time because I didn’t really have any answers, and I really wasn’t in the mood for one of Delaney’s ramblings.
“Well?” Darby asked.
“Well what?” I said.
“What are we going to do?”
“How should I know? Why are you guys asking me?”
“Because you always have all the answers,” Darby said, “or at least you think you do. And you’re the one who called this meeting.”
“So? That doesn’t mean I’m supreme high commander. I just called a dang meeting. I thought we could exchange ideas, but you’re the one saying we should give up.”
“I’m giving you the facts as I see them. Just because you don’t agree with me, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” Darby said.
“Well, you could still be a little more positive,” Delaney said.
“Yeah, you’re freaking out Delaney,” I said.
“I’m not freaking out!” Delaney shouted.
“You are!” I shouted back.
“Hic!” went Darby.
I got to my feet. “All right! I called this meeting and now I’m going to end it! I’m tired of you two and all your whining. Meeting adjourned!”
“Fine!”
“Hic! Fine!”
Each of us stomped over to our own beds, and I switched off the lamp. I could hear Delaney crying and Darby hiccuppin
g and crying. They’d want me to say they could hear me sniffling, too, but I wasn’t. I just had a runny nose.
I hate it when we fight. Usually, if there’s a misunderstanding between two of us, the third triplet helps settle it. It’s rare that each of us is mad at the other two. It’s awful, too. I always start out all clenched and blazing, but then, when I cool off, I feel like I’m getting smaller and emptier. I mean, I still know I’m right, but I don’t care as much about convincing them. Being mad at my sisters is like being mad at my feet.
After a while, I heard Darby’s shuddery voice in the dark. “I’m sorry I was a sourpuss,” she said.
“I’m sorry I was freaking out,” Delaney said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have any answers,” I said. “Truce?”
“Truce,” they replied.
Once we’d made up, it was like my mind started working better. “How about this?” I said. “Tomorrow, we’ll call Alex and make sure he’s coming to the wedding. If Lily can still go through with it with him sitting there in the audience, then we’ll know we have to accept it.”
We gathered at Darby’s bed, put our hands together, and swore an oath to accept Burton as our new brother if Lily chose him over Alex. And we promised to never argue with each other again — or at least try real hard not to.
The morning of the wedding, we woke up to some scary noises. They were sort of a cross between a moan and a growl, but we couldn’t tell if they were coming from a wild animal or something supernatural.
Dawn and Delaney, being big sissies, voted for me to go investigate.
I followed the sounds down the stairs of the attic to the door of Mom’s bathroom. It was open just a crack, and whatever was groaning was on the other side. My heart felt like a big gong inside me, and my arms and legs went all tingly — not because I was scared but because I was excited. I thought for sure I would finally meet the ghost!
I pushed open the door, and there, kneeling in front of the toilet, was Lily. She was still wearing her pajamas, and her hair was in a messy ponytail.
Revenge of the Flower Girls Page 10
