Especially Huxley.
Huxley and I didn’t experience the huge explosion in social activity that happens to most girls during middle school. In sixth grade, seemingly overnight, our deck of classmates got reshuffled into tiers of popularity, and we were near the bottom. I knew we weren’t popular, but we weren’t losers. We got invited to a few bar mitzvahs and summer pool parties, but our social calendar wasn’t exactly blowing up.
Huxley’s family live in a huge house atop a hill, and she used to tell me she felt like Rapunzel up in her tower alone. Still, we made our own fun. Huxley came up with the activities for us, and I followed along for the ride. That was our dynamic, and it worked. We did our own thing, and middle school was fun for us, but a dud compared to the popular crowd. I guess I never noticed how much it frustrated Huxley.
Even though Steve was a grade ahead of us, his old school had a different curriculum, and he was forced to take seventh-grade science. Since there were no kids with an N last name in our grade, Steve and Huxley wound up sitting next to each other and became lab partners. Huxley seized on the opportunity. On the second Monday of school, she burst through the double doors looking like a model. No more ponytails and cardigans for her. She maneuvered her way into Steve’s lunch table, then his social circle, then his heart. There was no warning. I observed this like the rest of my classmates. Huxley went from some girl to That Girl. Dating Steve catapulted her to the top of the social stratosphere.
I thought she would bring me along, but as she got invited to more parties, more outings, there wasn’t a place for me in her new circle of friends.
People forgot where she came from, or who she was before Steve.
She didn’t want to remind them.
I arrive home, and I can already hear the screaming as I open the garage door. After doing the stay-at-home, avidly-watching-soap-operas thing when we were young, my mom turned the spare bedroom into an alterations room. She’s become known about town for her mastery with hemming, with one future client even approaching her at a funeral. In a cracked-out twist of fate, most of my mom’s clientele are brides and bridal parties. I don’t know how she can work in that alteration room poring over wedding dresses after what happened with her own daughter. Maybe helping others can wash away the memory for her. Whatever the reason, it’s a lucrative business. Brides will spend gobs of money to ensure their special day is more perfect than everyone else’s.
The shrill complaints of another bride-to-be take over the house. I pop into the alterations room to say hello and offer my mom moral support. She’s working on a flowing, Disney princess–like wedding dress while the svelte, short bride yells into her cell.
“Mommy, no! We are not going with carnations. I want at least two dozen white roses in my centerpieces...they’re cheaper? You want me to go with some cheap flower for my wedding? We aren’t gutter trash.”
I crouch down and kiss my mom on the forehead.
“Hi, honey,” she says, unaffected by the shouting. She’s learned to tune it out.
“How’s it going?” I peer up at the bride, who’s now yelling through tears.
My mom senses my sarcasm. “Planning a wedding is very stressful. But it’s all worth it in the end.”
If you make it to the end, I think. Or else it’s just a waste of money. Wouldn’t these funds be better spent helping the homeless?
“What?!” The bride shrieks into her phone. “I am not making Leah a bridesmaid. She’ll look so ugly and fat in the dress. And her hair is a frizzy mess. She is going to ruin my wedding pictures...I don’t care that she’s my sister!”
“She sounds very much in love,” I say.
I’m halfway out the door when I spot a thick blue binder weighing down the sewing machine. Courtney & Matthew * May 25 is scrawled in ivory cursive across the front. Inside are dozens of tabs covering every possible detail of this bride’s wedding, along with pictures and magazine cutouts and logistical facts and figures for each. You’d think she was running a multinational corporation.
“Please don’t touch that,” the bride says to me, the “please” just tacked on. “That’s my Dream Day Scenario binder. I worked really hard on it.”
For a moment, I thought she’d said Doomsday Scenario. Not that far off from the truth. “Sorry.”
She squeezes together a fake smile and returns to the phone call. “No, Mommy. We aren’t doing folded napkins for the table. Napkin rings...because they’re freaking classy, that’s why!”
It’s times like these that I forget there’s actually a groom involved. She probably does, too.
I lie back on Diane’s bed and stare at the heartthrob posters pinned to her ceiling. It must be weird to wake up in the same room you had in high school and find nothing has moved.
“Man, these are some ugly bridesmaids dresses. Sweetie, that color is not champagne. That is crusted-over vomit.” Diane clicks through pictures online from her friend Marian’s wedding. Her friends dance up a storm—though at this point, I guess Diane’s downgraded them to acquaintances.
I lean in and size up the dresses. They’re poofed out on tulle steroids, but the soft beige color does complement their bridesmaid bouquets nicely.
“Wow. The whole gang’s there,” Diane continues. “Aimee and her creepy husband. And poor Erin, you will never lose that baby weight, will you?”
“Why didn’t you go?” I ask.
“I would’ve been gawked at more than the bride. ‘Oh, there’s Diane...at the singles table. Whomp whomp.’”
“They wouldn’t do that. They’re your friends.”
“They ditched me.” Diane spins away from her desk and shoots me a half smile. “You know what that’s like.”
She sticks her thick brown hair behind her ears. It matches her eyes perfectly. Combine those with her round face and slightly bulbous nose, and she’s the epitome of cute and endearing.
“I think Ted’s a flamer. I give it a year, tops.”
Until she opens her mouth.
“But back to Bari and Derek,” I say, or else we would talk about her friends all night. I motion to get on the keyboard. My gossip dossier sits open next to her monitor. “May I?”
“Of course.” Diane wheels away and stretches her feet on her bed. I consider Diane my break-up consultant. She’s the only person who knows what I do, the only person who would be supportive. Sometimes I need her advice, or a second opinion, or just someone to laugh at how ridiculous my classmates are.
“So I think Derek should be the dumper,” I say. I can’t imagine what this will do to Bari, but it’s for the best. I’m not in the business of ruining lives. People need the most help when they think everything is fine, right before their worlds get flipped upside down.
“Should? He so is, B. He’s done it twice before, so let history repeat itself. He obviously can’t stand girls who are smarter than him, so do Bari’s homework for a week and watch him drop her like a hot potato. You know men and their pride.”
Diane scrapes some food crumbs off the u in her Rutgers sweatshirt. That and her flannel bottoms became her uniform as soon as she took off her wedding dress. I guess when you plan to marry a doctor, you don’t prep a plan B. But watching daytime talk shows is not a viable career. Diane dabs water on the stain, and smiles with pride when it’s gone.
Each morning when I wake up, a part of me hopes that I’ll come downstairs and find Diane in a business suit, sipping coffee and checking her phone before racing to catch the train into Manhattan. She’d have some awesome job in a skyscraper in Midtown, followed regularly by happy-hour cocktails with coworkers. She would be someone I could look up to again.