Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [39]
“Why did Percy think I would be upset?”
“Well, because you’re the maid of honor and you’ll, like, miss out on all the girlie stuff.”
I rolled my eyes so hard that the blowback nearly took my head off my shoulders. “Does Percy know me at all?”
“I told him you’d be relieved,” she said, relaxing a little. “I know you’re so not into the whole wedding hoopla.”
(Okay. At this point you might be a little skeptical about the veracity of this conversation. I mean, all this wedding talk so soon after your proposal. Really? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I was pulling some James Freysian high jinks—you know, narrative manipulation that goes above and beyond the typical shenanigans employed by nonfiction writers through the ages. You will just have to believe me when I say that this conversation, even more so than others already documented in this notebook, occurred almost exactly as depicted here. The sheer implausibility of this conversation calls for a compulsory and most careful transcription.)
“But you know what I didn’t realize about myself until after I got engaged? I’m not into the wedding hoopla. In fact, I hate all the wedding hoopla. Am I really supposed to care so much about the font I use on my personalized napkins?”
She waited for me to shake my head, then continued.
“And what a waste of money. Did you know that my mother was going to put a second mortgage on the house so she could pay for this thing? If she’s determined to spend her money, it would be so much smarter to use it to pay off our student loans, or put it toward a house. But we’re not even sure she’ll give us the money if we’re not using it for the wedding, which is just so backward-thinking it’s scary.”
I barely got in a nod before she went on.
“And having people gush over me all day long as if I were Wedding Barbie come to life? Bleech. I don’t want anything to do with it!”
That part made sense. For most women, their wedding day is the only day in their entire lives when they are indisputably the most beautiful woman in the room—even if they are not. Bridget is almost invariably the most beautiful woman in the room. She’s so oohed and aahed at all the time, she doesn’t need fifty thousand dollars spent for the privilege.
“Have you ever seen Battle of the Brides?” she asked. “It’s a reality show. I think it’s on Bravo.”
“We can’t afford cable.”
“Oh, yeah. Right,” she said. “Anyway, this show is all about brides-to-be competing against each other for the wedding of their dreams.” She said the last words in a singsong, then stuck out her tongue. “They have to do all this crazy stuff. Like in this one episode it was the Touch of Silk competition. Six psycho brides standing outside in the freezing cold with one hand on this twenty-five-thousand-dollar wedding gown, which wasn’t even all that pretty. It was just too, too much. So tacky, like a cheaper version of the fifty-pound white duchess satin monstrosity the Donald’s latest wife dragged down the aisle.”
I don’t doubt that Bridget is indeed disillusioned by all the “wedding hoopla.” But the fact that she knows that Mrs. Trump III wore a fifty-pound white duchess satin dress—hell, that she even knows the term “white duchess satin” at all—indicates that Bridget has jumped through one or two of those hoopla hoops already.
“If they took their hands off the dress, even for a split second, they were out. These women were possessed. They just had to have this ugly gown like it was everything worth living for. And after, like, twelve hours, not one of them had been eliminated. So the evil producers made them take off their comfy shoes and put on white stilettos with, like, four-inch heels. Still, not one of them gave up. Finally, after they’d been in the competition for something like eighteen hours, they wheeled in these gigantic speakers and got this hyperactive wedding deejay calling himself DJ Jazzy Spaz to blast nothing but Barry Manilow songs.”
I’ve read somewhere that blasting Barry Manilow has proven to be a successful POW torture technique. The funny thing is, if I had been in this Battle