Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [16]
“Come on,” Lauren said. “We’ll take a cab to the hospital.”
Ellen’s face was white and she refused to take the towel off to look at her finger. “I think I cut it off,” she kept saying. “I think I cut off my whole finger.”
Lauren assured her that her finger was still attached. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll just need a few stitches.”
They had to wait over two hours in the emergency room. A man sat across from them with his head leaning against the wall. When he was called to go in, he left a bloody headprint behind.
Lauren and Ellen didn’t talk much while they waited. Ellen looked like she was going to pass out any second, and Lauren didn’t think it seemed like the right time to continue their conversation. Maybe Ellen hadn’t even heard her when she’d called Louis ugly. It was possible, she thought. They sat in silence until the doctor called them in. Lauren walked back to the examination room even though Ellen hadn’t asked her to.
The doctor looked at Ellen’s finger quickly and started numbing it for stitches. “That’s a nasty cut,” she said. “How did this happen?”
“A knife,” Ellen said. “It was summer sausage.”
“Summer sausage bites back,” Lauren said. Ellen looked at her with her eyebrows wrinkled together while the doctor stitched up her finger.
Lauren apologized later, but they both knew it was too late. “I don’t know what’s best for you,” Lauren said. “You’re the only one who knows that.”
Ellen said she understood. “Lauren,” she said. “I get it. You were just being a good friend. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
When Ellen and Louis got engaged, Shannon screamed. “Well,” she said, after she stopped screaming, “I guess some people just want to be miserable.” They all went to the wedding and tried not to be somber. After all, she was their friend and they wanted her to be happy.
They lost touch with Ellen. Not all at once, but little by little, so that they didn’t even notice until it had already happened. Maybe it was hard for Ellen to be around them, since she knew they didn’t approve of her marriage. Maybe their lives just went different ways—Lauren and Shannon both moved to New York and Ellen moved to a house in the suburbs. Sometimes they thought that Louis was behind it, that he had forbidden Ellen to see them. In the end, Lauren thought it was probably a combination of everything, but she knew they would never really know.
Lauren talks about that summer a lot. It has a point, a moral of some kind, but she’s not quite sure what it is yet. When people tell her that their friend is marrying a guy they hate, she says, “Have I got a story for you.” When she gets a Christmas card from Sallie and Max with a picture of their two little boys on it, she shows it to people and says, “You’ve got to hear about this wedding.” And whenever she’s at a party and someone serves summer sausage, she says, “Did I ever tell you about my friend Ellen?” and if the person she’s talking to shakes their head no, she says, “Well, let me tell you. We had this friend. And our friend Ellen, well, Ellen dated ugly boys.”
Isabella didn’t want to go to the wedding.
They were Ben’s friends. She had never met the bride or the groom, and besides, she was fairly certain that she and Ben were going to break up any day. While she was getting ready that morning, she sat down on the bed and said, “My head hurts.”
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Ben said. He was tying his tie and not looking at her. She knew he really wouldn’t care if she didn’t go and that pissed her off.
“Your tie is crooked,” she said, and stood up to finish getting ready.
They were early to the church, which never happened with them. Ben hated weddings. During the ceremony, he’d roll his eyes or sometimes say, “Oh God,” if the couple read their own vows or started to cry.
They sat in the pew and Isabella paged through the program. “You know who’s going to be here?” Ben asked. “Mike’s girlfriend. You know, the one that looks like JonBenét.”
Isabella had been hearing about