Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [19]
“You got any Red Bull?” Ben asked. The bartender shook his head.
“Ben,” Isabella said. “You can’t order that.”
“Why?”
“What are you, fifteen? We’re at a wedding.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Relax,” he said. “They don’t have it anyway.”
“But you can’t drink that at a wedding,” Isabella explained.
“You have a lot of rules,” Ben said. “I’m going out for a cigarette.”
Isabella ordered a white wine and stood by herself on the side of the room. She watched the bride and groom arrive and hoped that they wouldn’t come anywhere near her. They had no idea who she was.
When Ben finally came back, about ten minutes later, he was carrying a brown paper bag and smiling a proud smile. “What?” Isabella asked.
“Red Bull,” he said. “I got it at a convenience store down the street. Now I can just order vodka on the rocks. Pretty smart, huh?”
Somewhere after the dinner was served and before the cake was cut, Isabella lost Ben. Everyone at their table was up dancing and mingling. Isabella sat there and drank wine. She felt like a fool.
JonBenét smiled at her from across the room and then walked over to the table. “Hey, Isabella.”
“Hey,” Isabella said. She was happy not to be sitting alone.
“Where did your date go?” JonBenét asked, smiling.
“Oh, I don’t … I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“He’s probably off somewhere with Mike getting into trouble. Boys can be such shits sometimes, right?”
Isabella laughed. JonBenét was being very kind, but Isabella found it hard to look at her straight on for too long. It made the hair on her arms stand up. She thought about the JonBenét footage that showed her in the swimsuit competition of the beauty pageant. She wished she had never seen that part of the documentary. It haunted her.
“So, how did you and Ben meet?” JonBenét asked.
“In a bar,” Isabella said. Sometimes she tried to make the story a little better, to embellish it with details. But she didn’t feel like it right then.
“Mike and I met at a wedding,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, his cousin married one of my friends from college. It’s funny, isn’t it? The way things happen?”
Isabella nodded. “Yeah, it is.”
How she met Ben could have been a cute story, Isabella realized. If they ended up together, she could tell people, “That Ben! So impatient, so impish!” But for that to happen, Ben would have to be a different person. And he wasn’t. He was just a cocky boy who didn’t want to wait his turn. That was all. He had to go to the bathroom. That was their story. The next time someone asked, “How did you meet?” Isabella could say, “Ben had to pee.”
JonBenét chattered on about the different people at the wedding. She talked about her friend’s wedding that she was in next month. “The bridesmaid dresses are beautiful,” JonBenét assured her. Isabella had never met someone so in love with weddings. She tried to picture JonBenét as a bride, but she kept seeing the real JonBenét, overly made up in a poofy dress.
Ben came back about twenty minutes later, and JonBenét stood up. “I should go find my prince.”
“Where have you been?” Isabella asked. “I’ve been sitting here by myself for almost an hour.”
“Whadya mean, by yourself? There’s people all around.”
“These aren’t my friends, Ben. You just left me alone. Everyone’s been staring at me. I was sitting all by myself before she came over here.”
“So what? Are you mad because you had to hang out with crazy JonBenét?”
“She’s not that bad, Ben.”
“She’s crazy,” Ben said, like it was a fact. Like it was something everyone knew.
Isabella felt bad for JonBenét, the way that everyone at the wedding was talking about her, like she was some kind of freak show. No one knew what went on in her relationship with Mike. No one even really knew her. Maybe she loved Mike more than he liked her. And wasn’t that horrible? Wasn’t that sad? But people forgot about that. They didn’t see a tragedy, just a good story. To them, it was just some girl they could