Sloppy Firsts_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [47]
I’m slipping.
Hy wasn’t at our school long enough to earn any awards. But she came up to me in the auditorium and congratulated me as I gathered up mine. I thanked her, wondering if she still thought I was as smart as the girls at her private school.
Then she opened her mouth like she was about to say something else, but changed her mind. This was weird, because Hy usually says what’s on her mind.
"What?" I asked.
"Girl," she said. "Don’t take anything I do personally."
What a bizarre thing to say out of nowhere like that. I really wanted to say something snotty to put Hy in her place and vent some pent-up resentment. But I was so drained by the Marcus thing that I didn’t really give a damn.
"Ain’t no thing, Hy," I said, using her own words against her. "Ain’t no thing."
When I got home, I dumped my unimpressive awards into the corner with the rest of them. They’re such a given, my parents don’t even ask to see them anymore, let alone ooh and ahh over them.
Then I fell asleep for five minutes. Long enough to have a dream about an origami mouth trying to swallow me up.
the twenty-fifth
THE BIG DAY.
Bethany is no longer Miss Bethany Shannon Darling. She’s Mrs. Grant Doczylkowski, which is about as bad a new name as you can get.
My primary duty for the big day was to fluff Bethany’s train and hold her cathedral-length veil so it didn’t drag all over the floor. My secondary duty was to tell her how beautiful she looked. Which, of course, she did. But it got annoying having to reassure her.
"How does my makeup look? Not too much, is it? I don’t want to scare Grant when I walk down the aisle."
"It looks beautiful."
"How does my dress look? It isn’t too tight, is it? I don’t want to look like a whale when I walk down the aisle."
"It looks beautiful."
"How does my hair look? It’s not too poufy, is it? I don’t want to scream Jersey when I walk down the aisle."
"Your bangs are a bit mallratty."
"WHAT?!"
"I’m kidding. I swear. It looks beautiful."
Ad nauseum.
The universe gets so ga-ga about weddings that I expected sentimentality to sneak up on me and make me a mushy mess. But it didn’t. Bethany’s and G-Money’s vows left me unmoved.
Here’s what I remember about the ceremony: I sat with my arms folded tightly across my chest, trying to keep warm in the overenthusiastically air-conditioned church. The setting sun through the stained-glass windows turned my yellow ("Maize!") dress into a muted tie-dye. My strapless bra was cutting off my circulation, and I couldn’t help but think it would have a long-term breast-stunting effect.
The real action was at the reception.
As the Maid of Dubious Honor, I automatically got paired up with the Best Man all day. We walked down the aisle together. We posed for pictures together. We made our entrance into the reception hall together.
The bad news: G-Money’s best man, Tad, is thirty years old and resembles a bloated manatee after a beer bender.
The better news: Tad introduced me to his nineteen-year-old brother, Cal. Cal is one tasty morsel in a clean-cut, Abercrombie-ish kind of way.
The best news: Cal is a computer genius who pissed off his parents by dropping out of MIT this year to be a whiz-kid consultant for an up-and-coming software company.
The supa-dupa stupendous news: When Cal shook my hand he said, "I told my bro I had to meet the girl who made that butt-ugly dress look so damn good."
Paul Parlipiano, who?
"Let’s make our getting-to-know-you banter more challenging," he said.
"Okay."
"We’ll only discuss subjects most commonly known by abbreviations."
Cal was odd. But I liked it. I asked for an example.
"TRL," he said. "MTV democracy at it’s best? Or pitiful battleground for boy bands?"
"WWF," I said. "Harmless white-trash