Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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Arthur made a face. “Malvern? That’s far. Is that where you live?”

And so started the years of explaining—no, I don’t actually live there. I live in Chester Springs, which is even farther out, crawling with commoners, and while there are beautiful old houses that would certainly be met with approval, I didn’t live in any of them.

“How far away is that?” Arthur asked after I finished my spiel.

“Like half an hour.” It was forty-five minutes, fifty some days, but this was another lie I learned to tell.

Arthur and I arrived at the entrance to the cafeteria and he gestured for me to go in first. “After you.”

I didn’t know who to be afraid of yet, so even though the cafeteria was packed and brimming with an energy that could have been interpreted as threatening, I was oblivious. I watched Arthur wave to someone and followed him when he said, “Come on.”

The cafeteria was the confluence where the old mansion and the new school met. The lunch tables were wood, a worn shade of espresso, chipped to reveal their sandy skeletons in places. The dark, matching floors ended at a large entryway, which opened up into a newly constructed atrium with skylights, terrazzo gleaming underfoot, and floor-to-ceiling windows that watched the quad, middle schoolers roaming the grass like cattle. The food was contained in a U-shaped room that welcomed students from the old mansion with a deli bar and spat you out into the new atrium, shortly past the bony arms of recovering anorexics reaching into the salad bar for broccoli and fat-free Italian dressing.

I followed Arthur, who stopped at a table by an antique fireplace. It looked like it hadn’t been used for years, but its soot-stained mouth suggested that the former inhabitants had appreciated it. Arthur dumped his book bag into a chair across from a girl with big brown eyes set so far apart they were practically in her sideburns. Kids called her the Shark behind her back, but her unusual eyes were actually her best feature and the thing her husband would eventually love the most about her. She was wearing bulky khakis and a white cotton sweater that gathered underneath her large breasts in a wrinkled pouch. She was flanked by another girl, chin in her hands, her long brown hair spilling over her shoulders and pooling on the table around her elbows. She was so pale I was shocked by her short skirt, that she would put her white legs on display so brazenly. Mom would have strapped me into a tanning bed before allowing me to go out with skin as blanched as that. It didn’t seem to be working against her, though. The guy next to her wore a soccer jersey that seemed mandatory next to his wholesome good looks, and his hand rested on a quadrant of her lower back that only a boyfriend would touch.

“Yo,” Arthur said. “This is TifAni. She went to Catholic school. Be nice to her, she’s had it bad enough.”

“Hi, TifAni!” the Shark said, brightly. She dragged a plastic spoon around the curves of an empty pudding cup, trying to scoop up any last remnants of chocolate goo.

“Hi.”

Arthur pointed at the Shark. “Beth.” Then the pale girl. “Sarah.” Then her boyfriend. “Teddy.”

An a cappella of hellos. I held up my hand and said hi again.

“Come on.” Arthur tugged my sleeve. I hooked the strap of my book bag over the edge of a chair and approached the line forming at the deli. When it was Arthur’s turn, he ordered a whopper of a sandwich, with roast beef and turkey, three different kinds of cheese, no tomatoes, just lettuce, and enough mayo that his lunch made a squishy sound every time he bit into it. I asked for cheese, mustard, and tomato on a spinach wrap (oh, the days when we thought a wrap had fewer calories than bread). Arthur tossed two bags of chips onto his tray, but I noticed that most of the girls weren’t using, so I didn’t either. I carried my wrap and my diet Snapple to the register and waited in line to pay.

“I like your pants.” The compliment turned me around. A girl who was at once extremely bizarre looking and attractive nodded at my orange cargo pants, which I already couldn’t wait to never wear again. She had strawberry blond hair that was so uniform in color it couldn’t be natural, large brown eyes somehow devoid of eyelashes, and skin the color of a girl who had a pool in her backyard and no summer job. In her hot pink button-down and schoolgirl-style plaid skirt that most certainly broke the fingertips rule, she was dressed in a way that defied the androgynous prep style that seemed to be so dominant among Bradley girls, but she carried herself with the air of someone who ran the show.

“Thanks.” I beamed.

“Are you new?” she asked. Her voice was husky, like the voiceovers in those commercials urging you to call 1-900-GIRLS now.

Off my nod she said, “I’m Hilary.”

“I’m TifAni.”

“Yo, Hilary!” The booming voice came from the center of the most esteemed table in the cafeteria, crowded by boys with hair on their legs—real hair, coarse and dark like my father’s—and obedient girls to laugh when they accused each other of being any one of the following: pussy, ’tard, cocksucker.

“Yo, Dean!” Hilary met his call.

“Grab me some Swedish fish,” he demanded. Without a tray, Hilary’s hands were full. She tucked her Diet Coke underneath her chin and cradled a bag of pretzels in the crook of her elbow.

“I got it!” I was up at the register and I grabbed the sack of candy before she did, paying for it along with my wrap and drink over her protests.

“I won’t forget that,” she said, hooking her pinkie around the fish, somehow able to carry all of her purchases with just her hands now.

I caught up with Arthur, lingering a few feet away from the cash register. The encounter, Hilary’s curiosity about me, had left my face flushed. Sometimes, a momentary truce in girlhood is much more precious than a guy you really like asking you out, sticking around even after he got the milk for free.

“I see you’ve met one half of the HOs.”

I looked back at Hilary tossing the bag of Swedish fish onto Dean’s lunch tray. Guys could use lunch trays. “Is she slutty?”

“It’s an acronym for Hilary and her best friend, Olivia. That one”—he nodded to a girl with curly brown hair, laughing appreciatively as the Hairy Legs constructed a fortress out of empty French fry boats—“came up with it for their names. I don’t think they even know what an acronym is.” Arthur sighed, pleased by their ignorance. “Which just makes the whole thing even more brilliant.”

I may not have realized that Holden Caulfield was having a mental breakdown at first, but so help me God I knew what an acronym was.

“Are they really HOs?” I’d never heard of a girl willingly co-opting a word like that before. I’d been called a slut once, the natural jump everyone makes when you have adult breasts by the time you’re twelve, and I wept in Mom’s lap for an hour.

“They wish they were.” The skin crinkled on the bridge of Arthur’s slick nose. “But they wouldn’t know what to do with a dick if it punched them in the face.”

After lunch I had Chemistry, one of my least favorite subjects but exciting nonetheless because the HOs were both in my class. That excitement quickly faded when the teacher told us to pair up for an experiment that would prove that Chemistry can be cool. I looked desperately to my right, but my neighbor was already twisted in his seat, signaling to someone he wanted to be his partner. It was the same situation on the left. Happy twosomes meandered to the back of the room, and this migration revealed a fellow straggler, a boy with light brown hair and eyes that were visibly blue even from across the room. He gave me a nod and raised his eyebrows, a silent request to be his partner even though that was the only option. I nodded back and we made our way to the stations behind the rows of desks.

“Oh good,” Mrs. Chambers said when she noticed the two of us standing next to each other, still a little unsure, “Liam and TifAni, take that last table by the window.”

“Like we had any other choice,” Liam muttered softly, so Mrs. Chambers wouldn’t hear. “Thanks for looking out for the new people.”

It took me a second to realize that he was also lumping himself into the “new people” category. I glanced at him. “You’re new here?”

He shrugged, as though he assumed it was obvious.

“I am too!” I whispered excitedly. I couldn’t believe my luck I’d ended up with him. New people are contractually obligated to look out for each other.

“I know.” He lifted one side of his mouth into a half smile and the afternoon light caught a dimple in his cheek. Frozen like that, he could have been a poster you tear out of Tiger Beat. “You’re too pretty to be the last one picked.”

I squeezed my thighs together, trying to smother the heat.

Mrs. Chambers started in on a lecture about safety that didn’t interest anyone until she mentioned that if we weren’t careful, we’d walk out of here with our hair and eyebrows singed right off. I looked over my shoulder at her, realizing when I did that Hilary was watching me with her large, lashless eyes, as though she had already suffered the fate that so concerned Mrs. Chambers. I had a split second to make a decision—look away and pretend I hadn’t caught her, or smile and have some kind of nonverbal exchange that could further endear me to her. The instinct that had garnered my fleeting popularity at Mt. St. Theresa’s kicked in and I chose the latter.

To my delight, Hilary smiled back and nudged Olivia, whispering something to her as she leaned in close. Olivia smiled too and signaled to me. “He’s hot,” Olivia mouthed, stretching her lips widely around the word “hot” and giving the slightest of nods to Liam. I quickly glanced at him to make sure he wasn’t looking and mouthed back, “I know.”

My God, was I pleased with myself by the time the bell rang at 3:23 P.M. Only my first day, and I’d established a flirtation with the hot new guy, laid claim to him in a way that only our mutual newness could allow, and I’d bonded with the HOs. I felt like sending a flowery Hallmark card to that beast Sister John: “Dear Sister John, I’m doing so well at my new school and I found someone who I would like to take my virginity. I only have you to thank!”

CHAPTER 3

Twenty-five, twenty-six—lift your chins!—twenty-eight—two more, make them your best!—twenty-nine, thirty.” I rocked back and rested my butt on my heels, stretching my arms out in front of me in a bid to elongate them after “running toward the burn,” the prodigal promise that I paid $325 a month to hear. I probably would have that longer, leaner body, too, if only I wasn’t so desperate to get food into my mouth by the time I get home that sometimes I don’t even take off my coat before I start pillaging the kitchen.

“Take your weights back to the bin and set up at the bar for calf raises.” This is always the part of class that gives me the most anxiety—because I need to deposit my weights and get to my favorite spot at the bar quickly but politely, when all I want to do is elbow the slow movers out of my way. “I’m going to be on TV and I’m not here for my health, bitches!” I settle for the accidental bump, the one I typically reserve for the Singers. You know those people, just so fucking happy to be alive, bouncing down the street, buds in their ears and faces repulsive with pleasure as they belt out the lyrics to some noxious Motown classic. I’ve gotten bold, bumping them with my enormous bag as I pass by, savoring their outraged “Hey!” behind me. No one gets to be that happy.

I’m a little gentler in class. I wouldn’t want to alter the image the instructors have of me, one carefully crafted to impress and endear: the sweet but slightly standoffish girl who will always take the most advanced option in the thigh work portion of class, no matter how intensely her legs tremble.

Fortunately, by the time I dropped my weights in the bins and turned around, I saw that my favorite spot was wide open. I looped my towel around the bar, placed my water bottle on the ground, and bobbed up and down on the balls of my feet, all the while pulling my stomach back toward my spine and pinching my shoulder blades together.

The instructor said, “Nice form, Ani.”

For an hour, I tucked, sucked in, squeezed, lifted, and pulsed. By final stretch, my limbs felt like the pad thai noodles I’m always craving, and I debated scrapping the two-mile run back to my apartment. But as I stood to return my mat to the cubbyhole in the front of the room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the front mirror, specifically of the roll bulging over the back of my tank top, and reconsidered.

In the locker room after class, some girl who had phoned in all three of the abdominal sets said to me, “You were so good!”

“Sorry?” I had heard her, of course.

“During abs. That last position, I tried to let go of my legs and I couldn’t hold myself up for even one count.”

“Well, it’s the place I need it most so I push myself as hard as possible.” I patted my tummy, swollen against my extra-small Stella McCartney for Adidas yoga pants. Ever since wedding planning began, my binges have returned to their high-school-level intensity. For the last few years, I’d been able to contain them to Sundays, and the occasional Wednesday night. Overexercising and restricting myself the rest of the week kept my weight steady at 120 pounds (willowy when you’re five ten, squat when you’re five three). My goal for the wedding, and, most important, the documentary, was 105, and knowing what I was going to have to do—and soon—to attain that seemed to be exacerbating my cravings as of late. I felt like a deranged bear storing up for anorexia.

“No way!” the girl insisted. “You look great.”

“Thanks.” My eyes trailed the back of her body as she turned from me to open up her locker. She had a long, narrow torso offset by wide hips and an expansive, flat ass. I couldn’t decide which was worse—going gentle into that mom-jeans-wearing night, or fighting it, Botoxed and hungry, every step of the way.

I slogged home, my feet dragging along the West Side Highway. It took me twenty-five minutes to run two miles, which, even factoring in the stops I had to make to wait at lights so as not get run over by a car, was pathetic.

“Hey, babe.” Luke didn’t bother to look up from the iPad on his lap. When Luke and I first started dating, my stomach used to latch on to the word “babe,” hold it like those claw games in an arcade would a little stuffed animal, a miracle they came up with anything because everyone knows they’re rigged. It was all I ever wanted in high school and college, some broad-shouldered lacrosse player jogging up behind me and slinging his arm over my shoulder, “Hey, babe.”

“How was your workout?”

“Eh.” I peeled off my sweaty top, shivered when the wet hair stuck to the nape of my bare neck, no longer barricaded by the Lululemon. I went to the cabinet, located a jar of organic peanut butter, and dipped a spoon into it.

“What time are you meeting them again?”

I glanced at the clock. “One. I have to get going.”

I allowed myself a single spoonful of peanut butter and a glass of water before getting into the shower. It took me an hour to get ready, much more than I spend primping for dinner with Luke. There were so many women I was dressing for. The tourists on the street (this is how it’s done), the salesgirl who would kiss my ass only when she noticed the Miu Miu label nestled in the leather quilts of my bag. Most important today, the one bridesmaid, premed, who at twenty-three years old had boldly declared that if she didn’t have kids by the time she was thirty, she was freezing her eggs. “Advanced maternal age is directly correlated with autism.” She sucked on her vodka soda so hard it spat a bubble into the air. “All these women having kids in their thirties. It’s so selfish. If you can’t lock it down before then, adopt.” Of course, Monica “Moni” Dalton was sure she’d lock it down before she was stuck with a three handle. She hasn’t eaten a processed carb since the Sex and the City finale, and her stomach looks like it’s been Photoshopped.

Except, three months from now, Moni will be the first of us to turn twenty-nine, and there will be no man next to her in bed to rouse her with birthday sex. Her panic smells chemical.

Moni also happens to be the most fun to dress for. I love catching her studying the delicate ankle straps on my sandals, the way her eye travels in unison with my emerald. She’s no stranger to Barneys herself, but that bill goes to her parents. Not cool once you’re on the wrong side of twenty-five. At that point, the only acceptable person to foot your bills is your man or yourself. For the record, I do foot my own shopping bills (everything but the jewelry). But I’d never be able to do that if not for Luke. If not for him taking care of everything else.

“You look nice.” Luke planted a kiss on the back of my head on the way to the kitchen.

“Thanks.” I tugged at the sleeves of my white blazer. I could never roll the cuffs fashion-blog right.

“You guys are getting brunch after?”

“Yeah.” I stuffed my bag with makeup, sunglasses, New York magazine—which I’d purposely leave sticking half out of the bag so everyone would know I’m reading New York magazine—gum, and a rough version of the wedding invitation our timid stationer had drawn up.

“Hey, so this week—one of my clients really wants us to go out to dinner with him and his wife.”

“Who?” I unrolled the cuffs of my blazer and rolled them up again.

“This guy, Andrew. From Goldman.”

“Maybe Nell knows him.” I grinned.

“Oh God.” Luke puffed out his cheeks, concerned. “I hope not.” Nell makes Luke nervous.

I smiled. Kissed him on the lips. Tasted stale coffee on his breath. Tried not to shudder. Tried to remember the first time I saw him, the real first time: at a party when I was a freshman in college, everyone else in Seven jeans, me smothered by the waistband of my khakis. Luke was a senior at Hamilton, but his best friend from boarding school went to Wesleyan. They visited each other frequently over the years, but because I was only a freshman, that party fall semester was the first time I’d ever seen him. Luke wanted Nell then, before he knew what a ballbuster (his word) she could be. Fortunately or unfortunately, Nell was hooking up with Luke’s best friend, so it wasn’t happening. When I got home that night, smarting from Luke’s perfunctory “Hello,” I strategized. The guy I wanted wanted Nell, so I watched Nell closely. I ate the way she ate, leaving almost three quarters of food on the plate (she had a stockpile of blue pills to induce indifference to even the most devastating of carbs) and made Mom buy me the clothes Nell wore when I came home for Thanksgiving break. Nell taught me that I’d been playing it all wrong: Pretty girls had to appear as though they weren’t trying to be pretty, which I had made the fatal mistake of doing at Bradley. There were times Nell went out in her father’s polo, nasty old Uggs, and sweatpants, no makeup, just to prove her loyalty resided with her own gender. Pretty girls also had to have a self-deprecating sense of humor and point out when they had a blistering pimple and talk about their explosive diarrhea to assure other girls that they weren’t interested in the role of man-eating minx. Because if the others sensed any level of deliberate prowess, they’d end you, and you could forget about the guy you wanted. The snarling force of a pack of girls could wither the most screaming boner.

By the end of freshman year I could pull those same khakis on and off without ever even unbuttoning them. I still wasn’t thin thin, wouldn’t lose another ten pounds until after college, but college standards were less rigid than New York ones. Sometime in March, a teasingly warm day, I was walking to class in a trashy tank top. The sun was like a hot hand christening my head as I passed Matt Cody, an ice hockey player who’d humped Nell’s thigh so hard his penis had left a red welt on her skin that clung on, ripening in shades of purple and blue and green, for nearly a week. He stopped dead in his tracks, marveled at the way the light exploded in my hair and eyes, and actually gasped, “Wow.”

But I had to be careful. College was my first go at reinvention, and I couldn’t compromise it by getting a reputation again. Nell told me I was the sluttiest tease she ever met; I made out a lot, got topless a lot, but that was as far as I’d go unless the guy was my boyfriend. And I even learned how to make that happen thanks to Nell and what she called her Hemingway theory. Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage. When you like a guy, Nell reasoned, you need to immediately find another guy, the guy you always catch staring at you in Modern American Classics maybe, the one with too much gel in his hair, bad jeans. Smile at him finally, let him ask you out, drink weak whiskey in his dorm room while he waxes poetic about Dave Eggers, Phoenix whining in the background. Dodge his kiss or don’t, and keep doing it until the guy you really like gets a whiff of him—that other guy sniffing around you. He’ll smell it on you, his pupils dilating like a shark inhaling a tendril of blood in the water.

After I graduated, I came across Luke again, at another party in the city. The timing couldn’t have been more serendipitous because I had a boyfriend, and, Christ, that asshole’s scent could saturate a football stadium. He was this immensely polarizing descendant of a Mayflower family, whom I kept around because he was the only guy who wasn’t afraid to do to me what I asked him to do to me in bed. Slap me across the face? “Just let me know if this isn’t hard enough,” he’d whispered, before winding up and backhanding me so hard the nerves in my skull crackled neon and the dark blurred and twisted, a black blanket wringing above my eyes, over and over, until I came with a grotesque groan. Luke would have been appalled if I ever asked him to do something like that to me, but I was willing to trade that pulsating need to be savaged, whether a result of nature or one of nurture I could never figure out, for a last name like his, one I’d kill to put a Mrs. in front of. When I finally broke up with my boyfriend “for” Luke, the sudden freedom allotted us—to go out to dinner together and go home together like a real couple—was intoxicating. Carried us fast and far like a riptide, and we moved in together after a year. Luke knows I went to Wesleyan, obviously. Always comments on how funny it is that we never crossed paths all those times he came to visit.

“This is the Emile, in rose water.” The salesgirl pulled the dress off the hanger and swung it around in front of her body, holding up the skirt and pinching the material between her thumb and index finger. “You can see it has a little bit of a sheen.”

I glanced at Nell. Nell, still “a head-turner” (Mom’s word) even after all these years. She’ll never need to get married to feel good about herself, the way the rest of us have to. She used to work in finance, was one of two girls on the floor, the guys swiveling in their seats to catch a glimpse of Banker Barbie as she strode past. At the Christmas party two years ago, one of her meathead co-workers—married, with children, of course—picked her up, threw her over his shoulder so that her dress flipped up and exposed her elegant ass, then ran around the room making monkey noises while everyone whooped and hollered.

“Why monkey noises?” I’d asked.

“I guess that was his impression of Tarzan?” Nell’s shoulders poked up into her ears. “He wasn’t the smartest.”

She sued the company for an undisclosed sum, and now she sleeps until 9:00 every morning, follows up a spin class with yoga, and snatches the brunch bill off the table before any of us can get to it.

One side of Nell’s mouth pinched. “I’m going to look naked in that color.”

“We’ll have spray tans,” Moni reminded her. The light streaming in from the window pointed at a monstrous pimple on her cheek, smothered in too-pink concealer. She was really stressed over this whole me-getting-married-before-her thing.

“Midnight is a very flattering shade.” A Cartier Love bracelet slid loose from the salesgirl’s sleeve as she returned the rose water to the rack and presented its navy cousin with a flourish. She was a natural blonde, probably made blonder by a mere one or two trips to Marie Robinson a year.

“Do people ever mix colors?” I asked.

“All the time.” She went in for the clincher. “Georgina Bloomberg was in here the other week for a friend, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.” She pulled a third option, a hideous shade of eggplant, and added, “It can be very chic when done right. How many bridesmaids are you having again?”

There were seven. All from Wesleyan and all of them living in New York but the two who went the DC route. Nine groomsmen for Luke, all of them Hamilton grads with the exception of his older brother, Garret, who graduated magna cum laude from Duke. All of them in the city too. I once commented to Luke how sad it was that we both came here so thoroughly insulated with friends that we never really got to experience New York. All the weirdos roaming here, all the wild, mythical nights waiting for us, we didn’t need them, so we never sought them out. Luke told me it’s amazing how I always find a way to turn a positive into a negative.

Nell and Moni went into the back room to show me just how chic rose water and midnight can look together, and I dug around in my purse for my phone. I held it out in front of me at chin height while I scrolled through my Twitter and Instagram feeds. Our beauty director had recently filmed a segment for the Today show to warn viewers about the real dangers of smart phone addiction: Breakouts in the Cell Phone Zone, and Early Onset Turkey Neck, from all that looking down to see who had just gotten her butt kicked and her soul cleansed @SoulCycle.

Spencer had followed me on Instagram after we met. I didn’t recognize any of the people in the filtered haze of her pictures, but I did notice a comment, asking if she would be attending the Friends of the Five event, taking place in a sad pub located next to a Starbucks in Villanova, PA. A part of me fantasized about what it would be like to go: to show up in simple cashmere, that emerald cockroach attached to my finger, Luke at my side, emanating so much unabashed confidence that through some sort of osmosis, I’d bear it too. The place I had worked so hard to fit into that was now beneath me. All those losers who never left the Main Line, who lived in apartments that probably had carpeting. God. There would be a whisper through the crowd, half of them outraged, half of them impressed, their “Did you see who is here? She’s got balls” meaning a different thing to each of them. Maybe there would be the guy who still believed I owed him a fuck, after all these years. The event was months away. If I hit my goal weight by then, maybe.

I switched from Instagram to e-mail right as Nell glided out of the dressing room, rose water draped over her picnic bench of a body, the exposed back revealing nothing but skin and spine.

“Wow,” Love Bracelet breathed, and it wasn’t just to get the sale.

Nell pressed her stubby hands against her chest, flat as the thin-crust pizzas we used to order for breakfast in college. I had to look away. Nell chews on her appendages for sport, and the jagged edges of her fingertips, the raw and bloodied flaps of skin, they remind me too much of how easily the seams of the body fall apart. “If a rapist breaks into your apartment,” I’d once hypothesized in the middle of a Law & Order episode, “how are you going to claw his eyes out with those nubs?”

“I guess I should get a gun then.” Halfway through that statement Nell’s blue eyes had lit up with alarm. Too late, neurons had lit a match to the thought and fired the sentence out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Sorry,” she’d added, clumsily.

“Don’t be.” I’d pointed the controller at the TV and turned up the volume. “Sarcasm doesn’t have to die for the Five.”

“Ani, I look like I’m wearing a flesh dress.” It may have been spoken like a complaint, but Nell was admiring the smooth expanse of her back in the mirror, the way the color blended seamlessly into the skin just above her ass worth an undisclosed sum, so that you couldn’t tell where the dress ended and Nell began.

“Are you really going to make me stand next to her?” Moni whined, sweeping open the curtain to the dressing room. Moni will never be done trying to make Nell her best friend. She just doesn’t get it. Nell doesn’t want her ass kissed. She doesn’t need it.

“That’s a great color on you, Moni,” I said slyly, when Nell pretended not to hear her. I’ll never be done with rubbing it in Moni’s pouty little face that Nell chose me, the guido, over her, the Darien princess.

Moni fussed, “I can’t wear a bra though.” Love Bracelet scurried over to Moni—saggy boobs would not cost a sale, not on her watch!—and began rearranging the jersey strands of the dress. “It’s convertible, see? Flattering for all body types.” She ultimately tied what looked like a sling for a uniboob. Moni hoisted the sides of the dress in the mirror, her breasts rippling beneath the fabric like an underwater bomb had gone off, thousands of feet below.

“You think the other girls will look good in this?” Moni pressed. The rest of the group couldn’t make the appointment today, graciously leaving the decision in the hands of Moni and Nell. Luke had three single groomsmen—Garret, who wore polarized Ray-Bans and put his hand on your back when he spoke to you, was one of them. No one would dare jeopardize her place in the wedding party, her shot at Garret as her escort, by being combative about the dresses.

“I love it,” Nell announced. It was all she had to say, and halfheartedly at that.