Chapter 3
“Two hundred bucks.” The man—he was still a boy, really—was tall but slouched, with long, chestnut-colored hair swept back, a fleshy face, and full lips.
He looked like the kind of guy who’d spent age fourteen to eighteen behind a clarinet and then discovered, post-high school, the magic of casual sex. “Or I’m packing up and going home.”
People streamed around us, passing through Hemlock House in a flurry of last-minute preparations.
Sergey and LaLeesha were reattaching streamers that had fallen overnight.
Keme was skulking along the hall and doing his best impression of a teenage boy who didn’t want to be forced to do any additional work.
Mrs. Archer was making final adjustments to one of the flower arrangements.
It was a lot. Especially if you happened to be a perfectly healthy, perfectly normal young man who followed the Emily Dickinson guide for etiquette: don’t talk to anybody all year, and then throw one party.
(Also, if you forget, or if you’re tired, you can cancel the party, or you can count the time you and Keme bought all that clearance candy from the Keel Haul.) So far, I’d already rescued my mom from one of the house’s trick mirrors (it pivoted to reveal a secret door, but she’d gotten her dress caught in it, so she kept going around and around like something out of Scooby Doo), stopped my dad before he and Princess McAdams (not a real princess) turned the hedge maze into the world’s most terrifying shooting gallery, rescued Fox from their own cravat (a real life-or-death situation, as it turned out), and managed what was turning out to be a screamingly bad combination of wedding-day jitters and my normal anxiety.
The feral amateur sleuth in me was about to come out, and I was starting to think I needed to bite someone.
Enter the DJ.
If I’d known his name at some point, it was gone. It probably flew out of my head when he started trying to extort me.
“We already paid you,” I said as calmly as I could.
“And now it’s two hundred bucks extra.” The DJ shrugged. “Look, man, it’s all about supply and demand—”
I made a sound that probably would have been awesome if it had been in a video game; in real life, though, it just hurt my throat. “Stay here,” I said.
My first thought was to tell the DJ to leave.
We didn’t need him. We didn’t need music.
Although that was patently untrue, since Bobby loved music, and the thing he’d been most excited about when we’d been planning the wedding had been finding a DJ, and he’d spent hours researching and talking to friends, and then this DJ (who was, for some reason, The Best) hadn’t been available, but then he had a sudden opening—well, it had been a roller coaster of emotion for Bobby.
(I mean, as far as emotions went for Bobby.
Remember, this is the same guy who watched me beat The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and didn’t even cry!) And now this overgrown clarinetist was going to ruin everything!
(A part of me really wanted to call him an overgrown clarinetist to someone who could, you know, actually hear me.)
I was so caught up in this extremely unhelpful chain of thoughts that I might have kept walking if a familiar voice hadn’t broken through the haze.
“—and at my cousin Olivia’s wedding, her daughter’s piano teacher broke her foot, and then SHE COULDN’T DANCE WITH HER DAUGHTER’S PIANO TEACHER!”
In the aftermath of that, Keme said, “Why did she want to dance with her daughter’s piano teacher at her own wedding?”
They looked adorable. I mean, adorable. Millie wore a blue dress with lace sleeves, and it left a lot of toned leg visible; Keme had literally tripped over his own feet when he’d seen her.
Keme was dressed in matching blue trousers, a white button-up, and a new blazer (purchased for him by Indira for the occasion) that made him look like such a little man.
(I made the mistake of telling him this too many times, and if you’ve never had to have your dad unhook your underwear from a banister as an adult, let me tell you, it is not a choice experience.)
“I don’t know,” Millie said to Keme’s question. “And then at my cousin Romy’s wedding, her dad took off his shirt and climbed up on one of the pews, and then he FELL off one of the pews, and he kept screaming, ‘My back! My back!’ And then I got him an ice pack.”
“What’s wrong with your face?” Keme asked me.
“The DJ—”
“Just kidding,” Keme said. “Your face always looks like that.”
“Very funny. The DJ—”
“And then at my cousin Quinn’s wedding,” Millie said, “her dad SHOT HIMSELF.”
Keme and I traded a look.
“Like, killed himself?” Keme asked. “At the wedding?”
“Oh no. Shot himself in the foot. Because he was DANCING!” Millie beamed at me. “Hi, Dash, we’re trying to decide if I’m a wedding jinx or not. I hope I’m not because I don’t want to jinx your wedding.”
“I don’t care either way,” Keme said.
“What is wrong with you?” I snapped. And then, before he could answer, I explained what was going on with the DJ. I finished with “And now that overgrown clarinetist is going to ruin the wedding.”
“Did you hear him wind up?” Keme said. “He was waiting for a chance to say ‘overgrown clarinetist.’”
“What size should a regular clarinetist be?” Millie asked.
I gaped. And then I finally said, “Why do I talk to you two? Never mind. Where’s Indira? Because I am not asking my parents for two hundred bucks.”
Keme snorted. Then he locked eyes with Millie.
Millie beamed at me. “Don’t worry, Dash. I’ll fix it.”
“Uh, no, that’s not necessary—”
But she was already making her way down the hall, checking her hair as she passed a tarnished old mirror, adjusting one sleeve, and then, as we watched, fiddling with the waistband of her dress. The hem suddenly shot up about six inches.
And let me tell you: that girl didn’t have six inches to spare.
The best word for the sound that fell out of my mouth was “Uhhhhhhh.”
“OH MY GOD! HI, ROBBY!”
The DJ—shellshocked, but somehow still on his feet—said something (probably that his name wasn’t Robby).
Millie laughed and said something I couldn’t hear (a first), and then Robby laughed.
And then Millie put her hand on his arm, steadying herself as she fixed her shoe, and Robby got an eyeful of that, and then Millie was done fixing her shoe, but her hand stayed on Robby’s arm, and Robby’s face was turning pink, and he was looking at Millie the way an unsavory acquaintance of mine (Ozzy, who had been the absolute grossest in middle school) had looked at the page of the Kmart shopping circular he kept in his backpack.
(It was the bra page, in case you couldn’t figure that out.)
“So,” I said tentatively. “Are you, like, going to fight him?”
The look on Keme’s face suggested that, at least in some ways, he was infinitely more mature than I was. Which was reinforced by his despairing mutter: “Dude, grow up.”
Millie waltzed back to us, a smile glowing on her face. “All set! Dash, did I ever tell you about the wedding where my Aunt Sally fell down the stairs, and then she had to explain to everyone why she forgot to wear her bloomers?”