Chapter 4
True to Indira’s prediction (er, witchcraft?), the weather was perfect.
The guests moved outside to take their seats.
Music began to play. Bobby and I had planned our entrance so that we’d approach from separate sides of the house, which meant that, for the first time in forever (at least, according to my increasingly blurry memory), I was alone. On my wedding day.
The whole day, I’d been fine. For weeks and months, as we’d been planning this, I’d been totally normal. (At least, as normal as I ever got.)
And now, alone in the den, I went from pacing, to collapsing into my favorite chair, to jumping up to pace again.
My legs felt like they had the structural integrity of Indira’s sponge cake.
My stomach alternated between clenching until it felt like I needed to rush to the bathroom, and then—presumably in a fit of fancy—turning into this billowing, fluttering mass that rose up into my lungs and made it hard to breathe.
There were people out there.
There were so. many. people.
Waiting for me.
And they’d be watching me.
And what if I screwed up?
There were a thousand different ways I could absolutely botch things.
What if I did it wrong? (Whatever it was.) What if I forgot what I was supposed to say?
Or I said the wrong thing? What if I dropped the ring?
What if this was all a trap, and I said I do, and then Bobby ripped off his mask and was actually Hugo?
(Not likely, I know, but I pride myself on being anxious about even the most exotic possibilities.) We were getting married outside.
What if a bee flew right at me when I was trying to say my vows?
Or I got struck by lightning? Or I fell off the cliff?
(The beauty of a brain like mine is that literally anything is possible.)
My stomach clenched again, and another possibility occurred to me (I’d definitely take falling off a cliff over anything, uh, bathroom related), when I heard a familiar voice say a word that you can only put on a wedding cake if you’re getting hitched in Vegas.
I pushed out into the hall.
Keme was kneeling in the hall, his head buried in a Victorian commode (it’s not what you think, and I hate calling it that).
He said a few more of those words—let me tell you, you would definitely have to pay extra to have somebody put it all in those neat frosted letters—and dragged himself out of the commode.
He slapped the lid and half-shouted, “Where the fudge are you?”
(Er.)
“Everything okay?” I asked.
I expected a glare (probably set to level seven: immolation.) Instead, Keme stiffened and—the movement quick and automatic—ran a hand across his eyes. When he finally did look at me, they were still wet, although it looked like he was trying to cover up that fact by being annoyed with, well, me.
“You need to go outside,” he said, getting to his feet. “It’s almost time.”
“We’ve got a few minutes.”
Getting to his feet, he said, “You’re going to look like an idiot when Bobby walks out there without you.”
I watched him, but after that first look, he kept his gaze away from mine. He closed the commode. He scanned the floor. He moved over to an extremely uncomfortable chair and started digging around under the cushion.
“Keme—”
“How stupid are you?” he said. “Go!”
“Um, no?”
“Dash!” He gave up on the chair and moved a few feet farther down the hall to inspect a chest of drawers. “Can you please just—” He let out a frustrated sound that verged on tears. “You’re going to ruin everything.”
“You know what?” I said. “It’s my wedding day.
Well, mine and Bobby’s. So, as long as we’re happy, it can’t be ruined.
And they can’t start without me because I’m literally essential to this whole operation, which might be the only time in my life that I can say that.
So if I want to spend a few minutes checking on you, I can. What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. But then he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
I don’t know why it took me so long. (Probably because I’d recently been considering the odds of tripping as I walked down the aisle and somehow ending up with my face planted in Bliss Wilson’s ample, uh, decolletage.) “Oh,” I said. “Oh, Keme. Hey. It’s okay. We’ll find them.”
Keme shook his head. His thin shoulders quivered.
“It’s okay,” I said again. He flinched when I touched his arm. “It’s going to be fine. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal!” He took a wet breath. “I had them in my pocket. And then Millie wanted to see them, so I showed her, but I know she gave them back, and then we came in here, and—” He looked like he was fighting to hold back the words, but then he blurted—voice thick—“Please don’t tell Bobby.”
I rubbed his arm. “It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t say anything to Bobby.”
For some reason, this turned out not to be the right thing to say, because Keme dropped his hands and goggled at me like I was the biggest idiot he’d ever met. (Which might be true, honestly.) “You have to tell him! How are you going to get married without the rings?”
“I’ll figure something out,” I said. “But let’s not panic yet. Let’s look around and see if we can find them—”
“But you have to go out there!”
As though the universe had been waiting for this moment, the front door opened, and my dad called, “Dash? Kiddo? That’s your cue.”
The light in Keme’s eyes died.
“Just a minute.” Sometimes the muse is gracious. Sometimes the muse grants you exactly the right words. Sometimes, you can’t say or write or do the wrong thing. I choose to believe that’s why I then shouted, “It’s my tummy.”
Keme actually groaned and tried to disappear inside his blazer.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s work backward. Have you checked your pockets?”
Filled with self-recrimination or not, Keme had a surprisingly savage glare in answer to that. But in a particularly adolescent display of how-stupid-are-you, he shoved his hands in his pockets and said, “Yeah, I checked my pockets. They were right here, and now they’re—”
But he stopped.
And if you’ve never seen a teenage male brimming with testosterone-fueled self-righteousness suddenly have what I like to call A Moment, let me tell you: the taste is sweet.
His hands were shaking as he pulled out two rings.
“But I—” He stopped. “They were in the other—” And then, with something like despair, “But I checked!”
“It happens to me all the time—I put something in a different pocket and then forget. I’ve found so many Jolly Ranchers that way.”
Keme’s face suggested this was not as inspiring as I’d hoped. But then he crashed into me, crushing me in a hug. He held on for a good ten seconds—long enough to pulverize my ribs—and then he tried to knee me in the, um, apricots, and ran toward the door with a whoop of triumph.