Chapter 3
Eventually, though, the dense tree canopy opens up to a breathtaking view of the resort, perched on a manicured hill at the end of a paved driveway lined with stately elms. Those trees typically don’t grow at this elevation, but the Athenian can afford the upkeep.
This place occupied an almost mythical status among Puck’s grade-school friends in Johnson City.
Was the Athenian in Tennessee or North Carolina?
Both. The property was just that big. Had anyone actually ever been there?
No, but someone’s friend’s rich parents once stayed there for their tenth wedding anniversary, supposedly.
Legend was the hotel had everything: an entire fleet of shoeshiners, manicurists, barbers, chefs, sommeliers, and golf caddies who would tend to your every need the moment you set foot on the lobby’s polished marble floor.
In other words, the Athenian is exactly the kind of place that only Damon McLeod’s family can afford to rent out for a week, and exactly the kind of place Mia would have scoffed at once.
Mia and Damon. Even thinking about those two names together makes Puck squirm in the driver’s seat.
It’s a pairing as wrong as peanut butter and anchovies, which is why it’s so frustrating that everyone seems to be letting this happen.
If no one objects at the altar, Puck will be tempted to do it themself.
Few people know the burden of being right about everything quite like they do.
As early as high school, Puck realized that gender was the world’s biggest scam, invented to sell razors to girls at one and a half times the cost. Love was another conspiracy.
At Emory, they could count the number of lesbian undergrads—as they saw themself at the time—on two hands.
Everyone was already each other’s exes by winter break.
Puck mostly spent college watching over Mia’s love life instead, which is how they know it has definitely taken a wrong turn for her to be marrying Damon.
After gently easing their beat-up Subaru over a completely unnecessary speed bump, Puck pulls up beneath a white-columned portico to the grand entrance of the Athenian.
A valet in a crimson uniform jogs performatively toward the driver’s-side door.
Puck doesn’t relish handing over the keys to an ancient Subaru Forester that has had its Check Engine light on for nearly a year, but they do it anyway, asking the valet to “take good care of her” as a joke.
Instead, the obsequious valet treats the request solemnly, promising “she won’t get a scratch,” which makes Puck regret saying anything.
A more welcome sight is Mia. She’s standing at the top of the carpeted stairs in an A-line denim dress that would hang like a burlap sack on anyone else. Her wavy blond hair looks freshly blown out, and it probably is.
When Mia was assigned to be Puck’s roommate during their first semester at Emory, they stereotyped her on sight as a homophobic Southern belle—the kind of woman who would go to a bachelorette party at Lips but say that gay marriage “just isn’t right.
” But then she turned out to be one the most accepting straight girls at Emory, even holding Puck’s hand when they came out as lesbian to their parents over the phone sophomore year.
Never has an ally looked more like a Fox News anchor.
Nothing about her support felt put-on; she didn’t always know the right words, but it mattered more that her heart was in the right place, especially when all the other pretty blond girls on campus could be such menaces.
“Puck! You’re here!”
Mia rushes down the stairs as Puck drops their backpack on the ground and opens their arms wide for a hug.
Their increasingly intense shooting schedule has kept them from seeing their old roomie in the flesh since …
when? Three years ago at her and Zander’s apartment in New York?
So much has changed: Her relationship with Zander went south as his substance use got worse, but two years later, she had her chance encounter with Damon, followed by her baffling decision to move to Raleigh to be with him.
Everyone has been trying to make sense of the relationship since, especially Zander, who considered Damon one of his closest friends.
Puck’s connection to Mia has suffered, too.
How do you acknowledge when a best friendship has become merely a good one?
Their old stream of voice memos, astrology memes, and Instagram messages slowed down to a trickle after she got together with Damon.
Puck knew that Mia knew that they disapproved, and that tension was laced through every message without needing to be openly stated.
They try not to let any of that show as they squeeze Mia back. “I didn’t think this place was actually real,” Puck says.
Mia looks around at the landscape surrounding the resort, layer upon layer of gentle green domes, stretching forever in every direction.
“Isn’t it dreamy?” she asks, her sweet perfume only adding to the effect.
It’s not enough for her to be gorgeous; she has to smell like rosemary and fresh flowers, too.
“Your perfume is incredible,” Puck says as the hug ends.
“Oh, it’s called Pansy. Do you want some? It’s from Lush. I have more!”
“No, I prefer more abstract aromas like Grandpa’s Sweater or Monopoly Money.”
Mia’s laughter could power a major metropolis, and the McLeods are probably looking into that possibility.
Damon’s family made their fortune in “food processing,” which always struck Puck as a dystopian juxtaposition of words.
As far as they understood it, somebody further up in his family tree had figured out a new way to debone a chicken and, as a result, Damon had never had to work a day in his life.
Not that he’d acted rich back at Emory; he often bummed meal swipes off Puck before retreating to his frat house with bowls full of pasta to fuel all-night Super Smash Bros. sessions.
The Damon that Puck knew in college barely noticed women, and Mia had never paid much attention to him either, not even after graduation when his big brother made him trade his Wiimotes for barbells.
But now Mia’s wearing a diamond the size of a hubcap on her finger.
Puck spots the glimmer of it as Mia gestures down at their backpack.
“Is that all you packed?” she asks, before answering her own question. “Of course that’s all you packed.”
Puck let Mia use half their closet space back in college to store her voluminous collection of thrifted shoes because they didn’t need much room of their own.
“Who’s here so far?” they ask as they walk with Mia up the stairs to the entryway.
They don’t want Mia to give them the full guest list; they only want to know about the five members of the old Emory crew.
Mia and Damon made two. Zander, whom Mia still invited despite everything, will have to third-wheel his ex’s wedding.
And Lena, poor lovesick Lena who always had a hopeless crush on Damon that no one took seriously, rounded out the group.
“Lena got in last night,” Mia says, stopping to wave both hands in front of a finicky automatic door that has been awkwardly retrofitted into the Vanderbilt-era architecture.
“You just missed Damon,” she continues. “He left to go pick up his grandparents from Asheville, but he’ll be back late tonight. ”
There’s a telling pause, and Puck feels the need to prompt her.
“And Zander?” they ask.
Mia answers quickly, and as matter-of-factly as possible. “Early tomorrow morning. Redeye.” Just as hastily, she adds, “Come on, let me take you up to the suites.”
Puck had hoped the subject would be less sore on the verge of Mia marrying someone else, but apparently not.
For a few seconds of silence, Mia leads Puck through the opulent lobby of the Athenian, past a bubbling fountain and a veritable army of bellhops.
Perhaps Puck shouldn’t have broached the topic immediately, but they’re all going to have to confront it soon enough.
Mia dated Zander for two years in college and six afterward; she’s only been with Damon for one.
Little about Mia’s tortured relationship with Zander suggested it was going to last forever, especially with him drinking as much as he did.
They had zero trouble in the bedroom—quite the opposite, as Puck sometimes saw too closely in the dorm—but make-up sex was never going to be a foundation for an actual adult life.
Still, rebounding with Damon and committing this hard to the bit is concerning. Puck can’t believe Mia is marrying the guy who only ever had eyes for Princess Peach right in front of the ex-boyfriend who used to give her screaming orgasms that could be heard all the way from Savannah.
The engagement has made everything awkward in overlapping and overwhelming ways: Damon and Zander’s friendship is in a tense period of détente that Puck can’t parse.
Lena seems gutted that Damon is leaving bachelorhood behind for the only other girl in their old friend group.
And Mia has been worryingly uncommunicative about all of it, leaving Puck caught in the middle, navigating multiple smaller text chains while the main group chat stays quiet.
It was Mia’s right to break up with Zander.
Puck never expected them to be in rocking chairs together in their eighties.
But there were so many other rich men in the world she could’ve landed besides a McLeod—and that’s all that Damon, once a harmless nerd, seems to have become these days.
No, for some reason she made the only choice that could tear the entire crew apart.
As they step into a waiting elevator, Puck decides the only way out of the conspicuous silence is to run straight through it. “Mia, are you sure you’re OK with Zander being a groomsman?”