Chapter 5 #2
They look up from the page and take in their vast suite.
It’s silly that a little extra space can be enough to make a person feel so alone.
Last night, before falling asleep on the couch, Puck had a pang of homesickness for their condo back in Decatur.
Homewreckers pays enough money for them to afford the down payment on a house by now—they even looked at a place in East Atlanta a couple years ago—but what would Puck do with all that square footage?
Buy more plants that die within a month?
There’s no chance of anyone else moving into their imaginary house anytime soon.
The strap Puck packed for this wedding is in high demand back home, but partnership doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Queer women tend to be so principled that after they find out how Puck earns their living, they decide sleeping with a “hot masc,” as they are often labeled, is no longer worth the moral compromise.
The last girl Puck dated worked for a nonprofit that was fighting a “Don’t Say Gay” bill in the Georgia state legislature.
One night, over drinks at Leon’s, the two compared how they had spent their days: Samantha had gone all around Fulton County collecting testimony from queer youth to present at the Gold Dome; Puck had spent theirs convincing a Homewreckers hunk to oil his abs before a volleyball game.
Samantha called it quits over text the next day.
“Different priorities” was the way she phrased it, which was fair, because Puck saw the notification right after planting a gay porn magazine under a contestant’s pillow so that his girlfriend would find it later.
As for the handful of gay women with more questionable politics?
Well, they weren’t into all of Puck’s “gender stuff,” as a particularly terrible date once put it.
Back when they still used both “she” and “they” pronouns, Puck made the mistake of giving one hot girl a pass, only for her to never alternate between them.
Now that “she” is completely off the table, it’s much easier to pick out the rotten apples.
But Puck feels certain they’ll end up alone, just like Lena.
The only difference is Puck is resigned to a life of perpetual singledom whereas Lena still shares nuggets from Brené Brown about “cultivating love” or whatever.
Even after a decade with nothing to show for it, she still only has eyes for a guy Puck once saw pour used cereal milk back into the jug because he “liked the flavor.”
Lena’s single-mindedness is exactly why she’ll make a good substitute PA this week.
Puck looks down at the notepad, thinking about how she can help with each component of the plan.
Lena is definitely an expert at cornering Damon.
And if she can pull Damon away from Mia, that creates space for Mia and Zander to cozy up next to each other.
This way, Puck can have plausible deniability for the entire plot.
Besides, this could even be productive for the poor girl: Maybe Lena needs to spend some more time with Damon as a full-on adult to realize that her crush on him ought to be put to bed once and for all.
They wish they could level with Lena and enlist her to help with this scheme directly.
It’d be so much easier to do this with at least one ally.
No, she has to remain an unwitting accomplice, and she has too many moral scruples to get involved anyway.
If this is going to work in a way that leaves the Emory crew with any hope of remaining friends afterward, they all need to feel like they’ve arrived at their own conclusions.
If anyone were to find out about Puck’s involvement, they’d be able to use their outrage as an excuse to return to their comfortable delusions. But it won’t come to that.
“Use,” Puck writes in front of the blotchy “L” at the bottom of the note as a reminder, and even they feel the slightest twinge of guilt at that. But they nearly leap out of their chair when they feel a tap on their shoulder, whip around, and find the actual flesh-and-blood Lena towering over them.
“Lena, Jesus!” Puck shouts, ripping the AirPods out of their ears with one hand and flipping the notepad over on the desk with the other. They’re trying to figure out how she got into their room when they notice that in their haste to enter, the door fell against the security latch.
Lena gestures at her own ears. “So sorry, Puck, I tried to get your attention but …”
“No, no, it’s great to see you,” Puck interrupts, remembering to breathe.
It’s only after looking her up and down that Puck notices how different their friend is.
This is Lena, but it’s also not Lena. It’s not that Puck hasn’t always considered her beautiful.
Back in college, they liked to tell her, somewhat problematically, that she’d “clean up if she were gay.” The lesbians at that campus affinity group were always devastated to learn Lena didn’t play for their team.
She wore weird stretchy dresses with ironed-on prints of horseshoes and lassos, and graphic T-shirts with wolves howling into phosphorescent sunsets.
Her wavy hair spilled out everywhere, fraying into a thousand split ends well past her shoulders.
Her glasses were thicker than car windows.
If she had gone to Sarah Lawrence, she would have been among the most coveted women on campus, but she was at Emory, where beauty norms were decidedly more confining.
And now? The Lena standing in front of Puck is jaw-dropping, by conventional standards.
She hasn’t had any plastic surgery done that they can tell.
What she has done though, is gotten Lasik, apparently, because the glasses are gone.
An artfully shaggy chin-length bob now frames her cherubic face.
She’s finally dressing for her height, with a long collared dress cinched with a tie around her waist, but she hasn’t entirely given up on the whimsy, either, judging from the pin of a hippopotamus eating an ice cream cone on her left lapel.
It’s a lot of little changes that add up to an almost cinematic, Princess Diaries–style transformation.
Puck stands up to take it all in.
“You, um, got a haircut?” They don’t mean to make it a question, but the inflection happens of its own accord. They can’t believe what they’re seeing.
“Yup,” Lena says, confirming the obvious as she hugs Puck, her chin clearing the top of their buzzed head. “I finally did the big chop for Locks of Love.”
Lena’s heart was always so inconveniently large.
Puck secretly hated walking to class with her at Emory because she was physically incapable of ignoring all the petitioners collecting signatures for various causes.
Somehow, Lena had infinite patience to listen to organizers proselytize about the climate crisis, gun violence, and reproductive rights, even though she knew their statistics and talking points better than they did.
Meanwhile, Puck just wanted to get to Comp 101 so they could flirt with the hot goth girl in the back row.
“Did you donate your corneas to charity, too?” Puck asks.
Lena looks puzzled for a moment before the joke clicks: “Oh! The glasses. I mean, I know you’re being silly, but I did give all my old pairs to a nonprofit.”
“Of course you did,” Puck says, holding an arm out toward the center of the room. “Come, sit. My suite is your suite.”
Lena can act as altruistic as she wants, but Puck is certain that the wedding is the primary motivator for her makeover.
No way is she going to watch Damon get married without one last major bid for his attention.
Taking a laser to your eyeballs isn’t all that extreme in the grand scheme of desperate romantic behaviors.
“How was your drive?” Lena asks, pausing to choose between a restored velvet couch and the hulking leather armchair in the corner of the sitting area.
“It was quick,” Puck says, making Lena’s choice for her by taking the armchair. “How about yours?”
Lena sits off to one side of the couch, too humble, it seems, to take up space in the center. Puck has never found the same easy banter with Lena that they did with their other Emory friends. Small talk with someone so aggressively agreeable can feel like waiting for a progress bar to fill up.
“The drive was good!” Lena chirps. “Mia’s maid of honor gave me a ride from Raleigh. Robyn. She’s so sweet.”
Somehow, everyone besides Puck and Zander has ended up in the Research Triangle.
The McLeod family has an office there, where Damon accepted some nepotistic C-suite position after college.
His first-ever job on LinkedIn was being the vice president of some made-up-sounding department.
Lena followed him like a lost puppy, landing an internship at a local conservation network that eventually became a full-time job with a focus on preserving bird habitats.
She doesn’t believe in driving anymore, hence her glorified hitchhiking to the Athenian. And now, of course, Mia’s there too.
But wait, maid of honor? Puck knows it’s tradition to have one, and yet Mia hasn’t ever mentioned this “Robyn” person.
Who is she and where did she come from? As much as they would have been uncomfortable with the designation, Puck wonders why they weren’t asked to be the “person of honor.” Mia’s been with Damon for a year and she’s already replacing her oldest friends?
Another warning sign—and more proof that Puck’s plan is essential.
“So,” Puck asks, “who from Emory have you seen so far?” What they really want to know is whether Damon has seen Lena yet.
“Mia, obviously. And I ran into Zander on the way here, but I didn’t catch Damon yesterday. I think he was in Asheville.”
Interesting. Puck keeps the small talk going for a minute.
Lena shares updates about a forest she’s trying to save from development because it’s a critical habitat for the “red-cockaded woodpecker,” and Puck recounts a few recent Homewreckers feats to barely disguised looks of disapproval.
Lena would fit right in with Puck’s judgmental ex.
But even as they chat, Puck keeps thinking about the last line on the upside-down notepad: “Use L.”
When they wrote it, they meant to use Lena as a distraction, a persistent gadfly who could drive Damon away from Mia long enough for Puck to pull off their machinations.
But now, seeing Lena, and knowing just how superficial men can be, the field of possibilities has expanded considerably: They can also use Lena as a weapon.
Damon may not have noticed her back at college, but he certainly will now.