Chapter 6
Puck feels like a disgraced detective who had to hand in their gun and badge.
On Homewreckers, they can ask for any information they need and some harried lowling will procure it.
Here, they have to do their own investigating.
After their chat with Lena, they took some time to mull over the plan a bit more before heading downstairs for a chat with the Athenian concierge.
The resort, it turns out, has a nine-wicket croquet course.
What’s more, Puck’s learned that the hotel only has six balls to share across a total of twelve people in the wedding party, which likely means they will need to split into six teams of two.
As the concierge explained the rules of the game, Puck was already plotting: If there was anyone in the group who could take charge of assigning teams without it seeming out of character, it’d be a producer—and now it’s time to put that theory to the test.
On the expansive back lawn of the Athenian, the bridesmaids and groomsmen are fiddling with their mallets as they mill around a placard detailing the rules of backyard croquet.
They’re reading certain lines aloud, debating their meaning over the distant din of the other wedding guests throwing cornhole bags and playing Jenga with enormous blocks.
“What does it mean to ‘take a mallet-head’?”
“I think it means you can move the ball one mallet away if you hit somebody?”
“Like, the length of the whole thing?”
“No, just the bottom part, I think.”
“Are we playing the ‘poison’ variant? Or are we doing ‘cutthroat’?”
They’re almost making it too easy for Puck, who has so far been observing everyone’s interactions from the sidelines with interest. After he arrived a minute ago, Zander gave Mia a hug hello, but with Damon watching, it had to be cursory and completely drained of affection.
He then extended his hand out to Damon for a handshake, only for Damon to pull him in for one of those bro embraces that ends with a lot of vigorous back patting.
It reads as overkill, like Damon’s trying to make up for the easily apparent awkwardness between them.
Lena, meanwhile, has been busy lacing up her shoes, which look as new as her eyeballs.
Damon hasn’t seen her yet—at least not that Puck has noticed.
The rest of the wedding party seems confused by the croquet equipment.
Some are examining the colored balls as though they’re looking for billiard numbers. No one is taking charge.
Perfect.
“OK, everybody, listen up!” Puck announces, loudly clapping their hands once, using their set voice to cut through the chatter. “Let’s make this easy: We’ll split up into six teams of two. Everybody will take turns hitting their team’s ball through the little gates—”
“Wickets,” a brunette in a blue workout set corrects them as she joins the group.
“Yup, the wickets. And the first team to get their ball through the last wicket and then hit this little pole—”
“The starting stake,” says the newcomer, again, infuriatingly.
“Thank you,” Puck says, trying to disguise their annoyance. “Yes, the starting stake. If you hit the stake after getting your ball through the last wicket, your team wins. Don’t worry about all the other rules on the sign. They’re too complicated for us to bother with them.”
“Do you play a lot of croquet or something?” the interrupter asks them when they’re finished, a hint of mockery in her voice.
Who is this girl? And where did she acquire all of her nine-wicket know-how?
Puck wasn’t expecting to be hung out to dry in front of the group like this.
“I played all the time as a kid,” they lie to the late arrival, hoping she doesn’t try to chat with them about the finer points of getting “roqueted” and all the other nonsense they tuned out during the concierge’s spiel.
“OK, so what now, Captain?” the athleisure-wearing woman asks, still needling them. This relentless public teasing is not a great start for Puck’s first official act of sabotage.
“Let’s pick teams,” they announce, pushing past the sarcasm to procure their phone from the pocket of their khaki jumpsuit. “I’m going to write down everyone’s name in this randomizer app, and it’ll split us into pairs. That way we don’t all end up with someone we already know.”
There is, of course, no randomizer app; this is a ruse for Puck to get to choose who gets paired with whom.
And the entire wedding party is going to go along with it, even if a few people are looking at Mia and Damon for permission to enlist. The lesson Puck took away from the Stanford prison experiment is that everyone is already living inside of it every day, doing whatever the person with the most charisma or the biggest office tells them to do.
Puck doesn’t bother waiting for a consensus to emerge; instead, they open the Notes app on their phone and approach the first groomsman.
“What’s your name?” they ask, loud, clear, authoritative.
“Peter,” he says. Puck now recognizes him as Damon’s brother. The best man. A gym bro in the family business whom Puck blames, at least in part, for Damon becoming the kind of guy who’s obsessed with airport lounge access.
Puck moves down the loose line the wedding party is beginning to obediently form; Philip Zimbardo would be proud or ashamed, they’re not sure which.
“Francis” is next. Preppy. Pink shirt. Puck didn’t know popped collars had come back in style, and they wish they hadn’t.
“Phil.” Dead-eyed. Wearing a button-down and a puffy vest even though it’s seventy-eight degrees outside. Probably a friend Damon made at work.
“Anya.” Mia’s childhood friend. Came to visit her at Emory once.
Puck skips over Lena and Zander but makes a show of jotting down their names anyway.
Next up is the girl in the two-piece set.
Her hair is pulled back into a slick ponytail of almost impossible tightness.
Her green eyes narrow as Puck approaches.
They already don’t like this woman. She looks like she would have called Puck a “dyke” in high school—to their face, even.
Before Puck can ask her name, the woman says, “You must be Dr. Croquet, given all your expertise.”
Puck tries to joke their way through the dig. “I prefer Croquet, PhD. And your name is?”
“Robyn. R-O-B-Y-N.”
So this is Robyn. Puck is disappointed to discover that Mia’s maid of honor is apparently a pedantic bitch. This isn’t the DMV; Puck doesn’t need to know the spelling of her name.
“Robyn. Like the annoying little bird, got it,” Puck says, then immediately moves to the next person: a groomsman named Tom whom Puck vaguely remembers as an old college buddy of Damon’s from his peak gaming days—someone who didn’t otherwise travel in their friend circle.
As Puck writes down Tom’s name, they shoot a glance back at Robyn to find her scowling, presumably over the bird remark. Puck hopes she stews over it for the entire game. Or match. Whatever the fuck they call a unit of croquet, though she probably knows that, too.
Puck keeps moving past Mia and Damon to collect the name of the final bridesmaid, Willa, who looks way too fashionable to be standing in the middle of a clearing in southwestern North Carolina.
Wearing a strange asymmetrical dress with multiple cutouts and a pair of platform sandals, she’s dressed for the runway, not croquet.
At least Puck can now say they’re not Mia’s oddest-looking friend.
“OK!” they call out to the group after giving all the names a quick once-over. “Let’s find out our fate.”
They tap a random place on their phone screen and nothing happens, obviously, but the song-and-dance buys them time to start mapping out teams in their head.
“Francis and Willa,” Puck pretends to read off their screen. The collision of their outfits should be fun to watch, if nothing else. The groomsman and bridesmaid step toward each other, Francis regarding Willa leerily.
“Phil and Tom,” Puck says next. They’re not going to do all opposite-sex pairings. The men high-five as they link up, so they must already know each other.
And now that Puck is partway through the team assignments, they can lay their first trap: “Damon and Lena.”
Puck watches everyone’s reactions carefully.
Lena, of course, lights up despite herself but then tries to tamp down her excitement.
Damon, a few feet to her right, frowns involuntarily; he’s spent a decade knowing that Lena is in love with him, and to his credit, he has been nice about it.
But as far as anyone knows, it’s the “randomizer app” that chose the teams, so he’ll have to endure another hour of being pursued.
Damon scans the group, looking for Lena, even though she’s standing a couple feet away from him. “Is she here yet?”
Does he really not see her? She says hi from surprisingly nearby and Damon’s eyes widen. “Oh, Lena. Hey! I didn’t recognize you without all the … you know …”
“Yeah, I did Locks of Love,” Lena says, completing his thought.
“I, uh, love it a lot too,” Damon says, not following.
Does Puck detect a smile on his face? This is promising.
Mia doesn’t clock the expression, nor does it seem like she heard Damon’s flustered comment, despite standing right next to him.
At some point, she must have noticed that Lena started dressing differently—they live in the same city, after all—but she’s been conditioned to not consider her as a threat, which is perfect.
Now Damon is free to spend the entire afternoon with what is an undeniably attractive straight woman in a short white dress.
Croquet might not be the sexiest sport, but it still involves a lot of bending over and talking about balls, so maybe it’ll do something for him.