Chapter 20
It feels pointless to get ready for a wedding you are sure will be—or has already been—canceled, but Puck doesn’t have much to do this morning.
After quickly getting dressed, they spend five minutes adjusting their tie, daubing some lotion on their face, and polishing a bit of scuff off their Docs.
Best to look like they’re still expecting everything to proceed as normal, even though they know exactly what they’ll find when they walk into Mia’s room: the bride in tears, maybe with her mom or a few bridesmaids providing comfort.
“Hey!” It’s Anya’s voice, followed a moment later by, “Oh, sorry, Puck, I thought you were one of the groomsmen, with the suit and all.”
They don’t have time to process the comment because what they see past Anya is even more troublesome: Mia in her glam chair, surrounded by an entire pit crew of attendants who have laid out an array of mysterious elixirs and potions on the antique wooden vanity.
One of them, a woman in a mustard-colored stylist’s apron, is putting a topcoat on the bride’s nails, while another gets back to working a curling iron after picking a stray speck of dandruff off Mia’s updo.
The bridesmaids—except Robyn and Willa, who are nowhere to be found—are all hard at work perfecting their own physical forms, primping and tweezing and brushing.
Mia’s makeup looks done already, save for a few final flourishes. How can she still be doing this?
Mia and Zander made out. They held each other while sobbing.
Puck watched it all happen. Do the McLeods have her brainwashed?
Puck knows how to produce half-drunk Homewreckers girls, but they don’t have cult deprogramming expertise—and that’s apparently what it will take to get Mia to do the right thing.
Puck’s goal was to end this wedding and now not only is their best friend headed toward a bad marriage, but she also has to keep a secret every day until it ends: She was intimate with her ex on the eve of her wedding.
It’ll only be a matter of time before Zander lets something slip out of jealousy or spite—or until Mia gets a guilty conscience and tells Damon herself.
After that, she’ll be divorced, unemployed, and broke, forced to escape from Raleigh on her own steam.
How can she not be worried about that likelihood?
Puck walks over to the glam chair to get a closer look at her.
“You look gorgeous, Mia,” they say, tempering their shock, but it’s more than an obligatory compliment. She does look stunning. If Mia really can’t find it in herself to be gay, then she at least needs to be saved from the worst heterosexual fate imaginable.
“And you’re looking handsome, if that’s an acceptable adjective to use,” Mia says, looking up from the chair, her face frozen in place. “Sorry, I shouldn’t smile while the makeup finishes setting.”
“That’s fine,” Puck says. “I promise to only say extremely serious things. We can talk about global famine. Is Lena here? She’d be great for that.”
“Hey!” Lena shouts from her makeshift perch by a floor-length mirror.
Mia stifles a laugh. “Puck, I’m serious. These pictures last forever.”
Forever. It’s a tough word to swallow. Even after last night, Mia has somehow deluded herself into thinking it’s her and Damon for the long haul.
What good was all of that plotting and maneuvering if Puck has ended up right back here, put in a situation where they might just have to say directly: “Don’t do this.
You’re making a mistake”? Should they just say that?
There aren’t many options left. But maybe they can make one last oblique attempt to reach her.
“Hey, I was looking for you last night,” Puck says. “After your drinks with the moms. Did they give you the birds and the bees talk?”
Mia scolds Puck once again. “No jokes, Puck, remember?” The nail technician sets a small space-age-looking machine on the shelf of the vanity and gently moves Mia’s hand inside of it. “I was with Willa last night. She wanted to modify her bridesmaid dress, and I had to talk her out of it.”
“Not fashionable enough for her?”
“Something about the lines being all wrong.”
It’s an elaborate lie, which means Mia must feel some shame about what she did with Zander.
But Puck isn’t sure what to do from here.
Their scribbled memo isn’t useful anymore.
The only thing left to do is improvise. A glance around the room reveals Lena struggling with an eyelash curler at one mirror, while Anya applies a lint roller to a particularly troublesome section of her hem.
Robyn is probably off somewhere making sure each flower has the appropriate number of petals—a thought that makes Puck feel more affection toward her than anything else, now that they know what they know.
Puck decides the best thing they can do is vamp for more time. “And how are my lines?”
“You’re pulling off the lilac suit,” Mia says. “And the pocket square kind of makes you look like a sports commentator. Are you leaving Homewreckers for ESPN?”
“Hey, you said no jokes!” Puck retorts.
“Only applies to you, I’m afraid,” Mia says, looking down at the blue light coming from the contraption her hand is caught in. “I’m the one in the chair.”
Typically, an idea would have come to Puck by now. But they still have nothing. At a certain point, if no one intervenes, Mia will get married just so all this beautification doesn’t go to waste. In the straight woman cultural imaginary, unfortunately, some pictures are worth a bad marriage.
Puck sits down in the armchair opposite Mia, digging in for a tense interaction.
They’re going to have to be delicate about this, but at some point the gloves might need to come off.
“How are you feeling?” they ask, softening their voice to send a message: It’s me, your old friend, and I want to level with you.
“Good,” Mia says, recognizing the tone, but there’s a forced quality to her answer. “I mean, I’m nervous, but that’s normal, right?”
It’s a question that’s not really a question—and Puck needs to thread the needle with their response. “Don’t ask me that! I think anyone who legally commits to someone for the rest of their life should feel anxious about it!”
“So, in other words, it’s normal,” Mia clarifies.
“I mean, sure, but you love him.” Puck offers the false assurance to try to avoid this becoming an overt argument even as the conversation takes a more combative tilt.
“And this is what people do when they love someone.” Come to think of it, maybe Mia just needs someone to play chicken with her: double down on the idea of her marrying Damon until it starts to scare her as much as it should.
So Puck keeps going: “Ten years from now, when you’re picking up little Samuel and Stacy McLeod up from soccer practice and coming home to your mansion, it’ll seem silly to you that you ever had butterflies in your stomach,” they say, closely scanning Mia’s frozen face for anything that might betray her true feelings.
And there it is: the slightest wince, and not just at the mild rudeness. “I don’t think I want to live in a house. Damon’s parents’ place feels so big and lonely now that it’s just the two of them. I’d rather get a condo downtown. A loft, maybe.”
Good. Puck’s getting somewhere. Unlike Mia’s airbrushed skin, there are some cracks here that Puck can claw their fingers into and spread open, so long as these girls stay out of it. Thankfully, they all seem preoccupied with their beauty regimens.
“You haven’t talked about where you’re going to live yet?” Puck asks, genuinely alarmed at the revelation, not even needing to play up their concern for effect.
Mia pauses while the hairstylist puts away the curling iron and produces another ominous-looking instrument Puck can’t identify.
God, this process is medieval. Even before coming out as nonbinary, they never bothered to learn about beauty.
Having messy, air-dried hair and nothing on their face except ChapStick has never stopped Puck from being desired in queer circles—and now they don’t even have the hair anymore.
“Oh, no, we have talked about it,” Mia clarifies. “I think we’re going to get a little pied-à-terre in Raleigh and then a house out in Governors Club. That way Damon can have the kind of space he’s used to and I can still pop downtown for the things I want to do.”
Puck doesn’t know the Triangle super well, but they definitely don’t like the sound of “Governors Club.” It conjures up the image of a neighborhood where an angry posse of Nextdoor moms whip themselves into a paranoid frenzy over the sight of a squirrel breaking into a bird feeder.
And Puck definitely isn’t happy to hear that Mia and Damon are already thinking about living separately.
If they were a queer polyamorous couple—or even any other straight couple except a horribly mismatched rebound—Puck might support the arrangement.
But as it stands, it’s the reddest of flags.
Is that why Mia hasn’t stopped this yet—because she’d rather slowly slip out of the marriage than deal with the discomfort of preventing it?
“Just be careful, Mia,” Puck says, trying to disguise their warning as a joke. “Big and Carrie had a pied-à-terre and then he died on his Peloton, remember?”
It’s not that funny an observation, even Puck has to admit, so Mia has no trouble avoiding laughter this time.
“I didn’t think you watched Sex and the City,” she replies, accepting another dusting of powder on her face.
“You’re a film bro. I’d expect a David Fincher reference from you.
Something about the house in Gone Girl.”
Puck is impressed with Mia’s knowledge of Fincher’s filmography—but they have a vague recollection of Zander showing her Se7en in college.