Chapter 20 #2
“You made me watch Sex and the City!” Puck playfully protests. “We binged it over two weekends in our dorm when you found out I hadn’t seen it, remember? The theme song is playing on a loop somewhere in the back of my brain.”
“Yes, but that was the original,” Mia clarifies. “Big dies in the reboot. Which means you kept watching.”
“Guilty,” Puck admits, and they feel a certain surrender at the word. This conversation is already reaching a dead end. For some reason Puck can’t understand, Mia is determined to go through with this, even after everything. The only thing they feel like they can do now is—
A shout from across the room. “Get away from her!” Robyn is standing in the open door, green eyes glowering.
Puck’s heart plummets as Robyn races toward them, mascara-streaked tears running down her face, with a small square of paper clutched in her hand. Even Mia furrows her brow against her better judgment as her crew of helpers swivel to face the disruption.
“Robyn?” Mia asks, puzzled. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that your ‘friend’ has been planning to sabotage this wedding all week,” Robyn says, as Puck stands up to intervene.
“Robyn, I—”
But she won’t look at them. All the intimacy of the night before has vanished.
“Don’t talk to me,” Robyn fumes. “Talk to Mia. Explain this”—and at that, she produces Puck’s memo. Mia pulls her hand out of the manicure machine to accept the paper, and she reads aloud, more frown lines forming on her face.
“‘M plus Z, D eight Z and M, use L …’ Puck, what is this?”
“It’s your initials, Mia,” Robyn says, wiping away her own tears, even as she scowls. “It’s the Emory crew. ‘Mia plus Zander, Damon something something Zander and Mia, use Lena.’ I found it in their nightstand.”
“Wait, what were you doing in Puck’s nightstand?” Mia asks.
Puck notices that Lena and Anya have dropped everything they’re doing to watch this scene play out.
Willa has arrived too, her dress missing a shoulder strap, which means Mia wasn’t entirely lying about trying to talk her out of the alteration, but that’s not important now.
She’s standing in the doorframe, eyes agog, unsure whether she should enter.
“I was fucking them, OK?!” Robyn shouts. “A fucking mistake, obviously.”
And that elicits a gasp not just from Mia, but from the nail tech, who doesn’t even know any of these people.
“You were sleeping together and didn’t tell me?” Mia asks, momentarily forgetting about the incriminating piece of paper in her hand. The question is directed at Robyn, but Puck decides to answer first—anything to lower the temperature.
“It wasn’t serious,” they say, and that gets Robyn to look at them, though they immediately wish she didn’t.
Her beautiful face is distorted with hurt and anger.
Puck thinks back to what Robyn said last night, about once worrying that everything would fall apart if things didn’t go exactly as planned.
Puck has made those fears come to fruition.
“It wasn’t serious?” Robyn repeats, and Puck wishes they could retract their words. Downplaying it was all instinct; they wanted to try to address the memo before the hidden tryst, one thing at a time. But before they can offer context, Mia speaks again.
“Puck, what does this mean? ‘M plus Z’? Were you trying to get me and Zander back together?”
“They were,” Robyn answers, before Puck can come up with a believable lie.
“All week I’ve been ignoring it, but they haven’t been acting right.
The way they changed my icebreaker on the bus?
The random scavenger hunt no one at the Athenian even knew about?
After I found that paper, I ran a search for the phone number those texts came from.
It matches leaks from Homewreckers contestants that got posted to Reddit. ”
Fuck those fucking Redditors. Puck needs their obsessiveness for the show to stay in the cultural conversation, but truly, they all need something better to do with their time. They’ve ruined everything.
“And Zander said last night that he was coming down to the bar to get a fizzy water for Puck …” Mia says, putting it together.
Alarm replaces anger on Robyn’s face. “Wait, you saw Zander last night? Did something happen?”
But instead of answering, Mia just starts to cry.
“Please don’t, sweetie, I already did your lashes,” the makeup girl cautions, but the bride has reached her limit.
“Don’t tell me what to do!” she shouts. “I’m sick of people telling me what to fucking do!”
“Mia, I’m—” Puck says, trying to wedge a word into the conversation.
“You’re leaving, is what you are,” Mia says, collecting herself and speaking with a terrifying clarity as she folds the piece of paper in half and tears it along the seam.
“No, wait, Mia, we need to talk,” Puck says desperately, looking back and forth between Mia and Robyn, neither of whom will meet their gaze. Lena is crying out of sympathy. Anya and Willa, meanwhile, appear close to whipping out pitchforks and marching Puck out of the hotel.
As Puck looks at Mia in her tear-ruined wedding makeup, they can finally see the disaster this was always destined to be.
They were so certain they wouldn’t be discovered that they never even considered how much pain it would cause if the scheme came to light.
They felt free to use all their usual tricks.
At times, it was even fun. But this is no longer fun. Was it ever?
Puck isn’t clear anymore on what they were hoping to accomplish here—or why they felt the need to do it so intensely. This is big. This is elemental. This is unforgivable. And there’s no rewind button. This can’t be tweaked in an editing bay.
“You’ve said enough, or too little, I can’t tell which,” Mia says, her voice sounding far away. “And my head hurts.”
“I didn’t want it to happen like this,” Puck says, feeling their own tears coming now.
“Oh?” Mia asks, finally looking at them through streaks of mascara, some kind of pin jostling out of her hair, updo coming loose in the process. “How did you want it to happen? And why did you think that even mattered at my wedding?”
Puck wants to answer, even though they know they shouldn’t, but they can see the bridesmaids shifting closer, instinctively forming a protective circle around Mia. Some gendered groupthink has a social purpose, Puck realizes, and right now, they are on the wrong side of it.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” Puck says, feeling the inadequacy of that admission in real time. “I’m sorry. It was wrong.”
“You think?!” Robyn shouts.
“This isn’t TV, Puck,” Mia says. “This is my life.”
“I know it’s your life,” Puck says, seeing an opening they probably shouldn’t take, and plowing straight through it anyway, “and that’s exactly why I wanted to help. This is a big thing you’re doing, and … and …”
“Yes?!” Mia prompts, angrily.
“And you’re not going to be happy with Damon.”
They regret it immediately.
Mia’s seething. The bridesmaids tighten their circle around her. “And you’re not going to be happy, period. Because you don’t have anything going for yourself besides your stupid show. All you’ve ever done is watch us, Puck. Your life is empty.”
Puck can’t bear to hear their deepest insecurity come from someone else’s lips, let alone Mia’s. It hits a place so fragile and so deep inside them, all they can do is lash out.
“At least I’ve never cheated on my fiancé at my wedding!” they shout. “At least I’ve never compromised who I am for a family of billionaires! At least I’m myself, Mia! Can you say the same? Was breaking Zander’s heart really worth selling your soul?”
They feel the cruelty of what they’re saying the second they finish, and they’re just as shocked by it as the women are. Mia stands up, signaling that the conversation is over. And the look on her face isn’t shock anymore, or anger, or even pain. It’s pity.
“Is your heart really so hollow that you needed to play with mine?” she asks.
The question slices Puck down the middle, and a million inarticulable feelings pour out of them at once.
But as they open their mouth to say something, anything, to redeem themself, they take stock of the facial expressions of everyone in the suite.
Lena is sobbing. Willa looks even scarier than normal.
Anya seems ready to throw hands. And Robyn?
Her eyes are angry, but her lips trembling.
Why did Puck say their relationship didn’t mean anything?
It did. More than they ever got the chance to say, or even realized until now.
Why did they do any of this? It was just a wedding.
People marry the wrong person every day, hell, every hour.
There’s no way to explain themself. They swallow their words down instead.
“I think you should go, Puck,” Willa says, taking position at Mia’s flank now. “We’ll take care of this.”
Puck turns to Robyn and mouths another woefully insufficient “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Robyn says, her voice flat and unforgiving. “Like you said, it wasn’t serious.”