3 #2
He’s staring determinedly at the road, and I decide I don’t want to touch whatever that’s about with a ten-foot pole, so I just say, “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“Chunky or creamy peanut butter?” he pivots.
“Oh, creamy. One hundred percent.”
“One hundred percent,” he agrees. “Chunky is just weird.”
“It’s weird! Thank you. Tell that to your brother and his fiancée. They’re obsessed with chunky and it’s disgusting.”
He doesn’t respond, just pulls into the shopping center parking lot and picks a spot. When he looks down to shift the car into park, he almost seems sad.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“What?”
“That look.”
“What look?”
“Don’t play dumb,” I push. “What just happened to your face? What are you thinking?”
“Are you gonna mock me for it?” he asks.
“Probably.”
He lets out a reluctant sigh. “It’s just clear you just know my brother better than I do, that’s all.” Then he opens the door and steps out, ending that part of the conversation as quickly as it began.
Our first errand stop is Party City, and by the grace of God we’re on the exact same page with our goal: bachelor/ette party decorations that are over-the-top to the point of embarrassment, for at least Andy if not Sophie too.
We start with the balloon aisle, where we have the full alphabet of letters to play with.
“What should we do?” Owen asks. “Just Congratulations? Or maybe Mr. and Mrs. Walsh?”
“What makes you so confident she’s taking his last name?”
“Is she?” he asks.
“Yes, but you’re a chauvinist for assuming.”
Owen ignores the jab. “Actually… how would you rate your interest in fucking with them?”
“Extremely high.”
“Another thing we agree on, then. What about Nerd Wedding?”
I laugh. “I love it. Or how about just Congrats Andy? Simple but effective.”
“Or, take it one step further: Sophie Are You Sure?”
“What about Is This Incest?”
Now it’s Owen’s turn to laugh out loud. “I like it, but it doesn’t look like they have question mark balloons. What about Take Her Last Name?”
“Ooh I like that one!”
In the end, we purchase enough balloons to have a different phrase in each main room of the Airbnb: we do both Nerd Wedding and Take Her Last Name for the living room, then do Andy’s A Simp for the kitchen, Puke Here for the bathroom, and—most importantly—Quiet Down You Fuckers for their bedroom.
And we don’t stop there. We buy poster boards so we can hang more quippy signs all around the rental.
We also get penis-shaped balloons (which they don’t sell at Party City, but I do order online), colorful paper streamers, and an overabundance of cheesy photo booth supplies.
Finally, we get and/or place online orders for assorted goodie bag bits in a loose “Sophie and Andy” theme: shot glasses, bookmarks, ibuprofen, sleep masks, sticky notes, and Boston-themed temporary tattoos.
There’s one that says “MASSHOLE” in the shape of our fine Commonwealth that really speaks to me.
Then we’re onto the next, and arguably most important, supply stop: the liquor store. We make the mistake of sharing a cart, and that’s when the trouble starts.
“My brother is not drinking Mr. Boston at his bachelor party, Amelia. We’re not twenty-year-olds in the Sigma Chi basement.”
“Oh, sorry that our peasant alcohol is below you, Daddy Warbucks. I’ll raise you to Rubinoff but that’s the best my debit card can handle.” I try to load a bottle into the shopping cart, but he blocks it with an arm.
“Begone, shrew. I’ll pay for the alcohol, just please for the love of all things holy, don’t bring Rubinoff anywhere near me.”
I shake my head as I place it back on the shelf, muttering, “Mr. Ivy League thinks he’s too good for Rubinoff with his suits and his corporate sala—”
“Do you guys drink wine?” Owen interrupts.
My eyebrows rise involuntarily. “Andy almost exclusively drinks wine. You genuinely don’t know your brother at all, do you?”
“Fine,” he snaps. “Great. And I’m sure you have your highly distinguished taste set on pink moscato, but once again I’m going to insist we get something that’s actually drinkable.”
I feign confusion. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand the joke. Are you saying I only drink pink moscato because I’m a woman or because I’m poor?”
The clench in his jaw says it's because I’m a huge bitch, but he keeps that remark to himself, shoving the cart into the next aisle. And by the time we’re done, between the alcohol, the decorations, and the goodie bags, we’ve amassed a frankly absurd quantity of things.
“I’ll do the posters and you can do the balloons,” I say as I climb back into the passenger side of his fragile-masculinity-mobile.
“No way,” he says, seatbelt clicking into place. “You don’t just get to steamroll the poster making. I’ve got ideas too.”
“I’ll give you one chance to impress me. What ideas?”
“Okay. Right off the back we need to mock them for everything about their relationship. I’m thinking a poster that says something like: This Engagement Was Four Days in the Making.”
A cackle escapes me against my will. They did get engaged after dating for four days, after all. “Pretty good. What else you got?”
He smirks as he turns left out of the parking lot. “I’m just getting started. I trust you know all the people Andy dated since college? I’m thinking we can cyberstalk them and print out pictures to glue on a poster with a title like: People Andy Pretended Were Sophie.”
I’m laughing in full now. “That’s horrible. Keep going.”
“And then something for the nine years he was in love with her. It was nine, right? Maybe like: Andy’s Been in Love With Sophie Since… and then a list of pop culture things. Like ‘since “Despacito” was #1 on the charts’ or whatever.”
I’m clapping and kicking my feet. “Okay, okay! We can work on them together. These are golden. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”
"You would live here,” I say as I enter Owen’s apartment. The place is—and I cannot stress this enough—exactly what I expected.
“What does that mean?”
“It means some people have more money than taste.”
He lives in the Seaport, which is already a no from the jump.
When I think of the archetypical resident of Boston’s Seaport neighborhood, it’s a frat-bro-turned-“entrepreneur” who says things like synergize while secretly missing the pizza from his college dining hall, or a divorced dad with a flatly shiny bald spot to match his flatly shiny mid-life crisis Corvette.
Owen’s unit is on the 24th floor, and I’m sure it costs $6,000 a month in rent. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a genuine guess.
The decor might as well be a corporate lobby: white walls, gray marble kitchen counters, a living room with a beige suede couch and a big-screen TV mounted on the wall.
Oh, and of course there’s no art to be found anywhere—although there is a bowl of lemons neatly stacked on the kitchen island.
It makes me wonder if he has some kind of paid service come to set new ones out when the old ones rot.
“Oh yeah, and I’m sure your apartment is so tasteful,” he quips, following on my heels as I invite myself to snoop into each and every room.
“Maybe it is. You’ll never know.”
“You say that, but if we don’t finish all this today I expect you to host round two.”
“Oh, we’re finishing it today. Hand me the bags.”
We lay the supplies out on the coffee table: matte paper in bright white and blush pink, a kaleidoscope of colored pencils sharpened to needle-fine points, folded foil balloons in shining silver.
Once we’ve settled onto the couch, I note, “Didn’t think you’d be so big on celebrations.”
It’s true—I genuinely expected Owen to find this kind of thing beneath him. Before today, I couldn’t possibly picture him blowing up cheap balloons with the same arrogant, erudite mouth that says things like Objection, your honor! or whatever it is lawyers do.
He picks up a balloon shaped like the letter N as he asks, “Why not?”
“Well, you didn’t seem big on Andy’s graduation, for one.”
“His college graduation?”
I take my own balloon from the pile, a letter S, and stare at him. “What else?”
Calculation crosses his expression, his response weighed. Eventually he lands on, “You’re right. I didn’t.”
“Remorseless too. Classic.”
Owen has no response. Seconds tick by and I start inflating the balloon with hard, sharp breaths. It’s cathartic during this rage-inducing conversation.
Up this high, we can’t even hear traffic outside the windows. Only the crinkle of foil, the whoosh-and-wheeze of each inflating breath, the squeak to tie it off.
When so much time has passed that I almost forgot what we had been talking about, Owen asks, “He told you about that?”
“That you no-call no-showed your only brother’s graduation?
No. Sophie did, because she used your ticket to the ceremony.
You should really thank her for that someday, by the way.
She says it’s the saddest she’d ever seen him.
Not that Andy actually said anything about how he was feeling, of course, but you know how he is.
Or… well, maybe you don’t.” The final words are a knife I intentionally twist.
And with either feigned or genuine sincerity, Owen asks, “Really? He was sad?”
When I look up at him, his head is tilted, brow furrowed in confusion. “Are you seriously surprised your brother was sad you skipped his graduation?”
“I didn’t do it to hurt him.”
“Then why did you do it?” I ask outright, because I’m over it.
“It’s none of your business.”
“You made it my business when you hurt my friend.”
“I didn’t—” he starts but cuts himself off. A hand scrubs down his face. “I didn’t think he would mind. We’d barely talked for years at that point. How was I supposed to know he cared?”