Chapter 1 #2
"You're wearing heels."
"I'm wearing heels I'm perfectly capable of walking in."
Her eyes dropped to the heels, then came back to mine. I held the look. I'd been lying about physical things since I was nineteen and had told my hometown I was fine, absolutely fine, while my body did something I hadn't asked it to and didn't have language for yet.
I was very good at lying about physical things.
"The heels are fine," I said. "The programs are done.
You're going to walk down an aisle and marry the four people who look at you the way you look at them.
Like none of you can believe your luck. Everything's going to be beautiful, and at the end of the day you'll be bonded to your pack, and you'll all live happily ever after. "
Celia held my gaze for a count of three, then nodded once. Being trusted by her tugged under my ribs.
"Go," she said. "Deliver the programs. I have to get into the dress, and you don't need to watch that."
"I've seen you in a dress before."
"You've never seen me in this dress. It's different."
It was different. I understood that. I made forever beautiful for other people in cotton paper, gold ink, and names placed exactly where they'd survive being handled.
I did not trust ‘forever’ for myself. The two facts sat in my chest like a matched set, and I'd made peace with the arrangement years ago.
"One hour," I said. "Ceremony starts in one hour. If you need me before then?—"
"You'll be in the reception space, straightening a place card because someone's name came out at a slant and you caught it from across the room."
"The 'someone' in that scenario may be your new mother-in-law's, so yes, I'll be fixing it."
Celia laughed again, bright and real. The sound followed me as I gathered my things from the chair by the window.
I dropped the robe and flashed the makeup artist and Celia a view of my butt cheeks hanging in the breeze, since Celia had assigned me a body-con dress that would show panty lines.
She giggled behind me while I slid into it and zipped myself in.
At least the heels had straps, so I wouldn't walk straight out of them on the grand staircase down to the reception hall.
The stack of programs was safe in the old messenger bag, the last piece of a look no one else could have replicated.
I was at the door when the first cramp hit.
It was low and brief, a tightening that came and went in the space of a breath. I stopped with a hand on the door frame and waited it out. Low in my abdomen, mild, gone before I'd finished cataloging it. Pressure more than pain.
I blamed the heels, then the three hours I'd spent bent over the hotel desk finishing programs, shoulders tight, spine curved, too focused to remember a body needed maintenance.
Maybe the hotel mattress was to blame. The cramp was mechanical, anatomy rather than hormones, a muscle irritated by my talent for existing incorrectly.
I straightened, adjusted the bag on my shoulder, and stepped into the hallway. Celia's mothers were already there.
Ms. Carolann had her hands clasped under her chin in delighted prayer, and Ms. Bea was already reaching for my shoulders. Bea had raised an alpha daughter and apparently claimed all of Celia's friends by extension.
"Nitsa, honey, look at you," Ms. Carolann said. "Just look at you."
I looked, in the sense that I'd been studying myself in reflective surfaces for two hours, and what I'd seen was a woman in a body-con dress with almost no underwear and three hundred programs in a bag. "I'm going for functional," I said. "It's the bridesmaid aesthetic."
"Functional," Bea repeated, and took my face in both hands. Her palms were warm and slightly dry, and she tilted my chin up the way she had when Celia and I were twelve and she was checking for sunburn. "Carolann, she's doing that thing."
"The thing where she's beautiful and won't hear it," Ms. Carolann said. "I've known it since she was six and told me her macaroni art was structurally unsound."
The macaroni art had been structurally unsound, though I hadn’t used that exact language.
The elbow pasta I'd used for the frame had been too heavy for the paper-plate base.
It had collapsed during the class presentation, and I'd been right about the engineering.
But you didn't say that to Celia's mothers while they were gushing and the ceremony was an hour out.
"I fixed the structural issues in my later work," I said. "The programs are very stable." I hoped that would remind them I wasn't finished yet and needed to go before the guests were seated and my programs were pointless.
Bea released my face but kept her hands on my shoulders. "You did the programs yourself?"
"I do all the paper goods myself. It's sort of the business model."
"She's deflecting," Ms. Carolann told Bea. "Notice the deflection. She mentions the work so we stop talking about how she looks."
I had, in fact, been doing exactly that, and I'd been doing it since I arrived the day before and Ms. Carolann cried at the welcome signage.
The trick with Celia's mothers was to deflect gently.
They meant well, every second of every day, and refusing them outright would've been like kicking a golden retriever.
"I mention the work because the work is done," I said, adjusting the bag on my shoulder. "And I need to get these to the ceremony space before your relatives arrive and walk right past them."
Bea finally let go. "Go. Do your program thing. We need to get our daughter into a dress that cost more than our first car."
"The dress is stunning," I said.
"It's been in my closet three months," Ms. Carolann said. "I've been terrified a moth would find it. Every time I opened the door, I held my breath."
"Go help your daughter," I said with a laugh. "I'll have the programs set up in fifteen minutes."
Ms. Carolann touched my cheek once, light and brief, matching the touch she'd given Celia two hours earlier.
Warmth pressed under my sternum, inconvenient and immediate.
Then she and Bea pushed through the bridal suite door, their voices climbing toward the pitch mothers hit right before they saw their child in a wedding dress, and the door clicked shut behind them.
The hallway ran cool and silent, carpeted in the deep navy wave pattern used throughout the hotel.
Cobalt lines swept like wind over water, repeating on the lobby staircase, the ballroom floor, and the runner under my feet.
It was striking the first time you saw it, faintly oppressive by the third day.
I'd formed opinions at check-in and kept them to myself because Celia had enough opinions to manage without mine on the pile.
The programs were perfect, bundled in sets of eighty with cream ribbon I'd tied the night before.
Each was a single sheet of heavy cotton paper, letterpress-printed with the day's details in a clean serif, the ceremony listed first in a lighter weight.
The names were hand-lettered in gold, the same gold from the invitations, the menus, the place cards, the table numbers.
I'd finished the last fifty at one in the morning, back aching, eyes burning, the rehearsal dinner's playlist still playing in my mind.