Once they’re gone, the air slowly settles down around me. The sparks quiet themselves and burn away, like those Fourth of July sparklers once they’ve used up their fuel and are about to turn back into sharp metal sticks.
I close my eyes, feeling suddenly drained and tired. And then I know something I didn’t know before, a truth as insistent as anything I’ve ever felt: Marnie MacGraw and Noah are not going to marry.
In fact, it’s already over.
TWO
MARNIE
“Oh my God, that was an epic fail,” says Noah in the car. “Epic! And Whipple, you freak, could you possibly drive like you’re even slightly sober? Like you’re not trying to get a DUI? We’re hoping to stay alive back here.”
Whipple’s car—a brand-new BMW convertible—does seem to be taking the corners on two wheels, I swear, and he appears to have perfected the art of driving with two fingers of his left hand as he holds a cocktail glass in his right hand. A glass that keeps sloshing red alcohol onto the seats and into the center console.
I had automatically gotten into the backseat, and then, to my surprise, Noah had jumped in beside me, leaving Whipple alone in the front, which means he has to crane his neck around backward so he can keep up with the conversation. And every time he moves his head, the car swerves off course, and he mashes his foot even harder on the gas pedal.
Oh, so much of tonight has been a disappointment. I do not want to start off married life with mother-in-law problems. My boss, Sylvie, says that’s just the worst thing you can do. And now that I’m in the car, I can also hear my mother’s voice in my ear: “That was so rude of you, to sit there all night talking to one old lady! You should have gone and mingled with all the other guests! That’s what that party was for, for you to meet your fiancé’s family and friends.”
And now this, the biggest disappointment of all—the great Simon Whipple, whom I have heard such fantastic things about, turns out to be nothing more than your standard-issue, red-faced, laughing, overgrown frat boy. And in his presence, Noah seems to be regressing more by the minute.
Apparently we’re heading to the home of one of their other friends that Noah says I’ve got to meet. It’s the Hometown Tour, Noah told me. Meet the freaks. He pulls me over to him, roughly, and starts sucking on my neck like he’s going to give me a hickey. Like he thinks we’re in high school just because we’re in the backseat. “Holy shit, I am so, so sorry for what I did to you back there,” he says in my ear, way too loudly. “Leaving you in the clutches of my Aunt Blix.”
“You owe her big-time,” says Whipple.
“Right? She’s like the old woman in the forest who eats children.”
“That’s because she’s a witch,” says Whipple. “Marnie, you’re lucky there’s anything left of you. I told him, ‘Dude, you gotta go get your girlfriend, man. Between your mom and your great-aunt, she’s gonna run for the hills.’”
“Not this one,” says Noah. “I’ve got this one in the bag.”
I pull away from him. His beard is scratching me, and his breath smells like a brewery. I finger the scarf she gave me. It’s amazing, with lots of shades of blue, and holes that look like they were burned out on purpose. “For real she’s a witch?” I say, and that makes them both laugh. “No, no, tell me. Does she, like, practice witchcraft? Is she in a coven or something?”
“I don’t know about a coven,” says Whipple, “but she totally does spells, doesn’t she, dude?”
“Spells and potions and all that shit,” says Noah. “She’s got the whole thing down. It’s all over-the-top drama, if you ask me.”
“She seems really nice,” I say. “I liked her.”
Noah leans forward between the seats and takes the drink out of Whipple’s right hand and gulps down the rest of it.
Whipple laughs. “Hey! That was mine. I earned that, dude.”
“I need it more, man, and besides, you’re driving.”
“Tell me,” I say. “What has she done? I can’t believe you really think she’s a witch.”
But they have moved on by this time, talking about whether or not some girls they knew in high school are going to be at the party we’re all going to. Somebody named Layla is going to shit when she finds out that Noah is engaged without checking with her.
I look out the window at all the passing houses—big mansion-type things with huge lawns decorated with white twinkly lights wrapped around the tree trunks, and Christmas trees illuminating the windows. Boughs of holly, fa la la la la. So genteel, so rich.
I wonder if I’ll ever really fit in here.
Funny, I think later, how you can meet a random handsome guy in California at a party, and he tells you he once wrote movie scripts and one almost got accepted but then didn’t, and he tells you that he’s now teaching school, and he loves kids and he loves to go snowboarding in the mountains in the winter and later, in bed, after he’s managed to do amazing things to you, he tells you just how much he wants to help people in the world, and you can’t believe how moved you are at the way his eyes change when he tells you that, how much depth he has, and you find yourself falling in love with these pieces of him that he shows you—and then later, much later, after he’s moved in with you and bought you a deluxe garlic press and a pair of amazing turquoise boots and has written a song for you that he plays on his guitar, you go back to his hometown with him and find out that, oh my God, he’s the somewhat spoiled son of rich people who let him get away with murder and who don’t seem to automatically care about you, except for one ancient aunt no one else seems to like.
You see that he contains so many contradictions. And that you will have to make peace—and you will—with these people who are going to be your in-laws, and you will learn to please them. But you also know that after that night, you will look at him completely differently, and that one of the new things you’ll know about him is that it’s a miracle he survived his childhood and arrived intact at your heart.
And yet you still love him to pieces.
But in the days that follow your return home, you wonder why he won’t answer your questions about his Aunt Blix without rolling his eyes, and why he’s slightly disgruntled that you invited her to the wedding without checking with his mom first. He changes the subject, and you change it back, and he sighs and says, “Oh, she didn’t get the money she wanted, and so she moved up north, and got weird. She looks at everybody like she can see straight through them, down to all the layers of bad stuff.”
And you say something about how she maybe admires the so-called bad stuff (you make air quotes for this), and he wonders why you’re so obsessed with his Aunt Blix, and you say that you’re not obsessed. And you’re not.
But you do wonder why in your spare time, when you’re not thinking of anything else, you’re having a conversation with Blix in your head. You’re wondering if she’s right that love is the true expression of everything in the universe, and if the sparkles you see are real. You’re telling her that she’s wrong about you—that you’re not up for a big life and surprises; you just want ordinary love and happiness with her grandnephew. A house in the suburbs and three children.
And somehow, in a way you can’t explain, you know she’s not convinced in the least. And that just by knowing her, you’re walking into something that’s bigger than you are, that might even turn out to be some kind of mystical crazy thing you’re never going to be able to explain to anyone. Like the time you went to the planetarium show and looking up at the stars that represented billions of light-years, you felt like a little point of pulsating light, a flicker in the universe, but something that was meant to exist.
And maybe that’s why I have a headache.
THREE
MARNIE