Bee was lovely, which was good, because her event, despite William’s initial confidence, had become your basic wedding planner nightmare. First, the venue—a gorgeous old house with expansive gardens and a pond—had caught on fire just after she put down a hefty (last-minute) deposit on it. Then the caterer she insisted was her only deal breaker in terms of vendors had a nervous breakdown, although not over this wedding. (My mother was not yet convinced of this.) All this would have been bad enough even if her own mother’s event—which had gone so well, her son’s vanishing act aside; oh how we loved a third wedding!—had not resulted soon after the honeymoon in a separation due to “incompatibility issues.” (Even my mother and William had been blindsided: they didn’t bet on third weddings, feeling that by then you should know what you’re doing.) The upshot: with nine weeks to go, they now found themselves in the busiest part of the wedding season with no venue, no caterer, and a mother of the bride who was even more cynical about the process than they were.
I pulled on the last option Jilly had chosen for me, slipping it over my head. When I glanced in the dressing room mirror, it did seem awfully purple, although I liked the plain yet classic neckline and the way the skirt’s hem flared up and out at the bottom. I had just stepped out to see what Jilly thought when the salesgirl gasped, putting a hand to her mouth.
We both looked over at her. “What is it?” Jilly asked.
She looked up at us, startled, like she’d forgotten we were there. “Sorry. I was just . . . it’s the news. There’s been a shooting.”
I felt a prickle at the back of my neck, hairs raising up. Immediately, Jilly glanced at the twins, who were still absorbed in their game, then put a hand on my arm. “This one looks good. Who knew eggplant was your color?”
“What kind of shooting?” I asked the salesgirl, although I could swear I already knew. There was something in her face I recognized.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. She dropped her hand, shaking her head. “It’s a school. In California. Just breaking news, right now. They don’t have any—”
“Come on,” Jilly said, her voice firm as she steered me back into the room, shutting the door behind me. From outside she said, “You don’t really need a dress. Like you said, you have tons. Let’s just go.”
I stood there a second, looking at my reflection. I could see myself blinking, quickly, before I turned away, fingers fumbling to pull the dress up over my head. Ignoring the hanger, I left it in a heap on the bench in my haste to put my shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops back on and grab my purse. Outside, Jilly was waiting, reaching down wordlessly to take my hand. As we walked behind the counter, with the twins in tow, the salesgirl was still focused on her computer, and I averted my eyes so I wouldn’t see the screen. But I knew what was most likely there, as well as to come. A long shot of a flat, nondescript building, maybe with a mascot on the side. People streaming out doors, hands over their heads. The embraces of the survivors, mouths open, caught in wails we were lucky not to hear. And, in the worst case, pictures of kids just like the ones in my own yearbook, lined up neatly, already ghosts.
By the time I got to my mom’s office, I’d somewhat calmed down. Jilly had helped, turning up the radio loud as she drove us through town, now and then taking glances at me she thought I didn’t notice. It was gorgeous out, with a bright blue sky, and people were out on the sidewalks and in their cars, windows down—while elsewhere, someone’s worst nightmare had only just become real. It seemed wrong, like there should have been a stain on the day or something.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to hang out for a few minutes?” Jilly asked me as she pulled into the lot of my mom’s office, where I’d left my car parked earlier. “All I have left to do is to pick up Crawford’s new glasses and then grab him from Tae Kwon Do.”
“Another pair of glasses?” I asked.
She glanced at the twins in the rearview, each looking out a separate window, sitting close to each other. “The kid got suspended this time. We’ll see if it makes a difference.”
Although I found Crawford’s monotone and awkwardness appealing, it made him a huge target for the bullies at his school. Martial arts had made him strong, but not made much of a difference in the lunch line, at least not yet. In the meantime, the Bakers spent a lot on replacement eyewear.
“I’m fine, you should go,” I told her. “I’ll see you at the amphitheater.”
“Here’s hoping Steve passes out and doesn’t make it.”
“Fingers crossed.”
She laughed, and I did too, if only to convince her I was, in fact, okay. With her Baker and me Barrett, we’d spent our lives in this small town with Steve Baroff wedged between us for every alphabetical occasion, except when he was too stoned to show up for school. We’d long hoped this would happen for graduation, if only for the continuity of us being on the stage at the same time. Making memories, indeed.
As she drove off, already cranking the radio, I started toward my mom’s office. Natalie Barrett Weddings was located in the center of a modern office building with a dentist’s office on one side, a high-end stationery store called RSVP on the other. Entirely too much of my paycheck had gone to the latter due to my weakness for cards, writing paper, and, especially, blank books. Life seemed so much more manageable when you could write it down neatly on paper, which was probably exactly why I could only do it for a day or two, and hadn’t even tried in the last year. When I looked through those old barely begun journals now, the events on the pages seemed too small to even fill the lines, that inconsequential. Thinking this, I had a flash of the salesgirl and her computer, and felt a chill come over me. I pulled open the door to my mom’s office, where the A/C was always blasting and I wouldn’t notice my own drop in temperature.
William saw me, though, immediately getting up from his seat at the conference table across from Bee and coming over. “I had a news alert on my phone,” he said in a low voice. Distantly, I heard my mom, also at the table, saying something about head counts. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said automatically. “Go back to your meeting. I just came to drop off the tickets.”
He nodded, but still waited a beat, as if I might change my mind, before returning to the group. Meanwhile, I slipped into the back office, where I reached into my pocket, pulling out the two passes I’d picked up for the ceremony. You were allowed up to six, but it wasn’t like I needed any more. I slid them into my mom’s purse, which was sitting on her side of the big desk they shared, then went back out into the main room.
“. . . were supposed to meet me a half hour ago,” Bee was saying to her brother Ambrose, who had joined the group in my brief absence. Dressed in jeans, a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt, and tennis shoes, he looked freshly showered, as if just beginning his day at this late hour. Maybe this was why his sister, usually so pleasant, seemed annoyed. “It’s no wonder you can’t get a job if you’re incapable of getting places on time.”
“My watch is broken,” he said. “And then I had to get here, so . . .”
Bee’s cheeks were flushed. “You have a phone, Ambrose. And there are clocks!”
An awkward silence settled over the room, during which he spotted me and smiled, waving energetically, as if we were longtime friends finally reunited. His complete lack of caring for the trouble he’d caused would have been impressive if it didn’t seem so demented. I was still deciding how to react when my mom said, “So, Louna. How does it feel to be almost free from the compulsory education system?”
Now everyone looked at me. Even when I wasn’t working, I was working. “I won’t believe it until I flip my tassel,” I replied.