by Megan Crane
“Not at all. Now when you smile, I know you mean it.”
We looked at each other for a long moment then, and something glad and quiet swelled in me. I wanted to reach out and touch him more than I could remember wanting anything else. But then the waiter arrived with our food, and in all the chaos of plates hitting Formica, the moment disappeared.
The fact was, I admitted when I got home, I wanted to minimize time spent in the house. Not just because I was compelled by forces beyond my control to act like I was seventeen again. Of course, that was part of it. But mostly, I wanted to avoid the wedding.
It had been my mother’s idea to have the reception in our house and backyard. I distinctly recalled rolling my eyes at this news, and thinking I was lucky to live in Atlanta, where the trauma of the preparation would affect me not at all.
Karma was a bitch.
There were a scant two weeks before the Big Day, and the house was in a state of chaos. Melissa the wedding planner, who bore no resemblance whatsoever to Jennifer Lopez and wasn’t at all amusing or helpful, seemed to specialize in dropping in on the house and winding everyone up. I thought that given the opportunity, I could do a far better job. Every time she whipped out her little book and started talking about schedules, I could think of at least ten different and more efficient ways to do the same things.
I even suggested a few of them.
“Who knew you were so interested?” Jeannie sounded more amused than anything else.
“Seriously, all you have to do is move that aisle, and you don’t have to worry about the table,” I said. I noticed the way she was looking at me, and sat back. “I just like things to be planned well.”
Jeannie laughed. “And if it benefits me, who am I to complain?”
My father had disappeared almost entirely into his basement, emerging only to eat meals and make complicated statements concerning his fish tanks.
“Dad,” Hope said, cutting off a particularly involved and incomprehensible rant. “Unless you’ve created the Swamp Thing, can we not talk about this while people are eating?”
“Oh,” Dad said, seeming befuddled. Possibly he didn’t even realize he’d been speaking aloud.
My mother, meanwhile, was engaged in the kind of grim housecleaning usually reserved for people moving out of rentals who are determined to get back every penny of their security deposits. Corners of the house that had never seen daylight were exposed and scoured. Mom directed Hope and me in many an unpleasant task, seeming to take a certain amount of pleasure in the sight of the two of us in bright yellow rubber gloves.
“I think she wants us to suffer,” I told Rachel on the phone. “I think it makes her happy. On a cellular level.”
“Weddings are a day of joy and sharing for everyone,” she replied. Piously. “Maybe this is how your mother expresses her joy.”
She was probably right, I thought later, having spent some more quality time cleaning out the kitchen cabinets. Which, obviously, required the removal of every item and individual dusting and wiping, as well as full-fledged scrubbing of the shelves themselves, as we could expect all the guests to pry around in the pasta section.
The wedding couldn’t come fast enough.
Chapter 16
The happy couple and my mother had been colluding over the final seating chart for days, and called a new summit meeting disguised as a family dinner. Meatloaf and motivational speeches from the bride. What could be better?
“She’s really marrying him,” Hope said with a sigh from behind her hand. The two of us were off down the table, since it was predetermined where we’d be sitting at the reception. The perks of being family and bridesmaids. “She used to threaten to do it when we were kids, but I never thought she was serious. I thought she was just blustering about the pink dresses too.”
“Can’t you guys even pretend to be interested in where Aunt Lolly is going to sit?” Christian asked, with a smirk that announced his own lack of interest.
“Honey?” Jeannie bared her teeth at him. “She’s your aunt.”
“Great-aunt,” Christian retorted, and returned his attention to the seating chart.
“Your father adores her,” Mom intoned. Obviously, Mom was somewhat less enamored of Aunt Lolly. “I think we can give her a little bit of the respect she deserves.”
Dad, meanwhile, only smiled and (wisely) remained silent. Aunt Lolly would have to twist in the wind—she was getting no help from him.
Christian stared at our mother. “We’re giving her a catered steak entrée with béarnaise sauce. If Dad wants to give her anything else, he can pony up the cash to pay for it.”
Hope grinned her approval.
“I love it when he gets all butch,” she whispered to me.
The backyard was soon to be turned into a tented wonderland of tables and flower arrangements. Meanwhile, gifts arrived daily and it had somehow become my job to jot them all down in the book Jeannie had provided for exactly that purpose. Relatives I knew existed only because they shared our name called night and day to make last-minute travel arrangements and dietary requests. My mother was in her Eyes on the Prize mode—I wasn’t certain she’d even thought beyond the wedding since her return from Europe.
“Your great-uncle Irwin refuses to eat anything that was ever mobile,” my mother informed my father wearily now, ignoring the many rolled eyeballs around the kitchen.
“The man is eighty-nine years old!” My father actually frowned. “He can only eat food if it’s pureed.”
“He’s your relative.”
“They’ll all eat what they’re served,” my father grumbled.
“That always worked so well with us,” Hope murmured in an undertone. “Do you remember when my scrambled eggs came back at every meal because I refused to eat them?”
“Ew. Yes.”
“If I actually had eaten them,” Hope whispered, “I would obviously have dropped dead, don’t you think? Do you think there’s a statute of limitations on bad parenting?”
“Could you stop whispering over there?” Jeannie snapped at us, clearly losing whatever tenuous hold she’d been exerting on her temper.
“Brunch!” I smiled brightly. “We were wondering about the Sunday brunch. Just family and travelers, right?”
Christian slid a look my way at that one, and flashed me that wry little grin of his that told me he wasn’t at all fooled. It reminded me of back in high school, when the two of us would end up in the same classes despite the efforts of the faculty to prevent that from happening. We had an entire language of looks and signs, smiles and lifted eyebrows. A secret form of communication that led most of our peers to think we were twins and had that twin telepathy thing going on. Sometimes it had felt as if we really were twins.
But then college had separated us, and after that, Jeannie was his girlfriend and we just drifted apart. Maybe that was the way things happened. Maybe that was just growing up. I shook it off, and concentrated on the wedding details.
Two hours later, after we’d all discussed and debated the Wedding Day Schedule to death, Hope and I were allowed to leave. We were upstairs debating a night out when Jeannie appeared in Hope’s bedroom door.
“I want to talk to you guys,” she said. Her eyes were on me.
I sat up from my lounging position across Hope’s bed. Hope paused in the act of arranging her hair, peering at Jeannie instead.
“We have to pick up our dresses and shoes, and be at your house at eleven-thirty for pictures.” She didn’t make much of an effort to sound interested. “We get it, really.”
“What’s going on with you two?” Jeannie demanded, but she was still looking at me. “How do you think it makes Christian feel to know his sisters don’t care enough about him to even fake being happy for him?”
“Who said we’re not happy for him?” Hope asked, genuinely taken aback. “I don’t do enthusiasm, if that’s what you mean, but that doesn’t mean I’m not happy for him.”
I met Jeannie’s gaz
e. “We’re happy for Christian. What are you talking about?”
“Please!” She scoffed. “I had to drag you to get your dresses fitted. You never helped with a thing—”
“I offered to help you about a million times, Jeannie,” I reminded her, with a little leftover bitterness. “You told me you had all the help you needed. Remember? At the engagement party at Christmas?”
Jeannie pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “You offered,” she agreed, “but don’t think I didn’t get the subtext. I know you didn’t even want to come up for the bachelorette party. You’ve made your feelings perfectly clear from the start.”
“You know what?” Hope broke in, her eyes moving from Jeannie to me and back again. “Whatever is between you two really isn’t any of my business.”
Jeannie just glared at her. “And you were busy? Nice, Hope.”
Hope made a face at me and strode from the room.
“Thanks, Hope,” I said sarcastically. To her back.
“Guess you can’t hide behind her anymore,” Jeannie said. It was a taunt. “Like you’ve been doing all summer.”
I didn’t want to deal with that comment. I decided it was better to soothe than to respond. She was the bride, after all. They were notorious for going loony right before their Big Days.
“I understand that you’re incredibly stressed out right now,” I said, trying to sound completely sympathetic. “And who can blame you?”
“Just stop it!” She shook her head. “You know, when you decided to stay and take care of your dad, I was actually excited. How pathetic is that?” She laughed a little bit. “I actually thought we just needed to spend some time together, and things would be the way they used to be. I thought distance was the problem.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember what actually happened, and I still have no clue,” she continued, ignoring me. “You would think that I might remember why I lost my best friend in the whole world, right? You’d think something might stick out.”
“You have Ashley.” I couldn’t help myself.
Jeannie rolled her eyes. “Ashley is a stuck-up, evil little bitch.” She shrugged. “She makes me laugh, but let’s not kid ourselves. If she could make new friends, she would.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said, holding myself very still.
“It was that summer, wasn’t it?” Jeannie asked. “What was so terrible about that summer? Could you finally tell me, please?”
“You must be kidding!” I folded my arms across my chest. “We had a big fight, Jeannie.”
She threw up her hands. “We fought all the time!”
I sucked in a breath, and then blew it out in a sigh.
“Fine,” I said. “You told Rachel that I was dating Kevin Bigelow. And you took pleasure in it, because you wanted to hurt her and because you wanted me to look bad. It was the last straw.”
Jeannie blinked. “You were dating the love of her life behind her back,” she said. “I don’t think even you can come out of that looking good, Meredith.”
“It’s pointless to even talk about this.” I tilted my chin up, as if that could make me rise above it. “It was a long time ago, you don’t remember, and Rachel doesn’t care.”
“Rachel doesn’t care?” Jeannie repeated. She gave me a hard look. “Oh. I get it. You’re hanging out with her now?”
“She’s back in town.”
“And let me guess, you both like to bond over what a super bitch I am, right?” She didn’t take her eyes off me. “Swap stories about high school and how evil I was?”
I couldn’t resist. “If the shoe fits, Jeannie.”
“You’re lucky I don’t kick that shoe right at your head.” She looked like she might do it, too. “You are unbelievable.”
I didn’t like the way she said that.
“That summer was just the last straw,” I told her. “The truth is, I was tired of being ‘the nice one.’ You were just . . .”
“Just what?”
“Mean.” I looked at her. “You can be so mean, Jeannie.”
She looked as if I’d hit her. “I’m not mean!”
“Being mean was your favorite high school pastime and you know it.”
She blinked in confusion. “It was just stupid teenage girl stuff. We all did it.”
“Maybe you did. I didn’t.”
“Of course you didn’t! I forgot that Saint Meredith the Pure and Righteous never had a bad word to say about anyone.” She rolled her eyes. “I forgot how good and sweet you pretended to be.”
“I wasn’t like you,” I threw at her. “I didn’t play people off of each other just because I was bored.”
“No,” Jeannie said in a hard voice, “you just pretended. You never had the guts to actually admit how you really felt about anything. I bet every single person we went to high school with thinks you liked them.”
I blinked at her. “And what’s wrong with that?”
“You’re full of shit!” she exclaimed. “Take Rachel Pike. I bet you’ve conveniently forgotten how many times you were involved in the things we did to her. Poor, innocent Meredith,” she mocked me. “Swept along by evil Jeannie and forced to do horrible things.”
“They were your horrible things,” I retorted. “Not mine. I never wanted to do any of that stuff.”
“And what?” she demanded. “You were born without a spine? If you didn’t want to do something, no one was going to force you, Meredith.”
“No, I’d just have to be Ashley’s target for a week!”
Jeannie dismissed that with an impatient toss of her head. “Ashley was wildly jealous of you and always will be. You didn’t have any reason to care what she thought.”
I clenched my arms tighter around my chest. “This conversation is getting us nowhere—”
“You really do blame me for everything, don’t you?” Jeannie interrupted. “You have such a convenient memory. It lets you make believe that you were Miss Mary Sunshine, doesn’t it?”
“My memory is pretty specific.” I had to talk from between my teeth.
“You’re a liar,” Jeannie told me, her voice quiet and sure. “You have this fantasy in your head that you’re the good girl, the nice girl.”
“That’s because I am!” I retorted.
“Whatever. You wish.” She leaned close. “The difference between you and me is that I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not. Sometimes I’m nice and sometimes I’m good. Other times I’m a raging bitch. That’s the way it goes.” She studied me for a moment. “It’s called a personality.”
“You’ll have to help me out here,” I said in a snotty tone that managed to do the snotty thing while also throwing in some dripping condescension for good measure. “I’m drawing a blank on your nice and good versions.”
That hung there for a moment, alive in the air between us.
“You’re making my point for me,” Jeannie said. Quietly. “The reality is, you couldn’t handle the fact that you did something fucked up to Rachel Pike. Because in your head, that made you as bad as me, and God knows you love feeling better than me, don’t you? So instead of dealing with it, and possibly hearing some stuff you didn’t want to hear about yourself, you decided I was out of your life and you ran away to Atlanta.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Where, from all I hear, you paid penance by becoming a boring plastic girlfriend to some guy who was lucky you even looked at him and probably has no idea what you’re actually like,” she continued.
“You’re crazy.” But I was shaking.
“That version of me you have in your head? The one you’re so righteously indignant about?” She almost smiled. “That’s actually you, Meredith. It’s always been you.”
Naturally, I blew that off, and put it with all the rest of the crazy things Jeannie had said to me across the years. It was her way of ending that
pointless conversation—and it had worked. I’d walked out of the room and left her to stand there with her revisionist history and her insults.
But the things she said echoed around and around in my head. It actually kept me up that night, staring at the ceiling, practically itching with rage.
Obviously, she was insane. Truly mean, and vicious, and after all, she’d always had an amazing talent for striking right at someone’s weak spot, like she was some kind of psychic or something. I hadn’t listened to a word she’d said in years, why start now? What did she know, anyway? She was just mad because I had dared to move outside her control. That was all she cared about: her power over other people and the shitty things she could do if anyone let her down—
She’d called me mean. She’d all but called me a bad person, delusional, hiding from myself and blaming it on her. What kind of person would I be if that were true?
I turned over and glared at the window, hoping it might shatter from the force of my anger. It remained whole. Taunting me.
I was nothing like Jeannie. I was the good one, the sweet one, the nice one. My smile made up for the things she’d done—wasn’t that what Scott had said?
I was nothing like Jeannie.
Except—a tiny voice whispered. What makes you so different?
I’d cheated on my long-term boyfriend, never told him about it, and had made him feel like the bad guy for breaking up with me.
And much as I wanted to deny it, Jeannie had made some points about how I’d ended up with Travis in the first place. Playing perfect. Paying penance. Those words hit chords in me I wanted to deny.
I’d moved back into my parents’ home to take care of my father, of my own free will, and had used my great sacrifice as a weapon with which to bludgeon my siblings.
I had spent years ordering the world around one central concept: how much better my life was far away from everything and everyone in this house. And in case someone missed the memo, I’d beat everyone over the head with my own perfection for years. I’d gone to great lengths just to make sure that everyone knew how incredibly perfect my life was.