90 Days of Different

by Eric Walters

  We stood behind a counter, wearing aprons and hairnets, and served each man and woman as they came by. They were people who lived on or close to the streets of the city. Some were homeless, and others were just hanging on by their teeth.

  It was strange to think that these people had probably eaten better and had a healthier meal than my father and brother had today. I couldn’t write that without my father knowing that’s what I was thinking. I also couldn’t let myself think that way.

  Some of the people were incredibly friendly and thanked us. Others were so shy or wary that they didn’t even look our way. Others looked scared or confused. Those were the hardest for me.

  Each person got the same serving—a big bowl of hot stew, a freshly baked bun and as much coffee or tea as they could drink. I wondered if this was the only meal some of them were going to have today.

  I knew that a whole lot of stories were in the room with us. I assumed most were sad, and some had to be tragic. I guess I can understand why. Still, that didn’t stop some people from being grateful for what they had and what they’d been given, even it was only a bowl of stew.

  There aren’t many homeless people in the suburb where I live. I’ve never seen one. I think they all end up here in the city. At first I didn’t talk to anybody while I was serving. I would like to say that I was trying to respect their privacy, but really I was just a bit confused and scared myself. All of us are afraid of different. Maybe that’s been one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the summer. Being afraid or unsure or uncertain doesn’t mean you shouldn’t or couldn’t do something.

  I started my conversations with small talk when I was helping to give out extra food and cleaning up. Some of them didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Others were just so polite and friendly, and somehow happy despite it all. How could anybody be that strong or that brave?

  I can’t imagine what it would be like not to have a home, to live on the streets. What I know is that this isn’t something anybody would ever want to have happen, but sometimes bad things happen that put people out there. One of the people who works at the center told us that being homeless means you’re almost always going to be hungry and cold and wet and worried and deprived of sleep. These were homeless people, but they were people. Maybe they weren’t that much different from you or me.

  I don’t want to compare my life to theirs, but on some level I think I get it. There’s something about losing a parent that makes you think about losing them both, and that would mean losing your home. Not that I’ve ever thought my brother and I would end up on the streets. But I’ve thought we’d have to go and live somewhere else. That’s something that’s worried me, been part of me, since my mother died.

  I went there today because of something that somebody posted on my wall. I want to tell her she was right and thank her. I have been selfish—so selfish that I hadn’t even thanked Ella for all the work she was doing. Today was a different different.

  Some of the differents I’ve done I know I’ll never do again. I’ve already signed up here for a shift next week.

  DAY 56

  We strolled through the lobby of the hotel. We were each in a dress suitable for an evening event, along with appropriate heels and subtle makeup. Of course, I didn’t know what we were going to do, but I was actually pleased when Ella described the way we were supposed to dress. How much bad could happen when we were all done up like this?

  I’d been careful about what I wore. I wanted to look nice but not too nice. I didn’t want to be show-offy in any way. Wherever we were going, I wanted people to look at both of us. Ella looked really good tonight. I wasn’t sure if I should say anything or not. If I did compliment her, would she say something like, You mean better than I usually look? or Not as good as you or something like that? I was thinking about this too much.

  I was thinking about everything too much. Sometimes I figured it would be better to just forget about all of this stuff Ella was having me do and lose myself in my textbooks.

  Roaming the main hall, we could see that the hotel had almost a dozen banquet halls, and judging from what we’d seen—brides in white dresses and bridesmaids in assorted and sometimes hideous gowns—a number of weddings were going on.

  I’d only been to a few weddings in my life, but they always seemed like such happy events. Two people starting a life together with dreams and hopes, living happily ever after. Happily ever after—I guess that worked sometimes.

  When I was really little, before my mother died, I used to spend a lot of time looking at my parents’ wedding pictures. They were both so young that at first I didn’t even know it was them. My mother was in her white gown, and my father in a ridiculous baby-blue tuxedo that he and all the groomsmen wore. Those tuxes were almost as bad as the hideous peach dresses with big puffy sleeves that my mother’s bridesmaids all wore and—just then two bridesmaids walked by me, dressed as if they could have been from my parents’ wedding! How amazing, how sad, how ugly. I’d read that the bridesmaids are supposed to look bad so the bride looks better. The bride in this wedding would have looked like Miss Universe.

  What struck me was how happy everybody looked in my parents’ wedding pictures. How happy even the two bridesmaids that had just walked by looked. Weddings were supposed to be about happily ever after, and part of that happy was that they didn’t know what the future would hold. It was almost guaranteed to be a mixture of good and bad, happy and sad. What was that line in the vows? For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Death did happen. Eventually to everybody. Sooner for some.

  “So we have to make a decision,” Ella said.

  “And that decision is?”

  “Which wedding we’re going to crash.”

  No surprise. I’d started to think that was probably the reason we were here—it was the only reason I could think of unless I was being married off.

  “You seem pretty calm about this one,” Ella said.

  “Why shouldn’t I be? Minimal chance of death, a survivable level of embarrassment, and you’ll be going in with me, correct?”

  “How can I take pictures if I’m not right there? It’s not like we can ask the wedding photographer to snap a couple of pictures of you—or can we?”

  “Probably not. So what are your criteria for deciding which wedding to crash?” I asked.

  “I think the bigger, the better.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “And we need to blend in. If everybody else is Asian, we’ll probably stand out, and we don’t want to stand out.”

  “You’ve obviously given this a lot of thought,” I said.

  “I give all of these activities a lot of thought.”

  “And I’m grateful. Have I mentioned that?”

  “It never hurts to mention it again. So, next, I want one with a live band that’s playing music I like.”

  “And how does that help us blend in?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t. I just want a live band—it probably means they’ve spent more money on the wedding, and more money probably means better food.”

  “Unless they spent all the money on the band and scrimped on the food,” I suggested.

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Let’s start checking them out.”

  I followed behind Ella as she stopped at the door of each banquet hall and read the sign that listed the event taking place inside. We watched as people went in and out, listened for the music that swelled as doors opened, peeked inside and discussed each possibility. I was quite content to take all the time in the world to walk around and check out each one. The more time we spent out here, doing assessments, the less time we had to spend in one of those rooms.

  “I think this is the one,” Ella finally said.

  “Why this one and not the other four we’ve looked at?”

  “It meets the criteria, plus did you notice the cute guys who j
ust went in there?” She pulled open the door, and the music swelled. “After you.”

  There had to be close to fifty tables, with eight seats at each table, which added up to a lot of people to hide among. Over to the side, by a crowded dance floor, was an eight-piece band. At the front were the bride and groom, seated with their groomsmen and bridesmaids—altogether there were eighteen of them. I couldn’t imagine having that many people in your bridal party. Did anybody really have that many good friends, ones they needed to have in their wedding party? I had Ella and a couple of others, and really, having that many people in a bridal party seemed more like Facebook friends than real friends.

  Anxiously I looked around for somebody to stop us, ask us questions, do something, but there was nobody.

  “We need to circulate,” Ella said. I followed her farther into the room. It felt much safer in the middle than it had at the edges.

  “We don’t want to sit down until we’re sure there’s space at a specific table,” Ella said.

  “I was also thinking we should ask whoever we meet if they’re on the bride’s side or the groom’s side before they can ask us.”

  “Brilliant! Then we can claim we’re with the other side,” Ella said.

  “Even better, we can say we’re the date of somebody on the other side, so we don’t even have to know anything about the bride or the groom.”

  “So smart! So we’re nothing more than random plus-ones who don’t know anything at all about Sonya and Richard.”

  “Who are Sonya and Richard?”

  “They’re the bride and groom. It was on the board. Somebody would be suspicious if you didn’t know the names of the bride and groom. Although, Sophie, I am impressed by your level of deviousness around all of this.”

  “I guess I’ve been learning from the best.”

  “Compliments, compliments, compliments.”

  Ella took my hand and led me onto the dance floor. We squeezed through the couples and took a spot in the middle of the crowd, where there already were half a dozen females—including a couple of bridesmaids—dancing together. We joined in. I loved that girls could do this.

  We had soft drinks from the bar, sampled the munchies, mingled, danced together and were asked to dance by some guys. I was happy when the first one who came up asked Ella to dance instead of me. We’d made up stories and used fake names—she was Meadow and I was Sky, the reverse of our fast-food names. Those names had just popped out of my mouth when we first introduced ourselves to people, and we stuck with them.

  It hadn’t taken long for me to get beyond my initial fear of being discovered and simply start enjoying myself. This could become a habit. Where else could you get free food and drink and be part of a big, happy party?

  “Could everybody please take a seat!” the master of ceremonies said into the mic.

  “No worries,” Ella said. “We’re going to sit at table thirty-eight.”

  Each table had a sign indicating its designated number.

  “Why thirty-eight?” I asked.

  “It’s at the back, which means it’s populated by the least connected people, and I’ve been watching, so I’m pretty sure there are vacant seats. If there aren’t, we’ll just say we’re at the wrong table, and if worse comes to worse, just head out to the lobby until people get up and start dancing again.”

  We joined everybody else shuffling around to get to their seats. It was a slow process as people mingled, talked, laughed and generally continued having a great time. It amused me that more than a few people greeted “Sky and Meadow” by name. We’d already talked to enough people to have new friends. It felt like we belonged, like we were friends.

  We sat down at two of four empty seats at the table and introduced ourselves. The others were friends of the bride, so we were, obviously, friends of the groom. Two other people joined us, and we exchanged greetings. Thank goodness they were friends of the bride as well, so we threw around Richard’s name.

  We settled in as the speeches began. They were exactly what I’d expected. The parents of the bride and groom made speeches about when they were little, there was a short video clip and pictures on the screen behind the bridal party, followed by the maid of honor’s speech and finally the best man’s.

  His speech was like the ones I’d heard at weddings I was actually supposed to be at. It was a combination of praise, insults and attempts at humor that didn’t quite make it. I didn’t understand that whole guy thing where someone puts down his best friend in front of his friends, family and family to be. Males were an entirely different species that we interacted with but didn’t really understand. I was sure they didn’t understand us any better.

  After the main speeches a man with a wireless microphone started going through the room, allowing individuals to add their words or congratulations and giving little impromptu speeches.

  “You’ve enjoyed this one,” Ella said as she leaned in close, talking over the next speech.

  “It’s been fun and easy. Are you disappointed that it wasn’t difficult or embarrassing enough?”

  “Not disappointed at all. You never know how one thing leads to another.”

  There was polite applause as the little speech ended, and Ella jumped to her feet.

  “Over here, over here!” she yelled, waving her hands in the air.

  What was she doing? And then I realized. She had gotten the attention of the man with the microphone, and he was coming our way!

  “Get ready to give your speech to the bride and groom,” Ella said.

  I think she expected that I’d be scared or shocked. Instead I got to my feet and grabbed the microphone.

  “Sonya and Richard,” I said, my voice bouncing around the room. I held the microphone a little farther from my mouth. “I know I haven’t known either of you for long, but I can honestly say I’ve never seen Richard look happier or Sonya look lovelier. I wish you all the happiness and joy you desire and deserve.” I picked up a glass from the table. “To the bride and groom!”

  Everyone picked up their glasses. “To the bride and groom!” they called out, then clinked glasses and drank a toast.

  I sat back down. Ella clinked her glass against mine. “Pretty impressive.”

  “Don’t you remember who won the public-speaking contest in eighth grade?” I asked.

  “Still impressive. A toast to you, Sky. You are certainly becoming different!”

  DAY 57

  I didn’t get home until late, and I slept in even later. I’d searched for some shots of Ella and me dancing but couldn’t find anything without somebody in the background who would possibly give away where we’d been, and of course I couldn’t put up any shots of the bride and groom. Social media made the world a much smaller place, and it was probably best that nobody ever connected Meadow and Sky with Ella and me. Maybe it was pretty cool to crash a wedding, but it wouldn’t be so cool for those people to know about it. Richard and Sonya had seemed like really nice people, but I wasn’t going to test that niceness. Besides, I didn’t want to have our presence take anything away from their day. It needed to be marked by love, not wedding crashers.

  It had been such a wonderful wedding that I’d wished I actually did know the bride and groom. They’d looked so happy, and they made such a nice-looking couple. It would have been nice to put a picture of them on Instagram. Then I had another idea.

  I rushed off to the living room and pulled open the buffet. Inside were lots of family pictures, including my parents’ wedding pictures. I hadn’t looked at the pictures in years, but they were still so familiar to me. I started to search, looking for one very specific picture—I could see it in my mind. I went page by page through the album, and then there it was.

  It was of my mother and father, each holding a piece of wedding cake that they were about to feed to each other. They both looked so happy, so innocent and so young. And really, they were all of those things
.

  In that picture my mother was only six years older than I was now. She was two years out of college and three years before she gave birth to me. Almost exactly fourteen years later, she’d died. None of that was fair. Not to her, not to my father, not to me and not to my brother. But what did fairness have to do with anything?

  I removed the picture from the little white tabs holding it in place. I photographed it with my phone and posted it. I wanted people to see her and my father on that day and know how happy they’d been. That was what weddings were about. What happened later was beyond anything that anybody could control, and it was better that they didn’t know what was coming. No amount of worry, no attempt to control, no hope for predictable, could change some things. They just happened. Control was an illusion. One I was learning not to desperately cling to.

  DAY 58

  “I loved that picture of your parents’ wedding,” Ella said as we drove along.

  “A lot of people liked it.”

  It had been retweeted and liked and commented on more than almost anything else I’d posted. Several followers said how much I looked like my mother. My father told me that all the time, but I’d always had trouble seeing it. Of course, it was a compliment. My mother was really pretty, and so kind. I remembered that, but people were always saying it too. She was also brave. Back then I didn’t realize just how brave she’d been, the way she’d handled herself at the end.

  Ella pulled into a parking lot.

  “We’re going to a country-and-western bar?”

  “Where did you expect we were going dressed like this?”

  We were both in checkered shirts, cowboy hats and cowboy boots.

  “And how are we going to get into a bar when we’re underage?” I asked.

  “All covered.”

  “I guess I should just be grateful you’re not bringing me to a rodeo,” I said.