All there was to do now was to steamroll ahead and get this wedding in motion. With or without my mother by my side, this was happening.

Chapter Twenty-three

I was folding my laundry when Steven knocked on my door later that night. As usual he only gave me a couple of seconds before opening it; he never waited for me to say “come in.” He came into the room and shut the door behind him. Steven stood in my room awkwardly, leaning against the wall, his arms folded against his chest.

“What?” I said. Although I already knew.

“Sooo … are you and Jere serious about this?”

I stacked some T-shirts into a pile. “Yes.”

Steven crossed the room and sat at my desk, absorbing my answer for a minute. Then he faced me, straddling the chair, and said, “You realize that’s insane, right? We’re not living in the foothills of West Virginia. There’s no reason you have to get married so young.”

“What do you know about West Virginia?” I scoffed.

“You’ve never even been there.”

“That’s besides the point.”

“What is your point?”

“My point is, you guys are too young.”

“Did Mom send you up here to talk to me?”

“No,” he said, and I knew he was lying. “I’m just worried about you.”

I stared him down.

“Okay, yeah, she did,” he admitted. “But I would have come up anyway.”

“You’re not going to change my mind.”

“Listen, nobody knows you two better than me.” He stopped, weighing his words. “I love Jere—he’s like a brother to me. But you’re my little sister. You come first.

This whole marriage idea—I’m sorry, but I think it’s stupid. If you guys love each other that much, you can wait a couple of years to be together. And if you can’t, you for sure shouldn’t be getting married.”

I felt both touched and annoyed. Steven never said things like “You come first.” But then he called me stupid, which was more like him.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said. I folded then refolded another t-shirt. “Jeremiah wants you and Conrad to be his best men.”

Steven’s face broke into a smile. “He does?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Steven looked really happy, but then he caught me looking at him, and he wiped his smile away. “I don’t think Mom will let me be in the wedding.”

“Steven, you’re twenty-one years old. You can decide that for yourself.”

He frowned. I could tell I’d injured his pride. He said,

“Well, I still don’t think it’s your smartest move.”

“Noted,” I said. “I’m still doing it.”

“Oh, man, Mom’s gonna kill me. I was supposed to talk you out of getting married, not get roped into the wedding,” Steven said, getting up.

I hid my smile. That is, until Steven added, “Con and I had better start planning the bachelor party.”

Quickly, I said, “Jere doesn’t want any of that.”

Steven puffed up his chest. “You don’t get a say in it, Belly. You’re a girl. This is man stuff.”

“Man stuff?”

Grinning, he shut my door.

Chapter Twenty-four

Despite what I’d said to Steven, I still found myself waiting for my mother. Waiting for her to come around, waiting for her to give in. I didn’t want to start planning the wedding until she said yes. But when days passed and she refused to discuss it, I knew I couldn’t wait any longer.

Thank God for Taylor.

She brought over a big white binder with clippings from wedding magazines and checklists and all kinds of stuff. “I was saving this for my wedding, but we can use it for yours, too,” she said.

All I had was one of my mother’s yellow legal pads. I had written wedding at the top and made a list of things I needed to do. The list looked pretty skimpy, next to Taylor’s binder.

We were sitting on my bed, papers and bride magazines all around us. Taylor was all business.

She said, “First things first. We have to find you a dress.

August is really, really soon.”

“It doesn’t feel that soon,” I said.

“Well, it is. Two months to plan a wedding is nothing.

In weddingspeak that’s, like, tomorrow.”

“Well, I guess since the wedding is going to be simple, the dress should be too,” I said.

Taylor frowned. “How simple?”

“Really simple. As simple as it gets. Nothing poofy or frou frou.”

She nodded to herself. “I can picture it. It’s very Cindy Crawford wedding-on- the-beach, very Carolyn Bessette.”

“Yeah, sounds good,” I said. I had no idea what either of their wedding dresses looked like. I didn’t even know who Carolyn Bessette was. After I had the dress, it would feel more real, I would be able to visualize it happening.

Right now it still felt too abstract.

“What about shoes?”

I gave her a look. “Like I’m gonna wear heels on the beach. I can barely walk in heels on level ground.”

Taylor ignored me. “What about my bridesmaid dress?”

I pushed some magazines onto the carpet so I could lie down. I stretched my legs as high as I could and put my feet up on the wall. “I was thinking mustard yellow. Maybe in a satiny kind of material.” Taylor hated mustard yellow.

“Mustard yellow satin,” Taylor repeated, nodding and trying hard to keep the disgust off her face. I could tell she was torn between her vanity and her credo, which was, the Bride is always right. “That could maybe work with Anika’s skin tone. I’m more of a spring, but if I started tanning now, it could work.”

I laughed. “I’m kidding. You can wear whatever you want.”

“Dork!” she said, looking relieved. She slapped my thigh. “You’re so immature! I can’t believe you’re getting married!”

“Me neither.”

“But I guess it makes sense, in a Twilight Zone kind of way. You’ve known each other for, like, a grillion years.

It’s meant to be.”

“How long is a grillion years?”

“It’s forever.” In the air she spelled out my initials.

“B.C. + J.F. forever.”

“Forever,” I echoed happily. Forever I could do. Me and Jere.

Chapter Twenty-five

On my way out to meet Taylor at the mall the next day, I stopped by my mother’s office. “I’m going to look for a dress,” I said, standing in her doorway.

She stopped typing and looked over at me. “Good luck,” she said.

“Thanks.” I supposed there were worse things she could have said than “good luck,” but the thought didn’t make me feel any better.

The formal-wear store at the mall was packed with girls looking for prom dresses with their mothers. I didn’t expect to feel the pang in my chest when I saw them.

Girls were supposed to go wedding dress shopping with their mothers. They were supposed to step out of the dressing room in just the right dress, and the mother would tear up and say, “That’s the one.” I was pretty sure that was the way it was supposed to be.

“Isn’t it a little late in the year for prom?” I asked Taylor. “Wasn’t ours in, like, May?”

“My sister told me they had to push back prom this year because of some scandal with the assistant principal,”

she explained. “All the prom money went missing or something. So now it’s a grom. Graduation-prom.”

I laughed. “Grom.”

“Also, the private schools always have their prom later, remember? Collegiate, St. Joe’s.”

“I only went to one prom,” I reminded her. One had been more than enough for me.

I wandered around the store and found one dress I liked—it was strapless, blinding white. I’d never known there were degrees of white before; I’d just thought white was white. When I found Taylor, she had a whole stack of dresses on her arm. We had to wait in line for a dressing room.

The girl in front of me told her mother, “I will freak out if someone wears the same dress as me.”

Taylor and I rolled our eyes at each other. I will freak out, Taylor mouthed.

It seemed like we waited in that line forever.

“Try this one on first,” Taylor ordered when it was my turn.

Dutifully, I obeyed her.

“Come out,” Taylor yelled from her chair by the three-way mirror. She was camped out with the other mothers.

“I don’t think I like it,” I called out. “It’s too sparkly. I look like Glinda the good witch or something.”

“Just come out and let me see you!”

I came out, and there were already a couple of other girls at the mirror, checking themselves out from the back. I stood behind them.

Then the girl from earlier stepped out in the same dress I had on but in a champagne color. She saw me, and right away she asked, “Which prom are you going to?”

Taylor and I looked at each other in the mirror. Taylor was covering her mouth, giggling. I said, “I’m not going to prom.”

Taylor said, “She’s getting married!”

The girl’s mouth hung open. “How old are you? You look so young.”

“I’m not that young,” I said. “I’m nineteen.” I wouldn’t be nineteen until August, but nineteen sounded a lot older than eighteen.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought we were, like, the same age.”

I looked at us in the mirror as we stood there in the same dress. I thought we looked the same age too. I saw her mother looking at me and whispering to the lady next to her, and I could feel myself blush.

Taylor saw too and said, loudly, “You can hardly even tell she’s three months pregnant.”

The woman gasped. She shook her head at me, and I gave her a little shrug. Then Taylor grabbed my hand, and we ran back to my dressing room, laughing.

“You’re a good friend,” I said as she unzipped me.

We looked at each other in the mirror, me in my white dress and her in her cutoffs and flip-flops. I felt like I was going to cry. But then Taylor saved it—she made me laugh instead. She crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out sideways. It felt good to laugh again.

Three more stores later, we sat in the food court, still no dress. Taylor ate french fries, and I ate frozen yogurt with rainbow sprinkles. My feet hurt, and I was already wanting to go home. The day wasn’t turning out to be as fun as I’d hoped it would be.

Taylor leaned across the table and dipped an already-ketchupped french fry into my frozen yogurt. I snatched the cup away from her.

“Taylor! That’s gross.”

She shrugged. “This coming from the girl who puts powdered sugar on Cap’n Crunch?” Handing me a fry, she said, “Just try it.”

I dipped it into the cup, careful not to get any sprinkles on it, because that would just be too gross. I popped the fry into my mouth. Not bad. Swallowing, I said, “What if we can’t find a dress?”

“We’ll find a dress,” she assured me, handing me another fry. “Don’t get all Debbie Downer on me yet.”

She was right. We found it at the next store. It was the last one I tried on. Everything else had been only so-so or too expensive. This dress was long and white and silky and something you could wear on the beach. It was not that expensive, which was important. But most important of all, when I looked in the mirror, I could picture myself getting married in it.

Nervously, I stepped out, smoothing the dress down on my sides. I looked up at her. “What do you think?”

Her eyes were shining. “It’s perfect. Just perfect.”

“You think?”

“Come look at yourself in this mirror and you tell me, beotch.”

Giggling, I stepped up on the platform and stared at myself in the three-way mirror. This was it. This was the one.

Chapter Twenty-six

That night I tried on my dress again and called Jeremiah.

“I found my dress,” I told him. “I’m wearing it right now.”

“What’s it look like?”

“It’s a surprise. But I promise, it’s really pretty. Taylor and I found it at the fifth store we went to. It didn’t even cost that much.” I ran my hand along the silky fabric.

“It fits me perfectly, so I won’t have to get alterations or anything.”

“So why do you sound so sad, then?”

I sat down on the floor, hugging my knees to my chest. “I don’t know. Maybe ’cause my mom wasn’t there to help me pick it out… . I thought buying a wedding dress was supposed to be this special thing you do with your mom, and she wasn’t there. It was nice with Taylor, but I wish my mom had been there too.”

Jeremiah was quiet. Then he said, “Did you ask her to go with you?”

“No, not really. But she knew I wanted her there. I just hate that she’s not a part of this.” I’d left my bedroom door open, hoping my mom might walk by, might see me in the dress and stop. She hadn’t so far.

“She’ll come around.”

“I hope so. I don’t know if I can picture getting married without my mom there, you know?”

I heard Jere let out a little sigh. “Yeah, me either,” he said, and I knew he was thinking of Susannah.

The next morning, my mother and I were eating breakfast, my mother with her yogurt with muesli and me with my frozen waffles, when the doorbell rang.