Chapter 4Wrecking My Own Wedding

I hit the delete key on the email draft and walked into my studio.

If they were so in love, then I would help them celebrate a long and happy life together.

About half of the invitation envelopes were left, stacked in a corner. I found a template online, typed in the guests’ names, and soon a thick stack of new invitations was printing out. It was much faster than the ones I had painstakingly illustrated by hand.

As I unstuffed the original invitations, a sharp pain lanced through my stomach. I looked at the name on the paper.

It was love at first sight with Ethan.

He was the student body president, on stage giving a speech in a crisp white shirt and thin, silver-framed glasses. His voice was calm and steady, giving him an air of cool detachment that made you want to be the one to break through it.

The line of people trying to win him over stretched from the main building to two miles off campus, from high school freshmen who’d had a crush on him for years to seniors, both men and women. I was just one of the countless, unnoticeable ones.

My fundamentals in art were weak, so I was already spending twice as much time as anyone else on coursework and homework. I had no time for “chance encounters.” My only connection to him was through the campus forums online.

My girlish crush didn’t escape Maya. The day after she figured it out, she cornered Ethan in an alleyway not far from campus as he was heading back from his tutoring job.

She had a lollipop stick poking out of the corner of her mouth, her voice cocky and tough. “My girl wants to get to know you. Give her your number.”

Ethan’s gaze fell on me, and he sighed with a kind of weary resignation.

My hand trembled as I scanned his QR code. He held his arm out for me, then turned to Maya. “What about you?”

Maya gave my shoulder a shove and swaggered away. “Don’t have a phone.”

Later…

When did they exchange numbers?

I sealed the last new invitation and clutched my stomach, curling into a ball against the desk.

Every single moment Ethan and Maya had been in the same room replayed in my mind. The way he would turn his head to watch her laugh, the way he’d join in on her antics, go shot for shot with her, drive her home.

And I, like a fool, thought it was just him being kind to my best friend because he loved me.

Once the pain subsided, I grabbed my wedding dress and took a cab to the hotel.

This wedding was the culmination of all my dreams, a fantasy I had spent a year and a half designing and supervising, building from the ground up. Ethan hated all that stuff, so I never asked him to be involved, only getting his opinion on the invitations and the party favors.

Now, I was about to destroy that dream with my own hands and face the brutal truth.

I had all the photos of us taken down, leaving only our two names, stark and bare, at the entrance to the ballroom.

I whispered his name, Ethan, and the suffocating pressure in my chest began to ease.

More than Ethan, I hated Maya.

She was the one who encouraged me to pursue art, the one who was with me through college. She was the best person to me in the world. I had long considered her my family.

And a knife from family always cuts the deepest.

I sat on the top floor of the hotel all night.

As the sky began to lighten, spots of light danced on the floor. I pulled open the curtains and realized it was dawn.

In the ballroom next to mine, the parents of another couple were bustling around, checking the arrangements with joyful faces, ready to celebrate the most important day of their children’s lives.

I looked down at my own shadow. I was used to being abandoned, to being given up on. Being alone didn’t feel so lonely anymore.

At nine o’clock, the wedding cars pulled up to the hotel entrance.

The other bride, the one getting married on the same day as me, walked through the doors surrounded by her loved ones, stepping toward her happy future.

I looked in the direction the cars had come from and saw Ethan in a corner.

He was standing in the shadows, smoking one cigarette after another, until a hand reached out and took the last one from his lips.

Maya ground the cigarette out with her high heel and, without a moment’s hesitation, slapped him across the face. “Ethan, don’t make me lose respect for you.”