Snark and Stage Fright (6 page)

He stopped, took his hand off the doorknob, and turned.

“Oh, I have been looking forward to it all day, believe me. But this day has been exhausting, George. You and Catalina were all but hissing and scratching at the beach, and then when we get back, you have some kind of confrontation with my grandmother. By the way, do you have any idea why I had to spend ten minutes explaining to her that you are not a ‘gold-digger’?”

“Oh, that … I guess, I, um, made a joke to that effect earlier,” I admitted, then added hastily, “but only after she insulted me and my dad and the school where he teaches. She assumed I wanted you for your money, which is insulting to you more than me, really … ”

“Well, explaining your sense of humor to my family is exhausting. And complications like tonight’s, with Forrest. After that … ”

I slumped against the doorway to my room. So I had embarrassed him by my ungracious acceptance of a drunk forced kiss. I feared my lower lip was thrust out like a petulant child when I snapped back, “I’m sorry that my being molested by some alcoholic with grabby hands has created
complications
for your family—”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant … I am trying to figure out what I should do about it all. About how to handle you, and my family—”

“Handle me?” I repeated. I bit my lip then, hoping the pain would distract my brain from releasing the tears pooling in the corners of my eyes. “I complicate things for you around your family because I don’t belong here and everyone knows it. Some have made that pretty clear.”

Michael opened the door to his room and said, “You keep saying that, that you don’t belong here. But George, do you
want
to be here? Because a lot of the time, you don’t act like it.”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. I should have said
I want to be with you
, but I couldn’t explain to him that since arriving on the Cape I had felt like Alice when she goes down the rabbit hole—and everything she says and does is wrong until she doesn’t even know who she is anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if a guard stopped me at the door to the church tomorrow and the Red Queen yelled, “Off with her head!”

Michael’s jaw set in that familiar way again and he said, “Then sleep on it and let me know in the morning,” before he went into his room and closed the door.

I didn’t sleep much that night.

I was too terrified by the idea of walking into that perfect white New England church tomorrow and having all of the wedding guests, all of Michael’s family, gape at me like I was a monster just risen from the sewers and come to terrorize their perfect seaside village. They’d all know I was the horrible girl who had mocked the family matriarch and fallen into some bushes, and would no doubt be buzzing that I had smote Forrest Ritter, international literary treasure. But I was even more scared of going across the hall to Michael’s room and begging him to talk to me, of telling him that it wasn’t just his family and Catalina I wanted to see disappear. I wanted the whole world and everyone in it to evaporate and just leave the two of us on one of his massive beach towels with nothing but the sea and the sand and each other.

I lay on the crisp white sheets of the guest bed, staring up at the blank white ceiling, and I found myself remembering every mean or stupid thing I had said all day. And then my brain cast back further into memory, to a time when I was about ten and my dad was teaching at a little college in Virginia. Before she gave up on all of us, my mom was absolutely rabid about getting my family into whatever local scene we landed in with each move for each of my dad’s short-term teaching positions. On the day I remember, she made enough potato salad to feed a Third World country and forced us all into the minivan to go to some Ladies’ Aid Society picnic.

My sisters and I were all shower fresh and wearing pressed T-shirts and shorts; Mom even had the twins, Leigh and Cassie, in matching tops with rhinestone kittens glittering on their chests. And when we got to the big shady county park and were pulling our picnic blankets and vats of potluck potato salad in Leigh’s little red wagon, my dad had suddenly stopped grumbling about wasting a writing day and stopped dead in his tracks. I’d followed his eyes to the crowd ahead and saw that no one else was in T-shirts and flip-flops. The girls and ladies wore floral sundresses or pastel party dresses and big wide sunhats like they were staging a local production of
Gone with the Wind
, and the men wore pressed white or seersucker slacks and short-sleeved Oxfords. But before my brain could register all of this, my dad had spun around and was headed back for the parking lot.

“We’re going, Pam,” he’d said, and my mom had stammered but turned the wagon around and we all piled back into the car.

“I don’t see why we can’t just stay,” she had sighed as we drove through the brick-walled gate to the park.

I remember looking at Tori, whom I usually counted on to know what was going on, but she had just shaken her head, once, really quickly. We ended up having our picnic on the benches at the elementary school playground. We ate potato salad with nearly every meal for about three weeks. And neither of my parents ever mentioned the event again. Neither did my sisters.

I’m not sure how long it took me to figure it out, but looking back now, it was obvious: we’d left because we didn’t belong there.

And now here I was where I didn’t belong.

I texted Tori, but she didn’t respond. So I dug my sketchbook out of my bag and grabbed a pen. I guess other people write journal entries when they’re upset. I doodle. And an hour later, after I had rendered Forrest Ritter as a grotesque cartoon octopus with a lolling tongue and grabby tentacles, I felt a lot better. Good enough to draw a little sketch of Michael in his pj’s so I could practice more realistic portraiture—“mimetic,” my art teacher calls it—and so I could see him again before morning.

5 
The Pancakes of Penance

I must have drifted off at some point that night, my sketch pad beside me, because before the sun came up there was a knock on the door and I heard Michael whisper, “George? Are you up? May I come in?”

In that instant, all I could think about was how ratty my hair probably looked and how rancid my breath smelled, but he opened the door before I could warn him. He caught my sketchpad when I accidentally kicked it off the bed in an effort to cover my legs and underpants, though he’d seen both before.

“Let me guess—your rendering of Forrest Ritter?” He laughed as he flipped through the pages and landed on the octopus man I’d drawn last night. His laughter stopped suddenly when he’d flipped past a few pages; he looked up in surprise and delight, asking, “And … is this me?”

“Who else wears bear shirt jammies?” I groused, thoroughly embarrassed.

He climbed onto the bed and lay down next to me to admire my portrait of him.

“I’m working on realistic portraiture,” I explained. “Trying to move beyond mean cartoons. I’m taking extra art classes this fall since I’ve gotten all of my math credits done.”

“You’re not joining me in calculus? Who will I cheat off of?” he teased, because (1) he has the highest grade point average in most classes so he doesn’t need to cheat off of anyone and (2) cheating off of me in math would be a guarantee of failure. He put the sketchpad on the white wicker nightstand and looked at me. “You have to like me kind of a lot if you’re drawing my portrait.”

“I do. I’m just … out of my depth here.”

He rested his head on my shoulder so I couldn’t see anymore how his hair was sticking out in lots of directions, some of his curls matted and some having gone haywire overnight. I figured such disarray meant that he hadn’t been to the bathroom yet and had come to see me first thing upon waking up. I wondered if he had even waited for the first glint of daylight to knock on my door and this thought made my heart stop for half a second.

“If you want to go back to Longbourne … ” he began.

“I want to be with you,” I declared as I rested my head against his. “I’m just not too good at all of this.”

He put his arms around me and said with his mouth against my shoulder, “After the wedding today it will all be over. Then it’s just us.”

“That sounds good,” I said, and when we kissed I forgot my concern about the freshness of my breath. I just thought about how good it felt to be held by him and how demented I would have to be to lose him.

After a few minutes, he brushed some hair out of my eyes and looked at me intently, saying, “These people who make you so nervous—they’re my family, and they’re part of me, of who I am … ”

“I know. Remember how long it took me to figure out how lovable you are?”

He rolled his eyes and lamented, “And that should have been so obvious!” as he pulled me tighter to his chest.

We kissed as the sun came up and the little birds in the trees sang their songs to us. Then we knew the day had to start whether I wanted it to or not and Michael decided to go for a run before breakfast.

“I’ll make breakfast,” I declared as he reluctantly slid off the bed and shook out his limbs. “As a thank you-slash-hostess gift to your mom and dad. I’ll make pancakes?”

“Ah, the pancakes of penance.” He laughed, then added quickly, “not that you have anything to atone for with them.”

“Do you think your mom will mind if I use the blueberries she bought on the way here?”

Michael grinned loftily as he turned from the door and said, “She’ll be thrilled. Just double the batch because my dad will eat about ten of them.”

“Seriously? How do you Endicott boys stay so skinny?”

He grinned as he turned to the doorway. “Haven’t you gotten the picture yet, Georgie? It’s superior genetics. Ow.” He ducked to evade the pillow I threw at him. “I’ll see you after my run.”

He returned half an hour later, glistening and red in the face, just as I was delivering a second stack of pancakes to his father’s plate. Dr. Endicott had greeted me that morning with a hug and the promise that I would not see Forrest Ritter at the ceremony or reception as his invitation had been revoked. I’m not sure how Dr. Endicott had accomplished that and I didn’t really want to know. My goal was to simply survive the day without humiliating anyone, least of all myself.

After breakfast, I took a long bath and fretted for a long time over the possibility of doing anything with my hair besides leaving it in its usual artlessly layered state. I considered calling my sister Tori or even Cassie for advice but just gave up. Maybe I’d get lucky and fall off another porch, breaking a limb and getting a pass on the whole event. But when I came downstairs and saw Michael looking truly dapper, I thought it might actually be worth braving his family all day just to see him looking so handsome. He wore a light-colored suit over a dark rose shirt and a green and dark pink striped bow tie—and I swear to you it did not look at all dorky. Still, I must have smirked when I saw it because he said, “Go ahead and laugh, but trust me—most of the men will have on bow ties.”

“And not just those that want to look like Orville Redenbacher, the guy on the popcorn jar?” I teased as his mom ruffled his hair and said to me, “It’s a preppie thing. You’ll see.”

And they were right—most of the guys did have on bow ties.

I’d been so worried that throughout the whole ceremony everyone would stare at me, slapper of intellectual icons, but it turns out that at a wedding, all the attention goes to the bride. But even if they had stared, it might have been worth it when Michael held my hand as we settled into the pew and whispered, “You look really pretty.” A happy bubble swelled up in my heart and he kept his hand wrapped around mine for most of the ceremony and the warmth and strength of his fingers made me relax, little by little. The ceremony was mercifully short, and I managed to stand up and sit down at all the right times by following everyone else’s lead. Afterward, we threw birdseed at Rose and Sterling as they made their way to the limo and then Michael and I followed his parents to their car and drove to the local country club, where the hall looked like a castle made out of rough rock dug out of the beach. He and I walked into the little village and down the main street, looking in the windows of bookstores and the Vineyard Vines store and a bike repair shop just to kill time before the reception officially started. People in beach gear looked at us in our party finery, and I thought one woman, who wore an enormous Yankees shirt over a bathing suit that revealed too much of her butt, was going to snap a picture of us.

“Did she think we’re some kind of human tourist attraction?” Michael laughed as we walked back to the country club.

“Maybe she thought you were a Kennedy.”

“Maybe she knows you are the famous slayer of pervy literary giants.”

I stopped walking at the sound of that, but he was smiling, and he took both of my hands, brushed his forehead against mine, and mock cooed, “My little feminist avenger.”

“Little?” I squawked and he cut off my laugh with a kiss that reminded me how absolutely incredible it is when his lips touched mine. Suddenly I couldn’t wait for the reception to be over.

In the banquet hall, we shared a table with his cousins and, unfortunately, Catalina as well. Her parents were also in attendance, but I guess she was seated with us as the not-quite-children’s table. She looked really striking in an emerald-colored sheath and she spent most of the first course telling Michael about all the people they knew that I didn’t and practically cheered when the lobster was served. I ate both my salad and Michael’s because the restaurant had forgotten the request for a vegan meal. Michael wanted me to say something about it, assuring me that his aunt would be more upset about not getting something she had ordered than she would be with me for drawing it to her attention, but I wasn’t going to chance it. I talked for a long time with one cousin who had been to Burkina Faso with the Peace Corps and then an older distant cousin of Michael’s who made me laugh so hard a few times I feared the wine would fly out of my nostrils. He was an actual writer for one of the late night shows and knew everybody in Hollywood, but he just acted like a regular guy. When he saw me chatting away as if I had never had an angsty social moment in my life, Michael winked at me.