3. Go

We are cheersing to the radiant bride with stolen glasses I brought from home when I make eye contact with Eden’s parents, sitting to the side of the dais like minor royalty.

As they weave through the hall towards me and Laurie, my tongue swells to touch all of my teeth. The wedding cutlery clatters as I rush to slip our branded beer glasses under the heavy pink blooms of the spring bouquet frothing in front of our plates.

But in the conversation they don’t ask me about the $20s that used to disappear from the petty cash envelope in their silverware drawer, or the dimebag once secured in a sawed-off can of Coke in the garage of their old house, or the stick-and-poke Blink 182 tattoo just visible under the shoulder strap of Eden’s sleek white wedding dress, or the fact that I’m here with a woman, or anything else I used to worry about.

They tell me I look good.

“That dress becomes you,” says Eden’s mom. “Is it Portuguese?” Before I answer that it’s not, that it came into my life in high school, long before I moved away, she’s dragging me towards the bride.

Eden’s poreless face briefly cracks in surprise before it settles into her million-watt smile. “It’s been so long!” she says, tilting towards me. I’m confused before I realize it’s a version of a hug that protects the full skirt and long train of her dress. I lean towards her and clasp her shoulders lightly, the way you hold a plastic clamshell with a cupcake inside. “It’s great to see you. I’m so glad my parents invited you,” she says.

Bitterness pools at the back of my throat. Before I can respond, Laurie tugs at my arm and says, “Well, happy wedding! We’ll let you go, get back to your rounds.”

“Everyone from St. Francis, gather up!” says the photographer. Eden’s parents block our retreat and shoo me towards the dance floor. I pinch Laurie’s sleeve in my fingers and drag her with me. The photographer arranges us at the end of the row and gives us a three-second warning before snapping the shot. 

When Eden posts her wedding album six months later, I save that photo and open it in an editing app. I cut out Eden and the other girls I haven’t talked to in thirteen years. I cut out those girls’ balding husbands. I crop the photo down to a thin rectangle, just the two of us: me in flowing blue and white, Laurie in a navy blue suit, our hands held between us, the last shot of us with ringless hands.

2. Set

We are drinking beers at the bar near the beach after work on the first day of summer when Laurie asks me about the strangest thing I saw today and it doesn’t occur to me to lie.

“A wedding invite for my first best friend,” I say.

“First as in oldest? Or first as in best? Best-best?”

“Oldest,” I say. “Eden.” I touch my finger to my glass, then to the shards of chips on the shallow black dish in front of us, gone translucent with grease. I lick them off. The salt helps me drink faster. I don’t have to say I was in love with Eden or that it ended badly. Laurie nods and pushes me her beer.

My sweet Laurie, who flies home so often for her parents’ birthdays that her arrival on their porch on the special day is never a true surprise, says, “I can go with you, if you want.”

I don’t want—I can’t imagine us there, together—but then I hold the empty glass up to the undulating line of the sea and imagine something old and something blue and realize I haven’t been back to my hometown since I came out. Maybe that’s something Eden can give me, even now.

After I finish my third beer and slip our set of glasses into my bag while Laurie pays the bill, I surprise us both by saying yes.

1. Ready

We are sixteen and laying on black satin sheets because Eden’s parents, rich as they are, refused to buy her silk. She’s planning on breaking them in with Carlo Moretti but for now they are ours to slide around on, our hennaed hair and cocoa-buttered legs gliding across the sheen. When she asks me if I’m ready, I close my eyes and say, “Yes.”

“You’re really getting into this.”

My heart beats through the skin of my neck like a lizard.

“You remember how we’ll get away if they catch us?” asks Eden. “You’ll go right, cut through the Coney Island, I’ll go left and get the car, we’ll meet at CVS.”

I nod and gnaw my chewed-up cheeks.

At the thrift store, we stuff our oversized purses with secondhand versions of what hangs in Eden’s closet and has never hung in mine: Lilly Pulitzer golf skirts and knit polos embroidered with horses and chino shorts in meringue colors, peach and lilac and lime.

My bag is full and I’m signaling “enough” when Eden passes me a long dress patterned in blue and white like porcelain, so thin it could be folded and fit onto a spoon if you went about the task slowly enough. But I’m shoving fistfuls of its diaphanous skirt into my bag when the security guard looks our way. He runs towards us, big black boots pounding the scuffed-up floors, and even as I’m sprinting with my bag slapping my thighs, then doing frantic laps around the CVS parking lot, then spending long nights tossing in my own scratchy cotton-blend sheets, then calling Eden’s home phone and begging her parents to put her on the line, one image comforts me, looping endlessly inside my head, a love scene I’ve swiped from a teen soap and superimposed us into: me sliding my new dress over my shoulders and Eden tugging it all the way off.  





Katherine Plumhoff‘s short fiction appears in Passages North, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, Cimarron Review, Pithead Chapel, and X-R-A-Y. Honors include inclusion in Best Small Fictions 2024 and nominations for Best of the Net, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Pushcart Prize.

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