The following afternoon, Kate stepped out of the shower, took a look at the rented blue dress hanging on the back of the bathroom door that she’d need to shimmy into for Nessie’s wedding, and wondered if she should just give in. Kate knew that if she called Bernadette crying—openly weeping with desperation—her sister would back-burner the animosity between them and come over to do Kate’s hair and makeup with professional finesse.
But for the first time in a long time, Bernadette was in the wrong and needed to apologize, so Kate was on her own for getting ready. She’d done far harder things alone this summer—like wait on that guy at the Jetty Bar who, when she’d told him the Special of the Day was Ipswich fried clams, had jeered, “Do you even know where Ipswich is?” If she could handle that, she could handle this. With the strategic eye of a seasoned general, Kate reached for the comb and began her attack.
“Wow!” Miles yelled from the front porch as he stumbled back several steps, pretending Kate’s appearance had physically blown him out the door. “Vengeance has never looked quite so…vengeful.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“As you should. And this short hair,” Miles said, reaching out to touch Kate’s locks, “I know I’ve said it before, but it’s badass.”
“So is that,” Kate said, nodding at Miles’s car. She’d specifically asked him to pick her up in the Porsche so they could make a low-key spectacular entrance as they rolled into the Wharf and idled in line for valet parking. Even though they’d both used the staff parking lot all summer, tonight was about being seen.
After so many blurry months of rushing through the employee side entrance and clocking in, wiping down every bottle, marrying all the ketchups, making it a double, splitting the check, brewing coffee, dumping creamers, clocking out, and then clocking back in, it was weird for Kate to walk through the front doors of the Wharf in a floor-length dress with a Prince on her arm.
As soon as they entered the pre-ceremony cocktail area, Kate locked eyes with Thomas, but before she could decide what to do, Mrs. Drew, Nessie’s mom, was throwing her arms around her and making introductions to cousins who chirped like parakeets about what a cute little town Sea Point was while Miles stood by her looking hot and engaged in the cousins’ nonstop platitudes. As she pretended to listen, Kate chanced a quick glance at the woman next to Thomas and clocked Wally, the delicate and flexible woodland nymph she’d seen online, only now in 3D, wearing a slinky teal dress and incredible earrings.
Miles rubbed the small of Kate’s back but when she turned to look up at him with feigned adoration, it wasn’t Miles at all but Thomas, right there, right next to her, with Wally, who was smiling too genuinely for Kate’s liking.
“How are you?” Thomas asked, leaning in for an air kiss as if she were a great-aunt.
“Hey!” Kate said, her voice cracking as it flew out of her mouth, high-pitched and trying too hard.
“I’m Wally,” the pretty nymph said, flashing a mouthful of beautiful teeth.
“And I’m Miles,” the Prince announced, reappearing with two cocktails in hand.
Kate pretended to examine her drink as she watched Thomas’s skull slowly rotate up like a crane lifting something especially heavy. Miles was only a few inches taller than Thomas, but Kate still remembered Thomas lounging on his midcentury couch telling his college friends, “I’m only comfortable if I can see the tops of everyone else’s heads.” There was no way he could see the top of Miles’s head. And now, as Kate assessed her ex, she saw that his hairline was receding. Rapidly.
“I guess we should go find seats,” Miles suggested, steering Kate by the waist and guiding her toward the wharf. Just as she’d hoped, Kate caught Thomas staring at Miles’s hands on her body.
“It’s about that time,” Thomas agreed, withdrawing the case from inside his black jacket. “Hope you guys remembered your sunnies.” He smiled at Kate as he slipped the shades onto his face.
Gripping Miles’s arm for balance, Kate stood in her designer dress while suddenly understanding what Janet Leigh had experienced in the shower of the Bates Motel. Those sunnies drawn meant the knives were out. Even through his polarized shields, Kate felt Thomas’s gaze stabbing her through the heart.
Five or six Decembers ago, Thomas’s favorite sunglass brand had announced a limited-edition collection, the Superba, with only one hundred pairs made in North America, and Thomas had become obsessed with owning a pair. Exploiting every ounce of every type of resource she had—dipping into her savings, taking the LIRR in the middle of a workday, calling not one but two college acquaintances she hadn’t spoken to before or since—Kate had incurred all kinds of social and physical injuries to procure the sunglasses currently shading Thomas’s eyes from hers. The night she gave them to him, he’d put them on immediately, thrown her on the bed, and kept her there the entire evening, all while he wore his new Superbas. It had been ridiculous and funny and fun. It had been the best of what they’d been together.
Miles grabbed Kate’s hand and shook her from the memory. Leading her outside to the actual wharf behind the Wharf for the start of the ceremony, he whispered, “Breathe—you’re doing great.”
He pointed out two empty chairs but someone called Kate’s name—it was Georgina and her wife, several rows back. Liza’s smile lured Kate like a fishing hook. “Sit with us!” Georgina mouthed, gesturing to the open seats next to them.
“Kate Campbell at last,” Liza said, leaning across Georgina and extending a hand. She wore her copper-red hair in a long fishtail braid, and the bold curl of her smile made Kate understand that this was Georgina’s person, the gentle soul to hug all of Georgina’s sharp edges. “We’ve got some catching up to do,” Liza whispered and Kate nodded enthusiastically, wishing she’d remembered to pack gum or mints for the ceremony. Reunions required so much close talking.
“Altoid?” Miles asked, plunking his hand on her thigh and offering her an open tin full of assorted pills in every shape and color. “Make sure to go for a white circle—I can’t remember what half these guys are.” Reassurance flooded Kate’s system—not just from Miles’s pillbox as she picked out what she hoped was a mint—or his knee squeeze, but from her own foresight to invite this charming, handsome man who had already burrowed underneath Thomas’s thin skin. She felt like a Super Bowl champion coach recalling the choices he’d made during the draft—she’d chosen well.
“Can you believe I married such a ginger?” Georgina asked as the groom and his men marched down the wharf and stood at the end of the dock. “She’s like you but with, like, an almost-too-bright filter slapped on.”
Kate grinned as she shook her head at her lap, nervous to look at Georgina, scared she would just poof, disappear, and she’d wake up from this dream. But then Georgina reached out and squeezed her hand three times, which somehow, at least for now, said all that needed to be said.
The bridesmaids paced themselves down the aisle wearing variations of the same lavender dress and the traditional expression of the sartorially oppressed. The layers of foundation caulked on each of the bridesmaids’ faces was now beading in the August sun but could not hide their aggrieved relationship to their body-clinging gowns. Pat Benatar was right—love was absolutely a battlefield, and there was no greater proof than the POWs who now stood at the end of the dock, to the right of the groom, arranged from smallest to largest because there is always humiliation in war.
The music changed and everyone stood like well-trained shih tzus.
Nessie Drew radiated a nubile confidence as she stood between her parents at the back of the wharf, her chin tilted slightly up as she took her first step down the aisle in an off-the-shoulder white gown.
“It’s a Vera Wang,” Georgina whispered, “which surprised me more than if she’d opted for a space suit.”
Kate tried to disguise her chuckle as a cough. Nessie seemed to have gone from rebel child to conventional bride without any fallout—perhaps everyone needed their own self-designated rumspringa in order to grow up and toe the line.
The ceremony was brief—barely fifteen minutes—and soon the three hundred guests were throwing peony petals at the newlyweds as they raced back down the wharf toward their future marital bliss and a cadre of overenthusiastic wedding photographers.
Afterward, merging into the bottlenecked aisle, Kate overheard Miles debating Liza about personalized vows while fitting the definition of perfect wedding date. Kate noted he was objectively the best-looking guy in attendance, and the only person who would be more aware of that fact than she was Thomas. In a meek attempt to hide her wicked grin, Kate reapplied her lipstick and silently congratulated herself on a plus-one well picked.
Although Nessie’s traditional ceremony had been surprising and more than a little disappointing, the Loch Ness monster came out of retirement at cocktail hour: There were six stations, each one offering a full bar but also a different specialty cocktail to honor a meaningful place in Nessie and Rye’s relationship. There were mai tais to represent their annual trip to Maui, a whiskey neat from their Christmas in Osaka, a pisco sour to commemorate their hike along the Inca Trail and up Machu Picchu.
“To be clear,” Nessie announced before disappearing for golden-hour photos, “this is just an extremely bougie version of Theta’s infamous ‘Around the World’ parties!” Several of the bridesmaids whooped and cheered from their lavender casings.
“I mean, if that’s the game—” Kate began.
“And it’s Nessie’s day—” Georgina hedged.
“It just seems like the right thing to do,” Kate shrugged, catching Wally’s eye from across the outdoor tent.
“Wait,” Liza said, finally catching on. “Do you mean we’re trying all of them?”
As the twelve-piece band implored guests to join the dance floor, Kate, Georgina, Liza, and Miles swiftly traveled around the world on empty stomachs. An hour later, Kate didn’t notice that the best man’s speech dragged on for twenty unfunny-inside-joke minutes or that Thomas kept looking over at her. In fact, after the Cuba libre—because of course Rye had proposed on a seawall along the Malecón—Kate didn’t notice anything except that she was having the best night ever. “I’m worried about the bridesmaids’ hair,” Liza said, swaying. “They just look so flammable, don’t they?”
And then the band took a break and a DJ took over.
Kate was chugging water when she heard the triangle. She thought she’d imagined it, but the familiar intro grew and Kate knew—she knew—and so she pretended that she didn’t. She continued to chug with a denialist fury.
The beat dropped.
The Theta girls at tables three, four, and five screamed with recognition and scurried to the dance floor just as Nessie appeared on the band’s empty stage in a mini black leather dress, knee-high boots, and what appeared to be a studded dog collar around her neck. Amid the gasps of her great aunts and uncles, Nessie yelled into the microphone: “If you are female and physically able to dance, I DEMAND your ass on the dance floor now!”
Georgina grabbed Kate’s wrist and took the water glass out of her hand. “I love this song!” she yelled, yanking Kate toward the growing crowd of dancing guests.
Given the circumstances, she knew her refusal would not hold, and so Kate surrendered to yes.
Her shoulders automatically hiccupped in time. The floor was half full of wholly drunk women jerking their limbs every which way, waiting for the singing so they could belt out the lyrics into one another’s open mouths like some kind of holy communion.
Kate had secretly practiced these steps every day for four months. She had them down, and she was five international drinks deep.
Before she could stop, she was starting.
Her muscles found their proper home among the airwaves, each step, each second, drawing a larger divide between Kate and the Thetas. Not everyone was on the floor, but every pair of eyes found Kate’s body, the figure that kept moving to the music, not pausing to fix a strap or put up her hair or murmur something to a friend. She was in it, and she couldn’t stop, and she both had no idea and was fully conscious that three hundred wedding guests were gaping at her.
She heard multiple cat whistles and woops when she Baked the Cookies just right. When she put a snake in her neck for the Fila, Nessie shrieked with glee, and Kate was forced to look left and take a full inventory of the stares. Most people were up from their seats, lining the perimeter of the dance floor—even the Thetas had stopped to circle around her, their feet planted, and their molars visible. The song hit its bridge and Kate popped her hip, ready for the hardest part of the sequence.
Kate threw her head back, sank to the floor, remembered to smile just as the choreographer had said to, as if this weren’t work but joy in motion, which it was. She’d practiced and practiced and now she was the master of her Freaky Freakazoid.
Kate jitterjabbed left. She jitterjabbed right. She did the Biz Markie and she wopped the hell out of the wop and then marched to a stop, just like in the video. When the routine ended, right before the final chorus of the song, Kate reached for Nessie, which was the signal for everyone to pretend that what they’d just witnessed wasn’t a big deal and to join her on the dance floor. Georgina, Liza, and Miles rushed toward her, tongues flopping sloppy exaltations as they moved their bones in time with the music.
“Holy shit, Kate!” She felt two hands clamp down on her shoulder and turned around. “What the hell was that?” Thomas yelled. His Mayflower blue eyes were bright, entertained, elated. It took her a moment to identify the golden beam of his gaze: She’d surprised him the way she used to surprise him before his chosen family became their only friends and she’d tried too hard to fit in. Now, Thomas was looking at her like he hadn’t seen her in years. It was her fearlessness that Thomas had first fallen in love with—the way she had been so honest about who she was before slowly succumbing to whom she thought Thomas wanted her to be. Still panting, beads of sweat collecting at the base of her bra, Kate realized that she’d shrunk over their decade together—not into Thomas’s shadow but into her own. She would have never felt free enough in their apartment to have rehearsed that choreography—Thomas wouldn’t have cared, but she would have worried that he’d privately view it as a waste of time.
Nessie and Rye hurried over along with Mr. and Mrs. Drew—a haze of hairspray, bouquets, and boutonnieres. “The Bravermans just asked if you did bat mitzvahs!” Mrs. Drew shrieked. “They thought we’d hired you to dance like that—a ringer!”
“Sounds like you’ve got a real career ahead of you,” Nessie joked. As everyone continued to jostle her, touch her, tell her how amazing it was, Kate and Thomas continued to stare at each other.
“But seriously,” Thomas said, cutting through the group’s messy chatter, “where did that come from?” There was a hungry glimmer in his eye, but before Kate could answer, Miles swooped Kate up in his arms. Twirling through the air and laughing, Kate knew she was exactly who and where she was meant to be.
Her three-point plan had paid off and hand-delivered to Kate the love of her life—in a tux, no less. But as Kate flew and Thomas stared, she knew he was the love of a past life, not the one she’d discovered this summer, the one in which she’d saved the library, taught a Prince how to bartend, taken nightly walks with her oldest friend, reunited with her soulmate after more than ten years apart, and secretly mastered her own Freaky Freakazoid. In Thomas’s gorgeous blue eyes, Kate found her reflection and knew she was no longer the person she’d dissolved into in New York. She felt a pang of heartache until she realized it was gratitude.