We crash the wedding reception with style. Kind of by accident, Nick says he’s a friend of the groom, while I say I’m a friend of the bride, and so we end up pretending we just met, which in some ways, it feels like we have.
We listen to the toasts, eat cake, and watch a video that shows the bride and groom as babies, as kids swimming and camping and doing various sports and performances, as lanky awkward teens, then young adults studying and having fun, and finally, as two people who found each other—this couple so very in love. The video makes it feel like their entire lives were a series of moments that has led up to this one night. This moment. Now.
Maybe that’s true. I can’t hold on to being cynical about their chances at happiness. They seem like nice people. Normal people. They seem happy. In spite of everything, I can’t help but wish them well.
Then the music starts up again, and everyone is dancing.
“I’ve never been to a dance before,” Nick tells me as we sit eating a second piece of wedding cake, watching people pair up on the dance floor. The cake is vanilla with vanilla frosting, but it’s one of those cakes that proves that simple can be amazing. “I asked this girl at school, Lola, if she wanted to go to homecoming with me, but she didn’t think that was a good idea.”
“She said no?” I lick frosting off my fingers.
“She said, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’”
“Ouch.”
“Agreed. It could have been worse, though. She could have said, ‘No way, loser! Get away from me!’ I think she was at least trying to be polite. And anyway, my friends and I beat the Dragonstar Arena on veteran that night, and that wouldn’t have been possible if I’d been at homecoming with Lola, so, I figure it was destiny.”
“Destiny, like the game.”
“No, the real thing.” He hands his empty plate to a passing waiter. “As in fate.”
“I go to a private Catholic school. All girls.”
“You’re Catholic?” He sounds surprised. Maybe because he thinks Catholics prefer to wait until they’re married to have sex, and that doesn’t exactly seem to be my modus operandi.
I shrug. “I am for the purposes of school, which basically means I go to mass once a week.”
“So you’ve never been to a dance, either,” he says.
“Well, yes, I have,” I admit. “I went to prom this year.”
“Oh. With the asshole.”
“Yes.” I remember the way my prom dress burned when I tossed in the fire in my backyard. It was pretty satisfying, watching it go up in flames like that. I turn my focus back to Nick. “So you’re a dance virgin.”
“I guess so.”
I stand up. “Not if I can help it. Not anymore.” I hold out my hand. “Dance with me.”
He takes my hand and jumps to his feet, like he’s been waiting for me to ask. “All right, let’s do this, doll.”
I stifle a smile. “You’re so weird.”
“You know it.” He catches his bottom lip in his teeth and does what could be interpreted as a disco move. “Now this is a first I can handle.”
I follow him onto the dance floor. The guy’s singing about a full moon rising, and dancing in the light, but there’s only a white sliver of moon in the sky above us. Nick spins me and then pulls me close to him, his feet moving steadily from one spot on the floor to another and back again. He isn’t a great dancer. But he tries. That counts for a lot.
I wind my arms around his neck. I am too tall to lay my head on his chest, like Afton did the other night with Michael, but I kind of lean my head against Nick’s. Not cheek to cheek, exactly, but close enough. I close my eyes and feel the tension slowly drain from my shoulders.
“It’s been a good night, hasn’t it?” Nick says. “Even if it had a bumpy start.”
“I’m sor—” I stop myself from apologizing. Sigh. “I think we managed to salvage it.”
“And we always have next year, right?”
“Right,” I say softly, but I don’t believe that, deep down, because I can’t imagine that what was wrong this year is somehow going to be right, next year. But I don’t want to think about that now. I want to dance. Breathe. Be myself. “Crashing the wedding was a good idea,” I admit.
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty smart,” he says.
“Humble, too.”
“Of course. And you forgot to mention that I am smoking hot.”
“How could I forget that? I can’t even think straight, right now, because you’re so blindingly attractive.”
We both laugh. Then silence falls between us.
“I want you to know, it wasn’t about you not being sexy,” I say after a long moment.
He doesn’t answer, but his Adam’s apple jerks in his neck.
“I did think you were sexy. I mean, I still do. It wasn’t about that.”
“Okay.”
“It just didn’t feel right. That’s all.”
“I know. I really didn’t know what I was doing.”
“No, the thing is, I just found out that—” The words catch in my throat. The secret is stuck there, and suddenly I want nothing more than to get it out. So I make myself say it: “My mom’s having an affair.”
He stops dancing for a second, but I hold on and continue moving, keeping us close so he can’t see my face. He falls into the rhythm again, the slow back and forth of our feet.
“How did you find out?” he asks.
I tell him everything. About me blundering into the hotel room that day, yes, but also about Mom and Pop and how solid I thought things were between them until recently. I even fill him in about Afton and her drama. It takes dancing to two more songs.
Nick doesn’t say much. He’s the epitome of a good listener, quietly taking in all that I have to say. Then he simply says, “No wonder you put pepper in Billy Wong’s tea.”
I bark a humorless laugh. “That was a mistake.”
“Was it, though? I’m almost sorry I stopped you.”
“It was stupid. I’m glad you stopped me. It wouldn’t have fixed anything.”
“Yeah, but maybe it would have made you feel better.”
“Probably not.”
He clears his throat. He has something he isn’t saying.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing. It’s just, I’m disappointed in Billy. And it makes me remember when . . .” He trails off.
“Remember what?”
“No, we’re talking about you,” he says. “Not my drama.”
“Please, let’s stop talking about me. I just spilled all the sordid details of my life, so it’s only fair for you to get to do the same. Tell me. What did you remember?”
He takes a breath. “Okay. I was thinking about when my mom came to see me.”
“Your mom? I don’t think I’ve ever met her.”
He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t have. She was a resident when she and my dad had their thing. And you know, it’s not like how they show on TV, with surgeons hooking up with residents all the time. That doesn’t usually happen, right?”
“I don’t know. My mom’s life strongly resembles a soap opera right now. But yeah, I get it. So your mom was a resident.”
“She dropped out. She had me. And then she quit medicine.” He pauses. “I think because she was an addict. She had to have a C-section when I was born, because I was trying to come out backward, and then afterward she went downhill, like a lot, started talking about how she was fantasizing about throwing me in the pool at her apartment, so my dad came and got me. And then later she got caught stealing pills from the hospital, and she got kicked out of the program, and she just kind of left. Until this one night. When I was ten.” He drops his gaze to our feet. “She showed up at our house really late. I didn’t even know her. I wouldn’t have known she was my mom except she kept calling me ‘sweetie’ and touching my face. Her eyes were like black, black holes. I guess that means she was high or something.”
“Wow, that sounds like it sucked.”
He nods. “The worst part was, she wanted to come back. She asked my dad if they could try again. She said it just like that. ‘Please, let’s try again.’”
“Oh god. What did he say?”
“He said no. And then she left.”
“Wow. I’m sorry.”
“He was right to say no. I understood that, later. She was a mess. She’s still a mess.”
I grab his hand, and we intertwine our fingers.
He bows his head for a minute. Then he says, “It was two days after that that we went to Rio.”
“Oh. Ohhhh,” I say.
“I was with the group, shopping at the street market, the one with the word hippie in it.”
“I remember.” Afton and I were fascinated by the embalmed piñatas.
“And there was this lady selling bracelets—bahia bands, they’re called, made out of different colored ribbons. She explained that I could wrap the bracelet around my wrist and tie three knots, and I could make a wish for each knot, and then I had to wear the bracelet until it fell off on its own, and then my wish would come true.”
I see where he’s going with this.
“So I bought three bracelets, two white ones and a dark blue one—the colors had different meanings. I thought I would wear one myself, and give one to Dad, and then, if I ever saw my mom again, if she came back, I’d give one to her, and she could wish to get better and then maybe she really could come back and be my mother.”
“Oh, Nick.”
He clears his throat. “So, yeah. That’s what I was doing. I was buying wishes. And when I looked up, everybody was gone. I wandered around for a while calling for my dad, and then this man tried to help me, I think, but I got scared and I ran away from him, and then I was really lost.”
“Everyone totally lost it when they realized you were gone. Your dad was frantic.”
Nick nods. “Finally I sat down in a corner, next to a stray dog, and I tied that bracelet around my wrist and I used up all three wishes wishing I was home.”
I squeeze his hand.
“And then Billy Wong found me,” Nick says softly. “He said, ‘Hey, buddy,’ and he sat down next to me, and I recognized him as someone from the group, and threw myself into his arms. He just held me for a while. While I cried. He hugged me, and he said I was safe, and he said, ‘I got you.’ I never forgot that. And then he carried me back to my dad, even though I was kind of too big for that.”
I pull away. “No wonder you thought Billy Wong was the best.”
He sighs. “Right? I guess the moral of the story here is that a person can’t be summed up by a single action.”
I don’t know what to say to that, except, “Well, I’m glad he was there for you.”
“And I’m sorry he was there, for you.”
We stop dancing. Then, at that exact moment, the singer with the ponytail taps the microphone to get our attention. “And now the bride would like to dance with her father, while the groom dances with his mother.”
I immediately feel tears start to well up. I cast a desperate look at Nick, who also looks stricken. “Oh shit. We have to get out of here.”
He takes my hand and we just run, away from the reception, away from everybody, away, just away, until the grass under our feet gives way to sand and we reach the ocean. Nick takes off his jacket for me to sit on. Then he produces a rumpled tissue from his pocket. He hands it to me. “It’s clean.”
I dab at my watery eyes. “This trip is going to kill me.”
But then I look up. Away from the lights of the party, the sky has cracked open over our heads. I gasp. I have never seen stars so bright.
“It’s because there’s no light pollution,” Nick says as we gaze raptly upward. “We’re on a largely uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So everything’s very clear.”
“That feels like a metaphor,” I whisper.
He laughs. “I don’t know what it’d be a metaphor for, but it’s beautiful.”
“I could never paint this.” I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet salt air.
Nick takes off his shoes and socks and buries his toes in the cool sand next to mine. “You’ll just have to remember it.”
“I will.”
The breeze ruffles his hair. “Me too.”
This will be the beach I remember from now on, when I think of beaches. This beach and this night.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome, but for what?”
“For telling me your story. And for being my friend tonight.”
He gazes out at the water, smiling sadly. “I was hoping I’d get to be more than a boy who’s your friend. But that’s okay. I could use a friend, too.”
I understand. He thinks I’m giving him the let’s-be-friends speech. I shake my head.
“You’re more than that. I don’t know what we are, exactly, but we’re more than friends.”
He turns and looks at me, his smile happy again—I can tell, even in the dark. At the exact same moment we lean toward each other, closing the distance between us until our lips meet somewhere in the middle.
It’s the perfect kiss. It isn’t too long or too short, too dry or wet, too soft or firm. It’s simply two people who want to tell one another what we feel without having to use words.
At some point we come apart again. I touch his face, his smooth boyish cheek, and smile at him. He tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear.
“That was epic,” I whisper.