Girls In White Dresses (5 page)

“Just because she’s not fat anymore, she’s a huge slut? I mean, come on,” Shannon said.

“Maybe she wants a boyfriend,” Ellen suggested. “I don’t think she’s ever really had a boyfriend before.” She didn’t like it when they talked about Margaret Applebee.

“Well, she certainly doesn’t have a boyfriend now,” Lauren said. “She probably just has herpes.”

“Oh, Lauren.” Ellen looked at her like a disappointed mother and shook her head a little. “What’s going on with Tripp?” she asked, to change the subject.

Lauren shrugged. “Not much. We see each other when we see each other.”

Tripp and Lauren sometimes went days without speaking. She kept thinking they would either decide to start really dating or stop seeing each other altogether. But things just kept going like they had been. Most of the time, she saw no reason to change this. Once, she saw him go home with another girl from Life’s Too Short and it felt like someone slapped her. It was over, she decided. But then a week or so later, she saw him and made no mention of it. She would ignore it, she decided. After all, it’s not like they were exclusive or anything. He was just a good way to pass the time until something better came along.

At the end of July, their friend Sallie called to tell them that she was engaged and getting married in a month. And also, one more thing: She was pregnant. They weren’t sure what to say, so they told her congratulations. They couldn’t believe it. Sallie and Max had dated in college, where Max was known for doing keg stands until he vomited and Sallie sometimes forgot she had a boyfriend and kissed other boys at the party. They were getting married? They were having a baby?

“I think it’s exciting,” Ellen said.

“You think it’s exciting that their lives are over?” Lauren asked her. She was appalled.

“But you know them,” Ellen said. “They’re in love.”

Lauren snorted. “They’ll be divorced in five years,” she said.

“I hate to say it,” Shannon said, “but I kind of agree.”

Lauren learned something important at Sallie and Max’s wedding: You never want to be the first one of your friends to get married. If you are, just resign yourself to the fact that your wedding will be a shit show. Most people are still single, open bars are a novelty, and no matter how elegant the wedding was planned to be, it will wind up looking like a scene out of
Girls Gone Wild
.

They almost didn’t make it to the actual ceremony, because Lauren was throwing up all morning. “Please wait for me, you guys,” she kept saying before she ran back to the bathroom. “I’ll be ready in just a minute.”

They had five friends in town for the wedding, camped out all over the apartment on couches and air mattresses. When their guests had arrived the night before, they’d done their best to be good hostesses and show them a fun night, but had ended up staying out way too late. It was all they could do to shower and put on clean dresses.

“Is this going to be a long mass?” their friend Mary asked. She had gotten ready and then lain down on the couch to take a nap in her dress.

“You’re going to get wrinkled,” Ellen told her.

“I really don’t care,” Mary said. She kept her eyes closed.

Ellen was the only one who seemed to be excited about the wedding. She hadn’t stayed out too late the night before, and she was ready on time, looking fresh and ironed. She sat on the edge of one of the couches with her ankles crossed and watched as the rest of them scrambled to get ready.

The wedding was a mess. Everyone stampeded the bar and ordered tequila shots until the bride’s father demanded that the bartenders stop serving them. Their friend Isabella was one of the bridesmaids, and she informed them that the bride’s mother had been crying all morning. “She kept saying, ‘I can’t believe this is how it’s happening,’ ” Isabella said. “It was awful.”

Their friend Joe threw up on the dance floor and it had to be cleared and cleaned before anyone could continue dancing. One of the bridesmaids was found passed out in the bridal suite and had to be sent home. People made out in corners, girls fell down and ripped their dresses, and finally the band stopped playing and everyone was kicked out and decided to go to Life’s Too Short. Shannon kept slurring, “Their lives are ruined, you know. Their lives are ruined.”

Louis was at the wedding and they all knew this meant Ellen would cry. Louis and Ellen danced together at the reception and then sat alone at a table in the bar. They were sure that Louis would stand up at any moment and storm out, but every time they looked over, Ellen and Louis were laughing and he was touching her knee.

Tripp was at the bar and when he saw Lauren he said, “Oh, you’re here?”

“See?” Lauren said to Shannon. “Chivalry is not dead.”

Tripp didn’t say anything, and Lauren had a feeling that he didn’t know what “chivalry” meant. It was becoming clear that he was stupid. She would have to end it. But before she could say anything else, he walked away.

“What a loser,” Lauren said. Shannon nodded.

The night ended when Tripp and Margaret Applebee left together. Lauren started crying, and Shannon and Isabella decided they should go to the diner and eat. Lauren ordered eggs and corned beef hash, poured ketchup all over her plate, and didn’t eat anything.

“He’s not worth it,” they said to her. She went home, left her dress in a pile on the floor, crawled into bed, and cried until she fell asleep.

By the time Lauren woke up the next morning, most of their guests were gone. Only Isabella remained, sitting on the couch with Shannon. They both looked like hell.

“Where’s Ellen?” Lauren asked.

Isabella shrugged. “She didn’t come home. We think she stayed at Louis’s.”

“I can’t believe she went home with him,” Shannon said.

“Who? Ellen or Margaret Applebee?” Isabella asked.

“Both, I guess. But I was talking about Ellen,” Shannon said.

“Can we please not talk about Margaret fucking Applebee?” Lauren said. She could feel Shannon and Isabella exchange a look behind her back.

Ellen came home later that afternoon, carrying all of their usual supplies for a Bloody Mary–and–summer sausage picnic. She hummed as she mixed together a pitcher of drinks, and bounced around the kitchen getting glasses and knives.

“You seem happy,” Shannon said.

“I am,” Ellen said. She smiled. “You guys, I had a really good night. Louis and I decided to get back together.”

“Oh,” Lauren said. She waited for someone else to be supportive.

“You can’t date him,” Shannon finally said. “He’s awful. He’s awful to you, and he’s awful to us, and he’s just awful.”

“He does seem to make you really unhappy most of the time,” Isabella said.

“Do you really think that?” Ellen asked. She looked straight at Lauren. “Lauren,” she said. “Do you think that?”

Lauren had no idea why she said what she said next. Sometimes she thinks back to that moment and imagines that she could take it back. She blamed it on being hungover, on the wedding, on Margaret Applebee, but really she had no excuse. Because what she said was “He’s just so ugly.”

Ellen was cutting the summer sausage when Lauren said this, and they all watched the knife slice right through her finger. Her hand was completely covered in blood before she even looked down.

“Holy shit,” Shannon screamed. Isabella ran inside to get a towel, and Shannon called 911. When they answered, she apologized and then spent five minutes on the phone explaining why they didn’t need an ambulance.

“Come on,” Lauren said. “We’ll take a cab to the hospital.”

Ellen’s face was white and she refused to take the towel off to look at her finger. “I think I cut it off,” she kept saying. “I think I cut off my whole finger.”

Lauren assured her that her finger was still attached. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll just need a few stitches.”

They had to wait over two hours in the emergency room. A man sat across from them with his head leaning against the wall. When he was called to go in, he left a bloody headprint behind.

Lauren and Ellen didn’t talk much while they waited. Ellen looked like she was going to pass out any second, and Lauren didn’t think it seemed like the right time to continue their conversation. Maybe Ellen hadn’t even heard her when she’d called Louis ugly. It was possible, she thought. They sat in silence until the doctor called them in. Lauren walked back to the examination room even though Ellen hadn’t asked her to.

The doctor looked at Ellen’s finger quickly and started numbing it for stitches. “That’s a nasty cut,” she said. “How did this happen?”

“A knife,” Ellen said. “It was summer sausage.”

“Summer sausage bites back,” Lauren said. Ellen looked at her with her eyebrows wrinkled together while the doctor stitched up her finger.

Lauren apologized later, but they both knew it was too late. “I don’t know what’s best for you,” Lauren said. “You’re the only one who knows that.”

Ellen said she understood. “Lauren,” she said. “I get it. You were just being a good friend. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

When Ellen and Louis got engaged, Shannon screamed. “Well,” she said, after she stopped screaming, “I guess some people just want to be miserable.” They all went to the wedding and tried not to be somber. After all, she was their friend and they wanted her to be happy.

They lost touch with Ellen. Not all at once, but little by little, so that they didn’t even notice until it had already happened. Maybe it was hard for Ellen to be around them, since she knew they didn’t approve of her marriage. Maybe their lives just went different ways—Lauren and Shannon both moved to New York and Ellen moved to a house in the suburbs. Sometimes they thought that Louis was behind it, that he had forbidden Ellen to see them. In the end, Lauren thought it was probably a combination of everything, but she knew they would never really know.

Lauren talks about that summer a lot. It has a point, a moral of some kind, but she’s not quite sure what it is yet. When people tell her that their friend is marrying a guy they hate, she says, “Have I got a story for you.” When she gets a Christmas card from Sallie and Max with a picture of their two little boys on it, she shows it to people and says, “You’ve got to hear about this wedding.” And whenever she’s at a party and someone serves summer sausage, she says, “Did I ever tell you about my friend Ellen?” and if the person she’s talking to shakes their head no, she says, “Well, let me tell you. We had this friend. And our friend Ellen, well, Ellen dated ugly boys.”

I
sabella didn’t want to go to the wedding.

They were Ben’s friends. She had never met the bride or the groom, and besides, she was fairly certain that she and Ben were going to break up any day. While she was getting ready that morning, she sat down on the bed and said, “My head hurts.”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Ben said. He was tying his tie and not looking at her. She knew he really wouldn’t care if she didn’t go and that pissed her off.

“Your tie is crooked,” she said, and stood up to finish getting ready.

They were early to the church, which never happened with them. Ben hated weddings. During the ceremony, he’d roll his eyes or sometimes say, “Oh
God,
” if the couple read their own vows or started to cry.

They sat in the pew and Isabella paged through the program. “You know who’s going to be here?” Ben asked. “Mike’s girlfriend. You know, the one that looks like JonBenét.”

Isabella had been hearing about this girl for months but had never met her. A while back, Ben caught her lying on the couch watching
E! True Hollywood Story: JonBenét
. “Why are you watching this?” he asked.

“There’s nothing on,” Isabella said. Little girls marched across the stage with their faces full of makeup. JonBenét stood in the middle of them, twirling an umbrella and smiling.

“This is really creepy,” Ben said.

“I know.” Isabella couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. They were such little girls, but their hair was so big.

“I know a girl who looks just like her,” Ben said.

“Like who?”

“JonBenét,” he said.

Isabella turned to him. “You know a
little
girl who looks like her?” she asked, and Ben shook his head.

“No,” he said. “You know my buddy Mike? His girlfriend looks just like her. It’s fucking creepy.”

Isabella didn’t believe him. “Ask my friends,” he said. “I swear, she looks just like her.”

All of his girlfriends confirmed the story. “She’s a dead ringer for JonBenét,” they said, and then they laughed. “Plus,” they told Isabella, “she’s crazy. She’s obsessed with getting married and talks about it all the time. She introduces herself to people as ‘Mike’s girlfriend and future fiancée.’ She sends him pictures of engagement rings constantly. She buys bridal magazines and carries them around with her!”

Isabella wasn’t sure she believed all of it, but she still couldn’t wait to meet her.

She looked around the church for someone who fit the description. “Is that her?” she whispered to Ben, and pointed to a small blond girl sliding into a pew in front of them.

He shook his head and smiled. “No,” he said. “When you see her, you’ll know. And you’ll die.”

Ben hadn’t officially moved in, but he was in between apartments and his stuff was overtaking Isabella’s place. When the lease was up on his old apartment, she’d told him he could stay with her until he found a new place. They hadn’t talked about it since. That was three months ago.

“I can’t believe he’s still staying with you,” Lauren said one night. “You only let me stay with you for two weeks.”

“I never kicked you out,” Isabella said.

“Yeah, but you made me sleep on the couch after the first two days,” Lauren said.

“That’s because you licked me in your sleep,” Isabella said.

“I told you, I was having a dream,” Lauren said.

“That doesn’t make it okay,” Isabella said. “Anyway, I’m sure Ben will find a place soon.”

“Maybe you should ask him,” Lauren said. But Isabella didn’t want to, which she knew probably meant that she really should. Instead, she decided she wouldn’t worry about it for a while.