Authors: Liz Appel
So I appreciated what she was trying to do. But she was forgetting one thing: I loved Chase Somers.
“I don’t want anyone else,” I muttered.
“Too bad.” She smiled. “Because we’re going to find you someone else to want.”
SIX
I stopped for groceries on my way home from work. Business had been slow at Wonder World and I’d spent the better half of my shift taking inventory of the greeting cards.
So, apart from Jill, no one had said anything to me about the wedding.
Until the cereal aisle.
“Those should fit nicely around your finger.”
My grip tightened on the box of Frosted Cheerios I was holding.
Jenna O’Rourke stood behind me, her hands resting on a shopping cart.
“Excuse me?”
She smirked. “You know, since Chase didn’t put a ring on
your
finger.”
I could feel the cardboard buckle as my fingers clenched.
“They’re in Hawaii, you know,” she said, adjusting the sunglasses perched on her blond head. “Having the best time.”
What was I supposed to say to that?
“And they had a good laugh over your appearance at the wedding.” She smiled thinly. “We all did, actually.”
I turned away from her so she couldn’t see my cheeks burn. I didn’t know what I’d expected after that stunt. I mean, I knew what I’d wanted to happen. I’d wanted Chase to run away with me. To live out the song, to get the guy, to be that happily ever after. I never gave much thought to alternative outcomes.
“I’m surprised you weren’t better dressed for the occasion.” She selected a box of Kashi GoLean and tossed it into her cart.
I’d spent fifty bucks on the dress at Forever 21. What was wrong with it?
“I mean, what if Chase had changed his mind?” she asked, her eyebrows raised. “If you’d been wearing a wedding gown…why, you could’ve just stepped right in and taken Angela’s place!” She erupted into peals of laughter.
I pushed past her, toward the produce section. I was sure my cheeks were as red as the bin of apples in front of me.
“You could have had her cake, her reception, her gifts.” She snickered. “Even her honeymoon…”
My stomach rolled. How could I not have seen this coming? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Is everything OK?”
It was Paul, a blue shopping basket hanging on his forearm. It was filled with single-serving packages of Stouffer’s frozen lasagna.
Jenna quickly smoothed her hair and fixed an innocent smile on her face. “Oh, hi Paul.” She looked him over, her eyes zeroing in on the basket. “You like lasagna? You should totally come over to my place sometime—I make a kick-ass lasagna.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” He glanced in my direction. “You alright?”
Jenna answered for me. “Everything’s perfect. We were just reminiscing about the weekend. Weren’t we, Bonnie?”
I tried to nod my head. My stomach felt funny, but my head did, too, like there was suddenly more air floating around inside of my brain. It was a likely possibility—I was pretty sure a lack of brain cells was to blame for all of my recent acts of stupidity.
“Lay off, Jenna,” Paul said.
She frowned. “I’m not doing anything. Lighten up.”
Paul ignored her and stepped closer to me. “You don’t look so good.”
“Awesome. Thanks a lot.” I leaned against the cart.
“No, no. That’s not what I meant,” he stammered, a rush of red spreading from his neck upward. “You look…sick.”
I didn’t want to admit that I felt sick, too, all queasy and light-headed from my confrontation with Jenna. I knew this was just a precursor of things to come—I’d never live down what had happened at Chase and Angela’s wedding. Never. Maybe my time in Mansfield was coming to an end. Maybe I did need to think more seriously about becoming a hermit.
“Bonnie?” Paul spoke to me through a tunnel, his voice hollow but alarmed.
I tried to answer but I couldn’t. Because the grocery store started to spin and everything went black.
SEVEN
“What happened?”
Paul’s face was inches from mine. “Relax. You fainted.”
My hands were wet and sticky. So was my back. So was everything. I tried to focus my eyes but everything was blurry and lit-up, like I’d just spent fifteen minutes staring into a sky filled with fireworks. I attempted to sit up but he held me down.
“Hang on. Jenna went to grab you something to change into.”
“What?” I pushed his hands away and raised myself to a half-sitting position.
I was sprawled on the floor of the produce aisle, covered in something red and sticky.
“You fainted,” he repeated. “And, uh, you sorta took out the tomato display on your way down.”
My shoulders sagged and I sighed. Of course I did. A couple of curious onlookers had stopped and were staring at me, their expressions a mixture of horror and amusement. It reminded me of the looks on the faces of the wedding guests and I immediately wondered which event they were reacting to, my current situation or my past transgression.
Jenna appeared then, holding up a Minnesota Gophers shirt that looked more like a sail.
“This is all I could find,” she said, breathless.
Paul frowned.
“It’s a grocery store, not Target,” she said. “She should be happy I was able to find something that wasn’t covered in tomato paste.”
Paul took it from her. “Can you stand?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
He held out his hand to me and helped lift me off the floor. Jenna waited, watching.
“The bathroom is over by the deli,” he said. “You can go in there and at least change your shirt.”
I shuffled out of the produce section and toward the deli counter. Paul hovered next to me, his hand on my elbow. “I need to pay for it first.”
He ripped the tag off the shirt. “I got it.”
“No.”
He steered me toward the bathroom. “Don’t argue with me. Just go change.”
“Do you need help?” Jenna’s voice was laced with honey. I didn’t know she’d followed us.
“You’ve already done enough,” Paul said.
Her face brightened and I knew she missed his intended meaning. “OK. Well, let me know about that lasagna. I’m free tonight…”
“Yeah. I’ll let you know.”
“Here.” He shoved the shirt into my hands. “Go change. And don’t leave. I’ll meet you back here.”
I opened the door to the women’s room and got a look at my reflection in the mirror. My hair was plastered to my head and my white t-shirt was stained a sickly, pale pink, speckled with tiny white seeds. My denim shorts were splattered with tomato juice. The dark splotches made it look like I’d wet myself.
I found an empty stall and stripped off my shirt. I wore an elastic hairband on my wrist, mostly as a holdover habit from my volleyball days, which I took off and pulled my hair together into a slimy ponytail. I slipped the Gophers t-shirt over my head. It hung to my knees and had all the shape of a muumuu. What did it matter? I was already the laughingstock of the town.
I pulled down my shorts and peed, washed my hands and dried them and headed out of the restroom, my stained t-shirt wadded into a ball.
Paul was waiting, his arms looped with plastic grocery bags.
“Better?” he asked.
“Uh. Sure.” I suddenly remembered my own groceries. “Oh, hey. You know where my cart might be?”
He smiled. “Relax.” He held out one of his arms. “Your stuff is right here.”
“You bought my groceries?” I groaned. Along with the Frosted Cheerios and Rice A Roni, my cart had also held a month’s supply of tampons and pads.
“You needed them, didn’t you?”
I shook my head as we walked through the grocery store to the exit. “Well, yeah. But you didn’t need to buy them for me.”
“I wanted to.”
The sun blinded me as we stepped outside and I fumbled for my sunglasses.
“Here.” Paul pulled my glasses from his shorts pocket.
“How…?”
“They flew off your head when you passed out.” He grinned. “They ended up in the avocados.”
I sighed. “Awesome.” I reached into my purse. “How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I pulled two twenties from my wallet and thrust them at him. “Here. Thank you.”
“Really, don’t worry about it.”
I pressed them against his chest. “Seriously. You’ve already done enough for me. I’m not letting you buy my groceries, too!”
He reluctantly took the money and set his groceries down on the hood of my Volkswagen bug. “You sure you’re OK?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Do you faint often?”
I unlocked my car door and pulled the lock up on the passenger door. It was a ’72 bug. Nothing was automatic.
“No. Never, actually.”
Paul put my groceries on the back seat. “So, that’s a little weird, right?”
I shrugged. I was feeling better. Except for the humiliation and mortification of having passed out into a bin of tomatoes.
“I didn’t eat much for breakfast this morning.”
Come to think of it, I hadn’t eaten much of anything for almost three days. I’d been too nervous to eat on Saturday and too mortified to eat the day after. When I’d gotten up this morning and hadn’t been hungry, I’d thought maybe my stomach had shrunk. Kinda like my brain.
“Hmm.” He stood next to my car and waited.
“What?” I was anxious to leave. I wanted to get home and lock myself away for the rest of the day. Maybe for the rest of the week. Maybe for all of eternity.
“I just…” He hesitated. “I just wanna make sure you’re OK. That’s all.”
“I’m fine. Really. I just need to eat and I’ll be good as new.”
“Not what I meant.” He looked down and kicked at a pebble with his sandal. “I mean about Chase. The wedding.”
“Oh.” I straightened. “Uh, yeah. I’m OK.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I think he made the wrong choice.”
“What?”
“Angela. You.”
I swallowed. “Really?”
He nodded and chewed his lip as he glanced back up at me. “Yeah. If it were me…hell, if it had been me, there wouldn’t have been a choice. None.”
EIGHT
I stood in the parking lot with my mouth hanging open for fifteen minutes after Paul left.
What had he just said to me? Was he telling me that Chase had been a fool and that being with me was the obvious choice? Or was he trying to tell me something else? That I was
his
choice?
I mulled it over as I backed up out of my parking spot. I thought about it as I shifted into first and exited the lot. I obsessed about it as I drove the three miles home to my apartment.
And I called Jill as soon as I got inside.
“What?” Her voice was muffled.
I shoved groceries into my cupboards. “Something happened with Paul.”
“Did you crash his wedding, too?”
“Shut up.” I stowed the milk in my fridge. “No. He said something. Something weird.”
“I can’t hear you,” she practically shouted.
“Where are you?”
“Party at Lake Calhoun. You should come down.”
An hour drive down to the Cities for a party on a Monday night? No thank you.
“I have stuff to do.” Like try to figure out what Paul meant.
“You have stuffed ragu?” she screamed.
“Never mind.” I hung up.
I grabbed the rest of the stuff from the bags and put them away. I blushed when I got to the pads and tampons, wondering how embarrassed Paul must have been when the cashier rang them up. I took them into the bathroom and tossed them in the bottom drawer of the vanity. I caught my reflection again and realized a shower had to be the first thing on the agenda.
So I showered and washed my hair and thought about what Paul said. And when I was done thinking about that, I thought about Chase and Angela and what they might be doing on their honeymoon in Hawaii. And when that image brought a sickish feeling to my stomach, I switched back to Paul. What had he meant?
I thought about it some more as I got dressed and towel-dried my hair. I made my way back into the kitchen to make an early dinner. I still wasn’t hungry but my stomach felt weak and I knew I needed to eat something.
I opened the box of Cheerios and poured a bowl. I grabbed the milk but the thought of putting it on my cereal disgusted me so I shoveled them dry into my mouth.
If it had been me, there wouldn’t have been a choice.
So did that mean that, if he’d been acting for Chase, he would have chosen differently? Or did it mean that he—Paul—would have made a different decision?
I stared at the wall, but the answer was not written anywhere that I could see.
Paul and I had never dated. Paul and I had never done anything. He was one of those peripheral friends in high school. Sure, he was Chase’s best friend which meant we hung out a lot when he and I had been a couple. But it wasn’t like we went on double dates or anything. Paul had never had a serious girlfriend, at least not that I could remember. Jill had joked, more than once, that maybe he batted for the other team but I never believed that. He was always with a girl. Always had a date to dances, always had someone hanging on him at parties. And, more than once, had someone in the back seat of his pickup truck with him when Chase and I would stumble out of a party, ready to be driven home.
I finished my cereal and rinsed out the bowl and returned to the couch. I flipped on the TV and turned it to Shark Week. It was an episode on shark attacks and I thought about how much a mako shark looked like Angela—big teeth and big, fixated eyes. I shivered.
Shark Week lasted for hours. I sat through every episode, grateful for the diversion. When the doorbell buzzed me out of my TV-induced stupor, I almost leaped off the couch.
Jill pushed the door open.
“I thought you were in the Cities,” I said. “And thanks for giving me a heart attack.”
“That was like three hours ago.” She surveyed the scene in my apartment. “What on earth are you doing?”
“Watching TV.”
“Yeah, I see that.” She made her way to the couch and sat down next to me. She smelled of cologne and cigarettes.
“What kind of party were you at?” I asked.