“He does that,” I say, remembering that first day of sixth grade when Adam and I met. How scared and lonely I was at a huge new school, where none of the pseudo friends I had in elementary school were all that interested in continuing our journey together. The closest friend I had, Heather Russo, told me when I got to her locker our first day to walk to the class I was so excited we shared, “God, we just started here, Georgia, we don’t have to be together all the time. Stop being so needy.”
Adam saved me from new-kid loneliness; it makes sense that he’d save Eli from it, though in the moment I don’t know that he’s lonely, too, or that Adam’s house will become his home as much as it is mine.
“All right, Eli,” I say, looking him up and down. He’s got on Nikes that are fraying at the seams, gym shorts, and a T-shirt with a hole near the neck. I can see a sliver of collarbone pressing sharply against his golden skin. “I guess I’m kind of adopting you, too.”
He lets out a breath, his eyes moving over my face. “Probably a good idea, since I’ve already got a nickname picked out for you and everything.”
“I’ll let you get away with that one, Ninety-Nine,” I say, and my chest warms at the way his grin widens. It’s an addicting feeling, knowing I’m in the middle of meeting a person I’ll get to hang on to.
Adam looks at me over Eli’s shoulder, his mouth pulling up, and I know he feels it, too: the three of us are going to be friends. Something special.
Years later Eli will tell me that he fell a little bit in love with me right then, and in this movie-like memory I always see it—the dilation of his pupils when we can’t quite break eye contact, the flush along the delicate shell of his ear when I sit next to him on the couch minutes later, the way his eyes linger on me when Adam and I bicker over control of the TV, the steady bounce of his knee. The beautiful, shy smile he gives me over the pizza we have for dinner later.
He’ll hold on to it for years, but eventually that spark will become a wildfire.
And then we’ll burn it all down.
One
Thirteen years later
This wedding is cursed
Oh, god, not again,” I mutter.
To the untrained eye, this text message probably looks like a joke. A prank. The beginning of one of those chain emails our elders get duped into forwarding to twenty of their nearest and dearest, lest they inherit multigenerational bad luck.
In actuality, it’s been Adam’s mantra for the past nine months.
Adam is the brother I never had and I’m truly honored to be part of his wedding celebration. That said, had sixth-grade Georgia anticipated I’d be fielding no fewer than forty-seven texts per day from my more-unhinged-by-the-day best friend, I would’ve thought twice about complimenting his Hannah Montana shirt our first day of middle school.
The silver lining: I’ve taken a screenshot of each text and filed them away so I can present them to him via a PowerPoint-presented roast once his wedding is over.
My Spidey senses tingle with this text, though. It hasn’t been delivered in aggressive caps lock, nor is it accompanied by a chaotic menagerie of GIFs （my kingdom for a Michael Scott alternative）。 Whatever has happened now might actually be an emergency.
Then again, the wedding is ten days away; at this point, anything that isn’t objectively awesome is a disaster.
I pluck my phone off my desk and type out an exploratory what’s the damage?
A bubble immediately pops up, disappears, reappears, then stops again.
“Great sign.”
I wait while Adam molds his panic into thought, eyes on my phone instead of my computer. It’s nearly four p.m. on Wednesday, the day before my PTO for the wedding starts, and I still have half a page of unchecked boxes on my to-do list, plus a detailed While I’m Away email to draft for my boss. I can’t leave Adam hanging in his moment of need, though. What kind of best woman would I be?
No better than the largely absent best man? comes the uncharitable punchline. I slam the door on that thought. It’s not like I’ve minded executing most of the best-people activities; actually, it’s been a godsend for multiple reasons. It’s just that it’s so typical of him to—
I catch my own eyes in my computer’s reflection, delivering a silent message with the downward slash of my eyebrows: Shut. Up. I’d rather think about curses than anything even tangentially related to the subject of Eli.
Not that I believe in curses at all, but deep down, I do worry that Adam’s been followed by bad vibes since he proposed to his fiancée, Grace Tan, on New Year’s Eve. Their plans have involved a comedy of errors that have escalated from bummer to oh shit: the wrong wedding dress ordered by the bridal salon; names misspelled on their wedding invitations, requiring an eleventh-hour reprint; and the one that nearly got me to believe—their wedding planner quit three months ago because his golden retriever had amassed such a following on social media that he was making triple his salary as her manager.
For Adam, whose natural temperament hovers somewhere near live wire, it’s been a constant test of his sanity. Even Grace, who’s brutally chill, the perfect emotional foil for Adam, and an actual angel, has been fraying lately.
Then again, she wanted to elope. Every new disaster probably only further solidifies the urge to book it to Vegas.
Adam’s texts shoot rapid-fire onto the screen:
Georgia
Our fucking DJ
BROKE THEIR HIP
LINE DANCING AT A BACHELORETTE PARTY
IN NASHVILLE
I seriously need to know what I’ve done in my 28 years on this dying earth that is causing this to happen
The possibilities are endless. I start to type, but he beats me to it.
That was rhetorical, Woodward, DON’T
I can see that Adam’s shifting out of his panic fugue, and I physically feel myself shifting into fix-it mode.
Deep breath, nothing’s burned to the ground, right? I text back. This is problematic but not fatal. We’ll come up with a new list.
The bubbles of doom pop up again and I wait. Again.
Out of everyone, there’s a reason Adam’s come to me: I’m the one people run to when they need a shoulder to cry on, a brainstorm partner, a hype woman. The one who knows what to do when shit hits the fan or when a bottle of champagne needs to be popped. When their wedding planner peaced out, Adam called me begging for help.
I would’ve stepped up anyway, but my motives aren’t completely altruistic. Dedicating myself to problem-solving Adam’s wedding woes has been the only way to reliably stay in his orbit.
I’m a list girl. I learned the magic of them long ago—the way they can streamline tasks, dos and don’ts, expectations. Emotions. How they can take a messy, chaotic thing and make it manageable. They’ve been my coping strategy since I was a kid, the best way I can take care of myself. They quiet my mind and untangle my emotions so that I stay cool, calm, and compartmentalized. So I’m not a messy, chaotic thing, because that way loneliness lies.
Needless to say, it aggrieves me that there’s no way to list my way out of what’s been happening in my life: the friends I’ve built my social life around, who have been my family, are shifting into phases I’m not in—falling in love, cohabitating, building social circles with other nauseatingly happy couples—putting me on the outside looking in.