And here I am sitting with my mother, who probably thought that Josey and Theo were still broken up, who was probably hoping that the polyamory phase was over and I was dating a boy who was unfortunately putting ideas in my head but was still just one boy...
She snaps the puzzle piece she's holding into place around the border. “Go,” she says.
“Really?”
“It's a puzzle,” she says. “You're sixteen. Be home by one.”
I kiss her cheek and get the hell out of there.
“You two are insane!” I call on my way to the car. “You're gonna wake up my neighbors.” I get into the backseat. “Josey...”
She turns around. Her feet are on the dashboard so the whole front seat is full of her puffy pink skirt. “Yeah?”
“Were you prom queen?”
She laughs. “For a dollar fifty at Party City, everyone can be prom queen!” She takes her tiara off and puts it in my head, then digs through a plastic bag on the floor and comes up with a new one for herself.
“Student government was so pissed when she came in wearing that,” Theo says.
“Yeah,” Josey says. “You have to earn your plastic tiara.”
“We earned 'em,” Theo says, and I nod and tuck mine into my hair and we drive and drive, and they tell me about the horrible dresses most people were wearing, and how freaking adorable the actual king and queen were, it turns out, and who got busted trying to come in drunk and who started crying during the slow dances and when we get out to go to the diner Josey's feet are hurting, so she wears my ugly brown sandals and I wear her sparkly silver heels, and we tell our waiter that we were both prom queen and get free milkshakes.
28
And then, one Saturday in June, my mother is a bride.
We're in the clubhouse of the botanical garden in the room where they keep the brides, I guess, complete with a bed for reasons I don't really want to understand. We've only used it for draping dresses, storing extra folding chairs, and flopping down together at one point to cry off our makeup a little bit.
But now we're all polished and ready, and she looks beautiful. I straighten her veil over her shoulders. She's wearing it pushed back down her back instead of over her face, because she says she wants to see.
It isn't like one of those TV shows where everything goes totally wrong at the last minute, but there are naturally some glitches—the photographer is sick and sent her much-less-experienced son, and the reception room is isn't going to be ready for a half-hour after we planned, so cocktail hour is really going to be stretching the definition of “hour” —and right now they don't matter. They're never going to matter. We'll look at the blurry pictures of bored cocktail-drinking guests and laugh.
In a minute, we'll walk through the doors and see our people. Aanya in her turquoise dress. Lucas will probably be drooling over her in a way that will make me worry he's going to have his heart broken by another Miami girl. Alexis will be at the altar, bouncing in her Mary Janes. I'll pick her up and let those kicky feet catch in the lining of my dress.
And Dominic, Dominic will be beaming and shaking while my mother bursts through the doors like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. And I will be there.
I can't believe that at one point I thought I would be giving my mother away.
As if people can just be passed.
As if love is ever finished.
“Ready to hit the catwalk?” I ask her.
“Yeah, mija.” She kisses my cheek. “Dream team.”
I rest my head on her shoulder, for just a second. “Dream team.”
