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“Good Lord. He can’t come to the wedding. The numbers have already been turned in.”
Yep. Should have kept my mouth shut. “I wasn’t planning to invite him. Don’t worry.”
“There’s no future seeing someone like this, Sophie. This isn’t The Notebook. It doesn’t work in the real world.”
No mention of my happiness. No mention of how she hoped he was a kind person who treated her daughter well. It hurt my feelings, which irritated me. I had spent my whole life seeking my mother’s approval and I never received it. She had wanted another Bella. Instead, she had gotten an anomaly with shades of my father. None of her, inside or out.
“This isn’t about the future. I’m just having sex with him.”
While I can claim that I am just brutally honest, the truth is sometimes I’m petty. And that was petty. But so very satisfying. My mother gasped.
“Sophie Jane! I’m going to assume that is your bizarre sense of humor. I swear to God, you get more like your father every day. It’s twisted.”
It was probably better if she thought I was joking. “It is what it is.” I thought about pointing out that she had actually married my father, so presumably she had thought he was the shit at one point, but Bella had finally emerged from the restroom and I wanted to see what was going on with her. “Bella’s back. I’ll call you later.”
Bella just sat down and flipped her hair back as if nothing was out of the ordinary.
“Bel, do you have a gastrointestinal disorder or what? You were in there for twenty minutes.” And her eyes and nose were red.
She made a face. “Gross. No. I was crying. I hate my dress, Soph. I know you don’t understand it, but I despise it. It’s literally the world’s most hideous garment and I don’t even grasp how I could have thought otherwise. This is Mom’s fault. She forced me to take that one and I literally have never hated anything as much as I hate that dress on my body.”
At least she wasn’t overreacting. Not. “I’m sorry.” I was. Our mother could be overbearing. But the dress wasn’t ugly.
I bit into my fish, making a face when I realized it was cold. “But are you sure that’s all it is?” I sort of kept waiting for the moment when she realized Bradley was a douchebag. “Are you having doubts about marriage?”
She looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “Of course not!”
Then I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. “So get a new dress.”
“That dress cost twenty grand and it was ordered six months ago.”
“Don’t they sell some that are in stock?”
Bella sipped her iced tea and gave me a look of disdain. “As if I’d wear a three-hundred-dollar dress off the rack. Give me a break.”
She sounded like our mother and it was annoying. I shrugged. “So I guess you’re stuck with your twenty-thousand-dollar turd.”
Because if the price tag was what mattered, shouldn’t she automatically love it?
But Bella shoved her chair back. “You’re such a bitch sometimes. I know you think I’m vain and materialistic but I don’t have your brains. I don’t get excited by math or pi or gravity or whatever.”
I opened my mouth to say that as pi was a numerical value it was included within the subject header of math, but I stopped myself. No one wants to be corrected. My mother had been drilling that into me since preschool. I just let Bella continue.
“Why can’t you understand that this matters to me? You may think it’s stupid, but I’ve waited my whole life for my wedding and I want it to be perfect.”
I felt guilty. I wasn’t trying to dismiss her concerns. “It will be perfect. Because you’re perfect. You’ll be the most beautiful bride ever.” She would be, because she had been blessed with a beauty that was currently in style.
“You’re just saying that because you feel sorry for me.” But she did pull her chair back in. “You’re doing that thing with your straw when you get stressed.”
I was. It was a tic that drove my mother crazy. But when I fretted, I put my finger on the top of the straw, trapping the liquid in the tube, then lifted it and dropped it over the ice. I did it to confirm gravity. “I don’t feel sorry for you.” But I couldn’t stop myself from creating a vacuum seal on my straw and repeating my action.
Bella sighed. “Why does your water stay in the straw like that anyway?”
“Sealing the top of a straw with your finger stops air entering and exerting a downward force on the liquid, leaving only the upward force of air pressure from below. This upward force is stronger than the force of gravity pulling down on the liquid. It doesn’t work on a larger scale though. The external capillary—”
I stopped speaking. Bella didn’t really care and I was getting off-subject. But she actually laughed. “You’re such a nerd,” she said, but it was spoken with affection. “I wish you would get that excited about wearing false eyelashes.”
“Don’t waste your wishes on the impossible. But I am really sorry you don’t love the dress. I thought it looked amazing on you.”
