CHAPTER ONE
Crappiest, crap day of my entire effing life!
I’d been perching on the closed toilet seat for so long that parts of my body had gone dead. It had started in my feet, worked its way up into my ankles and was slowly numbing my calves. Maybe if I stayed here for long enough, everything would go numb? (Wishful thinking.)
My new—and ludicrously overpriced—pink cardigan was officially ruined from the mixture of mascara-stained tears and snot bubbles I’d been pouring into it for the last hour. But it was all I could use to stifle the undignified sounds of my uncontrollable sobs. This was a public restroom, after all!
I had a headache from hell; possibly from tear-induced dehydration, possibly from the half-empty bottle of wine I’d been sipping on for the last hour. But I knew I had to leave at some point. I couldn’t hide in a toilet cubicle forever, as much as I wanted to. People would start to wonder where I was.Hewould start to wonder.
This had been one of those monumentally bad ideas from the start.No, what was I saying? This wasn’t just a “bad idea,” this was the worst idea ever conceived of. On a scale of one to “worst idea ever,” this would be right up there with DIY open heart surgery (something I was seriously considering, since the pain of it breaking was almost too much to bear).
Going to my best friend’s engagement party.
Sounds perfectly benign.
Making a speech at my best friend’s engagement party.
Totally normal.
Toasting my best friend and his beautiful new fiancée.
Absolutely acceptable.
That is until you replace the words “best friend” with “the man I’ve been hopelessly, devotedly and excruciatingly in love with for the past three years.”
I glanced at my watch; ten minutes before I needed to make the speech. Ten minutes until I was due to take up position in front of friends and families and deliver the old “thrilled and couldn’t be happier for them” platitudes.
I gulped down another more-than-mouthful of anesthetizing wine as my phone beeped. I rolled my eyes when I saw whose name was lighting up the screen. It was my friend Lilly. She’d been on my case for the last week, insisting that this was my last chance to tell him how I felt, even if he didn’t feel the same way. I needed to get it off my chest, she said. It would be cathartic, she said. I would finally get closure, she said. I wished to God she would shut the hell up. But then she’d said that other thing too, the one that kept that ember of hope burning:What if he does feel the same way too?
But I’d been here so many times before too. Hopes up, only for them to later be dashed, and downright shattered in the flaming pits of friend-zoned hell. I glanced at my phone again; another one of those dreaded phrases was splashed across it.
You have to tell him how you feel before it’s too late. What if you’re meant to be together and he just doesn’t know it yet?
Meant to be? Yeah, that’s what I’d thought too. All that hanging out together. Pizza and beer evenings. Staying up all night chatting on the phone. We’d even gone to a friend’s wedding together, for heaven’s sake. Surely that was date-y? My friends had all agreed . . . itwasdate-y!
I’d certainly interpreted those as very clear signs. We were meant to be together! It was only a matter of time before he confessed his true feelings to me. But as time passed . . . and passed . . . and passed, nothing happened. And thenshecame along. And everything changed.
I needed to snap out of this. I needed to get a grip. I needed to go outside and pretend that everything was totally fine.More than fine. I needed to pretend that I couldn’t be more thrilled for my BFF. I’d written a speech drenched in a smorgasbord of hideous, romantic clichés that I’d plucked directly from the internet. As it turns out, cheesy one-liners are just a Google search away. But now, I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage to say them out loud.
Why had I agreed to this in the first place?But this was only the appetizer; the real main course was yet to come . . .
And let me tell you, it is a turducken of tragedy. One horrific idea rolled into another equally dreadful one and then stuffed into the mother of shitty ideas. Grilled, basted, tenderized and deboned!
Agreeing to help him pick out his wedding suit.
Agreeing to emcee his wedding.
Agreeing to help him choose his romantic honeymoon destination—where they’d have lots of romantic honeymoon sex.
Clearly, I was a sadomasochist hell-bent on torturing myself. But I had to do this. I had no other option.
So I stood up . . .
Pins and needles in feet. Kneecaps crunching. Dead legs. Stomach lurching. General revolting creeping feeling.
I took my first step, but as I did . . .Whoosh!It hit me all at once. The alcohol raced through my body, spiking the blood in my veins and making me buzz. I took another step and the buzz gave way to a much more unpleasant feeling.
Suddenly, I felt woozy.Very woozy.And this wasn’t the kind of establishment for wooziness. The engagement party was being held atherparents’ restaurant on their award-winning wine farm in the beautiful Cape Wine lands; no expenses spared. Very fancy. It was the kind of super-upper-crusty party that people with surnames beginning withVanderand ending inChildwent to. Many of the guests had been flown up from Jo’burg to be here, including me.
