“I didn’t order it; I just picked it up,” I say, but I sound weak, tired, small, and like a little girl who never quite did what her mother wanted her to.
She lets out a laugh—loud and animated with a hand to her chest like what she said was funny and not extremely rude. Everyone else is silent.
Emily’s smile grows uncomfortable, and her eyes dart between my mother and me. “Oh well. I’ll get the envelope from upstairs. You still have it, right, Mom?”
Mom blanches. Now everyone knows she ordered it. She doesn’t like to be blamed for things. But everyone here with common sense knows mishaps happen, and the bakery simply misunderstood and mixed their icing.
“Yes, dear. It’s in my bedside drawer.” Her lips are pursed, hands clasped tight.
Austin and Emily escape upstairs and JP jumps up from the table, whispering in my ear, “I’ll be right back. I have an idea.”
Mom marches over to me, smoothing out her dress as she gets closer. “Well, this is an ordeal, isn’t it, Julia?”
I stare at her blankly, washed with humiliation and confusion. No matter how used to my mother’s antics I am, it still manages to bruise.
“I’m not in the mood for you to be unreasonable, Mom.”
“I’m not, I’m disappointed.”
“You can’t pin this on me.”
Her head bobs. “Oh, I didn’t mean it was your fault—I just meant there’s a history of you screwing things up in the most innocuous ways,” she manages to double down while backtracking. “Remember when you were in charge of ordering merch for my book event and all the stickers were the size of my pinky nail? Or when you made my birthday cake and used salt instead of sugar?” She hoots out a laugh, reminding me of mymistakes as if it’s my curse and not light-hearted mishaps that could happen to anyone.
My chin snaps back like she clocked me in the chin. I almost feel like crying. “I’m going to freshen up in the bathroom.”
“Okay. Fix your eyeliner, too,” she adds as I walk away.
As I breeze through the house, I pass the dessert table and snatch a white box, swiping as many cookies as I can into it. It’s stuffed to the brim with Brenda’s sugar cookies and there are only crumbs left next to the crème brûlée my mother spent a fortune on.
With a box of cookies and my clutch under my arm, I go to the bathroom, sit on the lid of the toilet and emotionally eat for five whole minutes.
When I emerge from the restroom with half the box of cookies eaten and fixed eyeliner, I hear a delicate rumble of laughter on the patio, and out of the corner of my eye, the servers for the evening are hovering over the poured champagne for the toast, adding something to each glass. It could be diamonds, it could be poison. Really, both seem possible at this point.
I walk through the French doors and see JP setting down a tray with something underneath a white napkin in front of Austin and Emily.
“It turns out the green cake was a decoy and this is the real gender reveal,” he tells everyone, then clasps his hands together. “Now, if all of you would please countdown with me...”
The attendees count down. “5... 4... 3... 2... 1!”
Austin and Emily pull off the napkin and scream-laugh to reveal pink champagne.
“It’s a girl!” Emily exclaims.
JP smiles at me from across the room as the servers from the kitchen emerge with trays for a pink champagne toast. I take a glass as a tray passes me, and JP finds a path through the white linen tables to find me.
We clink glasses and sip our champagne. The animosity and embarrassment evaporate from my chest as I smile at him.
“How’d you pull that off?” I ask.
“I intercepted the envelope and found some red food coloring in the pantry. After enlisting a little assistance with the toast glasses”—He cocks an eyebrow in the direction of the staff, then gestures to the room—“Pink champagne.”
“Honestly, I like this more than cake.”
“There may be one problem,” he says, and I tilt my head.
“What’s that?”
“I think I’ve stained everyone’s teeth fuchsia.”
