I close my eyes and picture the whole thing.
My imaginary guy looks a little like a prince and mostly like Ace, and the flowers are so bushy that’s all I can see other than my groom. He has Ace’s warm eyes and Ace’s big smile, and he’s tall like Ace’s dad. I lick my lips, trying to transport myself to the day enough to know why the guy looks so much like my best friend, but I can’t quite get there.
Though, it feels good. Like, comfortable and stuff.
“Ace, we should get married,” I say over my shoulder as my best friend sends his Spider-Man action dude flying into the wall.
“Married?” he complains, now in the middle of the Hulk attacking a block city instead of my poor Barbie’s head. Spider-Man rolls and flips back into the action, and Ace makes punch, kick, andexplosion sound effects with his mouth. “Why would you wanna do something stupid like that?”
“Stupid?” I ask, offended. My mom’s magazine shows brides all the time, and girls at school were just talking about it because Mia Crawford got to go to her uncle’s wedding and she said it was the most exciting thing she’s ever been to. She even got to be the flower girl and wear a pretty white dress like the bride, and she said, after the wedding, there was food and cake and dancing.
“Getting married isn’t stupid, Acer! There’s a pretty dress and a big cake, and you get to dance with your friends and stuff.”
“Uh, all that sounds pretty stupid, Lia.” He scrunches up his nose at me. “Plus, don’t you have to be, like, really old to get married?”
I frown, tossing my T-shirt veil behind me and spinning to face him. His knees are scuffed from playing outside earlier, and his hair sticks up in the front from sweat or slime or something disgusting. Still, his cheeks are full, and his brown eyes are warm in the same way they always are. He’ll understand if I explain it to him. He always does.
“Our parents are married. They make it seem pretty cool.”
“Yeahhh,” he groans. “And they’re old.”
“Okay, fine. So maybe you have to be old. But I still think we should get married, and we should plan on it now for when we’re old, so we don’t have to think about marrying anyone else. I don’t want to be with some stinky man. I heard my mom and your mom talking one day about guys who were their boyfriends and how they had a big ego or something. I think that’s got somethin’ to do with BO.”
“Our moms don’t have boyfriends. They can’t. They’re not allowed because they have husbands. And I’ve heard my dad tell my mom she can’t have a boyfriend.”
I roll my eyes at him. “They had boyfriendsbeforethey got married to our dads.”
“Well, I don’t want to marry some smelly girl. I don’t even want to be a boyfriend or a husband. I just want to be your best friend.”
“That’s why we should get married when we’re old people.”
“Fine, Lia.” He tosses his Spider-Man figure onto the floor and picks up the Hulk. “But not until we’re realllyyyy old.”
“Duh, you already said that, Ace. We’ll be old, I promise. Like…twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five?” Ace asks, wowed. “That issoold, Lia.”
Ace is eight and I’m seven, and I think when we’re twenty-five, we’ll have our jobs and money and houses and stuff. Ace might even need to use a cane to walk around then; I don’t know. But I’ll still be his wife, even if he has bad legs.
“Iknowit’s old.” I put a hand to my hip. I always do this when I need Ace to focus on what I want him to do. “So do you promise or what?”
He stares at me for a minute, but the Hulk is still in his hand, and I can’t tell if he’s going to go back to playing or be serious. “Fine,” he says through a huffy breath. “Yeah, I promise.”
“That means you can date other girls and stuff for a while, but when we’re twenty-five, you don’t date any other girls but me.”
Ace scoffs. “Yeah, no problem, dude. I’m not gonna date girls at all. Besides you, every girl at school is annoying as heck.”
“Hey!” I protest. “Girls aren’t annoying!”
“I said every girlbutyou, Lia.” He rolls his eyes at me. “You’re different.”
“Why?”
He rolls his eyes again. “Because you’re my best friend.Duh.”
“Okay, it’s settled, then. We’ll get married when we’re twenty-five. What should we do to make it official?”
“Spit shake?”
