“Do you think she even bought a ticket or has she just been pretending the whole time?”
Yes, dammit, I bought a ticket. Two of them, actually, because three days ago, when Guy ‘gave me the choice’ to either postpone or find a new job, I wasn’t able to get a refund or make changes to the first ticket on account of buying it on a Black Friday sale. And yes, Tiffany, my sweet little sister, I’ll bother to show up. A thousand times, yes. I promise. I’ve been buffed, waxed, and detailed, just like the biweekly treatment Guy’s Bentley gets. I also had an early morning spray tan, which, now that I look at my hand, I see is getting darker by the minute. I shouldnothave listened to the girl at the counter who said I could totally pull off ‘deep bronze goddess.’ Shit. Maybe it’s not that bad and I’m the only one who’s going to notice on account of it being my skin.
But I digress. The point is, I’m fully committed to this trip. In my mind, I’m already there, sucking back piña coladas to numb the sting of all the biting comments coming from my mom and her sisters. But I will bloody well be there. I hope. My flight leaves LaGuardia in exactly two hours and twenty-two minutes. So long as I get that call in the next ten minutes, and everything runs smoothly en route to the Caribbean, I’ll arrive just in time for the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner, where I will make the most heartfelt, memorable speech a big sister/bridesmaidhas ever made. I’ll toast the hell out of the happy couple, and there won’t be a dry eye in the house. And everyone will have to shut the hell up about me being unreliable or out of touch with the family because it’ll bethatgood. And then, on the big day, I’m going to be the one she asks to help her hold her dress while she pees, because that is the sort of thing you need your sister to do. We’ll giggle away, tipsy on Champagne, while I gather all that tulle and silk up over her head, and she’ll know I’m going to be there for her, even for the yucky stuff. It’ll be one of those perfect, simple bonding moments we’ll remember forever.
“You are never going to make that flight,” Lyle, the junior ad executive whose desk is across from mine, says. Junior twatwaffle is more like it—a complete know-it-all who thinks his knowledge is far superior to my own because he has a marketing degree and I dropped out of college a year early when a summer internship here at Prescott turned into an offer of full-time employment.
“I am absolutely going to make it,” I answer. “He’s going to call. Right … now.”
We both stare at my phone but nothing happens.
Dammit. Why couldn’t that have worked? It would have been a total baller move. “Say, can you try calling me to make sure my phone is working?”
He smirks, then dials my number with one lazy, slow finger.
Immediately, my phone lights up and starts to ring. Damn. “Okay, good. Thank you.”
He doesn’t hang up, but instead smiles at me while the phone continues to ring.
He’s going to leave a message, isn’t he? “You can hang up now, we clearly know it’s working.”
He waits until my voicemail kicks in, then says, “Yeah, Paige, it’s me Lyle. Apparently your phoneisworking.Listen, you should know you are never going to make that flight. A meeting like the one Guy is in will take six hours, minimum. Also, you may have gone a little heavy on the spray tan because you’re starting to look like the orange stripes on a clown fish.”
Clown fish? Asshat. Also, how dare he make me check my messages? Ignoring the clown fish remark, I say, “You don’t know any better than I do what’s happening in that meeting.”
“I do, because I’ve been in lots of meetings just like it.” He clicks his teeth. “Yup, you are screwed. You’re not going anywhere.”
I set my jaw so hard my teeth grind. “He’s going to call. Any second now.”
“You should get a hold of your mom and tell her you’re not going to make the wedding. It’s better for them to know now.”
“I don’t need to because I’m going to make it.”
Lyle shakes his head. “You won’t. When Guy calls, he’ll have a laundry list of things you’ll have to do, and he’s going to tell you he’s counting on you and that he can’t trust anyone else. Guy doesn’t give a shit about your sister’s wedding. Guy would skip his own wedding for this account.”
He’s right. Guy would skip his own wedding, which is probably why he’s getting a divorce. And he’s definitely going to tell me I have to stay. I rub the bridge of my nose, feeling a tension headache coming on. “I’m just going to have to say no.”
Lyle shrugs. “Then be prepared to kiss your career goodbye.”
I stare out the nearest window for a second, my stomach in knots as I watch the people in the building across fromus. It’s the office of 2M Marketing, our biggest competitor, and the reason Guy leased the 32nd floor of the tower we’re in even though it has a funky, musty smell. They don’t even do half of our annual business, and yet somehow he feels threatened enough by them to want to look across at them any time he likes and flip them the double bird. The two M’s, Monica and Marcel, actually seem very cool. Like right now, they’re in a staff meeting, and someone just said something funny because they’re all laughing. That’s something that never happens here. I sigh, then say, “I bet they’d have let me go to my sister’s wedding on time.”
Lyle opens his mouth to say something I assume will be shitty, like, “If you think it would be so much better there, why don’t you quit?” but my phone trills and I pounce, answering it before the first ring finishes. “Guy Prescott’s office, Paige speaking.”
“Yeah, we’re making progress but this is going to take most of the day,” Guy says. “I need you to cancel my two-thirty with the lawyer and be on standby.”
“Umm, I can rebook with Hal, but I do have to leave for the airport in the next ten minutes.”
“Come on, Paige. You’re on Guy Time. You knew it when you took the job.”
“Yes, I know, but this time I really do have to leave.”
“For what?”
“For my sister’s wedding.” My gaze lands on my suitcase and my gut tightens. I’m going to miss the rehearsal dinner, aren’t I? Yes, yes I am. And I’ll be permanently on my family’s shit list. Forever, like those chemicals in non-stick pans. Unredeemable. A black sheep from now until eternity. I can’t stay. I just can’t.
“Oh, right. I forgot about that. Listen, that’s not going to work today. Get her to push it back.”
Push it back? What the actual fuck?“I don’t think that’ll be possible.”
