Madeline:Yeah, and I won
Ben:Also you told Amy what a good hugger I was for like twenty minutes straight
Madeline:She probably already knows that, huh
Ben:I like to think so
Madeline:Did I do anything besides embarrass myself to your girlfriend?
Ben:You also made Aaron walk the plank
The good news is one, I remember everything, and two, no one heard or saw me sending Javier any more pictures or leaving some sort of “I think about your dick and also your eyes all the time” voicemails, so I make myself be brave enough to open our text chain.
Thankfuck—the last thing is the mildly thirst-trappy picture of me, which he read at 11:49 p.m. and did not respond to. I sigh in relief and flop back onto the couch.
It’s not great, but it could be so,somuch worse. I can feasibly play this off asSorry—I was drunk and wanted to send you another picture of my cool costume, notMy tits looked great, and I thought you should know.
“This is completely fine and normal,” I say aloud to my empty living room and then spend the next three hours watchingBob’s Burgersand playingStardew Valleyuntil I feel somewhat human again.
November
“They’re in the mail,”I tell Javier when he answers his phone Saturday afternoon.
“The save the dates?”
“Yup.”
He says something just out of phone range, gets a response, and then I hear a door shut.
“Shit, sorry—are you at work?”
“It’s time for my break anyway. Plus it’s a little slow right now—past the Halloween rush, no Thanksgiving rush yet.”
“There’s a Halloween rush for flowers?” It’s a nice day in Virginia Beach, cool but sunny, and I’m walking back to my apartment from the post office. I could’ve just as easily texted Javi about the save the dates being mailed, but this is the kind of thing that warrants a call, right? This way he can confirm that I put them in the right slot, check it off his list, ask any follow-up questions he has about the process. All things I’m sure will actually happen.
“Floral arrangements add elegance and class to any event, Madeline,” he says, and I grin at the empty sidewalk in front of me. “If someone wants to pay hundreds of dollars for black-rose bouquets for their Halloween party, who am I to stop them?”
“There are black roses?”
“There are every kind of rose if you’ve got money.”
“What do black ones mean?”
“Mean?” he echoes, and I can hear something being shuffled around in the background. “I think these meantwelcome to my spooky party.”
“There’s a whole language of flowers,” I tell Javier, who works part-time at a florist and should honestly know these things. “Like, roses are for romantic love, and yellow carnations meanI don’t like you, and daffodils mean, like,I think we should just be friendsor something.” Turns out I know the meaning of exactly two flowers.
“Maybe black roses areI love you to death. Which is a little creepy.”
“I think the whole idea is Victorian, and they were into that sort of thing,” I admit. “They also thought people looked really hot when they had tuberculosis, so you can’t trust all their opinions.”
“Tuberculosis?” he echoes. “The one where you cough up blood? That was hot?”
“Have you evenseenMoulin Rouge?”
Javier scoffs loud enough for me to hear. “Of course I’ve seenMoulin Rouge. Bastien and I watched it in secret like once a week after I stole the DVD from the public library. When my dad found it, Thalia claimed it was hers, so none of us got into trouble.”
“It was okay thatshestole it?”
