“I told you that,”Castillo says when I call her the next day to ask if she’s got a gold star. She doesn’t, but once I explain the whole thing, she agrees that she’s fully expecting me to be four years sober next winter.
“You didnot.”
“I literally did,” she says, all matter-of-fact, the way she usually is. “A month ago, when you were bitching about putting up with your mom being in town for a whole week, I told you that if you could get through rehab three times, your mom being nearby was nothing.”
“I thought you weren’t taking me seriously!”
Castillo sighs. “Well, you were being very dramatic,” she admits. “But that’s the point I was trying to make. You obviously know how to do hard things. Probably better than most people. And.”
I wait a reasonable amount of time, which makes me nervous because if there’s somethingCastilloisn’t sure about saying tome, it might be very bad.
“And?”
“And the way you’re so self-deprecating about it is probably bad for you. Like, psychologically,” she finally continues. “Plus, it’s pretty annoying. The more you think you’re gonna fuck up, the more you fuck up.”
I want to roll my eyes at the phone and point out that I’ve got a history of fucking up and history only ever repeats itself, but for once I listen to what she’s saying. So I keep my mouth shut, even if I’m not sure I believe her.
“I wish you’d told me that before,” I finally say, mostly teasing.
“Lopez,” she says, very patiently. “I have beentrying.”
“Ben also knows, by the way,”Madeline says. I’ve got her on speakerphone in my car while I eat a peanut butter sandwich in the parking lot of Blue Ridge Community College. Thursdays are long—I’ve got work at the insurance office, then the Composition 101 class I put off until this semester, followed an hour later by Computer Design II. The registrar strongly suggested I get the composition class out of the way my first semester, and I didn’t listen.
“Ben?” I say, my mouth full of peanut butter and jam.
“He’s basically my sibling, and he can keep his mouth shut,” she says. “My mom still doesn’t know what happened to all her tomato trellises that one year.”
“What did happen?”
“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” Madeline says primly, and I laugh. “Shit, I still haven’t figured out what I’m wearing to the wedding.”
“You don’t know?” I haven’t gotten my suit yet—I will, I swear—but I know what I’m wearing.
“Women have a lot more sartorial choices than men,” she says. “It’s more complicated than deciding what color suit I’m going to wear. But Ben is locked into this idea that his pocket square needs to match my dress since he’s technically my date.”
I swallow another bite, and my jealousy, because I know it’s got no basis in reality. She just said they were basically siblings, which—okay, maybe not the best criteria, given our relationship, but we’re two completely different kinds of almost-siblings.
“Right, I forgot about that,” I say in an extremely neutral way.
“I think it basically means we’re sitting together at dinner,” she says. “Maybe during the ceremony? I don’t think they’re taking the seating charts very seriously. It’s a pretty small wedding. Hey, are you in the bridal party, and is there a bridal party?”
I shake my head, which is pointless, and swallow the last bite of my sandwich. “No, my mom was considering it, but then Bastien and Thalia disagreed over who should be the flower adult and she scrapped the whole thing.”
“Obviously it would be me,” she says.
“Take it up with them.”
“I’d be a great flower adult.”
“Maybe you should all be co–flower adults,” I say in a spirit of conciliation. “You can each fling different flower petals.”
“You don’t fling them, you scatter them. Gracefully. This is why you’d be a bad flower adult.”
“I’m the only one who hasn’t made a bid for it,” I point out. “I’m perfectly happy to sit in the audience and watch.”
“We could find you something. How do you feel about ring-bearing?”
Class starts in ten minutes, and I should go, but the car’s warm and the night is cold, and Computer Design II doesn’t have Madeline on the other end of the line.
