❝she was the girl, who bit the horizon, who peeled the stars from the sky and put them on her tongue, the girl who was hungry for the universe, who craved magic and saw the broken boy for who he truly was- a broken boy.❞
Beca...
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Chapter 46
Here Comes The Bride
Jem
I was starting to understand why my mother left Philly for this.
The wedding ceremony my mother had concocted with her brand new beau was nestled in four hundred and fifteen acres of protected woodlands, located within the Hilton Garden Inn on Staten Island. Guests in their best garden tea party outfits mingled on the beautifully manicured lawn, intermittent with unique sculptures, grand stone fountains and white arches of pebbled pathways that led through the bare dead trees to a bridal swing. A fucking bridal swing. There was even a Florentine gazebo where the floors were coloured marbles of jade and terracotta and the red, brown and sulphur yellow dead leaves of autumn curtained the eggshell white intricate designs of the gazebo roof in a gradient of red to brown. Rows of foldable plastic chairs decorated in red and orange sashes were lined up in front of the gazebo, except for the pathway where I supposed the aisle was meant to be. Waiters in black button-downs and red bow-ties served the guests with black trays of champagne and small plates of appetizers as some began to take their seats, reading the pamphlets given out by the reception at the desk of the hotel when we came in.
"Wow," marvelled Ellis, entering over the arch into the more enclosed area of green hedges surrounding the square grass courtyard of the outdoor wedding ceremony. "She really went all out for this."
"Yeah," I muttered bitterly. Of course, she did. She left my father for this. She left us for this.
Ellis suddenly squeezed my fingers and this smile erupted on her face, it was so wide you think it shattered her cheekbones. "Hey, you'll get to see her. She needs to know how you really feel. You need to tell her how you really feel." She stopped to kiss me on the lips and she tasted like water, reminding me about how I was the tide and she was the shore. She pecked me on the cheek as well, leaving a stain of lipgloss on my skin, and I wiped the sticky pink feel of her mouth off. I looked at her, glowing in the marmalade light of a New York morning.
Ellis's dress was yellow. Autumn yellow, kind of a butterscotch colour. It was cotton and it had a mid-calf hemline with a square neck that revealed her pale collarbones jutting out into the crisp air. The dress yellow straps were about two fingers width and there were no waistlines to the dress so it cascaded down flat on her body but she secured a brown belt around the thinnest part of her waist to create some kind of figure. With every step into the grass, her low brown heels sink into the wet ground. A thick wool coat covered her bare shoulders. She looked like a girl on her way to church, not my girlfriend.
She curled an arm around me as she practically dragged me over to one of the waiters and picked up two small appetizers. "Eat something," she ordered arbitrarily, "You'll certainly be happier once you have something in your stomach."
The appetizers happened to be salmon croquettes served with some alien fancy sour cream sauce grinded with specks of green- diced parsley, knowing my mother. She put parsley in everything. It was delicious but it wasn't filling and every taste was a mouthful of fanciful pretension I prefer mocking. The tuxedo I had on was constricting and it didn't fit me that well. It was appalling and wrinkled at tight bits and hang suspended in loose areas like they weren't supposed to be there. Everything about it was wrong. Every fibre in my body was telling me this was wrong.
