Wrecking My Own Wedding
It was one of those viral trends, a guy doing a funny, over-the-top impression of a dramatic movie scene. Without thinking, I tapped on the comments to see what nonsense people were writing.
The top comment wasn't text. It was a photo.
A man has a woman pinned against the wall in a dimly lit alleyway. He’s tall, dressed in a sharp suit; she’s in a short, burgundy dress, her body electric. Anyone would say they looked good together. Made for each other, even.
Only the crushed diamonds on his watch face caught the light and stabbed me in the eye.
They reflected two letters, E and C, with a tacky, heart-shaped ampersand sparkling between them.
E for Ethan, C for Chloe.
My five-year anniversary gift to him.
And the woman he was kissing? A little rabbit charm, adorned with a red rose, dangled from her purse.
A gift I knitted with my own hands for my best friend.
1
I made three of those rabbits.
The day I finished, I’d just put down my needles, not even having had the chance to arrange them on the shelf, when Maya burst in carrying a clinking tote bag.
She made a beeline for the fridge, pulling out mixers with the ease of someone who practically lived here. “Chlo, tonight I’m drinking until I forget my own name.”
I smiled, helping her line up the bottles on the counter. “When was the last time you were drunk enough to actually make it back to your own place?”
Maya loved to drink. She was a mixologist at one of the city’s best cocktail bars, so she couldn’t indulge at work. My apartment was her sanctuary, the one place she could really let go. I have asthma and have to be careful about everything, so it was always Ethan who would drink with her, while I’d sip on whatever non-alcoholic concoction Maya made for me. When she’d had enough, we’d carry her to the guest room and Ethan would take the couch for the night.
She paused, then let out a huge, uninhibited laugh. “You got me. Okay, then—let’s just get wasted!”
Maya’s talents weren’t limited to alcohol; her mocktails were just as incredible. While I stood in front of the open fridge, trying to plan dinner, her eyes lit up and she darted over to the couch.
“Well, look what we have here!” Maya squealed, grabbing one of the rabbits by its armpits and holding it high above her head. “Simba!”
She clutched it to her chest like it was a priceless treasure. “Is this my birthday present?”
“It is.”
Maya ran over and wrapped me in a hug that smelled faintly of lime and bitters. “Oh, thank you, my love! I’m going to kiss your whole adorable face on God’s behalf!”
We ended up wrestling playfully in the kitchen. The cake Maya had ordered arrived, and without a second thought, she swiped a dollop of frosting onto my nose.
“Bet you can’t catch me!” she taunted.
“Hey! You and your long legs!”
I was annoyed, but she was right. I could never catch her. Not when we were kids, not now.
We messed around like that for two hours until we collapsed in a heap, completely exhausted. I face-planted onto the sofa and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
I woke up to the smell of takeout. Ethan was home from work, unpacking containers on the counter. He’d also brought a small, palm-sized cake.
It was from the bakery on the west side. The one I’d been begging him to make a detour for for months, the one he always said was too out of the way.
I leaned against the kitchen island, a pouty, half-joking complaint on my lips, and completely missed the rigid set of Maya’s shoulders.
Ethan arranged the food on plates, then dimmed the lights and sat down next to me.
Maya held up the cake, two crooked candles sputtering on top. “Happy thirtieth to me!” she shouted.
“Happy birthday!” Ethan said, a fraction of a second before I could.
The smile froze on Maya’s face. The air in the room thickened into a strange, uncomfortable silence.
A sudden wave of awkwardness washed over me. I stood up and went to my bedroom to get her real gift.
When I came back, an open gift box sat on the table next to her.
So that’s what had been bulging in Ethan’s pocket.
It was a bracelet. The exact same one I was about to give her.
I froze, unsure what to do. Maya snatched the bag from my hand, tore open the box, and fastened the second bracelet onto her wrist.
She held her arm up to the light, taking a dozen pictures from every angle, her praise a waterfall of superlatives. “It’s gorgeous! I absolutely love it! Chloe, darling, your taste is impeccable! You’re such an artist!”
But her performance didn’t dispel the awkwardness. It amplified it, feeding on the way Ethan’s lips were pressed into a thin, hard line.
“You two are on the same wavelength,” Maya gushed, filling the silence. “Ethan got me the same one. Now we can wear them as friendship bracelets!”
“I’m glad you like it,” I managed to say, my smile feeling like a cheap mask.
Eight years together, and Ethan had never given me a gift that felt like he’d put any real thought into it.
My mind was a tangled mess. I forced myself to smile and listen to Maya’s drunken, off-key singing, staying with her until she was completely wasted.
For some reason, Ethan, who could usually hold his liquor, was drunk even faster than she was.
I was so busy taking care of the two of them that I didn’t notice until Maya was stumbling out the door that she’d grabbed the wrong rabbit.
The one I’d made for her—the one with the red rose—was sitting primly on the shelf next to the rabbit in the little black suit. The one she’d taken was the painter rabbit, the one with the tiny beret and easel. The one that was supposed to be me.
2
I rushed after her into the hallway. “Maya! You took the wrong one.”
How do you describe the look on her face?
It was like she’d been struck by lightning. A kaleidoscope of emotions flickered across her features: three parts laughter, two parts surprise, four parts panic, and one part guilt.
She’d been in the middle of saying she didn’t want to leave, but the words died on her lips.
Maya stared at me for a long moment, then let out a laugh that sounded more like a sigh of relief. “Well, you made them look like such a perfect couple. For a second there, I thought I was officiating your wedding.”
I looked down at the little red dress on the rabbit in my hand. She was right. It did look better with the black suit.
A knot of discomfort tightened in my stomach, and my voice was sharper than I intended. “I have to go meet a client. I’ll see you later.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“They’re picking me up.”
I heard Maya sigh, a sound of weary resignation, but she didn’t press, didn’t try to explain.
It was the first time Maya had ever hidden something from me.
Our origin story was a cliché.
The invisible girl at school—parents who didn’t care, grades that were just okay—I was the perfect target. The kind of person who fades into the background is the easiest to bully.
But I got lucky. The very first time a group of girls cornered me in an alley, Maya was there.
She was two years older than me and had gone straight to work after her vocational high school program. Her family was a black hole for money, so she’d moved to the city and gotten a job as a hostess at a bar to escape them.
The day she found me, she’d just been kicked out by her manager to “think about what she did” after telling off a customer.
“Hey, kid.” Maya had a cigarette dangling from her lips. “Go home. What are you standing around for?”
It was fine when she was at a distance. But as she got closer, the smoke hit me. My chest seized up. I collapsed, gasping, pointing desperately at my backpack. My inhaler was in there.
But Maya, bless her heart, was an idiot. She didn’t understand what I was trying to tell her. She started giving me CPR with all the finesse of a jackhammer and nearly broke my ribs.
One emergency room visit wiped out her entire savings.
My parents weren’t around and I had no cash at home. Luckily, Maya wasn’t expecting me to pay her back. She just muttered something about her bad luck and left the hospital.
From then on, I was determined to repay her.
A few thousand dollars wasn’t insurmountable. I could pay it back over time.
I started making a point of walking by that alley every single day, just hoping to see her. At first, it was hit or miss. Then, she started waiting for me. And after a while, she always seemed to have a small cupcake in her hand when I arrived.
Just like that, Maya became my protector, and I became her little shadow.
No one at school ever bothered me again.
Maya was always watching her figure, so she never ate any of the treats. It seemed like all the “protection money” I gave her just ended up in my own stomach in the form of snacks.
We went on like that for a year, and then my parents came home.
They demanded I cut ties with the “trash” I was hanging out with, or they’d pull me out of school and put me to work.
I refused. I took my ID—proof that I was seventeen and could make my own choices—and walked out.
I didn't have an umbrella. I got soaked.
Maya called me a brainless idiot for fighting with my parents.
I just grinned foolishly and said, “You’re the best person to me in the whole world, Maya.”
And I was right.
She quit smoking because the smell triggered my asthma, and she’d change her clothes before meeting me. She gave up spicy food because I couldn’t eat it, sneaking out at two in the morning to get her fix at a late-night barbecue stand. Things like that, countless things.
She paid the rent, the utilities, our living expenses, and my tuition.
I wanted to drop out and get a job to help, but she tore into me, screaming at me for the first and only time. And even then, the harshest things she said were about herself.
“Chloe, do you want to end up like me? With people pointing at your back and calling you a slut?”
I didn’t.
“Don’t worry,” she’d said, her voice softening. “I can take care of you. I’ve got this.”
I remember her expression, her words, as clearly as if it were yesterday.
A wave of nausea churned in my stomach.
How did we get here? How did we end up like this?
3
The comments and likes under the photo were piling up.
I clicked on the profile of the person who posted it. Her avatar was a girl in a high school uniform. A stranger.
A breath I didn’t know I was holding escaped me.
It wasn’t Maya who posted it.
But even so, the cheating was undeniable. Set in stone. There was no way two other people in the world had their exact builds, my custom watch, and a one-of-a-kind charm I’d made myself.
Eight years of love, twelve years of friendship, turned to ash in an instant.
Was a man really worth all this?
Maya, who never bought herself a nice handbag, who hadn’t upgraded her phone in two years, had bought me the latest model the second it came out, no questions asked. And me—the first two years after I started making real money, I didn’t get a mortgage for myself. I bought her a car, paid in full.
I treated Maya the same way she treated me. We would have emptied our pockets for each other.
If she and Ethan had just told me they had feelings for each other, I would have stepped aside. I could have walked away from the relationship.
Why did they have to play me for a fool?
Was the thrill of sneaking around that much more exciting?
I wiped the tears from my eyes and opened Maya’s profile.
Back when I was just a student, just starting out, she was already a semi-famous singer at a local club. Every time she posted a video or an update, she’d make me like and comment, and then she’d reply and pin my comment to the top to drive traffic to my page.
After I became a successful illustrator with a steady stream of commercial work, she stopped linking our accounts.
“It’ll hurt your brand,” she’d said. “Driving your followers to a lounge singer’s page will make you lose credibility. You won’t get as many big clients.”
But now, everything was different.
Maya’s most recent post was from a bar event three days ago. The video was shaky, but besides her on stage, the camera kept panning to the right, lingering on a man in a white button-down shirt, only his forearm visible.
I didn’t need to look closely to know. It was Ethan’s arm.
Three days ago, Ethan told me there was a problem with a shipment at work and he had to work late.
How convenient. One minute he’s working late, the next he’s at a bar listening to her sing, not coming home all night.
September 11th. Ethan was “working late” again. But in the background of Maya’s video, I could see his reflection in a TV screen. They were in a hotel room. He was still wearing the watch. Our watch.
September 1st. The owner of Maya’s bar opened a new location out of state. Maya went to perform for the week-long grand opening. Ethan was on a “business trip” for five of those days. When he came back, there was a Band-Aid on his temple and the scrapes on his knuckles were still healing. He said he’d seen a drunk harassing a girl and had beaten the guy up.
And today, Ethan was working late again.
The tears turned to laughter, and the laughter dissolved back into tears. The past and present collided in my head, a chaotic, brutal war. I wanted to believe I was losing my mind, that this was all some paranoid delusion, anything but the reality staring me in the face.
We were supposed to get married tomorrow.
My wedding dress is hanging in the closet. The hair and makeup artists are scheduled to arrive at my apartment in eight hours. My bouquet is sitting on my vanity.
I had practiced the bouquet toss eight hundred times, determined to make sure Maya would be the one to catch it.
Everything was ruined.
They say that after a person breaks, they become colder, more rational. Numb.
I opened my laptop to draft an email canceling the wedding. My eyes drifted back to my phone against my will.
Should I call them? Confront them? Listen to them scramble for excuses, a flurry of pathetic lies until they finally admit their disgusting behavior, only to turn it around and blame me?
The screen lit up. A notification from our joint account.
I tapped it open. A charge from a hotel.
The room type, priced at 0-0,888, was the “Eros Suite.” Ethan and I had only been there once, the night he proposed.
He really knew how to spend money.
The thought of ending things gracefully lasted for a single second before it was incinerated by a blaze of fury.
I’m the kind of person who holds a grudge.
After what they did to me, I had to get them back.
4
I hit the delete key on the email draft and walked into my studio.
If they were so in love, then I would help them celebrate a long and happy life together.
About half of the invitation envelopes were left, stacked in a corner. I found a template online, typed in the guests’ names, and soon a thick stack of new invitations was printing out. It was much faster than the ones I had painstakingly illustrated by hand.
As I unstuffed the original invitations, a sharp pain lanced through my stomach. I looked at the name on the paper.
It was love at first sight with Ethan.
He was the student body president, on stage giving a speech in a crisp white shirt and thin, silver-framed glasses. His voice was calm and steady, giving him an air of cool detachment that made you want to be the one to break through it.
The line of people trying to win him over stretched from the main building to two miles off campus, from high school freshmen who’d had a crush on him for years to seniors, both men and women. I was just one of the countless, unnoticeable ones.
My fundamentals in art were weak, so I was already spending twice as much time as anyone else on coursework and homework. I had no time for “chance encounters.” My only connection to him was through the campus forums online.
My girlish crush didn’t escape Maya. The day after she figured it out, she cornered Ethan in an alleyway not far from campus as he was heading back from his tutoring job.
She had a lollipop stick poking out of the corner of her mouth, her voice cocky and tough. “My girl wants to get to know you. Give her your number.”
Ethan’s gaze fell on me, and he sighed with a kind of weary resignation.
My hand trembled as I scanned his QR code. He held his arm out for me, then turned to Maya. “What about you?”
Maya gave my shoulder a shove and swaggered away. “Don’t have a phone.”
Later…
When did they exchange numbers?
I sealed the last new invitation and clutched my stomach, curling into a ball against the desk.
Every single moment Ethan and Maya had been in the same room replayed in my mind. The way he would turn his head to watch her laugh, the way he’d join in on her antics, go shot for shot with her, drive her home.
And I, like a fool, thought it was just him being kind to my best friend because he loved me.
Once the pain subsided, I grabbed my wedding dress and took a cab to the hotel.
This wedding was the culmination of all my dreams, a fantasy I had spent a year and a half designing and supervising, building from the ground up. Ethan hated all that stuff, so I never asked him to be involved, only getting his opinion on the invitations and the party favors.
Now, I was about to destroy that dream with my own hands and face the brutal truth.
I had all the photos of us taken down, leaving only our two names, stark and bare, at the entrance to the ballroom.
I whispered his name, Ethan, and the suffocating pressure in my chest began to ease.
More than Ethan, I hated Maya.
She was the one who encouraged me to pursue art, the one who was with me through college. She was the best person to me in the world. I had long considered her my family.
And a knife from family always cuts the deepest.
I sat on the top floor of the hotel all night.
As the sky began to lighten, spots of light danced on the floor. I pulled open the curtains and realized it was dawn.
In the ballroom next to mine, the parents of another couple were bustling around, checking the arrangements with joyful faces, ready to celebrate the most important day of their children’s lives.
I looked down at my own shadow. I was used to being abandoned, to being given up on. Being alone didn’t feel so lonely anymore.
At nine o’clock, the wedding cars pulled up to the hotel entrance.
The other bride, the one getting married on the same day as me, walked through the doors surrounded by her loved ones, stepping toward her happy future.
I looked in the direction the cars had come from and saw Ethan in a corner.
He was standing in the shadows, smoking one cigarette after another, until a hand reached out and took the last one from his lips.
Maya ground the cigarette out with her high heel and, without a moment’s hesitation, slapped him across the face. “Ethan, don’t make me lose respect for you.”
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