CHAPTER 1Molly
If you ever find yourself hosting an event that requires a rented white tent, you can be certain that I, Molly Marks, will RSVP with regrets.
If your tent is festooned with off-season flowers, or thousands of fairy lights, or embossed linen place cards—if it’s bedecked with a dance floor, a wedding band, a dais for the giving of toasts—rest assured I’ll be there in absentia, cheersing you, my dear friend, from hundreds of miles away.
It’s not personal. I’m sure your event is momentous and that you’re a wonderful host.
But the rented white tent is a monument to public displays of emotion, and sentiment makes me squeamish. If I must evince a feeling—and, gross—I want to do it at home, with the blinds drawn and the lights off, in a robe covered in frosting and dribbles of sauvignon blanc.
You can thus understand why, on this sultry night on this star-glimmered island famed for its champagne-colored beaches, I have the enthusiasm of a woman hobbling on heels to her tropical, waterfront grave.
For approaching us in middle distance in the pearlescent glow of the full Florida moon is the hungry white mouth of a tent the size of a cruise ship.
And beneath it, draped in fake bougainvillea and lit up in spotlights flashing from violet to rose, a banner proclaims in a jubilant font:
WELCOME TO YOUR 15TH REUNION, PALM BAY CLASS OF 2003!!!
Three exclamation points. Lethal.
I will allow that under the right circumstances—if I were another person, for instance—the atmosphere that greets me beneath the billowing canvas might be called dreamy.
The air, after all, smells like jasmine, and orange blossoms, and the salty breeze rippling off the Gulf of Mexico. Tiki torches cover the dance floor in flickering light. There’s a champagne bar and a lobster station. Carefully dressed men and women are embracing with genuine sincerity, beaming at each other. On a few faces I even spot tears.
I put my hand to my throat to feel my fluttering pulse. It was a mistake not to take a Xanax at the hotel. Perhaps I can hide in a lifeguard station.
“I can’t do this,” I whisper to my best friend, Dezzie, who along with her husband, Rob, is the closest thing I have to a date for the evening.
She squeezes my hand with immoderate pressure—a gesture meant to be either reassuring or painful enough to scare me straight.
“You will do this,” she whispers back.
“This is how I know my wife went to an obnoxious prep school in Florida,” Rob remarks, unperturbed by my nerves. “Her fifteen-year reunion looks like a destination wedding.”
“Actually, this is ten times nicer than our wedding,” Dezzie says, dragging me past a table of welcome bags full of sparkly flip-flops and bug spray. We pause to take in centerpieces that involve pineapples, orchids, and foot-long diamanté palm trees.
“That’s what you get for marrying an impoverished social worker,” Rob says. “Maybe we can hijack the reunion and renew our vows.”
“If there is one thing worse than a high school reunion,” I say grimly, “it’s a high school reunion slash vow renewal. Besides, it is a law of the universe that every couple who renews their vows breaks up within a year. You guys are too well-matched to throw it all away for some coconut shrimp.”
“I see we’re in a chipper mood tonight,” Rob says, reaching out to flick my shoulder.
Rob is lucky I’m too miserable to retaliate, or I would frog him right between the ribs. He and Dezzie have been together for so long that Rob and I are almost like siblings. The kind who love each other dearly and show it through bickering and a touch of light physical violence.
“Being dour was Molly’s brand in high school,” Dezzie tells him. “She was voted ‘Most Pessimistic’ senior year.”
I toss back my hair. “An accomplishment in which I still take pride, thank you very much. I had to work for that honor.”
I paid in a teenage proclivity for panic attacks. But don’t feel bad. I grew up and got a psychiatrist and am now a strong, fierce woman with a soothing cocktail of prescriptions for antidepressants and the occasional benzo.
“I can only imagine what Molly was like as a teenager,” Rob says, accepting a tiny, caviar-dotted crab cake from a waiter. “Given how intolerable she is now, I’d guess … not great.” He gives me a wicked smile, and it is my turn to flick his shoulder.
“Oh God, she was insufferable,” Dezzie says, throwing her arm around me affectionately. “Just all sad poetry and black coffee and feminist rants at debate club. She was like the human embodiment of a Sylvia Plath tattoo.”
“So, literally nothing has changed,” Rob says.
“Not true,” I counter. “I’m the life of the goddamn party. Just not this one.”
Please believe me: this is true. I live in Los Angeles, and my career depends on my ability to strike up sparkling poolside conversations at absurdly large houses tucked into the Hollywood Hills while downing just the right amount of champagne. I can charm with the best of them, converse like an ingenue, network so effortlessly it’s almost like I’m enjoying myself.
But that’s real life.
This is fake high school.
“Well tonight,” Rob pronounces, “we are going to get you so jazzed to see all your old friends they aren’t going to recognize you. Aren’t we, Dez?”
Dezzie scans the room, no longer paying attention to us. “Where are we sitting?”
“Let’s snag a table in the back where no one will talk to us,” I suggest.
She hits my arm with her clutch. It’s a very good clutch. Dezzie has excellent taste. Tonight she is wearing a short, architectural frock that looks like Comme des Garçons but that, she assured me when I gasped in envy at the sight of her, is a creatively belted tunic from none other than the high fashion house of Amazon.com. Her glossy black hair is in a severe, shoulder-length bob, and her lips are a slash of red that perfectly sets off her pale complexion. Rob, meanwhile, is lucky that he is handsome and square-jawed, because his fashion sense can charitably be called schlump-core. He is in his usual rumpled tan chinos, which tonight he has dressed up, if you can call it that, with a tweed blazer far too warm for the weather and some scuffed black loafers that don’t match his belt. They’re an odd pairing, like Karen O meets Jim from The Office. But they have enviable chemistry.
“Oh my God, Molly, you must stop complaining,” Dezzie says. “You haven’t seen most of these people in fifteen years. You flew all the way to Florida, which you hate, from Los Angeles. I’m not letting you hide in your wineglass all night, texting sarcastic observations to me and Alyssa under the table.”
“If you think I am going to drink something as low-proof as wine tonight, you don’t know me at all,” I say. “Besides, I saw there are signature cocktails. How can I resist a Palm Bay Preptini?”
“Oooh, what does nostalgia for a forty-thousand-dollars-a-year private school taste like?” Rob asks.
I grab a coupe glass from a passing waiter and down half the pale orange liquid. “Women sweating through their DVF dresses, aging drunk bros dancing to hip-hop … and, um, rum or something.”
Dezzie makes a beeline for a table and trots back holding three place cards.
“I found us,” she says, handing me one.
Molly Marks, Table 8.
My stomach drops. “Wait a minute. Seats are assigned?”
Dezzie shrugs. “Marian Hart planned this. She probably wants to encourage social mixing. You know what she’s like.”
Marian Hart was our class president and our prom queen. She has the relentless, upbeat energy of a cruise ship activity director.
“Please tell me we’re at the same table,” I say, grabbing Dezzie’s place card.
Desdemona Chan, Table 17.
“Fucking hell,” I mutter. “Alyssa better be at my table, at least.” Alyssa is our other best friend, the third in the impenetrable trio we formed in second grade.
“Nope. I saw her card. She’s at eleven. And besides, her flight got in late and she won’t be here for another hour. She can’t save you. You’ll just have to mingle.”
“I can mingle fine,” I shoot back. “It’s false nostalgia and forced cheer I’m not capable of.”
Onstage, the steel drum band of white guys playing Jimmy Buffet covers finishes “The Weather Is Here, I Wish You Were Beautiful,” and none other than Marian Hart steps onstage.
Unsurprisingly, she looks impeccable. Her perfectly highlighted blond hair is pulled into an elegant chignon that is somehow not melting in the Florida humidity, and her arms look like they’re sponsored by Goop.
“Guys!” she squeals into the microphone. “It is amazing to see everyone. We have a hundred and fifty-eight out of our class of a hundred and sixty-seven here tonight, can you believe it? And we are going to have So. Much. FUN.”
Her blue eyes roll back into her skull with sincerity.
I bury my head in Dezzie’s shoulder. “I already hate this. Why am I here?”
“You wanted to come, you hypocrite. Perk up. Maybe you’ll have fun.”
She’s wrong. I most certainly did not “want” to come. I’m here because I was peer pressured. I’m the only one of our little circle who lives on the West Coast, and occasions to see each other are increasingly rare, now that Alyssa has kids. But I’m finishing a project, and I don’t like to travel when I’m in writer mode.
“I should be at home, working,” I say.
“You can take four days off,” Rob says. “It’s not like you’re an oncologist.”
I am very far away from practicing life-saving medicine. I write rom-com scripts for a living. Think meet cutes, splashy set pieces, heartthrobs choking back tears as they profess unlikely, undying love to a woman who purportedly works at a magazine and always has blown-out hair.
I’ll wait for you to stop laughing.
My career is admittedly a departure from the misanthropic sensibility for which I am known. However, please note I’m surprisingly good at it. I had two indie hits back-to-back right out of grad school. Granted, that was eight years ago. But my producer is in talks with an A-lister to play the lead in the screenplay I’m finishing, and I think it could be a hit.
A big one, even.
Which my career could desperately use. I get steady work writing for hire, but after my success right out of the gate, I was vain enough to think I’d be the next Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers, banging out stone-cold classics while minting money. Right now, I’m coming up short in the “millionaire voice of a generation” department.
“Appetizers are about to be served,” Marian continues from the stage. “So if y’all can go find your seats now, that would be perfect. We’re going to have this fabulous meal and then we’re going to get down like we’re sixteen again! To kick us off, there are icebreaker questions at each table. Chat through them while you enjoy your scallops. Now go have so much fun!”
I grab Dezzie’s hand. “I can’t believe I have to endure this alone.”
“You’re going to be great, princess,” she says, detaching herself from my grip. “Knock ’em dead. If not with charm, then with that famed sinister glare.”
“I already regret this.”
“Look, here’s our table,” Dez says to Rob, pointing at a nearby eight-top already populated with that quiet guy who founded a hedge fund and Chaz Logan, the funniest boy in our class.
“Oh man, you got Chaz and the billionaire?” I whine, despite being thirty-three years old. “I’m legit jealous.”
Dez scans the room. “Oh, I think your table will be interesting.”
I follow her eyes to a smaller table toward the side of the tent, near the beach, with a seagull-shaped sign that reads: Table 8.
And sitting at it, alone, is Seth Rubenstein.
My breath lodges painfully in my esophagus.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I hiss.
Copyright © 2024 by Katelyn Doyle
