Meg Cabot - Queen of Babble Gets Hitched

It’s also for this reason that originally best men were not attendants on the groom’s side, but the bride’s. They were supposed to defend the bride from any unwanted male attention that was not the groom’s.

Unfortunately, the incidence of brides running off with best men tended to be rather high, so the position of best man was switched to the groom’s side, and a maid of honor was appointed to the bride to keep her chaste. Weddings (and wedding parties) sure used to be a lot more interesting!

Tip to Avoid a Wedding Day Disaster

Don’t be a bridezilla! Yes, everyone is going to have an opinion on who you ought to hire and what you ought to choose for your flowers, your cake, your wedding photos. Take the advice you like, and politely ignore or laugh off the rest. Don’t take it all so personally! So what if your wedding isn’t as grand/expensive/beautiful/bohemian as cousin Jacqueline’s? It’s not a contest! It’s about your joining your life—forever—to someone else’s. GET. OVER. IT.

LIZZIE NICHOLS DESIGNS^™

My cell phone won’t stop ringing. I know who it is. But I won’t pick up.

I am standing on Madison Avenue between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-sixth Streets. I am staring into the windows of a shop. I’ve stopped crying and can now see clearly. I can make out every inch of the yards and yards of creamy white silk and petal soft lace draped on the mannequin in front of me. I can see every minute detail on the stitching, so fine it’s almost invisible, the delicacy of the beading, the luxuriousness of the stiff tulle crinoline that holds the skirt in place. The gown is perfection personified.

It must cost thousands of dollars. Tens of thousands, maybe.

And yet.

And yet I think I could come up with something fairly close that—though it wouldn’t be quite as sumptuous—would make the girl wearing it feel just as special.

For a fraction of the cost.

I’m just saying. What I do is cheap—yeah, okay? I’ll admit it. But it’s still pretty good. People like it. Ava Geck liked it. Jill Higgins liked it. Hundreds—well, okay, dozens—of other brides have liked it. It was good enough for them.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t Vera Wang.

But it was good enough for their wedding day. It made them feel special. It made them look beautiful.

And that ability—that talent for taking something not so great and making it into something pretty, for not a lot of money—it’s all I have.

I realize this as I stand there on the busy sidewalk, as the summer heat beats down on me and busy New Yorkers rush by.

The reality is, that’s all I’ve got to contribute to the universe.

It’s true. Shari helps women who’ve been abused. Chaz is going to teach philosophy, probably to students as snotty about it as he is. (But hey. That’s important. Probably.) Luke is going to save the children—or help already rich people get richer, depending on what he decides. Tiffany models and answers phones, and Ava Geck… well, Ava does whatever she does, while Little Joey protects her.

And I make old wedding dresses pretty again. Sometimes I create new ones. For a fraction of what a designer gown at the shops around the corner on Madison Avenue would charge to do it.

It’s an okay thing to do.

It has to be. Because it’s all I’ve got.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Right?

My phone rings again. This time, when I glance at the display screen, I see that it’s not Chaz, but Luke. Unable to imagine why he could be calling, I pick up.

“I heard,” he says in a grim voice after I say hello.

My heart seems to stop. For a second, all the sounds of the busy street behind me—the honking, the sirens, the squealing of brakes—seem to fade away. All I can hear is my own breathing. And that seems shallow and irregular.

“You… heard?” I manage to wheeze.

“About the shop closing? Yeah,” he says. “I called there first. Tiffany told me. Lizzie, I’m so sorry.”

And my heart begins to beat again. And all the sounds of the city come floating slowly back.

“Oh,” I say.

God. I am so stupid. Also, I am the worst Bad Girl ever to grace the Bad Girl Scale in the history of Bad Girls.

“Right. Yes. It’s awful. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I do,” Luke says. “You’re going to move to Paris with me.”

I am trying not to be run over by all the people who are hurrying along the sidewalk. For the most part, they are stepping around me. But every once in a while, a harried Upper East Side mom on her way to some important lunch appointment uptown doesn’t see me and almost barrels her Bugaboo baby carriage into me, and I have to move. This happens now, and in the confusion, I think I’ve misheard Luke.

“I beg your pardon?” I say to him.

“I know what you’re going to say, Lizzie.” He is thousands of miles away, but he sounds as if he were standing right beside me. Except for the car horns and occasional police siren down Madison Avenue, which makes him slightly difficult to hear. I put my finger in my nonphone ear, just to be sure.

“But just listen for a minute,” he goes on. “I tried the medical school thing. I did. You can’t say I didn’t give it a fair shot. But… I just don’t think I’m cut out for it. I can’t hack another five or six—or more—years of school. I can’t do it. I think it will kill me. I really do.”

I watch as another young mother, this one pushing a newborn, walks by, a seven-or eight-year-old skipping by her side, an ice cream cone dripping all over his hand, down his arm, and onto the front of his shirt. Neither he nor his mom seems to care.

“Oh,” I say.

“But since coming to work for Uncle Gerald—Lizzie. It’s been great. I love it. I really do. I know when you first met me I was doing the same thing, and I said I didn’t like it, and I seemed burned out… but this is different. Gerald’s offered me my own department. I’ll have people working under me.” I’ve never heard Luke sound so enthusiastic. About anything. He sounds like his father sounds when he talks about wine. He sounds young. He sounds… happy. “There’s just one catch.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s here,” Luke says. “In Paris. I’d have to move to Paris. Permanently.”

“Oh,” I say.

“But that’s why when I heard what happened today at the shop,” he goes on excitedly, “I thought, it’s a perfect opportunity. You’re out of a job, and I just got offered a great one. Lizzie, you can come here, to Paris. You can start over, like I’m doing. You can open a new shop here. A bridal shop. I walked by one the other day, and your dresses are a thousand times nicer. And much more affordable. Everything here is so expensive. There’s a real demand for affordable fashion. That’s where your niche is, I think, Lizzie. That’s what you need to do. Open your own shop here in Paris. A shop that offers beautiful couture for the ordinary girl, at prices she can afford. For brides.”

“I already have a bridal shop,” I say, sniffling. “In New York.”

“I know,” Luke says. “But that shop belongs to someone else. And they’re selling it. I’m talking about a shop of your own.”

“But… ” I say, looking at the display window in front of me. “In France?”

“Look,” Luke says. “You speak French. My family can loan you the start-up income. Lizzie… don’t you see? This is a perfect opportunity for it.”

“But.” I look around at the people hurrying by in all their different shapes and colors, at the buildings all around me, at the taxis and buses and delivery vans and trucks whizzing by, the sun slanting through the leaves of a nearby tree, growing, against all odds, through the pavement, in the shadow of the skyscrapers all around us.

Because that’s what New York City is all about. Trees growing up out of the pavement, in the shade, where no tree should ever grow.

And I say, “I love New York.”

“You’ll love Paris too,” Luke says. “You’ve been there, remember? It’s just like New York. Only better. Cleaner. Nicer.”

“It’s so far away,” I say as a kid walking by with a dog fails to clean up after it, and a woman with a Chanel purse yells at him for it.

“From what, Lizzie?” Luke asks. “Your grandmother? She’s dead. Remember?” But Gran isn’t who I’m thinking about.

“I can’t decide right now,” I say. “I… I’ll have to think about it.”

“You do that,” Luke says. “You think about it. You take all the time you need. But I think you should probably know… I’ve accepted the job my uncle offered me.”

“What?” I think I must have misheard him again.

“We’ll figure something out,” Luke says hurriedly. “If you decide to stay in New York, we’ll just do the long-distance thing for a while. People do, Lizzie. We’ll make it work. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry? My fiancé—on whom, it is true, I am cheating—informs me that he is going to move permanently to another country, but that I shouldn’t worry?

“And if you need a place to stay, you know you can always move back into my mother’s place on Fifth. She already said it was all right. She’ll just need to use the place one weekend a month, for her—you know… ”

He means her monthly Botox injections. But I don’t say that out loud, since Luke doesn’t need me to remind him about that.

I am standing there, openmouthed in astonishment, when a voice behind me says, “Hey.”

I spin around, startled, and see a flash of khaki and the brim of a baseball cap.