Page 8 of Enchanted to Meet You

Sebastian snorted. “Oh, I’m responding.”

Lavender turned to him. “Seb⁠—”

“Relax,” he said. “I’m just going to keep it simple and passive aggressive. ‘Can’t make it. Busy not attending.’”

“Busy raising the family you left behind,” Lavender mumbled.

“At what point does passive aggressive just become plain aggressive?” Sebastian asked.

“You should send a gift with no card,” Cole suggested. “Something useless. Like a single oven mitt.”

Somebody threw a napkin at him, and the conversation dissolved from there into the usual chaos—Lavender trying to explain to Dean what garden party chic meant while he insisted it was just a fancy way of saying “wear beige,” Imogen drafting increasingly unhinged RSVP language on her phone that she swore she wasn’t obviously going to send, Nora stealing the last of the home fries off Sebastian’s plate while he was mid-sentence and pretending she hadn’t.

I folded the invitation in half, then in half again, until it was small enough to disappear into my pocket, and let myself get pulled back into the noise—Imogen’s shoulder against mine, Lavender laughing so hard at something Dean said that she nearly knocked over her water glass, the whole overstuffed, too-loud comfort of all of us in one room being furious at the same person together.

We may still have our stings and wounds from when Dad left last summer, but at least we had each other, we had Mum, and we had some amazing brunch takeout.

I spent an embarrassing amount of the next six hours trying not to think about the party—in the way that telling yourself not to dwell on it means that it’s the only thing you think of.

I tried on a dozen different outfits, demanding Imogen’s opinions as I rolled up my skirts to be short and tugged shirts around to fall off my shoulders just right, before deciding they all looked ugly no matter what she said. I settled on jeans and a top I’d bought with Nora two months ago that I’d never worn outside of my bedroom mirror, then convinced myself it was wrong, put my old sweater back on, looked at myself, decided the sweater made me look like I was on my way to a parent-teacher conference, and went back to the top.

Imogen sat with me—acting as DJ for the music I always had playing so loudly that my room would shake—as I redid my hair twice, trying to perfect a “I barely tried at all” hairstyle that definitely looked like I tried (and largely failed). I put on eyeliner, wiped half of it off because it felt like too much, then put more back on because bare-faced felt like not trying at all, and there did not seem to be a world where I landed on the correct amount of effort.

“Why do you care so much about this party again?” Imogen asked from where she sat cross-legged on my bed.

My fingers still on the tube of lipgloss I was debating about adding to the look. I wasn’t sure why I cared this much. All I knew was that every time I paused in thinking about this party or getting ready for it or seeing Justin at it, I’d start thinking about that stupid baby shower invitation again. All the unexpected blessings of the last year as if my father abandoning his family and getting her pregnant was just a fun surprise.

If I focused on Justin’s party, I didn’t have to worry about that one.

“Because Justin invited me to a party.”

“Technically he invited Sebastian to the party,” she reminded me, like the traitor she was.

I waved a hand at her. “Potato po-ta-toh.”

“Not really,” she said with a smirk.

“All I know is that if I get to spend time with Justin, he’ll finally see how great I am, how funny⁠—”

“How humble.”

I rolled my eyes. “This is my chance to get to talk to him without the bell cutting us off or sprinting to get to dance class. I’ll have time to show him the extent of my greatness, and then we can fall in love, just like in my mind.”

“In your dreams.”

“That too.”

By seven-thirty, Imogen had left for her date night with Cole, and I was ready, out of stalling tactics, and sitting cross-legged on my bed alone doing the thing where you refresh your phone even though nothing is going to have changed since the last time you checked it four seconds ago, desperate to keep my eye off the time.

The party wouldn’t start for a while. Everyone knew that. Showing up right at eight was basically an admission that you had nothing better to do beforehand, and showing up before eight was—well. I didn’t actually know what showing up before eight was, because I had never done it, but I assumed it was somewhere on the spectrum between desperate and unhinged.

I knew all of this. And yet, I left my house at 8:06 anyway, because I felt pathetic just sitting around watching the clock.

I told myself I was just going to walk in that direction and loop back if it looked too early. His house was across the street and four doors down from mine, so I knew that the walk was short, but it felt never-ending.

When I got there, it was obvious it hadn’t started yet. There was no music. No cars I didn’t recognize lining the curb—just Justin’s pulled right up to the garage and the one I’d seen Rhys in, parked crooked in the driveway like whoever drove it had never considered trying twice.

It was the kind of house that made you feel like you’d wandered onto the wrong side of a magazine spread. I’d seen it from the outside before—you couldn’t miss it, really, sitting back from the road behind a long paved driveway lined with those perfect hedges that somebody clearly got paid a lot of money to maintain. I always imagined his backyard was filled with Greek statues and fancy fountains.