Lily walks down the aisle, and I’m suddenly thinking about first grade. 

Her dark hair looks longer now. Back in high school, she used to take prenatal vitamins because she read somewhere that it would make your hair grow, but then she would fry the ends with a flat iron every morning and the strands would dissolve back into a pile of frizz. Now, her hair’s curly, natural without all that heat. It makes sense that it’s finally grown. Her hair changed, but her face is still that same little first-grader, long eyelashes and round cheeks with dimples that pop out when she smiles. 

The sky is sunny and bright, and the surrounding trees hang over the wedding arch and rows of seats like perfectly-placed decorations. I’m in a line with the other bridesmaids, glancing over at Matt while he watches the love of his life float toward him. She gets to the front and stops at the priest, and all I can see is her eight-year-old self at our first-ever playdate, draping a white top sheet over her shoulders, pulling the case off her pillow and letting it hang over her hair like a veil. 

The sheet spins around her ankles, sweeping across the dusty floor, and she is the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen as she takes my hand and twirls me under her arm. Her dad’s black bow tie hangs loose around my neck like a collar as Lily tells me to be her groom.

“Dance with me, Janey.” She curtsies and holds out her hand. We waltz around her bedroom to the beat of creaking floorboards. Little girls playing grown women. 

“My mom says your wedding is the most exciting day of your life,” she says. 

“What’s so exciting about it?” I ask. 

“We finally get to be brides.” 

         “I want my wedding to have a giant buffet,” I say. “With chocolate chip pancakes and syrup and waffles. And Froot Loops.”

“Mine will have a bouncy house out back, and all my guests will leave with a goodie bag filled with candy,” Lily tells me. “They’ll watch me kiss my husband, and he’ll spin me around in my poofy white dress and make me feel like a princess.” I look at the pillowcase flowing from her head, the way it reflects the whites of her eyes and the shiny row of her teeth.

         “You don’t need a wedding or a husband for that. You are already a princess, Lils.”

         We dance for hours in our dress-up costumes, dreaming about the Prince Charmings who will one day come to sweep us off our feet.

I wish I’d known then that there was no point in playing make-believe. I already had a soulmate, a real one, right there in my arms, waltzing around in a top-sheet gown.

         She had been there all along.

         I’m on my fourth mojito when the best man comes up to me at the open bar.

         “I have to say, I’ve never seen Matt so happy.”

Lily and Matt have their arms wrapped around each other, swaying in the center of the dance floor while Elvis sings “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” through the speakers. 

“Same with Lily,” I say.

It’s not a pillowcase and bow-tie kind of wedding, though Lily’s dimples deepen like craters in her cheeks as she grins all the same. Matt twirls her around, and the edges of her gown spin up and flash like the white of a top sheet, and even though I can tell she’s truly happy here with him, I still wonder for a second what else we might have dreamt about as little girls if we hadn’t been told to dream about this. 

“You must be jealous.”

I tense up. “Why would I be jealous?”

“Isn’t that what every girl wants?” the best man asks. “A fairytale wedding? A happy ever after?”

I slurp down on my mojito so hard I suck the mint leaf up the tiny plastic straw.  

“You think that’s the only thing that would make a woman happy?”
        He puts his hand on my waist and leans in.

“Well, I can think of a few other things.”

         “I have to pee.” I shove my empty glass into his palm and make a beeline for the bathroom.

         The line for the bathroom is too long, so instead I swipe a bottle of chardonnay from one of the tables and climb back through the woods to the altar where the ceremony was held. The four mojitos I’ve had send a light tingle through my fingers, and my cheeks feel loose, like my mouth might fall off if I move it too fast. I can still hear the DJ playing “Come on Eileen” in the distance, the faint echo of the crowd singing along. For June, the evening breeze is particularly cold, but I’ve got a warm buzz in my stomach that masks the bitter sting of the air. I take off my heels and wiggle my bare toes into the grass. The empty chairs and tall trees watch me wade through the aisles taking swigs of wine. 

“You missed cutting the cake.”
        Lily stands in the middle of the aisle, holding a slice of cake on a styrofoam plate in one hand, her scrunched-up dress out of the grass in the other.

She sits on the nearest seat. I plop down beside her. She steals the wine from my hand and swaps it out with the slice of cake. The buttery yellow liquid sloshes around the bottle as she lifts it to her lips.

“You know what this reminds me of?” I ask.

She hands me back the bottle. We take turns passing and sipping.

Lily laughs. “Our junior prom?” 

We’re in the high school gymnasium and in the woods. We’re seventeen and twenty-seven. We’re best friends and strangers.

“We stole that bottle of whiskey from your dad’s liquor cabinet and took turns chugging it outside the school,” I say. Another pass. Another sip. Acting out old memories. Pretending to be people we no longer can be.

“We were the last people to leave the dance floor. Principal Jones had to kick us out.”

“I think that’s where I’m happiest. Dancing with you,” I tell her.

I’m in Lily’s bedroom, dancing with a bow tie around my neck. I’m at the bar being hit on while she dances with her husband. I’m holding her hands while they slip from my grasp.

I continue. “Promise you’ll call me. At least once a week.”

“Matt and I are moving to Boston, not Antarctica.”

“Just promise, okay?” 

“I’ll call, Jane. Of course, I’ll call.”

I want to believe her but I can’t. “Good.” 

I pause the wine to dig into the blue flower of icing on the top of my cake slice, accidentally chomping down on the rough white plastic fork when I go in for the first bite.

         “You know you’re the only real friend I’ve got, right?” I add. “There’s never been—it’s never going to be anyone else.” I swallow sugary blue icing while my tooth throbs.

         “I know.”

         The sun starts to glow, a giant orange blob stretching out in front of us. Lily rests her head on my shoulder while it blinds us.

         We sit in an empty audience, and I can see all the people we have ever been. We are twelve years younger, and it’s almost midnight as she’s driving me home from the football game, only when we get to my house, I don’t go inside. Instead, we sit there in my driveway for hours, the heat blowing dry air onto my face while we hand each other little pieces of ourselves: our random thoughts and deepest fears, our favorite songs and school crushes. We are seven years younger, and she’s holding my hair back in the dorm bathroom while I dry-heave vodka seltzers and lukewarm beer into a porcelain bowl, swearing that I’ll never touch another drop of alcohol in my life as she rubs her hand over my back. We are three years younger, and I’m following her into the bar bathroom, wiping off her smeared mascara while she hyperventilates after running into an ex-boyfriend. We are twenty years younger, doing cartwheels in the backyard through sticky July heat, not minding the mud on our knees or sidewalk chalk on our dresses. 

We are zero years younger, sipping wine and eating cake in the brilliant glow of an evening sunset. 

We are three years older and I can’t picture a thing.

I look back and see her in every memory worth having. I look forward and she disappears. I hate her for leaving. I hate Matt for taking her away from me. Only I can’t hate her for this, because all she’s done is exactly what’s always been imagined for us, the dream we’ve been expected to have since before we even knew who we were going to be.

Don’t marry him, I want to say, but it’s cruel and selfish and she doesn’t deserve that. So instead I say, “I’m happy for you,” and she tells me she loves me while we sit there watching the sun slide down the pink sky below the wedding arch. The day will fade into night, the night will fade into morning, and Lily will start her first new day as a married woman. The world will keep spinning, the sun will keep setting, and we will never be these people again. 

__________

Caroline Funk is a fiction writer and Ohio native currently studying for her masters at The University of Chicago. Her short stories "Hatchling" and “The Leaves” previously appeared in Sequoia Speaks and Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine.