Free Beautiful Code by Sadie Hayes

strong one, the one who could take a bad situation and rationally develop a plan of action. But she was in no state to solve this problem.
    His mind raced. “We have to get them to cancel the Q&A.”
    “How?” Amelia moaned from the pillow. “It’s why they all came. Adam, why did we ever do this? I just want to go home.”
    “T. J. knows Mike, right?” Adam’s mind was suddenly lucid. “And, for that matter, everyone in the press. He can convince them not to ask those questions.”
    “But he’s at the wedding, remember?”
    “You have to go get him. No,” he reconsidered. “I’ll go get him. You might run into Ted Bristol.”
    Adam scrambled to pull on a pair of shorts and a Polo shirt—one that Lisa had helped him pick out—and dashed out the door. “Don’t worry about anything, Amelia. Order some room service and take a shower and I’ll figure this out, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.”
    This was all going to work out. It had to.

CHAPTER 15:
    Prepping and Primping
     
    “O h my God, you must be so nervous.”
    Patty glanced up from the InStyle magazine in her lap and into the mirror at the very gay hairdresser wielding a hot curling iron and a coy grin. He was a super thin, bald Asian guy, dressed completely in black, including thick plastic glasses, and he’d clearly had at least six cups of coffee already this morning, or a lot of something else. “Marc, with a C,” he’d introduced himself. Patty didn’t trust hairdressers who had no hair of their own.
    She smiled politely. “Why would I be nervous?”
    “Well, it’s your sister’s big day. I mean, I’d be totally nervous that I’d ruin it.”
    Patty felt her cheeks burn. What did he know? She lifted her eyebrows and he quickly backtracked. “I mean, that I’d step on her dress or forget to grab her flowers or whatever.”
    Whew, she thought. “No, I guess I’m not really that nervous.” She went back to the article about finding the right-fitting pair of skinny jeans.
    “Ahhhh!!!!” Marc with a C squealed, dropping the curling iron in order to clap as he turned from Patty to Shandi, who had come out of her private room and was twirling in the middle of the Four Seasons salon for all to see, her veil perfectly affixed atop a knot of careful curls. Her bangs were swept gently across her forehead and her makeup was flawless. Even in the tank top and shorts she was wearing, she looked like a princess.
    The four other bridesmaids, two from college and two from Atherton, turned in their salon swivel chairs and chirped gleefully along with their respective stylists. Patty swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and called out, hoping she didn’t sound fake. “Oh, Shandi, you look so pretty.”
    Not like Shandi heard, anyway. She was already at the mirror, examining each individual curl. “Are you sure?” she asked, pointlessly. Of course, everyone insisted she was absolutely mad if she thought she looked anything less than perfect.
    Patty couldn’t wait for all this to be over. She’d gotten good enough at swimming to prove to herself that her athleticism matched that of her nationally ranked tennis-playing sister; getting into Stanford had validated that she could match Shandi academically. But when it came to looks, Patty still felt totally, utterly inferior. She felt okay when Shandi wasn’t around. She could see that her legs were shapely, her stomach flat, her skin smooth, her face not so unattractive. But the minute Shandi came back into the picture, Patty felt like a fat cow. She looked at her sister’s thin frame and high cheekbones and knew that, even if she stopped eating for a month, she’d never be as pretty.
    And all she could think about now, sitting here with her hair actually looking really amazing (maybe Marc with a C wasn’t such an idiot), was that she’d never get to feel the way Shandi felt right now, with everyone ooh-ing and ahh-ing around her. That on her own wedding day, when she ought to feel like