Free Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest by Jen Doll Page A

Mars.
    In a departure from historical precedent, we stayed put, and as always, I adjusted. By the end of elementary school, my report card would read “excellent” for my courteousness and respect for authority. The years kept passing, and it became home, if not the home I might have chosen. Along with when to say
ma’am
, I learned what to wear, how to say
y’all
, and who to be friends with. I met Marjorie in seventh grade. By eighth grade we were hanging out in the elementary school playground where I’d nearly gotten pantsed, experimenting with smoking cigarettes. By ninth we’d graduated to wine coolers and loitering in the parking lot of that school at night, in the cars of boys who could drive. Her family lived in a rambling, multi-winged brick-red house with neatwhite shutters and matching trim, perched on the top of a hill near the edge of town. Its kitchen was warm and well lit and usually smelled of fresh-baked, delicious food homemade by her mom, who for a while had run a catering business. Marjorie and I shared crushes on senior boys whose girlfriends were the girls we dreamed of growing up to be. We joined the same clubs, running for different offices. We sat next to each other in our classes and passed notes in plain view of our teachers, our allegiance to each other, not them. We rushed for the same high school sorority—an association of girls intended to prep us for the real thing in college—and when those parties and formals started happening, we would ask boys who were inseparable twosomes like us to go as our dates.
    Around that time I took to wearing my mom’s engagement ring, the one that her ex-husband had given her, an emerald-cut diamond that looked like what I imagined an engagement ring should be. Given what I knew of my mom’s marital history, it may have been odd that I chose this ring as my preferred accessory, but somehow its wearing seemed an important thing to practice. Plus, it was a diamond, and from what I had heard, diamonds should be seen, not hidden away in jewelry boxes and forgotten. For some reason my mom let me appropriate it, and because it fit there, I wore the ring on the fourth finger of my left hand, not knowing there was any presumed marital karma in that decision. I worked for a while in a grocery store in town, and people would see it and ask if I was married, and I’d give them dirty looks because I was still in high school.
Marriage?
I was far too young for marriage or, for that matter, even a permanentdeclaration of love. I’d only just gotten my driver’s license, for heaven’s sake.
    That didn’t mean romance wasn’t something I longed for. As sophomores, Marjorie and I had noticed two senior guys who did a funny thing in our yearbook. In all the photos in which they appeared, they were always the tallest boys, and they tilted their heads and gave knowing, goofy looks to the camera, gesticulating with pointed fingers at each other. One of them had loose, floppy skater hair, an overgrown brunet bowl cut. He became my new crush, but he had graduated from high school, and there was little chance of my ever meeting him. Until, suddenly, there was. He was staying in town and going to community college. Over the summer before junior year, I was in a car with a friend one day. We went by his house, and she pointed it out, a landmark: “That’s where Nathaniel lives.”
    “Oh,” I said, nonchalant, but after that day, I drove by again and again. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes I had friends with me, sometimes I was in another friend’s car. It was a shortcut on the way to a drugstore, I reasoned; this was entirely acceptable behavior, not creepy
at all
.
    He was rarely outside, though, and the little blue house sat quietly and low on its haunches, unassuming. Sometimes his Volkswagen Golf would be parked in the carport, and I’d think,
He must be home
, and try to imagine what he might be doing. All of the drive-bys did not go unnoticed. Sooner or later