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

it got back to him that there was a high school girl with long brown hair who wouldn’t stop driving by his house. We met, awkwardly. We met again, less so. And then we were a couple. It had all been sosimple, but for the gas money and, later, the breakup. As the conclusion to my senior year approached, I tried to tell him we needed to end things. He couldn’t understand why, and I couldn’t, really, either, only that I knew it was something that I had to do. I needed to go on to the next stage of my life on my own, without him. It didn’t make sense—
How do you love someone so much, and then abruptly change how you feel?
—but it was the only thing that made sense.
    On graduation night at a party in a cornfield I kissed another boy, and though it meant nothing, it was freeing. I was done, I told Nathaniel, it was over. He did not take it well, nor did my own family, to whom he was very nearly one of us. “How could you?” I remember my brother saying. “Oh, Jennifer,” my mom had groaned. My dad had been silently disappointed, feeling sorry for the nice young man he’d gotten to know. Of course, they’d forgiven me, and in the years that passed, it seemed that Nathaniel had, too. He’d sent postcards, and word would occasionally come about his whereabouts from friends. I was glad he was doing well, glad in the way that you can be glad for someone you used to know while also feeling that pang of
What if
. What if I’d done things differently, where might I be now? You can’t go back, and it wasn’t that I wanted to. But a person couldn’t help wondering.
    •   •   •
    L ike romantic relationships, high school friendships don’t always make it through college separations, but Marjorie’s and mine did. We’d made a commitment, promising each otherthat after we graduated from our respective universities we’d move to New York City. We’d rent an apartment together and be successful career women and have the best lives ever, although Marjorie planned to stay for a few years only, after which she’d move back to the South, get married, and start a family. I planned to stay as long as I felt like. I had a feeling New York could be my new home, the permanent home I’d been looking for. I needed one, because my dad’s job had taken my parents to London the summer I graduated, and then to Singapore and Indonesia, farther and farther away from that Alabama town in which I’d spent eight years.
    Marjorie and I did what we said we’d do: We moved to New York, and we got a place on the Upper East Side with another high school friend, Violet. It was a three-bedroom apartment insomuch as there were three bedrooms side by side, with thin walls between them and their doors connected to a narrow communal living space. Not one but two brothels were busted in the building in the time we lived there, and at one point, a cop knocked on our door, thinking one of those apartments was ours. Marjorie let him in and insisted, “We’re not prostitutes!” and he nodded and said, “Three girls living together? Sure.” We didn’t know if we should be horribly offended or proud of ourselves. It was awesome, this grown-up life. Mostly.
    Together, we got our first and second jobs and learned the ropes of our newly adopted city. We had bad dates and hookups and breakups, got dumped and dumped others, dealt with boys who called repeatedly and those who never spoke to us again after the first or sixth night. We even stayed friends through theone time a man peed in our refrigerator. Then, just like she’d warned us she would, Marjorie moved back to the South, to Nashville, a few hours from our hometown—close enough, not too close—but not before she met Brian. From the beginning there was a seriousness to their relationship, and it threw me for a loop. That you could identify the person with whom you wanted to make a life, nail it down, and do it, seemed so inexplicable, so incredibly slippery. Did you just know? Did