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Tiffany.
    Still, I went to my closet and pulled out the hanging dress that Becky had returned to me, newly altered, just two days ago. I still wasn’t convinced that the pale green looked good on me, but Becky had been insistent to the contrary, and you just didn’t argue with her. It was close to impossible. More impossible, I thought with a smile, than the apocalypse on Tiffany’s wedding day. One more glance at the sky showed me that the trees in the yard were whipping their branches around furiously and a light spray of rain already dotted the window, even though it hadn’t been there two seconds ago when I’d last looked.
    The day grew even uglier with the passing of time and Becky had sent me not one, but four texts gloating over her prediction. Regardless, I got to the church unharmed. Thankfully, Tiffany had called to say that the hairstylist would meet us at the church, given the weather, rather than at the salon as we’d originally planned.
    Traffic was moving at a crawl and I got no less than fourteen texts from the frantic bride-to-be, and one from Becky that read: Told you so. LMAO . I bet she was, too. I could just see her living it up while I was here, trapped in ungodly bumper-to-bumper traffic with no end in sight and a bridezilla demanding to know why I couldn’t just walk to the church. By the time I finally made it, I was seven minutes late, my hair was a black, tangled mess, and I was soaked to the bone and shivering.
    “Oh, thank God!” Tiffany exclaimed when I came stumbling into the dressing room. She said it in a voice that led me to believe she might drop to the ground any minute and start praising the good lord on her hands and knees. She could be very devout, when it suited her.
    “S-sorry I’m late,” I talked over my chattering teeth, rubbing my hands up and down my arms—which was useless, since my shirt was also soaked through.
    “You poor thing!” Tiffany crooned sympathetically, leaning over to peck my cheek. “You look like you need to thaw out. Why don’t you have a cup of hot tea before you get your hair done? It’s over there.”
    I followed her finger until I saw the teapot with mugs nearby. “Thank you.”
    Though it had a rough start, three hours later we were talking and kidding back and forth, giggling as we applied our makeup. Now that her entire bridal party was accounted for, Tiffany had mellowed somewhat and was laughing at our bald ribbing.
    “My dad told Jonathon to paint his dick green!” another bridesmaid, Kim, said.
    “What the fuck?” Megan laughed. “Why would he do that?”
    “He told him that if I was really a virgin, I wouldn’t freak out,” she confided.
    “Did you?” I wanted to know.
    “Freak out? ‘Course I did, we’d been having sex since the tenth grade. Jonathon got a kick out of it though. Moral of the story, though, Tiff: If he’s painted his little man green, you know why!”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Megan chimed in. “The way I hear it, his man isn’t so little!”
    We joked and carried on in the way a group of women will do until the wedding planner poked her head in and told us we had half an hour until the service would start. As Tiffany fluttered around in an excited panic, I looked at her bright eyes and face-cracking grin and realized with a start that I was jealous. It completely took me by surprise, but when I thought about it, really thought about it, I had to admit it was there, even if I’d never noticed it.
    Today Tiffany would marry the man she’d given her heart to, who’d given her his in return, and the truth was, I hadn’t come even close to that kind of relationship in all the time I’d been away. If I was honest with myself, I had to admit that it might never happen for me again—maybe, when I was young and stupid, I’d looked right at the only chance I’d ever have and thrown it away with both hands.
    But things like that didn’t just come around once, did they? And we had been so young… so