Save the Date

I tried to fight it, to keep the emotions at bay, but it was like everything was starting to pile up—everything going wrong with the wedding, my failed attempts to make it perfect, my fight with Siobhan—it was all hitting me at once.

I was horrified to realize that my lip had started to tremble and my face was getting the hot, tight feeling that meant I was about to start crying any second now. I closed my eyes hard, trying to keep the tears back, but to my horror, they leaked out anyway. “Sorry,” I said, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Sorry! I’m not—I just . . .” I couldn’t believe I was crying in front of Brooke, of all people. “I’ll go,” I said, taking another step back. Then, when I realized I had nowhere to go, I started crying harder. “God,” I said angrily, swiping my hand in front of my eyes. “I don’t mean to do this. I just . . .”

“Um,” Brooke said, taking a step closer to me, then one away, twisting her hands together, clearly as thrown by my tears as I was. “Are you . . . ? I mean . . .” She bit her lip, and the fact that I was making her so clearly uncomfortable wasn’t helping me pull myself together.

“I’m just supposed to have my hair done,” I said, raking my hands through it. “And my makeup, but they can’t wait until the power comes back on, and I’m going to ruin all of Linnie’s pictures, and I don’t know what to do. . . .” Saying this out loud made me feel worse than ever, because there was the situation, laid out, with no solution in sight.

“It’s okay,” Brooke said, sounding much less uncomfortable than she had a moment ago. I just looked at her. “It’ll be okay. Go wash your face, all right? Then come back here.”

I stared at her for a moment, wondering what she was even talking about, but she just nodded toward the bathroom across the landing. “Go on,” she said, her voice totally assured, like there was not even a question in there anywhere, like this was the only thing to do in this situation.

And so, feeling like I was glad to have someone telling me what to do, I crossed the landing to the bathroom. I washed my face twice, splashing it with cold water, and when I dried it and looked in the mirror, it seemed like maybe the puffiness around my eyes had subsided somewhat.

I walked back to my room, and Brooke was pulling out my desk chair. “Close the door,” she said, and I did, feeling more confused than ever. “Sit.” It was only when I crossed over to my chair that I saw she had laid out a set of rollers, along with a comb and a series of brushes.

“We don’t have any power,” I pointed out, even as I sat down. I was facing the door, and Brooke was behind me, which was making this situation that much stranger. “So I’m not sure what . . .” I tried to look at her, but she turned it so that I was looking straight forward, and I felt a mist on the back of my head as she sprayed something on my hair, then started combing it through. “But . . .”

“I always like to have rollers on hand,” she said, and as I turned my head as much as I could to look at the dresser, I saw that they were foam rollers, the kind my mom had sometimes used when I was little. “They don’t need any kind of power, and with your hair type”—I could feel her picking up sections of it with her hands, like she was assessing it—“I think it’ll look great.”

“And you don’t need any kind of heat?”

“Well,” she said, and I felt the mist and then the comb again, “ideally, you’d hit them with some heat from a blow-dryer, just to set the curls, but they’re fine without it. I promise.”

I opened my mouth to protest, or say that she didn’t really need to do this, but then closed it again when I realized I didn’t have any other solutions. She set her comb on my dresser, then picked up her brush and started combing through my hair with quick, efficient strokes. “Thank you,” I finally said quietly, looking straight ahead at my door.

“Sure,” Brooke said a moment later, going back to work with the brush again, her voice also quiet. “It’s the least I can do.”

* * *

“I don’t know,” I said, glancing at my flickering reflection in the mirror.

“I do,” Brooke said, wielding her tiny gold can of hair spray. “These are air-drying, but we have to do everything we can to hold the curl for when we take them out. And that means hair spray.”

I hesitated, then nodded and closed my eyes as Brooke started spraying my head, which was now totally covered in foam rollers. When she seemed to have stopped, I opened my eyes again and tried not to cough, then ran my hand over Waffles’s head. At some point during this makeover, he’d clambered up onto my lap, where he’d stayed ever since, dozing off occasionally, his twitching paws letting me know that he was dreaming.

Brooke and I hadn’t talked much as she’d twisted my hair around the rollers, then pinned them with bobby pins, beyond her telling me to keep my head still, or turn it this way or that. And I was glad about that, since the silence—and the comfort of a sleeping beagle on my lap—had let me pull myself together a little bit more, and I no longer felt like I was on the verge of panicking or bursting into tears, or both simultaneously.

“I think you got the dog,” I said, realizing that I could turn the hair on the top of Waffles’s head into tiny spikes and they stayed that way.

“It’s not a bad look on him,” she said, and I smiled.

“He sure likes you,” I said as Brooke crossed back to the dresser and started going through a gigantic makeup bag.

“I love dogs,” she said as she crossed in front of me. “And this guy . . . I feel like he knows he’s not really wanted this weekend. That he’s a little in the way. So I wanted to give him some extra attention.” I looked down at Waffles and felt a pang of guilt—after all, it wasn’t the dog’s fault that he’d been dropped off here. He’d had no say in the matter. She bent down so that she was almost level with me, studying my face, eyes narrowed in concentration. “Now,” she said. “What did Linnea want for makeup?”

“Oh,” I said, blinking at her. “Um . . . you don’t have to . . .”

Brooke just shook her head. “No offense, Charlie, but I’ve seen the way you’ve done your makeup this weekend. What did she want?”

“She didn’t say. She looks great, though—really natural but still somehow made-up?” I hesitated, wishing I was better at describing this.

Brooke continued to study my face. “We can do that.” She nodded like she’d decided something, then crossed back to the dresser and brought over her makeup bag, standing in front of me again. “Close your eyes.”

I tried to sit as still as possible as Brooke smoothed primer, then foundation, on my face, neither of which I’d worn since the prom. Even though she’d never done my makeup before, Brooke wasn’t hesitating or needing to try out lots of colors before applying anything. She was working with remarkable efficiency, like in addition to being a doctor, she also dabbled as a makeup artist.

“Okay,” Brooke said after a moment, and I opened my eyes. “We can do a more natural look since it seems like that’s what Linnie wants.” She sounded almost resigned. “But just so you know, for the future, you should lean more toward blue eye shadow. It’ll make your eyes pop.”

“Blue?” I’d usually gravitated toward greens and purples, but I was realizing now that was just because that’s what Linnie always wore, and I’d just copied her.

“Blue,” she confirmed. “A cool blue. Trust me.” She leaned toward me, and I closed my eyes automatically, feeling the featherlight brush as it passed over my eyelids. “This is going to look good,” she said, but softly enough that I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to herself. “Just try and sit still.”

“Okay,” I said, concentrating on not moving as I felt slight pressure on my eyelid—probably eyeliner being applied. The longer I sat there, trying not to even breathe too much, the worse I started to feel. Brooke did not need to be doing this for me. It wasn’t like I’d been particularly nice to her since she arrived. It wasn’t that I’d been mean—at least, I hoped not—but I hadn’t welcomed her in. I’d resented that she was here—messing up my plans and taking away Danny’s attention. She had been nothing but sweet and kind to me, and in return, I had treated her shabbily.