Page 79 of A Storybook Wedding

If there are two things I know: (1) promises and lies go hand in hand, and (2) Ryan Howland looks damn fine in a tux.

He’s got the height, the muscles; he’s even got the smile for it. If a guy is tall and has broad shoulders, he should be able to pull off a tux, but if he lacks that je ne sais quoi—you know, that charisma—he might be able to fill out the thing but could still look like a total dork. In fact, tuxedos were created in 1750 in London by a bunch of dorky men with the intention of taking down the good-looking dudes by making them look dorky too.

It’s true. Google it.

Okay, fine. It’s a lie. But to be fair, you thought about it. You believed it, even if only for a second.

That’s because I’ve been working on my lying skills.

What is not a lie is that Ryan Howland can get it in a tux. And it’s all because of that damn smile.

I’m looking at him looking at me, and all I can hear is Macklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us,” because that’s an anthem and a time capsule all rolled up into a prom song. Our prom song, to be clear. Can we go back? it asks.

The answer is no, we can’t go back. It was one single night, perhaps the most important night in a young girl’s life: the night she loses her virginity to her one true love.

It was prom night. And yes, I know that’s cliché. But clichés come from true things that happen over and over again in the real world until they become old, tired stories. And believe me, I would rather have had my first time be a cliché with the right guy than a truly original scenario with the wrong one.

He booked us a hotel room for after. Prom was at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. It took me four weeks of paychecks from the bookstore to save up for my ticket. I told Ryan he didn’t have to pay for mine since he offered to pick up the tab for the room. A big group of us split the cost of the limo too, so I figured that when all was said and done, Ryan probably laid out close to $1,000 for this one special night.

Macklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us” was the last song of the night. The DJ was shutting it down afterward. The clock was striking midnight on this fairy tale.

I was ready. I bought new panties for the special occasion. A new bra too, but it had to be strapless because of my dress, so it wasn’t as fancy as the panties. They matched though. Black, black, everything black, as if my body was preparing for a funeral. The death of my virginity. I should have chosen white, right? White like angels and purity, or maybe red like the devil, but I chose black and found myself hoping it wasn’t an omen.

I purchased and packed my own box of condoms because in tenth grade health class, we learned that safe sex is just as much the responsibility of the girl as it is of the guy, and I took copious notes, not just in health but in life. I also brought a toothbrush and toothpaste, a pair of shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt for the day after, along with regular underwear (the kind that actually covers stuff), a sports bra, and my hairbrush. I packed light on purpose. Didn’t want to get bogged down by too much stuff. I wouldn’t need makeup or anything like that the next day anyway, I figured. Once Ryan had me—all of me—we would be closer than ever, I decided. No makeup necessary.

I loved him. And we were graduating in a few weeks, and then a few weeks after that, we’d be off to college. Thankfully, we both planned to be in the Boston area. He’d be at Northeastern on a soccer scholarship, and I would be at Emerson College in their creative writing program. We did that on purpose. Neither one of us wanted to go to a new school in a new state far from home without knowing that the other was close enough to see on the weekends. So when we made our lists, for every D1 soccer program he looked into, I found a school with some sort of writing program within a thirty-mile radius. It’s not exactly how I thought “college shopping” would go, but love doesn’t always make rational sense.

We waited to have sex. He’d wanted to for a while, and I’ll admit, I was curious, but something about sex just felt so final—like once you did it, you did it, and you would become a different person from that point forward—and, I don’t know, the fear always outweighed the curiosity. But during that last dance, it was just like Macklemore said: This is the moment. No more waiting.

Also, to be fair, I didn’t want to start the next chapter of my life without knowing I had experienced everything I was supposed to experience in the current one first. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever love someone the way that I loved Ryan, and I didn’t think I would want my first time to be with anyone else. I knew it was unlikely that we would end up getting married one day. I wasn’t some stupid kid who thought she’d run off into the sunset with her high-school sweetheart. In fact, I think it was because I was smart and forward-thinking that I believed it was the right time for Ryan and me to do it. I loved him, like I said. And I knew he loved me too. If he didn’t love me, I don’t think he would have waited as long as he did. We were together for over two years. That’s not exactly a short amount of time, especially in high school.

We ran in very different crowds. He tried out for varsity soccer as a freshman and snagged a spot on the team. I played flute in the orchestra. He failed his first three English tests and was told he better fix his grades or risk his spot on the team, and his mother, a gorgeous brunette who reportedly competed in the 1984 Summer Olympics as a gymnast, sought him out a tutor. She figured a peer tutor would help him not only academically but socially as well. The guidance office offered me the gig and said I could count it as community service on my college application, so naturally, I said yes.

Mrs. Howland wasn’t wrong about the multifaceted value of peer tutoring. Our relationship was professional through Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and a unit on transcendentalism—he thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were really cool, and so did I. Transcendentalism gave us opportunities to talk about something other than school gossip or homework assignments. We talked about life, and that made us feel deeper than other kids, whose musings were limited to such trivial issues as who got the lead in the school play or who was spotted holding hands at the mall.

Of course, he still played soccer and I still played the flute, so nothing major changed in our real lives, but by the time we had to read Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, we were definitely in the friend zone. By the spring, when we read the ever-controversial novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, I would battle hyperactive butterflies in my stomach every time we got together for tutoring. He had strong feelings about that book, and it was incredible to see him come alive over a piece of literature.

I made that happen. Talk about a high.

Tenth grade meant British literature, so we worked through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the fall and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the winter. We had our first kiss when he walked me home in late January of that year, after a heated discussion about Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, where Ryan insisted that it made sense for Pip to become obsessed with money and social class, while I argued that he had some nerve begging Estella not to marry Bentley Drummle. We debated the whole way to my doorstep, and when we were done, he looked me in the eyes with great expectations of his own—and then he kissed me.

We were together throughout the rest of high school, each new day adding another small piece to the story of Ryan and me. All those little bits blended together to pave the road that led us to the Macklemore moment in the hotel room after prom.

He stood before me and told me I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

He pulled the zipper down on my dress and said it again once he got a glimpse of me in those fancy panties.

And before anything else happened, Ryan gave me two things: (1) that gorgeous charming smile of his, and (2) a promise ring. “I swear that I will love you forever,” he said, slipping it on my finger as if it were a wedding band.

I believed him, and we made love. It stung, and the pressure hurt far too much to be physically enjoyable. But I curled up in his arms when it was over, gazing at the promise ring, while the tuxedo he wore so well lay crumpled on the floor by the window.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that the next time he wore a tuxedo was at his own wedding just seven years later, at only twenty-five years old. But it’s true. Because like I said, here I am, watching him watching me as I walk down the aisle, Macklemore chanting in my ear. Ryan looks better than ever in that tuxedo.

It’s the smile though. I’m telling you.

His groomsmen don’t pull off their tuxes the way Ryan does.

I can feel him eyeballing me in my dress. It’s floor-length, made of satin. I wonder if he’s wondering what I’ve got on underneath.

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