Page 16 of Sister of the Bride

“Iknewyou couldn’t hold back!” Polly says, her voice equal parts triumph and frustration. She wings the embroidered pillow back my way, but it flies over my head and thuds against the window. She flops over on her side to face me, a pillow tucked under her head, and even though this is nothing like the conversations we used to have when we were kids, whispering over the dim yellow lamp on the bedside table between us, I can’t help but be transported right back to those times. And I can’t help but wonder how much longer I’ll have Polly across from me now that she plans to run off and get married.

Polly lets out a frustrated sigh. “Wedoknow each other, Pippin. And when you know, you know. Why would I put off happiness?”

I have the sudden urge to reach over and switch off that dim lamp, because it’s providing entirely too much light right now. I can see the look on Polly’s face, and I know exactly what’s hiding behind those words, the thing she’s not saying. Because every day since Dad died, Polly has pursued her dreams as if the punishment for missing an opportunity is death itself. And I can see her eyes welling and feel the itch at the back of my throat, so I flip off the lamp and change the subject.

“Hey, so I forgot to tell you…Toby’s back,” I say.

I can practically hear her mouth drop open in the dark. “Like,backback?”

“Yeah. Apparently he decided he didn’t want to do the medical research thing and left Stanford to do his residency in the ER at Mass General.”

“Oh wow. So he’s really back. Right-around-the-corner back.”

“Yup, he’s living in the basement apartment of his parents’ town house,” I say. “And he broke up with Jen, apparently.”

I hear Polly’s sharp intake of breath. “Wow. So he blew up his whole life, huh? How is he?”

I roll over and stare at the ceiling, which is spider-webbed with delicate cracks in the plaster. “Good. He said he didn’t want to talk about the breakup, but he didn’t seem, well…broken up over it. He seems really happy, actually.”

“How’s he look?” she asks after a beat of silence.

“What do you mean? He looks like Toby,” I say, thinking about his ferocious yawn and those ridiculous pajama pants. “A very tired version of Toby, but still Toby.”

“Pippin.”

“What?”

“I don’t even like men, and even I can admit that grown-up Toby looks like the kind of guy who could really blow your back out.”

“Ew, stop,” I groan. Polly has always liked to taunt Toby and me, even when we were kids andPippin and Toby sittin’ in a treewasn’t ironic. But Toby’s my best friend, and okay, yeah, he came back from medical school significantly less gangly, but he’s still…Toby. I could never go there. I neverwantto go there, no matter how tall and muscular he gets. I don’t do relationships or romance, and I’m not about to blow up our friendship because Toby is cute now.

“Are you honestly telling me that even now that you’re both all grown up and he wears scrubs that look straight out of an on-call room scene inGrey’s, you haven’t thought about it?”

My face contorts into an expression I usually reserve for when someone tries to feed me mushrooms or any vegetable that’s been converted into a foam. “I can honestly sayno, I have never looked at Toby like that.”

“Looked at him like what? With your eyes?” I feel Polly staring at me, and when I look over at her bed, she’s giving me a look that is the human embodiment of the heart-eyes emoji, hands charmingly under her chin.

I roll over, stretch to retrieve the pillow from beneath the window, and chuck it back at her, wiping that look right off her face. “Stop it,” I say, “or I’m going to start asking you about all the times you pictured Cynthia Mills naked.” Cynthia was Polly’s best friend all through high school until Cynthia went off to college, joined the campus evangelicals, and decided she needed to pray Polly’s gay away through a series of increasingly hysterical emails. But before she became a homophobic loon, she was gorgeous.

Polly lets out a theatrical gag and mimes tossing the entirety of her dinner onto the carpet between our beds. “Message received,” she says, reaching for the lamp to switch off the light.

But as I lie back on my pillow, I let Polly’s words roll around in my head for a moment. Has Toby gotten hot? Objectively, yes. When he threw his arm around my shoulders tonight, I felt the presence of firm biceps and the corded muscle of his shoulder. His hair seems to be less teen frizzy and more grown-man floppy, and he’s got this one dimple—just one, on the left side—that used to look rascally but now has a bit of a model bent to it. Those are just facts. But that doesn’t mean I’mattractedto him. I never have been.

We’ve been best friends since we were five years old. Mom brought Polly and me to splash around at the Frog Pond because it was too hot to do anything else. Toby was there with his nanny, who was perched on a bench, deeply engrossed in some paperback thriller. That meant she didn’t notice when Colton Baker, a real asshole even at five years old, tried to pants Toby right there in the middle of the Frog Pond in front of god and the Massachusetts State House.

Toby, who I would later learn has never been one for confrontation, just stood there, mouth agape, with his lily-white butt crack hanging out of his Ralph Lauren swim trunks. And because I have frombirthbeen a person who thrives on confrontation, I marched my chubby little legs over to Colton, put my hands squarely on his chest, and shoved him straight down on the ground. Then I reached behind Toby, yanked up his swim trunks, took his hand, and marched us both off to beg Mom to buy us popsicles from the ice cream truck parked at the edge of the Common.

We’ve been best friends ever since, through middle school awkwardness and high school wildness, through three thousand miles and eight years of distance. Toby was there for me when my dad died, even though it was only a week into freshman year and his parents didn’t want him flying back across the country. He missed a week of classes to hold me while I sobbed and tried to understand what my life was going to be. He even filled in at the restaurant that first summer before he started doing internships and couldn’t get home as much.

Toby and I have twenty years of history that means almost as much to me as my family and the restaurant. Toby’s my person, my constant. You don’t fuck around with that, literally or figuratively. But as I drift off to sleep, my mind (that dirty asshole) suddenly takes me directly to aGrey’s Anatomyon-call room. Only it’s not McDreamy or McSteamy inside; it’s McToby in scrubs, his hair flopping over one eye as he grins down at me, that one rascally dimple catching the moonlight. His biceps bulge as he holds himself above me, his hands bracketing my face, lowering himself slowly, so slowly, and—

Ugh!

I have to flip over and stare out the window directly into the streetlight to burn the image away.

Chapter8

Toby

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