Page 7 of Little Gray Dress

“You checked bags and brought this?” He pretends he can hardly lift my super-sized pink luggage off the floor.

“It’s a wedding. I had to get the dress here and it takes a lot to maintain and dress this figure up.” I point to myself in case he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

“High maintenance, huh?” Evan directs his comment towards Josh and Lily, who both nod their heads.

“I am not high maintenance. This is just—”

What is it?

It’s a wedding that my ex will be at. That’s what it is. If I didn’t come prepared for anything even I would wonder what was wrong with me.

“Got it.” Evan nods with an unspoken understanding as if he’s just read my mind. Sometimes having a twin is a good thing. Like those times where you need them to spontaneously read your mind, or call when you're having a bad day and you don’t want to call first. We do those weird things.

He jogs over to the baggage carousel that is on the point of sending my two extra-large hot-pink luggage bags and dress bag back through the hole in the wall to wherever it goes if no one claims it. I was kind of hoping the dress bag would end up on its way to Brazil, or anywhere else for that matter. But there it is, taunting me by being draped over both my other bags, impossible to not see and accidentally leave behind.

“Is he there?” I ask Evan, following him to the parking garage, Lily and Josh lagging behind us.

“Who?” He gives a joking smile over his shoulder at me. “No, he’s not there. He doesn’t live with us, Em.”

“I know that.” Thank God. If he did I’d be heading to a hotel right now, instead of to my brother’s mini-mansion.

“I doubt you’ll see much of him anyway, besides at the wedding. He’s… uh… preoccupied.”

“With work, right?” Lily suddenly appears at my side leaving her luggage with Josh to pull to the car. “He’s a lawyer,” she narrows her eyes at Evan, “so I’m sure he’s busy on a case, or whatever.”

“Right. He’s working.” Evan is obviously following her lead on something.

“What’s going on?” I stop when Evan’s car beeps at us approaching and the back door automatically opens for our bags.

“Nothing is going on, Em.” He grabs my bags and stacks them in the back, arranging them like a Jenga game so that Josh and Lily can maybe fit theirs in as well. “Let’s head home.”

We all pile into Evan’s SUV quietly. Too quietly. Like someone-is-hiding-a-secret quietly.

“Seriously guys, what is up? What do you all know that I don’t?”

Evan backs out of our spot silently, avoiding even looking in my direction, obviously ignoring my question. I glance at the backseat, where Josh and Lily are exchanging a look I know all too well.

“What are you not telling me?”

“It’s nothing, Ems.” Lily is a horrible liar. Even though her mouth says nothing, her face is saying please forgive me.

“What did ‘nothing’ do?”

“He got engaged.” Evan blurts it out, never looking at me.

“Engage—”

“Yes,” Lily interrupts me. “I was gonna tell you, but I didn’t want to chance you refusing to get on the plane. Jack is engaged, OK?” She says the last sentence slowly, exaggerating the pronunciation of each of the words as if she’s talking to someone just learning the English language.

The words hang in the air like a storm cloud. I hear them, but I can’t wrap my head around it.

How can he be engaged? Engaged implies that he’s happily moved on, and I don’t want that. I want him to be miserable and broken like I am. I want him to look terrible, to have gained fifty pounds, to be balding and to eat dinner every night alone. That would make me happy: his misery. He deserves at least that.

“I’m fine with it,” I lie, and stare out of the window. “It’s not like I haven’t moved on too.” Another lie. Why am I lying to the people who know me the best?

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I mean, come on, I refused to talk to him for three months even though he begged daily, and then I moved over two thousand miles away when you guys got transferred. So yes, obviously, I’ve moved on.”

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