The Wedding Ringer

1

I never envisioned myself as a twenty-nine-year-old children's birthday party performer, but here I am. Princess effing Sparkleheart. The effing is silent. Squeezing myself into a flamingo-pink, Goodwill-clearance-bin ball gown that itches severely, I look like a walking bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

Once upon a time, I was someone else. Everybody was. Before my idol Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the Supreme Court's resident badass, for example, she was just a little girl from Brooklyn with big dreams and a bowl cut. Before Meghan Markle met Prince Harry, she was a B-list actress who got her start as a briefcase girl on Deal or No Deal.

But unlike Ruth and Meghan, whose glow-ups transformed them from ordinary people into aspirational figures, my transformation went in the opposite direction.

Weekends as Willa Callister-blogger, Columbus's adventurous "it girl," and fiancŽe to Max-are a thing of the past.

Today's gig is Chloe Wellington's sixth birthday party, the social event of the summer for central Ohio's under-ten set. I know this because it literally says so on the invitation, a thick piece of white stationery covered in pressed rose petals that each guest had to display before entering. Chloe's backyard garden party, complete with rows of sparkling fairy lights and a shitload of mason jar centerpieces, is a Pinterest board come to life.

Chloe herself, a wiry, gap-toothed kid sporting a fuchsia dress and a tiara I suspect might have actual diamonds in it, is a total asshole.

A key part of my job as Princess Sparkleheart is to keep the party moving. It's been difficult today, given that Chloe has chosen to eschew the usual elements of my routine. I'm supposed to perform a whimsical wood flute number, as well as a sugary-sweet reenactment of how I met and fell in love with Prince Leon the Brave. But she ripped the wood flute from my hand three seconds into "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and used it to smack a smaller child in the mouth. And instead of listening during story time, Chloe made her dutiful friends crawl around on all fours and make horse noises while she perched lazily on their backs.

"Faster, Kinsley!" Chloe screeches, digging her heels into the sides of the poor kindergartner she's chosen as her latest victim. "Slow horses don't get birthday cake."

Kinsley, a sweet-faced girl in a dinosaur-print dress, lets out a mournful whinny and tries to pick up the pace. But her knee hits a divot in the yard, sending both girls crashing to the ground.

Terrified that Chloe might smash her tiara over her friend's head as punishment, I whistle for attention.

"Gather round, children!" I say in my Princess Sparkleheart voice, which is somewhere between a Minnie Mouse-like squeak and how my normal voice sounds when I'm choking. "'Tis time for Princess Chloe to open her royal presents."

"But I want to hear the story of how you met Prince Leon," a pigtailed child says. She pops a miniature cupcake into her mouth and tugs at my skirt with icing-coated fingers, coming dangerously close to exposing Princess Sparkleheart's private parts.

Princess Sparkleheart never gets angry, I tell myself as the pigtailed kid claws at my skirt and Chloe steps over a crying Kinsley, uttering a string of very unprincesslike words. Princess Sparkleheart never gets angry.

"Tell us the story!" the pigtailed girl insists. "Did Prince Leon the Brave rescue you from an evil witch? Were you cursed until you found true love's kiss? Or maybe he was an ugly monster who held you captive somewhere, like in a castle or an attic, until your love changed him and he turned nice and also really handsome?" She claps her hands together and stares at me with wide, hopeful eyes.

"Um, no. Actually, Prince Leon and I met when I saved him from the jaws of a hungry dragon." I pause, unable to resist the chance to inject a little feminism into the party. "Besides, love should be a partnership between equals. Relationships should never start out with one person holding the other captive, because-"

"Tell that to Princess Belle," the girl retorts. "But seriously, tell us about Prince Leon. Does he have long hair? And does he wear it in a man bun? Because I'm, like, really into man buns."

Chloe rolls her eyes. "Prince Leon isn't real, dummy."

A seed of anger takes root in my chest, and I force myself to take a deep breath and not think about how much I hate children. Princess Sparkleheart never gets angry.

Chloe's mother Beth, a raven-haired woman whose T-shirt reads HOW MERLOT CAN YOU GO? in sequined letters, doesn't bother to scold her daughter for name-calling. Instead, she pats the pigtailed girl on the head. "It's not story time, Annabelle. It's present time, okay?"

Annabelle groans in exasperation. "But Chloe has, like, eight hundred thousand presents. Can we at least have cake?"

"It's time," Beth insists, "for everyone to sit and watch Chloe." She smiles in a vaguely menacing way-a subtle reminder that if anyone draws so much as one photon of the spotlight away from Chloe, she will fuck their world up.

"Goddammit," the pigtailed girl mutters. I give her an apologetic smile and toss a pinch of fairy dust (read: dollar-store glitter) at her in consolation.

"Gather round, princes and princesses," I announce, adjusting my flower crown as the children assemble before me, looking like they'd very much prefer to skip Chloe's present parade and get to the cake. "Let's see what tributes the villagers brought for Princess Chloe on her day of celebration!"

"I brought her an outfit," a redheaded child declares with a shrug. "It's yellow. From Target. She'll probably hate it."

I toss a pinch of glitter at her. "Now, now. A princess is grateful for any gift she receives."

"What shade of yellow are we talking?" Beth asks, narrowing her eyes at the child. "Because anything paler than lemon washes Chloe out."

Before the girl can burst into tears, I grab a present from the top of the pile and present it to Chloe, who perches herself in the golden throne I drag to every party. It's a plastic lawn chair spray-painted gold, and it will come in handy if Princess Sparkleheart ever has to moonlight in an industry requiring lap dances.

I place the gift in Chloe's lap and curtsy. "Here you are, princess. Open your gift and see what treasures await."

Chloe, who seems to have outgrown the fairy princess theme by at least a year, gives me a dismissive glance. "Take it down a notch."

I glance at Beth, but she's busy beaming at Chloe and recording the proceedings on her iPhone. We all watch as Chloe tears open gift after ornately wrapped gift, including a new iPad, a summer's worth of vouchers for horseback riding lessons, and-I shit you not-an Amazon gift card worth three hundred dollars. She tosses the gift card aside with a bored expression, and it takes every ounce of restraint in me not to shed my royal dignity and dive after it. It would take three Saturdays as Princess Sparkleheart to earn that kind of cash.

When the gift-opening marathon concludes, Beth motions for me to follow her into the house. We march through the backyard, my skirt rustling as we pass the pony ride station and the slightly deflated bounce house, where at least one partygoer has vomited up the catered appetizers. In a kitchen that looks like the pages of a Crate & Barrel catalog, I reach into a refrigerator the size of my childhood bedroom and remove Chloe's cake. It's a dreamlike confection that would make Willy Wonka jealous; the cake is castle-shaped, complete with pink buttercream turrets and a chocolate-chip-cookie-dough drawbridge. A tiny edible version of Chloe peers out from the strawberry shortcake balcony, gazing down upon her sugary kingdom with an uncharacteristically benevolent expression.

I feel the weight of the cake in my hands and have the sudden urge to smash it. Princess Sparkleheart never gets angry, I remind myself again. It's the mantra I repeat when the parties get overwhelming, or when a child accidentally whacks me in the face during a game of pi–ata. That happens more often than you'd think.

I struggle not to drop the cake, which weighs about the same as my three-year-old niece, as Beth and I parade back into the yard. Chloe claps her hands in excitement and the other children crowd around us, marveling at the cake and the promise of an impending sugar high. Beth lights the candles one by one as the adults, who have smartly avoided the petting zoo and the gift-opening display in favor of drinking wine indoors, join the outdoor festivities. Chloe's dad snakes an arm around Beth's waist, slurring something about the hors d'oeuvres, and I'm surprised when Beth doesn't light his hair on fire.

"Happy birthday to you," she sings, and everyone joins in in off-key voices, rushing through the lyrics to get to the cake-eating. My biceps burn with the exertion of holding the cake, and I dream of the moment when I can collect my money from Beth and go home to shower off the glitter and unchecked commercialism and drink myself to sleep.

"Happy birthday, dear Chloe," the woefully out-of-tune group continues. "Happy birthday to y-"

That's when I see her. At the outskirts of the assembled group, next to where Chloe's dad is indiscreetly eyeing a guest half Beth's age, stands Sarah. She's scrolling through something on her phone, so her face is turned away from me, but it's her. I'd know her anywhere. I recognize her outfit: a coral, sweetheart-neckline jumpsuit from Express that we'd picked out together. She thought the color was garish on her pale skin, but I'd convinced her it was just the unflattering fitting room lighting. And I was right. Here, at Chloe Wellington's sixth birthday party, with a bottle of Perrier in her hand and a slim gold bracelet around her left wrist-the one she broke when we were eight and tried Rollerblading with our eyes closed-Sarah looks pretty.

The shock of seeing her rips through me like a knife through soft, yielding flesh. My stomach lurches as a vision of her and Max together reappears in my mind: their sweaty bodies tangled and moving underneath my plum-colored bedsheets. I shut my eyes as Beth and the children finish the birthday song, their voices flat and ringing in my ears.

When I open my eyes again, fighting back against the memory of Max's trembling hands pressed against Sarah's pearly-pink nipples, I see her lips opening and closing, forming the words of the song. I know she's not really singing, that she's a terrible singer who lip-synced her way through our fifth-grade choral songbook, just as I know that she hates every single thing about this party, from Chloe's incessant smirking to the monogrammed cloth napkins. I know all this because I know her, or at least I used to. I used to think I knew both of them.

It's only when the group finishes the song with one last, tuneless note and a hearty cheer that Sarah glances up from her phone. Her gaze sweeps past the pony rides and the bounce house and the overloaded charcuterie table and lands, finally, on me. Her mouth drops open, and I notice her face is less round than it used to be. Maybe her boss at the law firm has her working eighty-hour weeks again, or maybe her on-off relationship with Pure Barre is back on. Or perhaps, in the five months since we last saw each other, since the day I swore to never speak of her again, I'd forgotten what my best friend looked like.

Sarah's face wrinkles with confusion. I imagine how I look from her perspective, with my ridiculous ball gown and too-tight heels and my flower crown wilting in the July heat. I fight the urge to vomit.

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Her nervous tic. "Willa," she says. Her voice is soft, hesitant, the way one might speak to a dog baring its teeth.

And then it happens. My fingers go slack as my body's fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. I try to hold on to the cake and the last of my sanity, but I don't stand a chance.

"No!" Beth screams as I drop Chloe's sugar castle and it splatters on the ground. A turret pops off and rolls into the grass, and the chocolate-chip-cookie-dough drawbridge crumbles. Chloe shrieks as the tiny cookie version of herself gets buried beneath layers of smushed icing, and an opportunist pony who's trotted over from the petting zoo bends toward the collapsed cake and takes a swift, gigantic bite.

"What the hell?" Beth still grips a lighter in one hand, and I step back as she thrusts it in my direction. "What have you done?"

"I'm sorry," I whisper. My head is suddenly pounding, and my body feels lighter than air, as if I could float away at any moment. Beth's face is as red as the merlot mentioned on her shirt, her lips curled into an alarming snarl, but all I see is Sarah's head thrown back in ecstasy as Max thrusts into her, her head slamming the headboard with each wave of motion. All I see is the shock on her face as I drop my purse in the entryway of my bedroom, Max still thrusting, not yet noticing my presence. "I'm so sorry."

"That cake cost three times what I'm paying you." Beth's hands clutch her chest, and I back away in case she decides to grab my throat instead. "Three times."

"I'm sorry," I repeat as the pony chomps merrily on the remaining clumps of cake and icing. I bend toward the ground to see if I can salvage any of it, and the pony licks a bit of glitter off my head.

"Get up," Beth demands as a sobbing Chloe is surrounded by a circle of concerned friends.

I do as instructed, pressing my fingernails so roughly against my palms that I draw blood. "I'm so sorry, Beth. I can run to Costco and get a sheet cake-"

"Costco?" Beth presses her face so close to mine that I think she might spit on me. "Cut the bullshit. I only hired you because our Elsa impersonator came down with the flu, and look what happened." She motions to the cake, where another industrious pony has joined the first in licking frosting off the grass. "You've ruined Chloe's party."

Princess Sparkleheart never gets angry, the better angels of my nature remind me. It's more a desperate prayer than a mantra. Princess Sparkleheart never gets-