Family And Other Catastrophes

“And well,” Emily said, “the only other bridesmaid is... Maddyson. But, ha-ha, since she’s your stepsister that pretty much...” She trailed off, unsure of how to finish the sentence.

“Don’t be so quick,” David said. “Nathan has been hung up on her ever since Susan married our dad.”

“What, really?”

“He’s being oversimplificated,” Nathan said. “I am not hung up on my stepsister. I merely admire a beauty such as she.”

Emily involuntarily cringed.

“Dude,” David said, “she’s way too young for you. I am not doing this with you again.”

“Eighteen is legal, for your information.”

“Yeah, but it started when she was sixteen.”

Nathan put his hand over his chest in a bad imitation of a pearl-clutching old lady. “Dear Lord! Sixteen! Reproductive age, legal in almost all of Europe and fully able to make her own choices! Whatever must we do with this pedophile?”

“I don’t get why you can’t just date girls your own age,” David said.

“The older women get, the more demanding they become. If I were to approach a twenty-five-year-old, for example, she would be attractive but wouldn’t have Maddyson’s fertile, nubile looks. And to make matters more unsavory, she would look down on me for not having a so-called traditional job. Maddyson doesn’t have a job, ipso facto, we are actually a good match. Moreover, if we lived just a few hundred years ago I would be the natural first choice to take her maidenhood—intelligent, wise, generous, successful—and in the same family line.”

“How are you successful in any way?” David asked. “You just said you don’t have a job.”

“In days of yore, my good sir, I would have been successful. The trades in which I am highly skilled are not valued by our declining society. Sword fighting, for example.”

Emily looked over at Maddyson, leaning against a column. She had wavy brown hair cut to her shoulders with a streak of pink. (Emily had objected to the dye job because Maddyson would be in the wedding party, but she wound up allowing it for fear of looking like a bridezilla.) She wore a pair of frayed acid-washed shorts, Converse sneakers and a large white T-shirt that looked intentionally splattered with green paint. She was looking at her iPhone with her eyes glazed over, giving a surly, slightly openmouthed expression to the screen. Emily noticed that Nathan had seen her staring at Maddyson, so she quickly averted her gaze.

“She’s beautiful,” he said with a knowing smile. “No shame in looking.”

“I wasn’t...”

“It’s fine. All women are slightly bisexual.”

“Nathan,” David said. “That’s enough.”

Nathan shrugged. He was relatively immune to criticism. Emily couldn’t tell if it came from abnormally low or abnormally high self-esteem. Either he was so used to negative feedback that it no longer affected him, or he was so delusional that he refused to believe that anything could be wrong with him. Perhaps she’d ask Marla to analyze him. She was sure there would be an interesting cavalcade of diagnoses on the ride home. All of Emily’s ex-boyfriends had earned their places in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from histrionic personality disorder to borderline personality disorder to chronic depression. Marla followed up each assessment with, “not that I’ve personally examined him or anything” as if trying to avoid liability. She had diagnosed Christina with narcissism back when she and Jason were dating, and Matt with compliant codependency. David was the only one who had evaded a diagnosis so far, probably because Emily had rigorously prevented him from spending too much time with her mother.

Jason

Jason was wasted, there was no way around it. He was mindlessly peeling the label off his Heineken and glaring at Christina from behind glassy corneas. Why did everyone like her? Why did people respect her and not him? It was because she was a woman. The woman always got to play the victim and nobody asked any questions. He thought ruefully of Lauren’s article in Cunt Magazine: “It Happened to Me: I Was the Victim of Grade-Shaming.” It was an article devoted to the one time in high school when she got a C on an essay, and how it was not only an undeserved grade given to her purely because of sexism, but it also gave her lifelong brain-image issues. He had trolled the article briefly under the username Butthole_Dude_80 and told her she was a delusional bitch...and later felt bad about it briefly before finding it funny again.

That was when he saw her: the famed jailbait. Was it jailbait if they were eighteen? He had heard that David had a much younger stepsister, and there she was in all her slender, tanned glory. She was hanging around Nick’s porch looking bored, as if she were afraid some friends at school would make fun of her for being too enthusiastic around her family. He had heard that girls her age—no, women her age, she was legal—absolutely loved older men because they saw them as confident, distinguished provider types. Jason wasn’t at the sugar-daddy level quite yet, but that hardly mattered when it came to a one-night stand. The only problem was where they would do it. Certainly her room would be full of creepy childhood items, like teddy bears that said “I wuv you” when you pressed them, ballet participation certificates from elementary school, posters featuring those douchebags from One Direction and old haunted-looking Barbie dolls with tangled hair and rubbed-off eyes. Not to mention her bedroom was under the roof of her inevitably protective stepfather. Jason’s room wasn’t much better as it was under Marla and Steven’s roof, with Lauren, the self-appointed Cockblocker-in-Chief, across the hall. He did have a car, though.

“Hello,” he said, sidling up to Maddyson. She looked up from her phone, which displayed the Snapchat app. She met his stare, her eyes widening slightly. Either she was intimidated by his confidence and swagger, or creeped out. He was inclined to believe the former.

“Hey,” she said, looking bored again. “Sorry, I didn’t see you standing there.”

“What’s with the pink streak of hair?” Jason asked. “Is that a wig? You’d look better if you were Asian.”

“Are you a friend of my dad’s or something?”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” he said with a smirk. He could never let comments like that get to him. Then he would be just as emotional and self-centered as Christina, or any other woman for that matter. He had to remain stone-cold and keep his alpha game tight.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just trying to get through this party without having to talk to anyone.”

“This attitude is going to stop being cute when you’re older.” He had to keep the smile on his face or else he’d just seem mean. The goal was to be cheeky—rude, maybe even arrogant and slimy, but never antagonistic. He felt a tap on his shoulder and a man’s voice. “I implore you to leave her alone, good sir.” The accent was vaguely British, like the generic old-fashioned accent used in gladiator movies.

He turned and saw an overweight man in his early twenties. He looked as if he were in a community theater production of The Matrix, complete with a shiny black trench coat lightly coated in sweat and giving off the fishy, chemical smell of synthetic leather.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I am Nathan, good sir, brother of the groom.”

“Wait, I heard about you. Are you the one who got banned from the live-action role-playing group for scaring those women with your sword?”

“Even LARPers can’t always appreciate true historic accuracy,” he said a little defensively. “In bygone days, females appreciated valiant warriors, and I never intended to fight a lady. In fact, I wasn’t fighting anyone—merely displaying my sword-fighting skills for the womenfolk to behold. My plan was to throw my handkerchief to the most beautiful one once my performance was done...but next thing I knew, the police were there, and I was being asked not to return. Chivalry is dying in this society, verily.”

“Damn,” Jason said, taking another sip of beer. “You couldn’t just talk to the girls?”

“Good sir. Do not try to debate me on the importance of chivalry. I implore you to step away from the lady.”

Jason almost laughed but then realized he wasn’t joking. “I’m sorry, I’m a friendly guy. I was just chatting with her.”

“I am the protector of her innocence.”

“Nathan,” Maddyson groaned. “For the last time, I’m not a virgin! Both of you, go away!”

“Nonsense, milady.” He turned to Jason. “You, sir. Be gone, unless you desire a duel in the arena of intellect. Care to discuss Descartes?”

“I don’t want any trouble, buddy.” He paused. An idea. “See that woman over there, man?”

He pointed to Christina, who had moved on from Joss and was now sipping some sauvignon blanc with Susan, laughing as she plopped a plastic ice cube into her glass. He could only hope she wasn’t talking about him and his “constant infidelity” or “alcoholism.” Women would complain to anyone who would listen, and Susan seemed like enough of a chump to fall for Christina’s whole self-pitying routine.

“Yes,” Nathan said. “The fair blonde lass.”

“You want to intellectually duel someone? Duel her. She loves being told when she’s wrong. Makes her hot.”

Nathan smiled smugly, as if Jason had just made an embarrassingly basic grammar mistake.

“What?” Jason asked. “What is it now?”

“A gentleman cannot duel a lady. For if he did, he would no longer be a gentleman.”

“Oh, brother. How about this? I promise to leave your sister alone if you—”

“Stepsister.”

“Okay. I promise to leave her alone for the entire night, if you go and talk to that blonde lass. I hereby beseech you to flirt with her, serenade her and defend her honor.”