I Am the Wallpaper Read Free Page A

sneak a look at my mother. I waspretty sure he had a thing for her. Between snapping shots and stealing peeks at Ma, he kept wiping tears from his eyes. Gary’s a big crier. For his sake and for the sake of the wedding album, I hoped he’d make it through the ceremony without melting away.
    “Lillian, do you take Helmut to be your husband, to love, honor and comfort, to keep in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, from this day forward, so long as you both shall live?”
    That’s when I felt the first raindrop on my nose. A moment later another big fat blob plopped on my ear, dribbled down my neck and eventually soaked itself into the poofy pink shoulder of my awful dress. My mother’s face suddenly looked panicky. Some of the guests glanced up at the sky.
    If everyone was forced inside, where was I going to hide?
    Soon the wind picked up and my elephant-ear bouquet flapped around. Then, all at once, the raindrops began to fall more quickly and the minister started talking a lot faster. By the time the wedding party hurried up the aisle with the guests hurling birdseed, my dress was almost soaked.
    “The flowers!” Lillian wailed.
    “Everybody grab something!” my mother shouted.
    Friends and relatives grabbed the giant arrangements of bizarre flowers and hustled them, along with anything else that seemed important, up the back steps and inside to safety. Our house wasn’t really big enough for seventy-twopeople. Other than our big living room, there were only the two bedrooms, the kitchen, a small television room, and a tiny office the size of a closet. Still, there was no choice except to cram everybody in.
    Lillian was so upset by the unexpected rain that she locked herself in our only bathroom, crying. Her new husband stood at the door trying to comfort her for twenty minutes before she finally agreed to come out and rejoin her guests, who flocked around her sympathetically.
    I, on the other hand, found an empty corner and sat there quietly for at least half an hour. In such a small house, staying out of sight would have been difficult for anybody else. But not for me.
    Right then, for instance, my mother was standing only a few feet from me, talking with Gary and poor Helmut’s square-faced father, but I could tell she had no idea I was there.
    Wallpaper, thy name is Floey.
    For ten minutes, I’d been sitting so close to Ma that I could almost have reached my arm out and touched her. Would she ever look in my direction? How could she not notice me?
    A tray of champagne glasses drifted by. My mother always made a big deal that she didn’t want me drinking alcohol, so as a test, I stood up and grabbed one of the glasses. “Hello, Ma,” I said through the wall of people. “I’m right here and I have a glass of champagne.”
    She kept talking.
    I decided to wave my arms around, moving the glassback and forth in front of my face, trying to get her attention. Incredibly, she still didn’t notice me. I felt like Molly Ringwald in
Sixteen Candles
. No, worse. At least at the end of the movie, the forgotten girl gets the cute guy in the red car. Where was my cute guy in the red car?
    Then my glass knocked into something hard. It was a blue suit.
    “Whoops! Hold on!” it said.
    “Oh, I’m so sorry! I didn’t—”
    The boy in the suit took out a handkerchief and wiped his jacket, which now had a dark wet streak on one sleeve. He was older, fifteenish.
    “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said in a slow, friendly voice.
    “Really, I feel just horrible!” I grabbed a couple of napkins from the sideboard next to me and tried to help him.
    “No, no. It’s fine.” He had a slight accent like he was from the South or something, definitely not from Rhode Island. “It’s not so bad. That’s why they make them with two arms.”
    I stopped wiping. He was smiling at me. He was a head taller than me, blond, with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen.
    “Have you been standing here all on your own?”