by Brenna Womer
A sixteen-year-old high school junior goes to Zales in the mall with her boyfriend’s mother to pick out the ring she wants him to propose with. Both the girl and the mother know there’s only one diamond in the case he can afford—a fourth-carat stone in white gold—so they pretend it’s the one the girl wants because, right now, all she wants is a marriage nothing like her parents’ and thinks she can have it with him, so she’d say yes to a soda can tab or a Ring Pop or a well-tied loop of string. She’d say yes to nothing. She has her ring finger sized, the mother to report back.
*
A sixteen-year-old high school junior sees her boyfriend’s mother’s minivan pull into a parking spot in front of her apartment building. His mother lets him out with a bouquet of flowers and a box of ice cream sandwiches in a plastic grocery bag and then leaves. The eighteen-year-old gets down on one knee in the kitchen of the apartment the girl shares with her mother, who listens against the door of her bedroom a few feet away. A decade later, when the girl is a woman, she won’t remember what he said in the way of a proposal, just how little they had to say to each other after she said yes, how awkward the silence.
*
A sixteen-year-old high school junior and an eighteen-year-old high school dropout scout a pink B&B in town for their upcoming nuptials. They haven’t set a date yet because at least one of them is scared shitless and knows the wedding can never actually happen. At least one of them knows life has to be bigger than this, but is afraid to let go because what if it’s not. The sixteen-year-old’s mother drove them to the venue, and she peeks around the garden while the couple teeters on the porch swing out front. He’s wearing his father’s brown-leather flight jacket, and she shoulders an empty purse. The three go inside to ask about availability, and they’re handed a brochure by the woman working the front desk, who is polite but understandably dubious. The pamphlet tranquilizes the mother and the couple, and they return to the car through the back garden, where the sixteen-year-old can imagine some version of herself happy.
*
A sixteen-year-old high school junior stands alone in a David’s Bridal dressing room, surrounded by cheap, white taffeta. Her mother sits on a stool just outside the door in front of a three-way mirror under fluorescent lights. The sixteen-year-old’s hair has been let down from a ponytail, so there’s a crease just above her ears, and her makeup is oily and smeared after eight hours of classes. She feels the room is a bit cramped; she feels a bit sick to her stomach; she feels exceptionally alone. She doesn’t like any of the dresses the attendant picked out, but really, she doesn’t like herself or who she is yet; really, she isn’t sure who will ever love her if he stops. And because she can’t imagine life too far beyond this moment, she picks a strapless tea-length with horizontal bands that reminds her of the one Julia Roberts wears in Runaway Bride, the one she swishes like a bell, and sings, ding, ding, ding.
*
A sixteen-year-old high school junior sits cross-legged on the carpet across from her eighteen-year-old fiancé in the basement bedroom of his parents’ house. She hands him the chip of a diamond she’d been wearing on her finger for the last three months, the one her science teacher laughed at, saying, “Don’t be an idiot,” and that her boss said she couldn’t wear at work. A decade later she won’t remember what she said in the way of a breakup, only that her fear of missing out on more, at some point, started outweighing the security of the moment. He threw the ring across the room but dug it out of a pile of laundry when she left. They’d get back together and break up again, but the ring would remain on his dresser next to a stack of change.
*
A nineteen-year-old college sophomore stands alone in line at UPS, stuffing a never-worn wedding dress into a used cardboard box. She’s relieved the dress serves as its own packing material, so she doesn’t have to shell out for bubble wrap or Styrofoam peanuts; these days, she has her own rent to pay, and the fifty bucks she got for the dress won’t go far, but she’s so tired and embarrassed of seeing the reminder of her almost-life in the back corner of her closet that she’d have said yes to thirty, to fifteen; she was so desperate she’d have given it away. She tapes the box shut and writes the address of an eBay buyer on a bright white label.
Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, Latine writer of experimental prose and poetry. She is the author of Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023), and two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at W&L and the Creative Nonfiction Editor for Shenandoah.