“Wow,” Love Bracelet breathed, and it wasn’t just to get the sale.

Nell pressed her stubby hands against her chest, flat as the thin-crust pizzas we used to order for breakfast in college. I had to look away. Nell chews on her appendages for sport, and the jagged edges of her fingertips, the raw and bloodied flaps of skin, they remind me too much of how easily the seams of the body fall apart. “If a rapist breaks into your apartment,” I’d once hypothesized in the middle of a Law & Order episode, “how are you going to claw his eyes out with those nubs?”

“I guess I should get a gun then.” Halfway through that statement Nell’s blue eyes had lit up with alarm. Too late, neurons had lit a match to the thought and fired the sentence out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Sorry,” she’d added, clumsily.

“Don’t be.” I’d pointed the controller at the TV and turned up the volume. “Sarcasm doesn’t have to die for the Five.”

“Ani, I look like I’m wearing a flesh dress.” It may have been spoken like a complaint, but Nell was admiring the smooth expanse of her back in the mirror, the way the color blended seamlessly into the skin just above her ass worth an undisclosed sum, so that you couldn’t tell where the dress ended and Nell began.

“Are you really going to make me stand next to her?” Moni whined, sweeping open the curtain to the dressing room. Moni will never be done trying to make Nell her best friend. She just doesn’t get it. Nell doesn’t want her ass kissed. She doesn’t need it.

“That’s a great color on you, Moni,” I said slyly, when Nell pretended not to hear her. I’ll never be done with rubbing it in Moni’s pouty little face that Nell chose me, the guido, over her, the Darien princess.

Moni fussed, “I can’t wear a bra though.” Love Bracelet scurried over to Moni—saggy boobs would not cost a sale, not on her watch!—and began rearranging the jersey strands of the dress. “It’s convertible, see? Flattering for all body types.” She ultimately tied what looked like a sling for a uniboob. Moni hoisted the sides of the dress in the mirror, her breasts rippling beneath the fabric like an underwater bomb had gone off, thousands of feet below.

“You think the other girls will look good in this?” Moni pressed. The rest of the group couldn’t make the appointment today, graciously leaving the decision in the hands of Moni and Nell. Luke had three single groomsmen—Garret, who wore polarized Ray-Bans and put his hand on your back when he spoke to you, was one of them. No one would dare jeopardize her place in the wedding party, her shot at Garret as her escort, by being combative about the dresses.

“I love it,” Nell announced. It was all she had to say, and halfheartedly at that.

“It is kind of cool,” Moni agreed, scowling at her body from different angles.

I went back to my phone, checking e-mail this time, forgetting all about Early Onset Turkey Neck when I came across a subject line that roiled the lone tablespoon of peanut butter in my neglected belly: FRND OF 5 SCHDL UPDATE, it read, an urgent red flag waving by its side.

“Goddamnit.” I tapped on the message to open it.

“What?” Nell was holding the hemline of the dress above her knee, seeing how it looked short.

I groaned. “They want to move filming to the beginning of September.”

“What was it before?”

“The end of September.”

“So what’s the problem?” Nell’s brow would have furrowed if not for Botox (“Preventative,” she’d said, defensively).

“The problem is that I’ve been eating like a beast. I have to go ano now if I want to be ready by September fourth.”

“Ani.” Hands on thirty-two-inch hips, Nell said, “Stop. You are so tiny right now.” Nell would kill herself if she was ever this “tiny.”

“You should do the Dukan diet,” Moni chimed in. “My sister did it before her wedding.” She snapped her fingers. “Dropped eight pounds in three weeks, and she was already a two.”

“That’s the diet Kate Middleton used,” Love Bracelet said, and we all acknowledged the Duchess of Cambridge with a moment of silence. Kate Middleton looked so hungry on her wedding day it had to be commended.

“Let’s go to brunch,” I sighed. This conversation was making me wish I was alone in my kitchen, deepest night, with a stocked fridge and hours to myself to defile it. I loved the evenings Luke had clients to entertain. I’d come home with two plastic bags filled with the neighborhood bodega’s finest carbs, devour every last starchy crumb, and toss the evidence down the garbage chute, Luke none the wiser. After I fed, I’d watch hours of porn clips, the kind where the men shouted at the women to bark like dogs or they would stop fucking them. I’d come again and again. It didn’t take me long. Then I’d collapse into bed, telling myself that I wouldn’t want to marry someone who would be willing to do that to me anyway.

Moni got up to go to the bathroom after we ordered.

“What are you thinking for the dresses?” Nell shook her frosty hair out of a knot. The bartender stared.

“You looked great in the rose water,” I said. “But your nipples are kind of a problem.”

“What would Mr. and Mrs. Harrison say?” Nell placed her hand over her heart, a scandalized Victorian in a too-tight corset. My future in-laws amuse Nell to no end, what with their misleadingly modest home in Rye, New York, their summer estate on Nantucket, his bow ties and her chic white bob, held away from her face with a velvet headband. I wouldn’t have blamed them for turning up their classic Nordic noses at me. But Mrs. Harrison had always wanted a daughter and I still can’t believe that she’s satisfied with the likes of me.

“I don’t think Mrs. Harrison has ever seen her own nipples,” I said. “It would probably be a good anatomy lesson for her.”

Nell held up an invisible monocle to her left eye and squinted. “So these are what you call areolas, dear?” she said, her voice wobbly as elderly tourists standing on the subway. It was a stereotypical old lady impersonation, and she sounded nothing like Mrs. Harrison. I could picture the look on my future MIL’s face if she could hear us, roasting her over the cayenne pepper in our fourteen-dollar Bloody Marys. She wouldn’t get mad—Mrs. Harrison never gets mad. Instead her fine eyebrows would pinch, the skin there collapsing in a way Nell’s cannot, her lips parting in a soft “Oh.”

She had been so patient the first time Mom visited the Harrison home, prowling the handsomely decorated rooms, turning over candlesticks and other totems to decipher their origins (“Scully & Scully? Is that a store in New York?” “Mom, stop.”). Most important, Mr. and Mrs. Harrison were contributing 60 percent to the wedding. Thirty percent was coming from Luke and me (okay, Luke), and the remaining 10 percent from my parents, despite my protestations that they didn’t have to, despite the fact the check would never clear even though they insisted. As the main investors, the Harrisons were fully within their rights to veto my fabulously hipster band and dominate the guest list: more sixty-year-old women in headbands, fewer twenty-eight-year-olds in skanky party dresses. But Mrs. Harrison had only held up her never-manicured hands and told me this is your wedding, Ani, and you should plan it as you see fit. When the documentary people first reached out to me, I’d gone to her, fear lodged in some secret pocket in my throat, like I’d swallowed a bulging time-release Adderall with no water. My voice so husky I was embarrassed by it, I’d told her how they were digging into the incident at Bradley, that they wanted to portray the untold story, the real story, the one the media had gotten wrong fourteen years ago. It would be worse if I didn’t agree to be a part of it, I reasoned, they could paint me any way they wanted and at least if I had the opportunity to speak for myself I could—“Ani,” she’d stopped me, her expression bewildered, “of course you need to do it. I think this is a very important thing for you to do.” God, I am a shit.