Every Boy's Got One by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page B

snack.
    Except that on the way back to the hotel, we passed a church where a wedding was going on—or about to go on, anyway. I saw the crowd and assumed it was another sight we should see, but then it turned out to be a lot of tourists like us waiting outside a church with some flower girls and maids of honor, and we realized it was a wedding!
     

    So then Holly said she had to stay to see the bride for luck, since she was getting married too.
    So we edged into the church and stood there and waited and it wasn’t long until a sleek beige Mercedes sedan pulled up and the bride, looking incredibly chic in an ivory sheath with a tiny veil got out, beaming and speaking in Italian to the little flower girls who started jumping up and down.
    I got some very good photos of the whole thing and wanted to ask her if she wanted me to send her copies (the bride I mean), but I didn’t know the right words in Italian, and besides, by that point her father had come out of the church and lent her his arm, and that’s when Holly and I realized we were standing right in the aisle, with the groom at the front of the church with the priest, trying to see past us to catch a glimpse of his wife-to-be in her gorgeous ivory sheath.
    So we scampered out of the way and I looked at Holly and saw tears in her eyes!!!!
    I thought she’d been stung by a bee or something so I was like, “Let’s go find some ice!” but it turned out that wasn’t it at all. Holly looked at me all tearfully and went, “I want my father to lead me down the aisle! Only he doesn’t know I’m doing this. And I’m not even going to have an aisle. Because we’re going to get married by some clerk in some office .”
    Then she burst into tears right there on some street I can’t remember the name of.
    Of course I had no choice but to hustle her as fast as I could to the café where we’d said we’d meet Mark for snacks. Only I knew it was my duty as witness/bridesmaid to get her cleaned up before her future husband saw what a psycho he was marrying. Not that he didn’t already know, since Holly cries at the end of every episode of Seventh Heaven she sees, even the reruns, and won’t pick up the phone on Monday nights as a consequence.
    But still.
    We got a seat right away at the café across from the Pantheon—an outdoor table, even. In New York, you practically have to chew off your own foot to get an outdoor table anywhere. Maybe the waiter saw how dire our need was, considering Holly’s tears. Anyway, he sat us under the shade of his restaurant’s big fluttery awning, and I said, “ Un verre de vin blanc pour moi et pour mon amie ,” forgetting I wasn’t in 11th-grade French, but in Italy.
    The waiter totally took it in stride though. “Frizzante?” he asked me.
    I had no idea what he was talking about, but remembering I was in Italy and not France, I managed to say Si and not Oui .
    My first foreign language exchange! I’d spoken English with the Diet Coke guy and Mr. Gladiator’s pimp. And OK, the exchange hadn’t been in the actual language spoken in this country. But it had still been foreign.
    Then the bread basket came, with a little pot of silky white butter, and we dug in, because even when she’s crying, Holly can still eat, which is one of the many reasons I love her.
    And I told her how lucky she is her father ISN’T here, since, like her mom, he doesn’t exactly approve of Mark. Which is ridiculous, because Mark is totally perfect husband material, being completely sweet and thoughtful and funny and self-deprecating and totally the opposite of his horrible friend Cal the Modelizer in every way. Plus Mark’s even reasonably good-looking. Oh, and a doctor. With a weekly health column in a New York paper that’s read by millions. What more could the Caputos ask?
    A Catholic, apparently.
    Sometimes I get so mad at Holly’s parents for what they’re doing to her, I just want to spit.
    But then, Mark’s parents are just as bad, in