The Wedding Ringer - Softcover

Rea, Kerry

 
9780593201848: The Wedding Ringer
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593201841 ISBN 13: 9780593201848
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

A woman who wants nothing to do with love or friendship finds both in the unlikeliest ways in this hilarious and heartwarming debut by Kerry Rea.

Once upon a time, Willa Callister was a successful blogger with a good credit score, actual hobbies, and legs that she shaved more than once a month. But after finding her fiancé in bed with her best friend, she now spends her days performing at children's birthday parties in a ball gown that makes her look like a walking bottle of Pepto Bismol. Willa dreams of starting fresh, where no one knows who she used to be, but first she needs to save up enough money to make it happen.

Maisie Mitchell needs something too: another bridesmaid for her wedding. After a chance encounter at a coffee shop, Maisie offers to pay Willa to be in her bridal party. Willa wants nothing to do with weddings—or Maisie—but the money will give her the freedom to start the new life she so badly desires.

Willa's bridesmaid duties thrust her into Maisie's high-energy world and into the path of hotshot doctor Liam Rafferty. But as Willa and Maisie form a real friendship, and Liam's annoyingly irresistible smile makes her reconsider her mantra that all men are trash, Willa's exit strategy becomes way more complicated. And when a secret from Maisie's past threatens to derail the wedding, Willa must consider whether friendship—and romance—are worth sticking around for.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kerry Rea is a 2017 and 2019 #Pitchwars mentee. Her work has appeared in Seventeen Magazine. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband and four dogs. The Wedding Ringer is her debut novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

I never envisioned myself as a twenty-nine-year-old children's birthday party performer, but here I am. Princess effing Sparkleheart. The effing is silent. Squeezing myself into a flamingo-pink, Goodwill-clearance-bin ball gown that itches severely, I look like a walking bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

Once upon a time, I was someone else. Everybody was. Before my idol Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the Supreme Court's resident badass, for example, she was just a little girl from Brooklyn with big dreams and a bowl cut. Before Meghan Markle met Prince Harry, she was a B-list actress who got her start as a briefcase girl on Deal or No Deal.

But unlike Ruth and Meghan, whose glow-ups transformed them from ordinary people into aspirational figures, my transformation went in the opposite direction.

Weekends as Willa Callister-blogger, Columbus's adventurous "it girl," and fiancŽe to Max-are a thing of the past.

Today's gig is Chloe Wellington's sixth birthday party, the social event of the summer for central Ohio's under-ten set. I know this because it literally says so on the invitation, a thick piece of white stationery covered in pressed rose petals that each guest had to display before entering. Chloe's backyard garden party, complete with rows of sparkling fairy lights and a shitload of mason jar centerpieces, is a Pinterest board come to life.

Chloe herself, a wiry, gap-toothed kid sporting a fuchsia dress and a tiara I suspect might have actual diamonds in it, is a total asshole.

A key part of my job as Princess Sparkleheart is to keep the party moving. It's been difficult today, given that Chloe has chosen to eschew the usual elements of my routine. I'm supposed to perform a whimsical wood flute number, as well as a sugary-sweet reenactment of how I met and fell in love with Prince Leon the Brave. But she ripped the wood flute from my hand three seconds into "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and used it to smack a smaller child in the mouth. And instead of listening during story time, Chloe made her dutiful friends crawl around on all fours and make horse noises while she perched lazily on their backs.

"Faster, Kinsley!" Chloe screeches, digging her heels into the sides of the poor kindergartner she's chosen as her latest victim. "Slow horses don't get birthday cake."

Kinsley, a sweet-faced girl in a dinosaur-print dress, lets out a mournful whinny and tries to pick up the pace. But her knee hits a divot in the yard, sending both girls crashing to the ground.

Terrified that Chloe might smash her tiara over her friend's head as punishment, I whistle for attention.

"Gather round, children!" I say in my Princess Sparkleheart voice, which is somewhere between a Minnie Mouse-like squeak and how my normal voice sounds when I'm choking. "'Tis time for Princess Chloe to open her royal presents."

"But I want to hear the story of how you met Prince Leon," a pigtailed child says. She pops a miniature cupcake into her mouth and tugs at my skirt with icing-coated fingers, coming dangerously close to exposing Princess Sparkleheart's private parts.

Princess Sparkleheart never gets angry, I tell myself as the pigtailed kid claws at my skirt and Chloe steps over a crying Kinsley, uttering a string of very unprincesslike words. Princess Sparkleheart never gets angry.

"Tell us the story!" the pigtailed girl insists. "Did Prince Leon the Brave rescue you from an evil witch? Were you cursed until you found true love's kiss? Or maybe he was an ugly monster who held you captive somewhere, like in a castle or an attic, until your love changed him and he turned nice and also really handsome?" She claps her hands together and stares at me with wide, hopeful eyes.

"Um, no. Actually, Prince Leon and I met when I saved him from the jaws of a hungry dragon." I pause, unable to resist the chance to inject a little feminism into the party. "Besides, love should be a partnership between equals. Relationships should never start out with one person holding the other captive, because-"

"Tell that to Princess Belle," the girl retorts. "But seriously, tell us about Prince Leon. Does he have long hair? And does he wear it in a man bun? Because I'm, like, really into man buns."

Chloe rolls her eyes. "Prince Leon isn't real, dummy."

A seed of anger takes root in my chest, and I force myself to take a deep breath and not think about how much I hate children. Princess Sparkleheart never gets angry.

Chloe's mother Beth, a raven-haired woman whose T-shirt reads HOW MERLOT CAN YOU GO? in sequined letters, doesn't bother to scold her daughter for name-calling. Instead, she pats the pigtailed girl on the head. "It's not story time, Annabelle. It's present time, okay?"

Annabelle groans in exasperation. "But Chloe has, like, eight hundred thousand presents. Can we at least have cake?"

"It's time," Beth insists, "for everyone to sit and watch Chloe." She smiles in a vaguely menacing way-a subtle reminder that if anyone draws so much as one photon of the spotlight away from Chloe, she will fuck their world up.

"Goddammit," the pigtailed girl mutters. I give her an apologetic smile and toss a pinch of fairy dust (read: dollar-store glitter) at her in consolation.

"Gather round, princes and princesses," I announce, adjusting my flower crown as the children assemble before me, looking like they'd very much prefer to skip Chloe's present parade and get to the cake. "Let's see what tributes the villagers brought for Princess Chloe on her day of celebration!"

"I brought her an outfit," a redheaded child declares with a shrug. "It's yellow. From Target. She'll probably hate it."

I toss a pinch of glitter at her. "Now, now. A princess is grateful for any gift she receives."

"What shade of yellow are we talking?" Beth asks, narrowing her eyes at the child. "Because anything paler than lemon washes Chloe out."

Before the girl can burst into tears, I grab a present from the top of the pile and present it to Chloe, who perches herself in the golden throne I drag to every party. It's a plastic lawn chair spray-painted gold, and it will come in handy if Princess Sparkleheart ever has to moonlight in an industry requiring lap dances.

I place the gift in Chloe's lap and curtsy. "Here you are, princess. Open your gift and see what treasures await."

Chloe, who seems to have outgrown the fairy princess theme by at least a year, gives me a dismissive glance. "Take it down a notch."

I glance at Beth, but she's busy beaming at Chloe and recording the proceedings on her iPhone. We all watch as Chloe tears open gift after ornately wrapped gift, including a new iPad, a summer's worth of vouchers for horseback riding lessons, and-I shit you not-an Amazon gift card worth three hundred dollars. She tosses the gift card aside with a bored expression, and it takes every ounce of restraint in me not to shed my royal dignity and dive after it. It would take three Saturdays as Princess Sparkleheart to earn that kind of cash.

When the gift-opening marathon concludes, Beth motions for me to follow her into the house. We march through the backyard, my skirt rustling as we pass the pony ride station and the slightly deflated bounce house, where at least one partygoer has vomited up the catered appetizers. In a kitchen that looks like the pages of a Crate & Barrel catalog, I reach into a refrigerator the size of my childhood bedroom and remove Chloe's cake. It's a dreamlike confection that would make Willy Wonka jealous; the cake is castle-shaped, complete with pink buttercream turrets and a chocolate-chip-cookie-dough drawbridge. A tiny edible version of Chloe peers out from the strawberry shortcake balcony, gazing down upon her sugary kingdom with an uncharacteristically benevolent...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593201841
ISBN 13 
9780593201848
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
369
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland