Bullseye

This was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives.

The thought replayed through her head as Helena watched the raspberry and lemon cake she and Lyle chose seven months before go hurtling through the air in a flurry of frosting across the football field to splatter against a ten foot by ten foot bright red target at the 60-yard line.   

“Bullseye!!”

Several feet below Helena, Cameron, her Maid of Honor, howled to the empty stadium surrounding them, pumping her fists in the air and running a short, raucous victory lap around a car-sized catapult before loading up its bucket with a melting ice sculpture of a swan.

The swan had not been Helena’s choice.

For that matter, neither had the catapult.

Lyle’s mother, Vicky, not able to have one at her own wedding years ago, felt that this was an important moment to right a deep wrong dealt to her on what should have been the happiest day of her life. There would be ice sculptures at the wedding reception. A menagerie of ice sculptures, it turned out, scattered all over the indoor venue like the entryway to the White Witch’s home in the Chronicles of Narnia. Instead of evoking a sense of winter wonderland, the effect had been cold, creepy and nothing like Helena imagined her wedding would be when Lyle proposed.

Cameron pulled the catapult lever and the ice swan took its first and only flight, soaring above the field to hit the target in an explosion of glimmering shards and white powder with a bang! that echoed across the stadium. The swans’ head and part of a wing survived impact to fall heavily onto the spongy grass below, where they twinkled

Cameron chugged the remains of her beer and flung the bottle at the field. “Helenaaaaa!” Cameron bellowed up at Helena. “You should come down here and try this! It’s freaking great!”

Helena leaned forward and peered over the edge of the twelve foot hight platform she was currently sprawled across. Behind her, the pink rose-bedecked gazebo where she and Lyle were to have taken prom do-over photos (Vicky’s idea), loomed like a science fiction monolith. Below her, Cameron waited with a cooler full of alcohol and a cart full of wedding projectiles, catapult trigger at the ready. “Girl, get down here!” she called up again, and Helena flopped over onto her back to stare up at the sky. Her body just felt so damned heavy. Even her toes felt impossible to move. She concentrated on her left pinky toe, testing the theory. When it didn’t budge, she hollered back to Cameron, “Can’t do it! I’m going to die here. They’ll have to scrape my bloated corpse off this wood before I move again.”

“Jesus, you’re dramatic.” Cameron laughed. There was a snickpop!hiss from beneath Helena, followed by a chugging sound. Cameron had opened another beer. A few seconds later, heavy footsteps clomped up the platform stairs and Cameron appeared above Helena. She dropped down to a cross-legged seat beside her friend and pressed a bottle to Helena’s mouth.

Helena turned her head, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t want any beer, dude. My stomach can’t take it right now.”

Cameron scoffed and lifted the bottle up so that Helena could see it. Water. “Come on now, what do you take me for? I know you. You’re my lil’ tender-tummied booboo.” She crossed her eyes to emphasize the baby voice she’d employed for this last statement, and Helena stared at her balefully until Cameron dropped the expression with a laugh and shook the water at her again. “You really should drink some of this. If you weren’t already lying down I’d say you look like you’re about to fall over.”

“Ha ha.” Helena grunted sourly, but accepted the drink of water. It was refreshing, and cool relief rushed down her throat and spread through her in that way it only did when she was tilting into dehydration. “I’m sorry to be such a grouch.” She said, sighing heavily, and Cameron dropped down to a seat beside her, twisting the cap back onto the bottle of water and setting it down beside Helena’s head so that she could take a swig of the beer she still held in her other hand.

“Uh, you’re entitled under these circumstances. All the more reason to indulge in a little rampant destruction.” Cameron said.

  When Helena just sighed again in response, Cameron nudged her with her foot. “You know you want to.”

Helena thunked her head on the platform beneath her and squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s too far away. I’m enjoying watching you do it. I don’t need to pull the lever. Besides, I’m going to die here, remember? I’m never moving again.”

Cameron stretched out beside her, pillowing her head with her crossed arms. “Somehow, I don’t believe you.”

“You should! I just exploded at my now definitely EX mother-in-law and ex —” she took a breath, glared at the relentlessly blue sky — perfect weather for a wedding, she thought, then shoved the thought aside angrily and forced out the word, “fiancee, ending my wedding —”

“It wasn’t really your wedding, though.” Cameron said.

Helena pinched her mouth closed and glared at the sky, unable and unwilling to answer for several tense minutes before she let out a loud, long groan, the last drops of resistance draining out of her, and admitted, “You’re right. It wasn’t even remotely my wedding. I was a prop in Vicky’s fantasy. If she could have married Lyle, she probably would have.” The words felt truer after being said aloud, and every weird dinner she’d gone to with that family, every uncomfortably snuggly hug between mother and son that Lyle had waved off, every goodbye kiss on the mouth Vicky insisted on, all crystallized into nauseating clarity. “Total barf,” she said.

“Yeah,” Cameron said, sitting up and crossing her legs beneath her. “It really was. But you know what isn’t? That catapult. Seriously, we’re lucky that Vicky wasn’t born during a feudal era and only wanted to lodge rubber balls at a target today. She would have enjoyed old school warfare way too much.” Cameron raised her beer and saluted the huge red target across the field. “To Vicky. May she remain her diabolical self somewhere far, far away.”

Lying on her back on a platform built in the middle of a High School football field for the express purpose of fulfilling her ex-Mother-in-Laws’ wedding fantasy of being married on the field where she met her husband when they were teenagers, Helena could not bring herself to even mouth the words of a mock-toast to Vicky. Vicky was the one who had commandeered Helena’s wedding down the last detail, including the wedding dress. Vicky was the one who, after having a wine-induced dream eight weeks before the wedding day, insisted on having a carnival after the wedding to complete her High School Love Story re-enactment fantasy.

It had been Vicky who insisted, as a final fun touch to delight their guests, on having a ten foot by ten foot target erected onto this football field next to an above ground pool so that the guests could play ‘dunk the bride’ with Helena after the wedding. “Won’t that be so much fun?!” she’d exclaimed with unmitigated glee that morning as Helena was being zipped into the enormous, billowy, puff-sleeved nightmare of a wedding dress Vicky had guilted her into accepting.

Much of the morning after that moment was still a blur.

Helena remembered tearing herself out of the tulle and lace nightmare dress. She remembered Lyle chasing after her, yelling something about not getting hysterical. She remembered Cameron handing her a sledgehammer.

The majority of the menagerie of ice animals had not survived. She definitely remembered that.

“Did you just remember the Ice Menagerie Massacre?” Cameron said, grinning around the rim of her beer.

“Ohhh yeah,” said Helena, and found that she did, in fact, still have the capacity to smile.

Cameron cackled and nudged Helena again. “See? There were great things about today! You tore up a wedding dress, destroyed some ice sculptures, avoided marrying into a family of the not-fun kind of crazy people, body-slammed Vicky into a chocolate fountain —”

“Oh my god, I forgot I did that!”

“Girl, you definitely did that, and it was beautiful. I’m so, so proud.” Cameron said, placing a hand over her heart and gazing off into the distance. “You became my hero in that moment. And if you get arrested for assault for this, I will absolutely bail you out. You don’t even need to pay me back. I have already been paid in full with Vicky’s tears.”

They both snickered at that last statement, and sat together in companionable quiet for several minutes before Cameron spoke up again.

“There’s still one thing you haven’t done yet today, and I really think you should.”

Helena rolled her head in Cameron’s direction and raised an eyebrow at her friend. “And what is that?”

Cameron’s smile curled so diabolically, it would have made the Grinch blanch. “You need to pull that lever.”

“What?!”

“The catapult lever. You need to pull it. Lob some ugly party favor through the air in the ultimate act of catharsis! That tantrum-baby of a MIL was going to have the wedding guests at your wedding dunk you in water with that target! Claim it as your own instead! Make that target your bitch! Use the catapult!”

“Cameron, I told you already that I can’t move.” Helena groaned.

Cameron raised an eyebrow and set down her beer. “Challenge accepted,” she said. Before Helena could react to her words, Cameron shoved her arms under Helena’s torso, and with a strength that could only have been born from drunken confidence, threw her friend over her shoulder.

“Jesus Christ!” Helena shrieked, flailing, but Cameron was already lurching down the stairs. There was a bad moment on the third step from the ground when they almost toppled over, but Cameron found her footing long enough to stumble down the last few stairs safely.

She dropped Helena on the grass beside the catapult and plopped down beside her, gasping for breath. “Goddamn, you’re heavy!”

“No one told you to pick me up!”

Cameron, still panting, grinned. “Challenge accepted, remember?”

“Oh, for goodness sake!” Helena huffed, but there was no real fire behind it. Staying on the platform hadn’t been a real option, and at least now she was this much closer to getting off the football field at some point. Back to her life, where she would have to deal with the technical logistics of a break up and what to do next.

Won’t that be so much fun? Vicky’s voice echoed in Helena’s mind. That demented giggle. The guileless expression that masked the sugar coated, passive aggressive, likely incestuous beast within. Her plan to dunk Helena in water on her wedding day.

Use the catapult, Cameron said.

The catapult? Still feeling too heavy to move herself much, Helena lolled her head to one side so she could see the target across the field. The pool had already been dismantled but not removed, leaving behind the dunking seat connected to the target to hover above the flacid pile of waterproof fabric like skeleton that had dropped its skirt. She could see herself as she would have been, feet dangling above the water, hideous dress bunched around her, watching as her new husband and his family hurled balls at a target. She imagined them laughing as they did it.

Helena was absolutely going to use that effing catapult.

Before she could talk her self out of it, Helena stomped over to the cart full of what was left of her wedding, shut her eyes, and plunged her hand inside. Chance would decide what would be catapulted next. Her blind fingers curled around a bulbous object that was almost too wide for her to grasp, but she managed to snag a corner and heaved it up and out of the pile, sending other party favors tumbling out of the cart and onto the lawn.

“Aw, I forgot about the flamingos!” Cameron laugh-gurgled around another mouthful of beer.

Yes, the flamingos. Chosen by Vicky to line the path leading bride to groom.

Looking into the flamingo’s painted black eyes now, Helena realized they were ever so slightly crossed.

She had been about to walk down the aisle surrounded by a flock of cross-eyed, pink flamingos.

Helena walked to the catapult as though in a dream. She watched herself settle the flamingo into the bucket, where it sat in the smeared remains of cake frosting. She stared down at it in amazement, at what she’d almost allowed to happen. She was so deep into this realization that she barely processed the peripheral view of someone driving toward them across the field in a bright baby blue Jeep, white ribbons and cans on strings whipping and clanging behind it. She almost didn’t hear the sound of a voice shrieking obscenities over the roar of the engine.

Cameron, however, did. And dropped her beer bottle, her mouth falling open.

“Uh, Helena?”

Helena’s hand reached out to grasp the lever.

“Hel— woa, Helena, we’ve got incoming —”

Cameron scrambled up, slipped, fell on her butt on the grass, flailed back up to her feet. “Helena!” she squeaked, reaching out for Helena’s arm.

“YOU’RE GOING TO PAY FOR RUINING MY WEDDING!” the woman in the car screamed.

  Cameron froze, finally recognizing the pale, wild face behind the steering wheel of the car barreling towards them.

It was Vicky.

“Oh, shit,” she said, her vision spinning. She swatted blindly towards Helena. “We have to go. We have to go we have to go we have to GO!!!” Her fingers hit air and Cameron turned to find that Helena had let go of the lever and was adjusting the aim of the catapult’s bucket to alter its trajectory. “Helena, what the hell are you doing?! Vicky’s going to run us over!!” She grabbed a fistful of Helena’s shirt, yanking, but Helena shrugged her off.

“I know!” Helena said, her eyes now fixed on the jeep heading toward them. She gripped the lever so hard her knuckles turned white, and suddenly Cameron knew exactly where Helena had aimed that cross-eyed flamingo.

The jeep reached the 40-yard line.

“Helena!” Cameron shouted.

By then it was too late.