Page 55 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

‘It’s fine. I wondered if maybe you were a bit wedding-shy, being the last one standing and all.

But. With your career change and your five-star rating on Google – well, except for that really weird one about the ashes that I assume was meant for the funeral home next door – I wanted to ask if you’d do me the honour of planning the wedding. ’

Lily sipped at her tea, scalding her tongue. She waved her hand frantically in front of her mouth, pretending that her skin wasn’t sloughing off.

Tessa mistook Lily’s pain for enthusiasm, her eyes brightening.

She pulled out her phone and pulled up a photo collage, pushing it into Lily’s hands.

‘Oh, I’m so glad! Here’s what I’m thinking.

I want super classic. White dress, white veil, six-tiered wedding cake, doves, Enya, the whole lot.

The opposite of my parents’ wedding, because looking back over those photos gives me the hives.

They should’ve just put an embargo on any and all Nineties weddings.

Except the music – I could get down to some Ace of Base.

Anyway, nothing edgy, nothing trendy, just classic .

Like if Barbie got married, only without all the pink.

I’ll pay your full fee, of course – I wouldn’t expect a hook-up type thing where you put in months of work and get a thank you on my Instagram or whatever. ’

Lily swallowed. Between the very laissez-faire approach that Venus took to paying her bills (a problem given all the returns that Lily was fronting) and the money she’d been spending on ads, her bank account was gasping for air.

She could seriously do with the commission.

But Tessa was her cousin. They’d known each other their whole lives, and Lily knew for a fact that Tessa did not do surprises.

If Lily planned her wedding and the cake collapsed into a maggoty mess or the dove release turned into a murder of crows, her cousin would never forgive her.

Lily had worked so hard to overcome their tiff in ninth grade, when Lily, who at the time had decided she was an aspiring hairdresser, had helped Tessa bleach her hair using household bleach.

It had taken a year for Tessa to forgive her (and to grow her hair back).

She didn’t want to risk losing her cousin again.

‘Can I … think about it?’ she asked, her voice thick in her throat.

Tessa pulled her phone back, frowning. She was clearly hurt. ‘Sure, I suppose.’

She sipped from her drink.

‘Is it that you don’t like Adam? That you don’t think it’ll last?’

‘No, no, Adam’s great,’ said Lily. Where had that come from? ‘You two are meant to be together. I mean, you’ve been together since college.’

‘Yeah, we have.’ Tessa twirled her straw in her cup. ‘When you know, you know.’

Something was going on here, and Lily wasn’t quite sure what.

‘It’s not anything like that,’ said Lily. ‘It’s just that I don’t know if I can do your wedding justice. Everything I’ve been working on recently has been a bit … off kilter.’

‘I get it.’ Tessa nibbled primly at the coconut-creme cronut that Dierdre had dropped off at their table. ‘I’ve never been cool enough for you. Of course you don’t want my wedding in your portfolio.’

Lily wished she’d ordered a tequila instead of a tea. Everything she said was making things worse.

Then she took a deep breath. Against all her better judgement, she said, ‘I’d love to do it. Count me in.’

‘Really?’ Tessa squealed with joy.

‘Really,’ said Lily, desperately hoping that the switcheroo had a limited radius that wouldn’t extend to La Jolla, or that she and Mort would have figured out how to reverse the spell before the wedding date, or that Tessa would be uncharacteristically charitable should the event take a deathly turn.

Tessa’s phone alarm chimed. ‘Ugh, I’d better be getting back,’ she said, pulling up Google Maps on her phone. Red squiggles filled its screen. ‘Traffic is already backing up.’

Then she frowned. ‘Is your lip okay, Lils? You’re looking a bit bee-stung.’

Right as Tessa said it, a tingling started up in Lily’s lip. Lily’s eyes widened.

Oh no, the tropical lip balm that Venus had dropped during their first meeting, and which Esmeralda had batted out from behind a chair just that morning.

Against all of Lily’s better judgement, she’d tried it – just a fingertip’s worth – because how could you not?

Nothing so expensive and so limited edition would ever grace Lily’s makeup cabinet.

She’d fully intended to send it off to the world-renowned team at UC Davis so that they could use it to clone whatever now-extinct plants had gone into its production.

But now she’d been cursed for her dishonesty.

Hastily seeing Tessa off with a hug and a promise of a personalised wedding mood board, Lily raced back to her shop, slamming the door and turning over the ‘open to love’ sign so that no hapless visitors would come in for cake and a chitchat.

She hurried upstairs, her lip aching from the swelling.

Where was her tube of Lysine? She scrabbled around in her dresser for it, hoping to reverse the cruel spell of herpes simplex 1 which, unlike the switcheroo, had absolutely no positives.

Aha! Victory. Lily lunged for the tube, uncapping it. But why was it blush red?

Oh no. It had turned into a tube of mortuary makeup.

And now it was too late. In mere moments, the tingle had turned into a swollen lip that had seemed mildly bee-stung, perhaps the result of a generous dose of lip filler or something similarly glam.

And then. And then . The swelling had pustulated.

Was there a worse word – or concept – in the English language than pustulation?

Lily sobbed. Her poor lip had gone through the kind of grisly practical effects transformation you might see in an Eighties horror movie.

And now she was a monster. A freak. She simply could not show her face in public for the foreseeable future, or even the future beyond that, if such a future even existed.

Lily went to close the upstairs Venetian blinds with the fluffy pom-pom tassel, but they’d been switcherooed with dramatic wooden shutters that looked like something stolen from a medieval dungeon by very committed ren faire fans.

Draping a towel over her hideous face, she slammed the shutters closed as though she were the resident of a plague house. Although was there much difference, really? A cold sore was a pustule was a bubo, as far as she was concerned.

She texted Angela. Babe, I’m so sorry. Cold sore. I hope Tink’s birthday is a blast. I’ll have Roddy drop off the stuff for tonight.

Angela texted back a string of sympathetic emojis. She knew the pain. Everyone knew the pain. Basically everyone in the world got cold sores. But no one wanted to admit that they, personally, did.

Lily replied with a fainting gif and then sadly made her way over to what was likely to become her deathbed. What a way to go out. What a way to see the bright spark of her life fizzle into sheer nothingness. Oh, the pathos of it all.