The camera whirled. A heavyset woman led a donkey, gray and groomed, down the aisle by a red leash.
“I am,” Chip said, “so confused, Gianna.”
Gianna put a finger to her earpiece. “I’m being told that the donkey is being followed by an ox and several sheep.”
“Yes, we can see them now,” Chip said. “There they are. So perhaps this is a zoo theme?”
“Adore that,” Gianna sighed.
The bag of gummy bears crinkled under Orla’s tailbone as she leaned forward, trying to figure out for herself what was happening.
“And now we see the groom proceeding down the aisle,” Chip said. The camera followed Aston approaching the altar. He was wearing a long-sleeved tunic that fell to his knees and laced up the chest. It was made of something that looked like burlap. On his feet were simple brown sandals.
Gianna flipped the cue card in her hand and looked at Chip. “We were told that Aston would be in a Gucci tux,” she said. “I’m not sure what’s...”
She trailed off as a whooshing gasp went through the crowd. Chip and Gianna both raised themselves out of their chairs, trying to see what was happening. Gianna looked uncertainly at someone off camera while Chip hopped up, took a few steps out of frame, and quickly returned, panting. As he climbed back into his chair, the cuff of his pants rode up, exposing his leg above his sock. Orla saw his real skin—it was pasty, half the color of his made-up face and hands. “This is unbelievable,” Chip said, breathless. “Even for this couple, this is a stunt beyond—Hold on, we’re working on getting you all a shot here—”
Orla’s heart began to pound. The photographers, who had been behaving at the edges of the ceremony, were now rushing the center aisle, blocking the shot. Orla saw the broad, gray-suited shoulders of security moving into the frame. They swept the paparazzi away. Finally, her mouth falling open, Orla saw Floss at the back of the aisle.
She was lit from behind like an angel, and she wasn’t wearing her slutty dress. Instead she wore a plain white column of silk, a braided gold rope around its empire waistline. Her veil was thick and floor-length, opaque, bird’s egg blue. On her feet were the same type of sandals Aston wore.
Floss took a step and all the fabric moved, shifting to reveal that when she came forward, her stomach came first. Her stomach was high and round and full. Like Orla’s.
Forgetting her state, Orla leaped to her feet and stumbled to the screen. She put her face right up to it. The glass pixels made her eyes water. Could it be distorting things, this shitty TV?
Then she heard Gianna say, “Folks, it’s unbelievable. Floss Natuzzi has somehow managed to keep from the entire world that she is with child, and now the theme of this wedding, I finally get it: it’s the Christmas story of Jesus’s birth.” She laughed. “No pressure, kid!”
“And guess what, Gianna.” Chip waved another cue card in the air. “Sounds like our bosses were in on the whole thing, those scamps. I’m now being told what the major announcement we’ve been waiting on is: Floss and Aston will return to television this winter with the brand-new docuseries, Flosston With Child.”
Orla thought she must be hallucinating as a graphic bubbled up in the corner of the screen: Aston and Floss, alien-airbrushed, a pink faceless bundle between them.
Orla backed toward the bed and collapsed on its edge, slid down to the floor.
On-screen, Floss proceeded down the aisle, hands folded beneath the round of her stomach. She nodded beatifically at people as they applauded—they were applauding, Orla realized. When Floss reached the altar, Aston picked up her hands, taking a moment to look lovingly down at her belly. Craig stepped between them, grinning. This was the only detail that remained intact from the version of the wedding Orla knew: Craig would officiate. Melissa should have been in the front row. But Orla saw, as the camera swept the scene, that Melissa wasn’t there. She could spot the seat-filler summoned to take Melissa’s chair—an unfamiliar, fidgety blonde with too much eye makeup and too little skirt—from where she was, two thousand miles away.
“Fuck all of you,” Orla yelled. She threw her empty bottle of minibar water at the screen. It hit the bride square in the nose. Floss smiled.
Orla turned her back on the TV and seized her phone. Twitter was exploding. In