At 9:47 PM on the Friday night of my best friend Jillian's rehearsal dinner, I pulled her into the single-stall handicapped bathroom at a steakhouse in Charleston, locked the door behind us, and told her the thing that twelve other women in her life had been privately telling each other for six months and had never been brave enough to say to her face. I told her the dress was wrong. I told her the silhouette was aging her ten years. I told her the lace pattern was doing something to her
collarbones that was technically called a "shelf effect" in bridal magazines. I told her the eight thousand dollars she had spent on it in October — an eight thousand dollars that had come, in part, from a loan from her mother — had not been worth it. And I told her, because she asked, that yes, I had thought it was wrong at the first fitting. And at the second. And at the third. And that I had, along with her three other bridesmaids, spent the last six months lying to her because we had all assumed someone else would tell her and none of us had. Jillian looked at me in that bathroom mirror for about fifteen seconds. She said, "You knew this in April and you said nothing?" I said, "Yes." She said, "Get out." I got out.