Remove the Cast or Leave the Party

I had been her bridesmaid-in-chief since the engagement — eleven months of spreadsheets, three dress fittings, one bachelorette I planned to military standards. Two weeks out, I came off my bike and broke my wrist in two places. Lime green cast; the nurse let me pick, and I was feeling optimistic.

The bride's first text upon seeing the photo was: 'Can they do it in nude?' I thought she was joking and replied with a joke. Her second text was not a joke. It was a paragraph, and its topic sentence has since entered my family's permanent vocabulary: 'I'm not being dramatic but the cast isn't in the palette.'

There followed, over three days, an escalating series of proposals from her side: a nude-toned recast ('I called the clinic, they said medically unnecessary but POSSIBLE'), a custom satin sleeve her seamstress could run up, my standing at the far end of the lineup with my arm 'behind Priya', and — the summit — a suggestion that I attend the ceremony as a guest rather than a bridesmaid and 'rejoin the aesthetic' at the dinner, once photos were done.