I look back at the happy couple on the screen. Bailey has clearly said yes, and her brand-new fiancé is slipping a ring onto her finger. The crowd around us cheers, while Bailey cries happy tears in front of everyone.
“That’ssotacky,” Tina says. She grabs onto Ryan’s hand and leans against his arm.
I bite my lip. I know that Tina is only saying this because it’s Ryan’s ex getting engaged on the jumbotron. If it had happened to her first, she would have been ecstatic. Instead, she’s misread Ryan’s reaction to Bailey’s engagement as some sort of weird resentment, and she’s coming to his defense by pretending she thinks a jumbotron proposal is in bad taste.
This is kind of perfect for me. But for Ryan? Not so much. I don’t know how he’s going to follow his ex’s engagement with his own proposal after Tina just said that it was tacky.
I look past her at him. His face has fallen, and for the first time today, he looks nervous. He pulls his eyes away from the jumbotron to look at Oliver. There’s an unspoken exchange between the two of them, and then Ryan nods.
“Come with me,” Oliver says.
I turn to him, then look back over my shoulder in case he was talking to someone else. When it’s clear that neither Tina nor Ryan heard him, I ask, “Who, me?”
“Yes, you.” Oliver stands up. I hesitate a moment, and then I follow him. We make our way up the stairs toward the concessions.
“Where are we going?”
“To cancel the jumbotron message,” he says.
“Are you sure? He didn’t say anything. How do you know that’s what he wants?”
“Because his college girlfriend just got engaged on the jumbotron, and his current girlfriend called it tacky. He didn’t need to say anything. He can’t propose after that.”
I know that he’s right. I was thinking the same thing. “Where do you go to cancel that sort of thing?”
“I have no idea,” he says with a sigh. He looks around us. “Maybe someone at concessions knows.”
I follow him to the place where we bought our beers earlier. He grabs the attention of one of the attendants, and asks, “Do you know who I could talk to about canceling a message on the jumbotron?”
“Sorry, man,” the attendant says. “I have no idea.”
One of his coworkers elbows him, then looks at Oliver. “Talk to guest services. The office is that way.” She gestures with a towel she’s holding in a direction to our left.
Oliver and I exchange a glance, and then we take off in a brisk walk toward the guest services office.
“I feel really shitty about taking the ring, by the way,” I admit on our way there.
“I should hope so,” he says, looking ahead. “It was a pretty shitty thing to do.”
“I guess it’s pretty selfish of me to get in the way of him proposing to Tina.”
“Selfish and pointless,” he says. “All you needed to do was wait a bit and let Bailey’s engagement sabotage his proposal for you.”
“How long was he with her?” I ask.
“Bailey?” He shrugs. “They dated for a few months. It was never that serious.”
“He turned white when she popped up on the screen. Are there still some feelings there?”
I watch Oliver, trying to gauge his reaction to my question. “If he turned white, it’s only because he knew it would seem unoriginal if he got engaged on the jumbotron right after his ex-girlfriend. I think that even if Tina hadn’t called it tacky, he would be reconsidering his decision to do this. I mean, how do you follow something like that and have it not be weird?”
“True.”
“I guess you can rest easy knowing that Tina’s plan lives to see another day.”
“It’s too bad they can’t both get what they want,” I say.
We reach the door to the guest services office. Oliver stops. “Why can’t they?”
