The Best Time I Got a Shrink-Wrapped T-Shirt and Thought It Was a Ring

by Bianca

Connecticut, Christmas morning, 2010

“I saved this for last,” my boyfriend says, proudly handing me a wrapped box the exact size of a ring box that he had been hiding behind him on the couch that is now strewn with opened gifts and discarded wrapping paper.

I can’t believe he’s doing this in front of my whole family, I think, nervously accepting it. I can’t believe our proposal story is going to be this cheesy and, considering he’s Jewish and I’m half Jewish, so Christmasy.

I hear a sharp intake of breath from my mom that basically says … This is it.

Now let me preface this by saying that I am not someone who grew up dreaming of my wedding day. I grew up dreaming about my book release party, which by the way I just had, with 100 of my closest friends and family and I wore a yellow vintage Fendi dress, I got my hair blown out, I got my make-up done, and we ate cupcakes and drank pink champagne and it was fabulous. But now, I realized looking down at the box I was holding neatly wrapped in a red bow, I was ready to get married. We’d been living together in sin for over two years and we’d even adopted a surrogate child otherwise known as a cat together. By this point we kind of knew what we were signed up for. We knew what the other was going to say before they said a word. We were that annoying couple. Which was why I was a little surprised to unwrap my “Tiffany’s” box and find a shrink-wrapped t-shirt. Like the kind they sell at Muji or the MoMA gift shop. The kind no one ever actually wears.

“Oh my god!” my mom cried. Nearly crying.

“I know, isn’t it great?” my boyfriend asked, completely oblivious to the range of ingrained feminine emotions he had just put us through. “Can you believe they fit a t-shirt into a package that size??”

No, we both said.

So I did the only reasonable thing to do in a situation like that: I re-gifted. I rewrapped the t-shirt, put a big fat bow on the top, and gave it to his sister for her birthday. She was psyched because when you’re not expecting a gift, a shrink wrapped t-shirt is pretty awesome.

It took another year for my boyfriend and I to take a long overdue break. We’re still in relationship limbo.

Bianca Turetsky is the author of the YA series The Time-Traveling Fashionista, released this spring by Poppy/Little Brown. She also works for the artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel. You can follow her on twitter or Facebook.