Whatever you do, don’t end up doing something that ultimately will leave you feeling resentful and upset. This is, when it is all said and done, your wedding and your day.
Frankly, MOH is basically a symbolic position. It’s unfortunate that it’s been turned into a symbol of “this is my best friend ever”, though and not what it was intended for - which was to indeed be an attendant. Actually, it was usually customary to have a matron (married) of honor and not a maid (unmarried) with the idea that the married woman would have already undergone a wedding and thus would be more suited to help out the bride, since she’d been there and done that, so to speak.
Anyway, to give you a bit of a flip side to all of this, I have a friend who a matron of honor for a woman with whom she doesn’t share much of a bond. The bride is marrying her husband’s best friend. How she even ended up in the wedding party is beyond her. To be her matron of honor is frankly, a duty she didn’t really want. But, she felt that it would be too rude to say that she didn’t want to do it. Being someone’s MOH in this day and age basically comes down to shelling out a few hundred (or possibly thousand dollars). And my friend frankly isn’t too happy to be doing that.
So, some people kind of like the idea of being off the hook.
Now to give you some actual concrete advice from a former bride… I would say to have Cheryl as your attendant (just call her that - your “attendant” - since you won’t have any other bridesmaids) and ask Tracey to do a reading during the ceremony.