Guess what, Mara, not everyone takes your side, you dumb cow.
I'd barely hung up the phone when it rang. "Hello?"
"We'll be at your house in twenty minutes," said Jessica. "We're going to Miracle Mile."
"Connor's taking me out to dinner tonight," I said.
Jessica screamed. "Oh my god! He loves you."
I couldn't think of what to say to that, so I just screamed. Then I remembered something.
"Jessica, I don't have anything to wear."
"Okay, do not panic," said Jessica. "They don't call it Miracle Mile for nothing."
Madison's mom dropped us off at Bistro des Filles for lunch, where Madison, after telling us
how many millions of grams of fat were in each of the entrées we'd ordered, just got a glass of
water. Then she ate about two-thirds of Jessica's Croque Monsieur before Jessica threatened to
stab her with a fork if she didn't get her own sandwich.
By four o'clock, despite my duet of personal shoppers, I still didn't have anything to wear on my
date with Connor. Madison and Jessica dismissed everything I liked as boring, while everything
they wanted me to try on cost about a thousand times what I'd planned on spending. Finally,
since we were running out of time, we
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agreed to split up. Madison went to Chanel to get a mascara, while Jessica and I headed to Ralph
Lauren to look for a dress for me.
As soon as we walked in the door, I saw Jessica notice a blue linen tank top and hesitate for a
second before continuing past the rack.
"That's nice," I said. "You should try it on."
She shook her head. "We're here to find you a date-worthy dress."
But I nudged her toward the top. "Go for it," I said.
"Are you sure you don't mind waiting?" she asked. "I'll be really fast."
"I'm sure," I said. "Take your time." While Jessica went to look for a dressing room, I wandered around looking for something I could possibly wear on my date. But unless Connor was taking
me for a cruise on his yacht, there was nothing in Ralph Lauren that would be right. Finally I
gave up; in a wood-paneled alcove stocked with evening dresses, I found an empty chair and
collapsed into it, dropping my head back, closing my eyes, and sighing.
"I don't know," said a familiar voice, "you're the one who told me what black-tie means."
My eyes snapped open. Sitting a few feet away from me was the last person in the world I'd have
expected to find in the evening-dress section of the Ralph Lauren store at the Miracle Mile.
Sam Wolff.
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He was hunched forward over a sketch pad, and he didn't see me. In his faded jeans and a torn
Red Grooms T-shirt, he looked a little out of place sitting on the overstuffed chintz chair. But he
didn't seem self-conscious, like most of the other guys who were sitting around waiting for their
wives or girlfriends to show off a dress they were considering buying. Instead he looked totally
oblivious to his surroundings, like he could just as easily have been on the Left Bank of the Seine
or the median of the Long Island Expressway. While I was watching, he pulled absently on a
corkscrew curl at the back of his head, then suddenly let it go and drew a series of lines on the
page.
Just as I turned to look around for Jessica, the door to the dressing room right in front of where
Sam was sitting flew open to reveal the beautiful girl who'd sat down at my table that day with
Kathryn Ford. The slinky black cocktail dress she was wearing showed off her amazing body.
"Okay, this or the green one?" she asked. To my amazement, she was addressing Sam.
He didn't look up. "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe," he said, still sketching.
"Sam," she said, "you're starting to piss me off."
He sighed and flipped his sketch pad closed.
"Okay," he said. "Turn around." She spun around on her heel. "The green one." Considering how gorgeous she looked in the dress she was wearing, I couldn't even
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begin to fathom what the green one must have looked like.
"Oh, please," she said. "You have the worst taste."
"And you're asking my opinion because ..."
"Just forget it, okay?" She looked at herself in the mirror, frowning, though what she could
possibly have seen that made her frown was completely beyond me. "Obviously, if I want this
done right, I'm going to have to do it myself."
"Jane, you're gorgeous in everything you tried on, up to and including the very first dress I saw
you in three hours ago."
Now I was starting to feel weird about how thoroughly I was eavesdropping. What if Sam
suddenly turned around and saw me?
"Could you just be quiet for a minute? I can't even hear myself think." She studied herself in the mirror. "I hate this stupid rehearsal dinner, I hate this stupid wedding, and I hate my stupid
sister."
"Amen to that," said Sam, flipping his sketch pad open again.
She shot him a look. "I'm getting both and I'll decide at home," she said. Then she opened the
dressing-room door and disappeared behind it just as Jessica appeared holding a shopping bag.
"There you are," she said. "Oh, hey, Sam."
Sam turned around lazily. I froze, sure he'd be all, Enjoying listening in on my conversation
much? But the
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only thing he said was, "Hey." Then he kind of lifted his head in my direction in a move that was somewhere between a nod and a nothing.
Now I was totally confused. How did Sam not only know A) the most beautiful girl in the senior
class, but also B) Jessica?
Jessica put her hand on my shoulder. "So we should probably hook up with Madison," she said.
"Yeah, let's go," I said. I stood up, and the ache in my feet that had disappeared while I was
sitting came back.
"See you," Jessica said to Sam. Without really looking up from his pad, he gave us a salute.
When we got outside, I was about to ask how she knew Sam, but she beat me to it.
"He's in my art class," I said. "But you know what's really weird? I think he was there with that girl who hangs out with Kathryn Ford."
"Oh yeah," she said. "Jane Brown. They go out."
I almost tripped over a nonexistent crack on the sidewalk. Sam Wolff, the most antisocial person
on the planet, had a supermodel girlfriend?
"She's such a mega-bitch," said Jessica. "But guys totally love her. Can you believe that of all the hot guys at Glen Lake she picked some random junior artist who's a total freak?"
Something about the way Jessica said artist and freak rubbed me the wrong way. I thought of Sam's
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beautiful paintings and stopped walking. "What's freaky about being an artist?"
Jessica shifted her bag to her other hand. "Oh, no offense," she said, putting her hand on my arm.
"I didn't mean he was a freak because he's an artist. I just meant ... He, like, never talks or anything. Why would she want to go out with him?"
We started walking again. "I don't know," I said, remembering the scene in the store. "If she's such a bitch, maybe it's weird that he goes out with her."
"Is he, like, a friend of yours?" asked Jessica. "Because you're being kind of defensive about him."