Emma pushed through the door and raced straight back to her work space. She froze, blinking several times. And screamed.
Chapter 14
Flipped Out!
She couldn’t believe her eyes. Paint!
White paint…splattered everywhere.
A dirty canvas tarp was draped haphazardly on her worktable. The floor of her studio was littered with cans of open paint, metal trays, and wood mixing sticks. And on her dress forms…oh, God…she couldn’t bear to look.
“No! No! Please no!” Emma screamed. “Dad! Come quick!”
Her father burst in. “What’s wrong?”
She pointed with a shaking hand at one of the dress forms. Her vest. Her beautiful, smooth cotton-sateen gray vest with the silk aquatic-watercolor-design lining had two huge white paint splatters. “They ruined it!” Tears sprung to her eyes.
“I don’t understand it.” Her father stared, horrified. “They weren’t supposed to be back here at all!” He balled his fists, his anger apparent. “Where is Leo? Leo! I paid him to supervise the painters just so something like this wouldn’t happen. Leo!” He took a deep breath. “Are the other two pieces all right?”
Emma slowly walked over to the other two dress forms. She had left all three of her girls, as she had taken to calling them, here last night dressed in her nearly finished creations and looking beautiful. She had said a special good night to each one almost the same way her dad used to do when he tucked her in when she was younger. Wishing each one dreams as sweet as cotton candy. And now…now…
She examined the fabric as if under a microscope. She nodded slowly. The other two were unharmed. The third, oh God. She scrunched her eyes closed.
“I’m so, so sorry, Cookie,” Noah said, shaking his head. “This is awful. Leo has never let me down before.”
“What am I going to do?” Emma choked, as she tried to pick a glob of paint off the outside of the vest with her fingernail. But the paint was already dry. Even if she could scrape off the top layer, the fabric had already absorbed most of it.
“Is there any way you could send two pieces instead?”
“I can’t. I promised—Allegra promised, whoever promised—Paige three pieces. Three, not two!” Emma gulped. “And if I don’t deliver all three on time, she’s going to find a designer to replace me. I’ll be ruined before I ever get started.”
Emma sunk to the floor, her legs too shaky to support her.
Now what?
Sunday passed in a blur. Charlie was summoned, of course. Her father screamed at Leo and his painters. Leo apologized profusely. But, really, what good did that do? The damage was done.
Charlie analyzed the situation from every angle. There was no question that two was not three, and three was what Paige wanted. Charlie advocated the quality-versus-quantity argument for a while. But Emma was no fool. Paige wanted it all—three new pieces, all to-die-for amazing. And Allegra had to deliver.
“So what about you just make another vest, identical to this one?” Charlie suggested. “Shouldn’t it be easier the second time around?”
“If it were that simple, don’t you think I would be working on it already?” Emma shot back. “It’s Sunday. Allure is closed, and I don’t have enough of the outer fabric or the lining fabric left over to start again. And even if I raced to Allure right after school tomorrow and bought more fabric, there’s no way I’d be able to finish it in a couple of hours.”
“Okay, skip school. Problem solved.” Charlie crossed his arms, satisfied with his solution.
“Problem not solved. I promised my parents I was going to school tomorrow. I have to go.” Emma ran her fingers nervously through her hair. She couldn’t battle her mother now about missing school, on top of everything else. “Next idea?”
After a bout of tears and four big Reese’s peanut-butter cups, Emma finally decided she would turn in her two new pieces along with the off-white linen corset dress she had made the previous summer. The dress didn’t fit into her collection, but it was done, which, at this point, was a huge plus. Emma analyzed the dress. If she could include some of the lining material—Charlie crawled on the floor, gathering the useable scraps left over from the vest—and weave strips of it into the corset and maybe have some peeking out ever so slightly from the hem of the dress, the dress might not look like an afterthought. She hoped.
Emma felt as if she were in an action movie. Instead of running for her life, she was sewing at manic speed. She stitched as fast as she could without sacrificing the level of construction. She polished the other dress and the jacket until she felt they were perfect.
Then she tackled the corset dress, incorporating the lining fabric in what she hoped was an innovative design. During the entire afternoon, she could barely look at her ruined vest, still displayed on the dress form. Except for the finishing touches—and maybe a little extra work on the corset dress— Emma finished by Sunday night.
She truly loved the charcoal jacket and the belted dress. She just wished she was happier with her last-minute corset dress. It was good, but she suspected it wasn’t quite good enough. She could envision Paige shaking her head in disbelief, throwing around phrases such as, “overworked,” “tacky,” and “lacking vision.” How humiliating! If she was going to fail at this, she decided, she couldn’t fail with a dress she didn’t believe in.
All night, Emma tossed and turned in bed, redesigning the dress in her mind. Adding fabric, taking away fabric. Changing the hemline. Altering the shape. As the variations appeared and morphed on the inside of her eyelids, she felt as if morning would never come, and then suddenly it was here.
She rode the subway to school next to her mother as usual, except this morning she played a different game in her sketchbook. This game was called: Reimagine the Dress.
Emma waited for Holly at her locker. She realized that Sunday had passed without them talking. She needed to make things right. But Holly didn’t show. Emma shuffled into her first-period classroom and took her seat, her mind still focused on the dress. She now wondered if she shouldn’t reroute to Allure after school and buy more fabric to try to line the skirt. Or was that just ridiculous?
“I’ve never seen Lexie that mad before!” Emma overheard Kayla say two rows in front of her.
“I know,” Shannon agreed. She had the desk next to Kayla.
“You think she’s going to stay mad at Holly forever? If I were Lexie, I would. I mean, Holly stole Lexie’s boyfriend,” Kayla said.
Emma leaned forward slightly in her desk chair to hear more.
“Seriously!” Shannon gasped. “Holly was totally hanging all over Jackson. By the end of the night, she was practically sitting in his lap! It was pretty disgusting, if you ask me.”
“Who knew she was such a major flirt?” Kayla asked. “But what I don’t get is why she flirted with Jackson, when she’s known forever that Lexie likes him. There were a million other guys at the party she could’ve gone after.”
Mr. Whitmore entered the room, and the gossip session was put on hold. Emma tried to make sense of it. She completely expected Lexie to throw herself at Jackson, especially at a party, but how could Holly go after the one guy Emma liked? She wondered if Shannon and Kayla were telling the truth. Did Ivana put them up to it? She couldn’t figure it out.
Out in the hallway after class, Emma overheard two other girls talking about Kayla’s party. And Holly throwing herself at Jackson. Then in third-period English class, Sophia Hodges said knowingly to Claire Giberna, “I hear they’re a couple now.”
“They looked like they’d been a couple forever at the party,” Claire said.