Even though the girls didn’t say Holly and Jackson’s names, Emma knew who they were talking about. The news was clearly all over the school. Was Holly that mad at her for not coming to the party that she flirted with Jackson for revenge?
How could she, the one person who knew Emma best, do something so incredibly hurtful in such a public way? Holly had to know it would get back to Emma. Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she’d always had a thing for Jackson but had kept it from Emma. Maybe that’s why she wouldn’t answer Emma’s calls and texts yesterday.
“Where were you on Saturday night?” Holly demanded. She was waiting for Emma by their lockers. “I thought you got run over by a hot-dog cart or something.”
“That would’ve been even more convenient than me not showing up, wouldn’t it?” Emma met Holly’s gaze.
“What are you talking about?” Holly asked, her eyes narrowing.
“How could you not know? The whole school knows you were all over Jackson at Kayla’s party.”
“Are you kidding me? I wasn’t all over Jackson,” Holly said.
“That’s not the way I heard it. Seems you were in his lap the entire night.” Emma could hear her voice growing louder. She and Holly had never fought before, but after everything that had happened over the past couple of months—all the uncomfortable moments and the feeling that they’d never gotten back in their groove after Holly got home from summer vacation—suddenly Emma couldn’t stop herself. It was all just spilling out.
“What are you talking about?” Holly demanded. She whipped around and glared at a group of girls in the hall who were not at all subtle about listening in. The girls retreated, giggling and whispering.
“Don’t pretend with me. Everyone is talking about how you hooked up with Jackson. Just because I didn’t show up—and by the way, I had a very good reason for that— didn’t give you the right to do that to me. That’s just cruel.” Emma took a deep, almost painful, gulp of air. “And I never thought you were cruel.”
Holly had a look on her face that Emma had never seen before—a mix of anger, disbelief, and embarrassment maybe—and suddenly Emma worried that they’d just crossed some invisible line. In all their years of friendship, she had never lashed out at Holly like that.
“Wow,” Holly finally said. “I can’t believe you would accuse me of doing that, especially since I’ve literally been going out of my way to get you and Jackson together all semester. And you know what else? This was just another time out of maybe like a million that you showed zero effort to be friends with Ivana and the girls—and zero effort to be friends with me. You blew me off, Em, so I really don’t know who you think you are to be mad at me.”
Emma was stunned. “You are so amazingly selfish!” she cried. She brushed by Holly and practically ran to fourth period.
She didn’t stop shaking until the end of seventh period.
By the time the final bell rang, Emma was beyond desperate to escape school and Holly and get to Laceland. She grasped the twenty-dollar bill her mom had slipped her in the hall for a cab. Even her mother knew the importance of an extra fifteen minutes today. Scrambling to shove the right notebooks in her bag at her locker, Emma checked her phone. A text from Paige—no surprise there.
Ms. B: Sending a messenger @ 5pm sharp 2 pick up 3 pieces from ur collection. Model fitting is @ 6. Pls confirm they’ll b ready. No margin 4 error. Ciao, PY
“No margin for error,” Emma repeated, as she sprinted out the front doors. Wonderful. The last twenty-four hours had been nothing but a study in mess-ups. Her vest was messed up, and now her friendship with Holly was completely messed up. She definitely did not want to add to that growing list.
If the messenger is coming at five o’clock, that only gives me a little more than two hours, she figured. She still needed to check everything—make sure all the loose threads were snipped off and every button was secure—and sew in the Allegra Biscotti labels that she had embroidered with hot-pink thread at home. Plus she had to steam out all of the wrinkles.
She knew she had to get creative and make that corset dress work, because there was no extra time to start over. What she was going to do, she still had no clear idea. Her fingers clenched into fists. This dress could end her dream. She tried to take deep breaths, to push away the suffocating stress so she could create.
Sitting in the backseat of the taxi that blessedly was zipping up Sixth Avenue despite the traffic, Emma psyched herself up. This was the final push. Paint splatters or no paint splatters, she would finish what she started and make it great. Emma typed quickly:
Ms. Young, Everything will be ready 4 pickup @ 5. Thanks, Allegra Biscotti
“How’s it going?” Charlie asked, poking his head into Emma’s studio a little while later.
Emma spritzed steam from the handheld steamer near Charlie’s face, blasting him with the warm, moist air.
“Not so good, huh?” He blocked his face from another blast of heat.
“Let’s be honest here, Charlie. I’m panicking, and I need to focus.” Emma turned her attention back to the high, dramatic collar of the dress. Charlie was great but just not now. She had turned Marjorie away earlier, too.
“I’m not even here. Ignore me.” He wandered around the room, eyeing each of Emma’s finished pieces.
“I will.” Emma inspected the zipper running along the back of the dress. She slowly moved it along its tiny tracks, double-checking its grip.
“I heard you and Holls had quite the scene in the hall today—”
“Not now.” Emma warned him. What had happened with Holly was too raw, too painful to analyze now. She needed to finish being Allegra first. Then at home quietly, when she was ready, she could figure out what had gone so horribly wrong between her and Holly.
After a couple of minutes Charlie said, “Hey, Em, does this lining go all the way around inside?”
She looked up. He was standing by her worktable, the paint-splattered vest in front of him. “Yeah, why?”
“I had an idea. Do you think you could, like, flip it inside out?”
Emma had turned her attention to the dress form now wearing the not-great-enough corset dress. While she still thought of the other dress forms as her “girls,” this one seemed more like the hanger-on girl. The girl who worked so hard to fit in with the others, yet everyone else could see that she just didn’t have that special something to jell with the group.
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, I mean, the lining is really cool. I actually always liked it better than the outside fabric. So I was thinking: what if you reversed it and made that the outside?”
Dropping the steamer on the table, Emma hurried over to Charlie’s side. She reached for the vest and gently flipped it inside out. She held it away from her body and studied it. It wasn’t how she’d originally pictured it at all…but it totally worked.
Now the gorgeous swirly silk lining was on the outside, and the gray silk-jersey fabric peeked out along the edges, as if it had been intended as a border all along. The slit pockets, which she and Marjorie had luckily taken such care to sew, still had their desired effect.
All she had to do was sew the buttons onto the new front, trim the pocket with bits of the gray fabric to counteract the softness of the lining, and add an Allegra Biscotti label to the new inside. No one would ever see the white paint splatters hidden inside.
A huge grin spread from ear to ear as she stripped the never-loved corset dress off the dress form and replaced it with the vest. She stepped back and eyed the three pieces of her original vision together. The printed vest still worked perfectly with the party dress and the structured coat. She raised her arms above her head in triumph.