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.
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.
“Yes! Yes! Charlie! You’re a genius!”
For once, Charlie was more modest than usual. “Yes, I am, but you’d probably planned on making it reversible the whole time.”
“No, I didn’t!” Emma laughed. “I didn’t! But who knows… maybe Allegra did!”
She eyed the clock. She really had to hurry now to get those buttons on. When she grabbed the tin box off her worktable, she giggled.
“What?” Charlie asked.
Emma held up the box that once had contained biscotti cookies—the very same one that had given Emma the idea for Allegra’s last name just three weeks earlier—and shook it. The buttons clanked around inside.
“That has to be a good sign, right?”
“Definitely,” Charlie agreed.
He watched as she made the alterations and adjustments to the vest. As she snipped the final threads, he reached behind the filing cabinet and pulled out a large shopping bag. “Here you go.”
Inside were three canvas garment bags with the Allegra Biscotti logo that Emma had designed in the upper-left corner of each of them. Emma hugged them to her chest.
“I love them. They’re perfect.”
“I asked my mom for some of the garment bags she uses to protect her costumes from all those musicals and heat-sealed your logo onto them,” Charlie explained. “I thought they’d make everything look more professional and official. Much better than those lame dry-cleaner bags you were going to use.”
“Brilliant, as usual.” Emma smiled at her friend, and now her partner. “Thank you.”
A few minutes later, Marjorie stuck her head into Emma’s work space.
“Ready, honey? The messenger from Madison is here.”
Her dad hurried in, too, not wanting to miss the big moment.
The sensationally cut, sparkly dress with a teasing slit showing a hint of watercolor silk; the fabulously dramatic charcoal jacquard overcoat with its brilliant-striped, pleated lining (and perfect box pleat!); and the dash-of-color vest with gray edges practically danced on their hangers, as if they, too, were eager for their big debut.
Emma zipped up the final bag and turned to Marjorie. “Ready as I’ll ever be!”
“I’ll take these up front for you, Ms. Biscotti,” Marjorie said. She lifted the three garment bags off the garment rack, whisking away Emma’s very first collection to face the scrutiny of fashion’s top editors.
Emma sunk down onto the stool, her whole body tingling. This was the most exciting, terrifying, satisfying, exhilarating, joyful, and proud moment of her entire life.
This must be what it’s like to be a real fashion designer, Emma thought as she followed Charlie and her dad out of her studio and turned off the light: Hurrying and waiting. A million ups and downs. Times when everything was going right and then it…wasn’t. Wondering what people would think. Hoping that someone would love what she created as much as she did.
Now there was nothing she could do—no sketching, no sewing, no snipping—but wait.