SEVEN
March 11, Twenty Days to Deadline
The next week at school, Dawn had a bad idea. It occurred to her in English class, Edie and Georgia stuffed into too-small desks on either side of her.
Their teacher had handed out a worksheet and then stepped out to talk to the principal at the beginning of class and never returned, twenty minutes and then thirty passed without her presence, students quietly working on the assignment.
“I should buy a dress for the awards ceremony,” Dawn said in no particular direction.
Dawn had been pressing herself as thin as paper trying to edit her interviews into some semblance of a full-length documentary for days. Ever since she’d been notified that she had a chance of winning a scholarship and prize money, she’d obsessively stared at her computer every night, eyes glazed over, trying to create something perfect. She needed to relax for a moment and indulge in some unwarranted optimism.
Georgia looked up from the book of Jericho Brown poems she’d been reading in place of the grammar assignment they were supposed to be working on. “Absolutely you should.”
“Shopping trip?” inquired Edie. “I think I already have an excuse to be at school late today. I just need to be dropped off around the corner from my place because my parents think I’m with Joyce Abo doing Model UN stuff.”
“Love that. I can drive us,” Georgia offered. “I don’t have anything today except that stupid physics project, but I think it’s due midnight tomorrow.”
“Nobody’s started,” reassured Dawn with an easy shrug. Edie nodded in agreement though Dawn was sure she was just being nice and had in fact already finished the project flawlessly in classic Edie fashion.
“I’m thinking something elegant and flowing, memorable and pretty, in case I win.”
“Okay, Miranda Priestly. And I think you mean when you win, which you will,” insisted Georgia.
“Please.” Dawn sighed and reached for her backpack, where the untouched physics assignment sat smushed between two notebooks.
“It’s called manifesting, duh,” retorted Georgia.
Dawn looked down at the sheet of paper with its long list of requirements. “I need to manifest an A on this physics project.”
Georgia shot her a look.
“Okay, okay.” She flipped the paper over and took a deep breath. “I will win. And when I win, I will be wearing a nice dress from the Galleria.”
Georgia practically shot up from her desk. “Yes, yes, and yes. I’m interested. I’m involved. I am a woman seeking an Orange Julius from the food court.”
Edie tapped her pen against the desk a few times in thought. “Are you finished with all the interviews except ours? Ben told me to ask you again in case you needed AV help.”
“How dare you ask such a thing,” Dawn glowered in a flat tone.
“What?” Edie looked up suddenly, worried she’d said the wrong thing.
The line of Dawn’s lips broke into a smile and she laughed as Edie’s face went from one of concern to annoyance. “E, I’m totally kidding. Yeah, it’s coming along okay. It’s been just days and days using my old computer trying to make something happen with the edits. Sometimes it literally crashes right in the middle of my work. It feels like some sort of cruel cosmic joke at this point.”
“Babe, just use one of ours.” Georgia scrunched her eyebrows into that soft upward arrow of concern Dawn was so familiar with. “Or at least the computer lab upstairs.”
“I know, but I’ve already edited over half the interviews I’ve done. I’m in so deep on my busted little laptop, bless her heart.”
“What about an external hard drive?” Edie wrote her name at the top of the English assignment and leaned on her desk. “I think you can move stuff even if it’s already edited. Or like, in a software.”
“Are you kidding? Those things are like a hundred dollars, probably more. I can’t get that and a dress and keep saving for someone to help out with my dad when I leave.”
“We’ll figure something out, D.” Georgia leaned over to look at Edie’s paper and began writing the answers on her own blank sheet. Dawn pulled out her own English assignment and did the same.
“It’s fine, I just need to keep going,” Dawn sighed as the class bell began to ring.
Georgia and Dawn quickly finished copying down Edie’s answers to the assignment, their usual routine for mind-numbing classwork.
“Meet after last period?” Edie snatched up the finished papers and shuffled them into a neat stack.
“Yeah, I’ll just pull my car around. Or, you guys can come to the garage with me.”
“We’ll just walk up with you, right D?”
Dawn nodded in agreement as she slung her bag over her right shoulder. “I gotta go meet some AV guys to help me with editing stuff. See you guys after French.”
“Love you.” Georgia rushed off to meet Jill for an early lunch.
“Love you, my little angel babies,” crooned Dawn.
“Love you.” Edie slapped the assignments onto their English teacher’s desk and slipped out of class, peeling to the right to meet Ben before next period.
Edie thought back to her call with Ben the night before. Ben had been a hovering blur of pixels on her screen as they Facetimed. They started by saying sorry, that they didn’t want to pressure her into saying I love you but that it had come out like a huge bursting dam. Edie had laughed and so had Ben. They were back to normal. Everything was normal for now.
Edie walked the stairs of Alsbury with her hands gripped tight around her backpack straps. Her gait became a skip as she made her way up the stairs to the math wing where the rooftop garden faced the brightly lit hallway. Edie pushed her way through the glass doors to the garden and found Ben hunched over their phone on the huge concrete steps that lined the rows and rows of Texas wildflowers. It was their favorite spot to meet, just between both their fourth period classes on the second floor, always swirling with butterflies or lizards depending on the season.
“My darling, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” Edie brought the back of her hand up to her forehead, a damsel finally stumbling upon her suitor.
“My love!” Ben feigned an accent stuck somewhere between British and Australian. “I thought you’d never return.” They dramatically dropped their phone and outstretched their arms to greet Edie with a hug.
“What’s up, nerd?” Edie settled into a seat beside them.
“Just getting sucked into some articles about linguistics stuff, what about you?”
“Dawn wants to get a dress for the film festival, so we’re going to the Galleria after school. What was your linguistic thing about?”
“You really want to know?” Ben asked.
“Duh. Can’t have you outsmarting me,” Edie teased. “I’m the brains in the relationship.”
Given permission to spew their nerdy facts, Ben launched in. “Okay, actually, it’s really cool. There’s this thing called the bouba/kiki effect,” Ben’s eyebrows shot up as they talked, their words rushing to keep up with their enthusiasm.
“Uh huh.”
“And basically, this German guy in the twenties was like trying to figure out if there was some connection between speech sounds and the visual shapes of objects. So fast forward and this other experimenter was like, we should look into that. So, he did an experiment where they showed people one spiky shape, and one blobby shape and asked them which one is bouba and which one is kiki. And like 90 percent of people said that said the blobby one was bouba and the spiky one was kiki.”
“Oh, so it’s like how your brain associates abstract stuff with words and shapes in the same way?” Edie asked, not completely understanding everything but trying her hardest.
“Exactly. Ugh, I knew I picked you for a reason.” Ben kissed her on the cheek and laughed.
“So, which one am I?” Edie asked.
“Which what?”
“Shape.” She said.
“Kiki, obviously.”
“Oh good. I was worried we were not on the same page, my little Bouba.” Edie tapped Ben lightly on the nose.
“I’m obviously Bouba.” Ben looked down at their phone where they’d dropped it before and saw the time. “Oops, we gotta go. Fourth already started.”
“Okay, call tonight?” Edie asked.
“Obviously.” Ben smiled.
They quickly hugged and Ben started down the hall. Edie picked up her bag and walked in the opposite direction.
Ben yelled over their shoulder, “Bye, Kiki!”
Edie tilted her head down towards her feet and smiled. “Bye, Bouba.”
The Galleria appeared over the highway as the girls listened to the final moments of a podcast they all loved, Food 4 Thot. The topic of that week’s episode was queer-coded cartoon villains.
As they pulled into the mall’s underground parking lot, Dawn declared her favorite villain as Maleficent while Edie and Georgia got stuck between Ursula and Scar.
They floated between a section of designer stores looking at things they and their mothers and their mother’s mothers could never afford let alone want to buy.
Dawn’s mother and father used to bring her to the Galleria on her birthday and let her pick out one thing. The date fell in late November, close enough to Christmas so that all her cards and gifts from family members seemed to imply that they should act as both. Happy birthday and Merry Christmas to my lovely cousin. $10 so you can buy a new toy!
She’d go straight for the Build-A-Bear every year without fail. She’d slowly built up a collection of roller-skating unicorns and dogs that wore intricate leather jackets. All of them were stuffed to perfection and emitted her three- or four- or seven-year-old voice when you pressed the plush foot or paw.
My name is Albert and I’m six. Today is my birthday.
Her mother’s voice would emerge from the scratchy, now-old audio machine right after Dawn’s.
Mommy and Daddy love you. Happy birthday!
They were her most prized possessions. She kept them all in the back of her closet, only bringing them out on particularly draining nights when she needed to be tucked in by her mother’s kind tone, the gentle singsong of her voice.
Dawn shook loose from her memories and found herself in front of the window of a store she’d never seen before, some boutique. A single midnight-black dress shimmered in the display, the ground around it covered in fake clouds made of cotton glinting with silver glitter, which made the dress look even more angelic and sleek.
“Dawn, I think that dress was literally made for you. Holy shit,” said Georgia turning to walk into the store.
Dawn froze and looked at the glittering fabric then shifted her gaze to the glowing letters of the storefront. MOSSÉ they read in neon-white lettering. She’d never heard of it, which probably meant it was too expensive for her to even walk into. A stout security guard stood at the entrance, eyes pointed out towards mall patrons, another sign she most likely couldn’t afford a keychain let alone a dress from this place.
“I’m not going in there just to disappoint myself with some three-thousand-dollar dress.”
Georgia rolled her eyes. “It could be on sale. You don’t know! Plus, it’s perfect. Come on.” Georgia grabbed her by both hands and began to walk backwards into the abyss of too-nice clothing as Edie disappeared into a small section of intentionally ripped jeans at the front of the store.
As they moved past the security guard into the dimly lit store, Dawn went red, worried he’d heard their conversation.
“Please, Geo. I need to be realistic about—”
She went silent at the row of gorgeous gowns in the center of the space arranged in a spiral leading to her dress, the black dress. As she moved closer, she noticed how the dress was particularly well lit, the mannequin bent into an awkward, impossible pose. Headless, her arms squared forward, legs akimbo, as if to say beauty hurts more than you could ever believe.
Edie emerged from a rack of pastel orange cashmere sweaters.
“That’s so pretty. You would murder in that dress. I would actually let you kill me in that dress.” Edie laughed at her own joke as Dawn stepped forward to touch the fabric of the skirted lower half.
Two thin strips split into an impossibly low V-neck triangle and flowed downward in a silken form that cut just above the mannequin’s ankles. Because she was tall, the dress would stop, below her knees instead. Dawn walked around to the back of the pedestal to find the dark blue tag hanging off the back of the gown by a single thick white thread. She picked it up and turned it over to find the price.
Her eyes met the number and she accidentally let out a little yelp.
“Oh no,” she whined and looked up at Edie and Georgia with a visible pout. “The price is not cute or quirky. Y’all, can we please just get out of here?”
“Let me see,” reasoned Edie reaching out for the tag, which was now swinging back and forth across the mannequin’s back where Dawn had dropped it. “Oh, it’s not horrible. I mean, it’s a lot, but … it’s not impossible.” She tried to even her voice.
Georgia peered over at the number with its two zeros. “How much do you have to spend? We can help you.”
“Thank you, but no freaking way. I’m not asking you guys to buy me a dress.” Dawn sighed and started to think of other places they could go.
“We’d do that literally even if you weren’t winning any award. You know that,” Georgia declared, looking to Edie who started nodding instantly.
“At least try it on, D. It’s the perfect dress for you. Seriously.” Edie insisted.
“Fine,” resigned Dawn. “But if my butt doesn’t look perfect you both owe me froyo for emotional trauma.”
They found the rack with the black dress on it and fingered through for Dawn’s size. Luckily, her height helped her a bit in the looking-good-in-clothing-she-had-no-business-wearing department. She pulled her size and started looking to the back of the store for dressing rooms.
A woman who’d been hovering near the girls the whole time they’d been in the store emerged from behind a display of jewelry and walked Dawn to a row of fuzzy, emerald-green curtains that seemed to reach all the way to the ceiling. She gestured to Dawn with both hands as if she were marshalling a plane.
Dawn settled the dress on a hook next to the small, gold-framed mirror leaning against the far wall of the dressing room.
“Let me know if you’d like to try on anything else or another size,” Her voice came through the other side of the curtain. “Need anything, ladies?” Dawn imagined she was talking to Georgia and Edie who’d planted themselves on a huge, pink velvet couch facing the dressing rooms. Dawn listened to the woman’s footsteps fade to the other side of the store.
“Ugh, I can’t wait for Austin,” voiced Georgia from the other side of the curtain as Dawn reached for the hanger. “I found a couple of poetry readings that are actually happening the same weekend as the film fest. I guess writers come into town to see the films and end up arranging a bunch of events around the festival.”
Dawn unzipped the side of the dress and tried to step into it but tripped over her own foot.
“Great, so we can eat good food Knox suggested, go to some readings, watch Dawn win like a hundred thousand dollars, and then turn back around. Very chill weekend.” Edie chuckled as Dawn lifted the dress over herself, a new tactic.
Her first date with Knox had been on her mind lately, his softness, the plush curve of his smile. She tried to keep the overrunning thoughts of him to a minimum, the film her first priority, but she couldn’t help the creeping up, the little daydreams of holding his hand. They’d been texting, his excitement for Austin fueling her own.
“Exactly. I can’t believe we have to wait another three weeks. If I have to listen to Principal Ramos tell us how great ‘we’ all did on some standardized test one more time, I’m going to scream.” Georgia muttered. “Who is ‘we’? I didn’t see you take the SATs, sir.”
“It’s a full scholarship, by the way. Plus, five thousand dollars for film projects that I can spend however I want,” Dawn said, finally getting the zipper up.
“It’s already yours, queen. I’m claiming it in the name of the Lord.” Dawn could imagine Edie reaching a hand up towards the sky in feigned worship.
“Thank you, E. I need the power of any and all available higher powers.” She tugged at the bottom of the dress and attempted to get the neckline to rest on her chest in a smooth pattern. “Last night while I was editing, I freaked out because I thought I’d lost my escapulario that my dad gave me for luck when I was younger. I mean, full-tilt breakdown.”
“What’s that?” Georgia asked.
“Oh, it’s like this piece of cloth that was apparently blessed by a priest. You wear it around your neck. I used to wear mine all the time then I don’t know, I kind of just stopped. But last night I was in this editing haze and I just was like, wait a minute, where is it?”
“You find it?” Edie asked, concern lacing her words.
Dawn paused before answering, her eyes trained on her body in the small mirror in the dressing room. “Yeah, it was in my book drawer. I guess I used it as a bookmark for some Toni Morrison book I forgot to finish.”
Dawn pushed aside the green fabric curtain to reveal herself in the gown. Looking down, Dawn noticed how it kissed her stomach and thighs so that she appeared rounded and tall.
“Wow. I mean, absolutely wow.” Edie shot up from her seat.
“Incredible, amazing, genius, never the same, never been done before, not afraid to reference or not reference, daring, put it in a blender, pour it out the blender, drink the juice, stunning. I mean.”
“I … don’t know what any of that meant, like, on a constructive level, but thank you, Geo, for the contribution.”
To her left was a mirror that folded into three panels. Dawn turned to it and watched herself frown and jut out her waist from three angles. Three dresses on three girls.
“What’s wrong?” Edie asked, her eyes on Dawn’s back.
“Nothing is wrong which is why this absolutely sucks. I look like a model and I can’t buy this dress.” Dawn put her hands on both sides of her face like an old Hollywood actress in distress.
“You always look like a model,” sighed Edie in that motherly tone she often didn’t even notice she was using.
“You know what I mean. If I bought this, it’d totally eat the money I’ve been saving for my dad to get some help. Well, not completely, but, like, a lot.”
“Get the dress, D. This is literally the best you’ve ever looked and we’re not leaving the store without it.” Georgia insisted.
“The best? Ouch.” Dawn laughed and twirled in the dress again.
“You know what I mean.” Georgia rolled her eyes and leaned into Edie with a laugh.
“I can’t afford it.” Dawn gritted out, frustration rising in her voice.
“Then we will buy it, obviously,” offered Edie. “You just owe us shitty cafeteria pizza until the end of time, or like, until graduation.”
Dawn looked back into the three-faced mirror again. Georgia was right, she looked incredible and, more importantly, felt like the movie director she fantasized about being. If she didn’t buy it now, she never would. If she didn’t make dumb decisions now, she’d end up old and sad with no stories to tell.
“Okay, but I’m going to buy it. I’ll figure something out later.”
She went back into the dressing room and quickly peeled the dress away from her body. It fell to the floor in a slump and Dawn stepped out and put her clothes back on, somehow a new person now, the kind that would buy an incredible, expensive dress. She wanted to hurry up and make a rash decision. She couldn’t get to the counter fast enough, the small woman trailing behind her to ring up the dress.
Dawn swiped her card and felt her stomach drop to the pits of hell then pick back up again as the woman gently folded the black fabric and wrapped it in a thin white paper with silvery foil.
She slipped the wrapped dress into a sleek, dark blue shopping bag with MOSSÉ embossed in white on its side and slid it across the counter towards Dawn.
The girls walked out of the store and emerged into the still-gleaming rows of shops and pretzel stands reeking of butter and salt.