Since Dad was back on the road, dinner was going to be just the girls. But Aly wasn’t interested in food at all.
Besides worrying about how Mom was going to react to the unofficial first day of the salon before the grand opening, Aly also couldn’t stop thinking about what Suzy had said. The back room really did look more like a huge storage closet than someplace special.
If they couldn’t make it look really cool and inviting, they wouldn’t get any customers—well, except for maybe the sixth-grade soccer team. But they’d need more clients than that to make the salon real.
By the time they’d gotten home from True Colors, it was later than usual for a school night. So Mom made “breakfast for dinner.” It was super fast to make—eggs, toast, tiny sausages, and sliced-up orange smiles. Aly and Brooke sat down at their usual spots at the kitchen table, next to each other. Aly pressed her left leg against Brooke’s right one. For courage.
“Okay, girls,” Mom said when she sat down.
Aly braced herself for trouble. Instead, Mom gave them a few more rules that were actually helpful: All appointments made at school had to be written down and then run by Mom before they were confirmed. No more parties until they got the salon up and running smoothly. And they couldn’t forget about the charity donations. (Heather and her friends had not donated. But that might have been because Aly and Brooke had forgotten to ask them to donate.)
With their stomachs full of breakfast for dinner, Brooke and Aly went up to their room.
“Okay, so what can we do to make our salon look better?” Brooke asked. “I don’t want our grand opening to wind up as our grand closing.”
Other than the two teal pedicure chairs and the two blue manicure stations, everything in the back room was pretty much the same shade of Chocolate Brownies, which, even though it had a tasty-sounding name, was the girls’ least favorite polish color ever.
“Let me get some paper,” Aly said. “I think we’re going to need a list.”
The girls brainstormed:
• Paintings/pictures for the walls
• Cushions for the manicure and pedicure chairs
• Rugs
• Special floor pillows for when people make bracelets in the drying area
• A beautiful, fancy donation jar
• Signs that tell people about the donations
• A shelf to display nail polishes
• A sign for the door
Brooke looked at the list. “We’re missing one thing,” she said. “A name! Our salon needs a name!”
Brooke was right.
“Any ideas?” Aly asked.
Brooke shrugged. “Maybe . . . Twinkle Toes?”
Aly made a face. “We do manicures, too.”
Brooke tucked one braid behind her ear. “I’ll keep thinking.”
The girls went downstairs to show Mom the list. She agreed to everything except the curtains and the rugs. And she offered to let the girls go on a treasure hunt in the attic for cushions and pillows and shelves.
Aly and Brooke hadn’t been in the attic for ages. All they remembered was that it was kind of dark. And that whenever Mom or Dad wanted to store something there, they would usually just pull down the ladder and throw stuff up on the landing.
Aly grabbed Brooke’s hand as Mom pulled the creaky ladder down from the ceiling. A duffel bag came tumbling out and landed on Mom’s head.
Mom dropped it on the floor next to her. “Take that as a warning,” she said. “It’s going to be pretty messy.”
Mom climbed up slowly until her head disappeared from view. “Can one of you girls flick on the light?”
Brooke was right next to the light switch and turned it on. The attic looked like it was glowing.
“Come on up, girls!” Mom shouted down.
With the hand that wasn’t holding Brooke’s, Aly grabbed the railing tightly. The ladder creaked with each step.
Aly imagined finding mountains of colorful pillows and cushions and shiny new shelves. It was okay if the attic was a mess as long as it was filled with treasures.
But when she got to the top of the ladder, Aly was shocked. There wasn’t anything new and shiny about the attic. Just dust and piles of junk all over the place.
From right behind her, Brooke whispered, “We’ll never find anything cool up here.”
But then Mom laughed. “Look at this!” she said. She had lifted a dusty flowered bedsheet off a table and picked up an old cookie jar shaped like a strawberry.
“That’s perfect for the donation jar,” Brooke said, getting excited.
“Where did you even get that, Mom?” Aly asked, taking a few steps closer to the craziest-looking cookie jar she’d ever seen. The strawberry was enormous enough for the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and it was painted a sparkly teal.
Mom flipped the jar over. “See these initials?” she said, showing the girls the KB at the bottom of the jar. “They’re mine. Karen Benson. I made it in art school. I remember this color—it was called Teal Me the Truth. I used it because I loved the name so much.”
“You went to art school?” Brooke said. Her eyes were huge. “How come you never told us?”
Mom’s cheeks turned pink. She hugged the sparkly strawberry to her stomach. “I never finished.”
She never finished? Aly couldn’t believe it. Her mom always finished what she started. It made Aly think something bad had happened back then. “Why not?” she asked softly.
“There wasn’t enough money. I needed to get a job and couldn’t concentrate on my classes after that. So I left.”
Wow. That was too bad. And sad. And maybe it was part of the reason why Mom was so serious about the girls paying attention to school and not working when they were kids.
“I want to go to art school,” Brooke said. “And make strawberries like this.”
“Maybe you can,” Mom said, putting the cookie jar down in a safe corner of the attic. “But that’s a long way away. Let’s keep hunting. What else do you girls need?”
“Floor pillows,” Aly said, remembering the list in her head. “And cushions. Oh, and paintings for the walls, too.” As they started looking around some more, Aly realized that the attic wasn’t as much of a mess as it first appeared. She got into the treasure-hunting spirit with Brooke, peeking underneath sheets and inside boxes.
After about twenty minutes, Aly, Brooke, and Mom had found four striped floor pillows, one set of shelves, two polka-dot seat cushions, and four paintings Mom had made in art school—two of the sun, one of the moon, and one of a rainbow.
“Mom, these are beautiful,” Aly said. “Can we hang them in our salon?”
“They’re one hundred percent perfect, Mom! Please?” Brooke pleaded.
Mom nodded. “Of course,” she said, blushing. “I’m glad you like them.”
“Maybe you should paint some more,” Aly suggested. “It doesn’t matter that you’re not in art school.”
Mom shrugged. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m busy enough as it is.”
Aly made a note in her brain that maybe she and Brooke should get Mom some paint and art canvases for her birthday.
As the Tanner women continued their hunt. Brooke kept coming up with salon names. Nonstop, as usual. Aly found some of Mom’s old art supplies—some heavy sketch paper and pastels. They weren’t in great shape anymore, but they’d do perfectly well for making signs.
“One more name,” Brooke said. “How about the Glitter Girls’ Salon?”
Even Mom wrinkled her nose at that one.
But everything else seemed like it was falling into place. And Mom and the girls agreed that the grand opening would be this Saturday.
School moved slower than a baby snail on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Even dodgeball, Aly’s favorite gym game, seemed to take forever. And Brooke said that recess felt like it lasted a million hours.
But kids did keep coming up to Aly and Brooke, asking all about their salon and when it would be open for business.
Every afternoon for those three days, Brooke met Aly at 3:00 on the dot. They hurried over to True Colors, finished their homework, and then worked on the salon redecoration.
On Wednesday they hung Mom’s four pictures on the walls—with some help from Joan and Carla. And they found ways to hide all the boxes of supplies as best they could, piled under tables and stacked in out-of-the-way corners of the room.
On Thursday they set up a drying area near the couch, with magazines stored in a crate they’d found and pillows and a table for a jewelry-making station. Then they created a polish display with the shelves from the attic.
On Friday they made a bunch of signs and taped them in all the right spots around them. Well, all the signs except for the one with the salon’s name on it. They still hadn’t settled on that. So while they worked, Brooke kept making suggestions, like Project Polish and Pretty Nails and Finger Fun. Also, Mermaid Manicures and Rainbow Polish and Tip-Top Nails. And Perfect Ten and Polish Palace and Happy Feet. Nothing seemed quite right, though.
As a finishing touch, they put the sparkly cookie jar on its own special table right next to the nail polish display. That way, no one would miss it.
“I can’t believe how great this place looks,” Brooke told Aly on Friday at closing time, as they stood in the doorframe admiring their work. “Now all we need to do is figure out a name!”
“And get some customers,” Aly added.
And hope that know-it-all Suzy Davis wasn’t right again.