“It’s fun to play dress up!” Ali added, before scampering off to a rack of short leather skirts. “Do you think I should wear this tonight?” she called across the store, holding up a red suede miniskirt. Ty and Meg laughed and hooted.
Skylar tried to loosen up. She grabbed a bright green tunic, held it to her torso, and put a suede fedora on her head. The other girls were parading around in cropped blazers, a denim jumper, a pair of tight black pants with zippers at the ankles. They practiced their model pouts. And then, way in the back of the store, Skylar found a beautiful sweaterdress—navy blue, short, with detailing around the boatneck. The dress was cashmere and impossibly soft. There was a tiny pearl button at the nape of the neck. And it fit like a glove.
“Oooooooh, look at that!” Meg came running over. “It’s perfect for you!”
Skylar blushed, but she walked over to the mirror anyway. Meg was right. It looked great—perfectly proportioned for her small frame, and making her boobs look a little bigger than usual. It was remarkably similar to something she’d seen Gabby wearing last week. Only this one was a teeny bit nicer.
Ty and Ali crowded around.
“It’s made for you!” Ty said, motioning for Skylar to spin.
“Imagine that with tights and boots. Perfect for a bonfire party,” Ali chimed in. Yes. Skylar saw herself in the dress, flirting with Pierce by the fire. It was so warm that she probably wouldn’t even need a jacket. Perfect.
But then, even as the fantasy danced in her mind, she snuck a peek at the price tag. As she’d expected: way too high. “No can do,” she said with a sad smile. She started peeling off the dress.
“That doesn’t seem fair,” Meg said. “That dress should belong to you.”
Skylar walked back through the store to return the dress to its rack—but her heart practically broke as she held it up one last time. Why should she put this back? Gabby wouldn’t have to. Lucy wouldn’t have had to; she would have found some way to get it. She would have found someone to buy it for her, or she simply would have taken it.
Skylar’s mouth went dry.
She thought, suddenly, of the time Lucy had caught Skylar trying on one of Lucy’s pageant dresses. “Is this mine?” Lucy had asked, fingering the strap. Skylar had pulled away quickly, and in the process, the strap had snapped. In a second Lucy’s face had morphed from shock to outrage. “You ruin everything,” she’d said, throwing her arms in the air. “God. How the hell did I end up with you as a sister?”
“I didn’t ask to be part of this family!” Skylar had screamed back at her. When her mom had come running to see what the fuss was about, she’d grounded Skylar for touching something that wasn’t hers, and Lucy had gotten a brand-new gown. The memory still made Skylar furious.
Meg’s words echoed in her mind: That doesn’t seem fair. That dress should belong to you.
Nothing was ever fair.
Taking a deep breath, she turned to head back over to the girls, who were standing near a rack of accessories. As she did a red box on the wall caught her eye. The store’s fire alarm. She straightened her shoulders and walked like she was on a runway. And without another thought, she bashed her shoulder against the box as she passed it, then sailed quickly by.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. The sound was practically deafening, and it caused chaos in the store. Shoppers clamped their hands over their ears; employees scampered around from behind the registers, calling confusing instructions to one another.
After a few moments of looking bewildered, one store employee finally started shooing people out of the store. “Sorry for the inconvenience, folks,” she said roughly, herding the customers toward the entryway and out of the store. “We’ll have this all sorted out in a few moments.”
Amid the hubbub, no one noticed that Skylar had stuffed the sweaterdress—and a headband, no less—into her bag.
? ? ?
“That was so amazing, what you pulled yesterday.” Meg was still gushing the next day, when she, Ty, and Ali showed up to help Skylar party-prep. (They’d snuck in through the back door, not wanting to elicit another weird reaction from Aunt Nora.)
“Totally badass,” Ali agreed. Everything Ali said seemed somehow seductive, as though the words rolled over her curvy body as they left her mouth.
Skylar smiled sheepishly. “Anything is possible if you want it bad enough,” she said, parroting back words that Lucy used to say to her. “Plus, Gabby’s going to die when she sees this dress!”
Again that tiny twinge of guilt wriggled in her stomach. Gabby had been nothing but nice to her since she’d started at Ascension. But this was a special day, and Skylar felt like she finally had some guts. Not to mention . . . she’d never had a group of girlfriends before. Hanging out with Meg, Ty, and Ali was exhilarating, like being on a sugar high. Now, if only she could be this popular at school . . .