“Well, and I’m no expert, but I thought girls were supposed to be all excited and flittery about their homecoming dresses. Not grab the first one off the rack and be done with it.”
Brynna tried to remember the words to the song playing on the store’s sound system—anything to take her mind off Erica and that stupid dress, anything to cover up the thundering sound of blood rushing through her ears.
“I’m not most girls,” Brynna said with a smile she hoped would look convincing. “And this wasn’t the first dress I pulled off the rack. It was the third.”
By the time Brynna returned home, she was almost excited. She had spent an afternoon just like a real teenage girl—a real teenager who wasn’t crazy, wasn’t likely to go on drugs at any given moment, and who was not responsible for something heinous. She was jumpy still, but the idea of spinning with Teddy in the filmy white dress was enough to bolster her spirit and make her excited.
“You got a dress!” Brynna’s mother clasped her hands in front of her chest as Brynna entered the living room, the long garment bag trailing behind her.
“Actually, I decided to go with a tasteful pantsuit.”
“What?” Her mother’s mouth dropped open, panic in her eyes.
“I’m kidding, Mom. I got a dress. It’s girly and everything.”
“Well, come on, I want to see it!”
Brynna was contracting some of her mom’s giddiness, and she worked to untie the knotted plastic at the bottom of the bag, eager to see what her mother would think.
“No, no, not like that! Go in the bathroom and make an appearance.” Her mother pointed to the bathroom door, and Brynna offered her the expected teenage groan face.
“Oh, come on!” her mother went on. “Give me this. Your dad is on his way to the airport and you’re my little girl. Indulge your mama.”
Brynna rolled her eyes but was secretly happy to sweep out into the living room in the gown.
“Okay.” She trudged into the bathroom and hung the dress on the back of the door, feeling a tiny, unexpected flutter of butterfly wings in her stomach. She finished undoing the bottom knot and pushed the plastic up over the gown.
A thousand pinpricks jabbed at her skin. Her breath caught in her throat. Brynna went for the doorknob, desperately trying to turn it, desperately trying to get out of the bathroom.
She looked at the dress, the blue spaghetti strap, ruched dress that Erica was going to wear, hung up on the bathroom door, and fingers of terror grabbed at her, pulsed for her.
“No, no!” Brynna pounded against the door. “No!”
“Brynna, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”
It’s just a dress, Bryn, just a dress. It was at the store; it could have been a mistake.
Even as she tried to talk herself through the fist of panic that tightened in her gut, Brynna knew it was wrong. She saw the woman at the counter. She saw her slip the white dress into Brynna’s bag. She watched as the woman tied the bottom—“extra tight, because if it opens up, this thing is going to get dirty fast.”
Brynna pulled open the door and her mother stood there, flushed.
“What’s going—” She turned toward the dress, her eyes immediately lighting up. “Oh, Bryn, that’s beautiful!” She snatched the dress from the back of the door and attempted to press it up against Brynna, but she snaked back as if the dress were solid poison.
“That’s not the dress I bought,” she mumbled. “That’s the wrong dress.”
Her mother held it at arm’s length. “It’s a pretty beautiful wrong dress.”
“That’s not mine,” Brynna snapped. “It’s not for me.”
“Well, we can’t get back to the mall tonight—it’s already closed.” She pressed the dress toward her daughter. “Try it on—just once. For me?”
Brynna shook her head, the lap of water reverberating in her head. Her mind showed a constant slideshow of Erica, first in the dress, then in the pool, and then in the ocean until she was gone.
Brynna started to tremble. She wanted to tell her mother that this was Erica’s dress—not Brynna’s, not the one Brynna picked out—but she knew how it sounded: crazy. If she told her mother that she even saw the saleslady put a different dress in her bag and that Erica must have switched them, she would sound like she had lost it.
She bit her lip. She couldn’t let her mother think she was going crazy, especially since Brynna herself wasn’t sure that she wasn’t.
“Okay, okay, no dress.” Her mother tossed it aside and gathered Brynna in her arms. “It’s not that big of a deal, okay? We’ll take it back tomorrow,” she said too brightly. “Or I could take it back and I’ll just get the one that you wanted. What color did you say it was?”
Brynna swallowed, her stomach turning over and over on itself. She tried to process the words her mother was saying, tried to remember the color of the dress she had actually picked. She saw white in her mind’s eye, but when she tried to recall the image, the white turned into foam on the waves as they broke over her legs, and Erica was already gone.
FIFTEEN