“Can you believe these?” Jane asked, her eyes wide in as much awe as I was.
“I know, right?”
“We’re going to be successful, Truly. Do you understand that? We’re really going to do it.”
“I know.”
And then it came to me. The most perfect name imaginable. I knew exactly what we were going to name our label.
CHAPTER 7
“Every Girl,” I said. “We have to name our label Every Girl.”
Jane’s face lit up. “That’s perfect. Every Girl Incorporated. The clothing line for every girl.”
I pulled out my phone and started a text to Hope. “And you said we would never agree on anything. I’ll tell Hope, she can finally register everything for us.”
I showed Jane the text before she agreed to me sending it. It felt like an entire weight had been lifted now we had a name. Who would have thought that would be the hardest thing about starting a fashion label? I certainly didn’t.
We made a copy of the photos so we each had one before Jane dropped me home. I invited her in for dinner but she insisted she had homework to do – making me feel a little guiltier about offering up her services to Sandy. Still, our photos were awesome so I guess it was a good trade.
When all the kids were settled down for the night and Mom was home, I retreated to my bedroom and took out the to-do list. It was long. Almost so long as to believe it would be impossible.
But there was no impossible in Every Girl Inc.
I would do anything for our business. Heck, I might even have attempted Sandy’s Biology homework if it was necessary. Of course, she might also have taken back her photos when she flunked.
I put all the tasks in order of importance and worked out what I was going to tackle the next day. Then I hid the list from the prying eyes of my family. They couldn’t know what I was doing, not until I knew I wasn’t going to fail.
The next day, school was boring and painful to sit through. I don’t even know how I managed it, really. But as soon as the final bell rang, I hurried from class to find Jane. We had another big task to tick off our mutual list.
I found her at her locker and we hurried to the media lab to catch Beau before he left for the day. He was our resident computer genius. He wanted to be a film director one day, but until that happened, he loved messing around with websites. We found him glued to a computer.
“Hey, Beau,” I said happily. “How’s things?”
“Fine. What do you want?” he said to the computer screen. I waited for him to turn around so we at least had some of his attention. When he finally did, he actually did a double take. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize it was you two. What brings you here?” His change in attitude made my head spin.
I nudged Jane, because I was certain she would get more out of him than I would. She got the hint… eventually. “Oh, we, uh, need to talk about our website. You said you were going to do it for us? We have a name now.”
Confusion knitted his eyebrows for a second before they smoothed out and he remembered that little conversation we had. “Of course.” He slid a pad and pen across the table. “Write down the name and I’ll get everything going. You have photos now?”
I held up the thumb drive. “We do.”
“Great. I can have everything ready for your approval tomorrow. I’ve laid all the groundwork already so it won’t take me long.”
I nudged Jane again. “That’s very nice of you, Beau. Thank you for doing this.”
“No problem, Jane. Really, I’m happy to help anytime.” He flashed her a smile so big he should have supplied sunglasses first. Seriously, I was blinded.
The minute we closed the door to the media room, my mouth would not stop. “So, remind me again what we’re paying him for the website?”
“Nothing. He’s doing it for free,” Jane replied as we walked.
“Come on, you aren’t even giving him a date?”
“Why would he want a date?”
I stopped, swatting at her arm. “Are you serious?”
She sighed, like putting up with me was the hardest thing on the planet. “I honestly have no idea what you are talking about, Truly.”
I stared at her incredulously. Then I realized she actually meant it. Talk about oblivious. “Beau has a huge crush on you.”
She started walking again, this time quicker. Her cheeks started to rosy too. “He doesn’t have a crush on me.”
I chased after her to catch up. “Are you kidding me? He wants himself some Jane action. Trust me on this one. I know when a guy is crushing on a girl.”
“He’s not crushing on me. He’s being nice, that’s what nice people do for other people.”
“No, they don’t. Not teenage guys. He wants you.” She wasn’t slowing down for me, hurrying along like getting home was the most important thing in the world. Something else was going on. “Why’s that so hard to believe, Jane?”
She swallowed before facing me. “Because guys don’t think of me like that. They don’t want to date me and they certainly don’t develop crushes on me.”
Oh my God. Jane didn’t think she was good enough for a guy to like her?
“Jane, that’s crazy. You’re incredibly pretty. Not to mention super smart, nice, and sometimes you’re even funny. Of course guys think of you like that.”
Her gaze went everywhere except to me. “No, they don’t. He’s just being nice.”
“A guy’s never asked you out?” I asked, skeptically. Surely all the guys in school weren’t completely blind?
Her cheeks grew rosier again. “No, never. I told you, they don’t think of me like… like I’m a girl that they might want to date.”
She stomped off before I could stop her. I was actually lost for words. I had been asked out loads of times. So many times I lost count. So many times it was actually getting annoying.
Why hadn’t Jane?
Clearly, it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about and I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I caught up with her and changed topics. All I could think of was how stupid all the guys at our high school were.
Unfortunately for Jane, she couldn’t ditch me at the school gate. We had a meeting with Hope so she drove me home and we visited my next door neighbor.
Hope didn’t seem as frazzled as she normally was. Her apartment was almost tidy and her clothes were ironed. Perhaps she was pulling herself together.
Just in time.
Go Hope!
We sat at her coffee table, going over everything she had registered for us. We had a company and stationery, even tax numbers. The whole thing sounded too real for me, so I left it up to Jane to check it all over. She was much better with those kinds of things.
Finally, we got to the topic I wanted to discuss. “So I have some thoughts about our fashion parade. I think we should do a pop up guerrilla type event at the mall.”
“What’s that?” Jane asked, her face scrunched up in confusion.
“Have you heard of a flash mob? Where a bunch of people suddenly start dancing in the middle of a public space? It’s like that, except instead of dancing we’ll be putting on a fashion parade.”
“That sounds illegal,” Hope said.
“Only if we get caught,” I shot back. “Nobody is going to question whether we have permission or not. They’ll just think we’re supposed to be there.” I had tested that theory many times at school. It’s how I get free cupcakes from the teachers’ lounge on Teacher Appreciation Day.
The wrinkle in Hope’s brow told me she wasn’t convinced. Adults – they were too worried about everything. We could pull this off, I knew it.
“I don’t-”
Jane cut her off. “We should do it.”
We both looked at her in amazement. I thought she would have been the one to hate my plan, not Hope. I had a whole speech worked out just to convince her. It was actually kind of a little disappointing to waste it.
“What did you say?” I asked, needing clarificati
on.
“I think it’s a good idea, we should do it,” Jane replied, as if she hadn’t suddenly developed a split personality disorder. “Don’t look at me like that. My parents own the mall, we won’t get arrested. I’ll clear it with them so we have full permission. We won’t have to hide.”
Of course Jane’s parents owned the mall. Silly me for thinking only people like Scrooge McDuck and Richie Rich owned malls.
“Which mall?” I managed to get out. All other words longer than five letters had fallen out of my head. Probably never to be seen again.
“The Stanthorpe Grand Mall down on Lefray Street.”
So only the biggest mall in the city. Good to know. I wonder if she got a staff discount at all the stores? Probably wasn’t appropriate to ask right now. I’d save that for later when she was in a really great mood.
Hope was still speechless.
“Okay, so that’s… sorted,” I started. Jane’s cheeks were starting to redden, I didn’t want to dwell on her family’s money. “We have clothes, we have a venue, we have a name. Now all we need are models.”
“The same girls from our shoot might do it,” Jane offered, pleased with moving on.
“Smiling in front of a camera is a bit different to walking in front of a couple of hundred people,” I pointed out. It took a lot of wrangling and sweet talking to get those girls to pose. We needed people we could count on for the show. We wouldn’t have time to wait for them to get comfortable.
Jane sighed. “That’s a good point. But we don’t want to hire real models, it defeats the entire point of our label. We want normal girls. Everyday girls.”
“You could have an open casting,” Hope suggested, somewhat recovered. “That way you could still get a variety of girls and they would know they have to walk the runway.”
We both stared at Hope. How could something so brilliant come from her scatterbrain? Maybe half a business degree had taught her everything she needed to know.
“I can put a call out on social media,” I said, already composing the post in my head. “We’ll get a few people anyway. If nobody shows up, then we can beg and plead with our photo models.”
“I’ll make posters to put up at school,” Jane added. “We can do the casting at lunch on Friday so we can do the rest of the preparations on the weekend.”
“You could do the launch next Saturday,” Hope said. “There will be more people at the mall then. Can you be ready by next weekend?”
I smiled. Because if there was something I was really good at, it was working to a deadline. Fear was my biggest motivator – especially when it came to school work. “We’ll be ready by next Saturday.”
Now all that was left to do was a month’s worth of work in a little over one week. Simple.
CHAPTER 8
When I said we might get a few people to show up to our audition, I literally meant a few people. Like three, or four, maybe.
I didn’t expect the entire school would want to be in our fashion parade.
Okay, maybe the entire school was a bit of an exaggeration. But there were so many people that I couldn’t see the back of the line.
Who was I kidding? There wasn’t even a line. Just a crush of bodies all expecting to be in our show. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be Donatella Versace or Stella McCartney.
After telling all the boys that we only had female clothes, it cut our numbers by half. That still left about a hundred girls. Way too many for us to use in the show.
Jane was shutting down in a panic. She didn’t want to tell anyone they couldn’t model in case she hurt their feelings. That was nice of her and all, but we didn’t have a hundred items of clothes.
We were outside the cafeteria and our time was quickly running out. I wouldn’t have minded missing Math class to continue, but I figured Jane and the teachers might. I stood up, getting my leadership on.
“Everyone form a line,” I yelled out. A hush ran through them. “We will assess you in groups of five. Those five will stand in front of our table. If we like you, we’ll take your details and email you. If you’re not right for what we’re doing, we won’t take your details. Got it?”
Nobody asked anything so I guess that was a yes.
Jane quickly stood. “If we don’t take your details, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a great model. It just means we might already have someone like you or we’ve run out of clothes.”
Such a kind little soul.
We both sat down again and six girls approached. Oh well, I guessed I’d tried to bring some order to them. The girls were typical model types – tall and skinny. We took one of them, and even that was only because Jane had a pair of slacks that would fit nicely.
Moving through the line was easy after that. If a girl didn’t look like a model and Jane knew she’d have something that would fit, they got the tick. We took her details and promised to be in touch.
None of my friends turned up, which was surprising. I thought the fashion parade would be something they’d totally be into. Maybe they didn’t think they needed to audition. I’d have to talk to them later about it.
By the time the bell rang and told us all to get to class, we had about twenty girls. Even Bree and Kristy had auditioned and they immediately got the green light tick. For a start, nobody said no to Misty Kristy, but I was also kind of happy she wanted to do this. She obviously felt good in the clothes.
The twenty girls could not have been more different from each other. We had a melting pot of body types, ethnicities, sizes, and heights. And they would all look fantastic in our clothes.
I could not have been happier.
Class was actually a breeze after that. Mainly because I was thinking about my to-do list rather than the school work. Jane would need to fill me in later on what we were supposed to have learned.
She would know.
When the final bell rang, I threw by books in my locker and headed for the buses. Jane was busy with her to-do list so I actually had to use public transport again. It felt like it had been ages since I’d last used it.
As I hurried down the corridors, Hayley caught up with me. I couldn’t stop to talk. “Hayles, I’ve got to catch the bus.”
“We have to talk,” she said seriously. All my nerves instantly stood at attention. Hayley never wanted to talk about anything except the sales at Neiman Marcus.
“Can we walk and talk?”
She rolled her eyes but started walking with me anyway. Hayley had a car, she wasn’t well versed with the dire need to catch a moving target before it leaves and doesn’t return until the same time the next day.
“You haven’t spent much time with the group lately,” Hayley blurted out. “We’re worried about you.”
“You know I have my new business to launch. It’s not that I don’t want to hang out with you guys, it’s just that I only have so much time,” I replied. I tried not to get defensive. I mean, they had to understand. This was my dream I was chasing, after all.
“It’s not just that. You’ve been so friendly with that geek-”
“Her name is Jane.”
“Jane.” She made the word sound ten syllables long. “She’s not one of us.”
“She’s my business partner, I have to hang out with her.”
Hayley gave me a seriously? look. “Oh, please. Heaps of people have seen you laughing with her. If it was out of some sense of obligation you’ve been spending time with her, then you wouldn’t be laughing. We know you’re friends with her.”
“Okay, fine, we’re friends. What’s so bad about that?” We finally reached the bus lines and joined the back of the queue.
“What’s so bad about that?” she scoffed. She actually scoffed. I never thought I’d be able to say that about someone. “It’s Jane Davis. She’s not one of us. You are at serious risk of losing your reputation, Truly. You’re not cool anymore.”
Wait… what?
“Are you seriously telling me that I can’t be friends with Jane anymore?�
� I asked. Because, really, I needed some clarification here.
“Let me spell it out for you,” Hayley started. “If you want to continue sitting at our lunch table and hanging out with us, you need to reconsider the other company you keep. Jane is not one of us. You need to decide. And then put up with the consequences of your actions.”
Hayley turned around, flipped her hair, and walked off. My mouth was hanging open in her wake.
If it was anyone else delivering that message, I might have thought they were joking. I might even have laughed and told them to get over themselves because they were being ridiculous.
But this was Hayley. The girl didn’t joke about anything. She was deadly serious.
How on earth was I supposed to choose between the friends I’d had since first grade and my business partner? It was impossible. Choosing one meant giving up so much else.
I was so caught up in my thoughts I barely registered getting on the bus. Really, it was lucky I even remembered to get off at my stop.
Mom was actually home when I entered the apartment. It was a rare moment when she actually left work in daylight. She was making dinner too, extra bonus.
I flopped down at the kitchen table, my head still spinning. So much for getting my to-do list done and ticked off.
“Honey, how was your day?” Mom asked.
“Fine.”
“What’s wrong?” Damn her mom-instincts kicking in. Sometimes I wish she didn’t notice as much as she did. I couldn’t explain everything to her without giving away what I was up to.
I needed to be super careful about what I spilled. “You know how I’ve been hanging out with Jane recently?” She nodded. “Well, Hayley and everyone else said I can’t stay friends with them if I keep doing it. They don’t like Jane.”
“Why don’t they like her?” She stopped putting away dishes to sit at the table with me.
“Because she’s a nerd.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very good reason not to like someone.”
“Welcome to high school, Mom.” Surely she should remember what it was like? It might have been a hundred years ago, but she had attended high school once. I saw the embarrassing yearbooks to prove it.
Fashion Fraud Collection Page 8