Dictatorship of the Dress (9780698168305)

by Topper, Jessica

  Airing my grievances to Laney about Sloane kind of felt like playing hooky from school. It had been thrilling and exhilarating while we were holed up together in the hotel. But now that we were out in public, in broad daylight, I felt a little paranoid and weird.

  “She must be proud of you, too,” Laney said, tucking my smiling glossy face back into her bag and retrieving her sketchbook.

  “She probably would’ve been more excited had it been GQ or Details. Kind of like your mom with The New Yorker. But yeah, she thought it was bragworthy, for sure.”

  Leaning back with her sketchbook propped against the edge of the table, Laney smiled and dropped her gaze. I couldn’t tell what she was drawing; all I could see was her hand moving, making broad strokes here, or tight, fluid movements there.

  We chatted as she worked, about snow days we remembered having as kids and that feeling of utter reprieve when the TV announced that all schools in the area were closed. I didn’t admit it to her, but I think I would’ve felt that same elation had both our flights been canceled at that very moment.

  Is it really Laney making you feel that way, or is it just an excuse to delay reality? I told my mind to shut up and enjoy the distraction. I really didn’t want to consider the source right now.

  She let me have a sip of her root beer float, which did seem to have hangover healing properties. Or maybe it was just the brain freeze combined with carbonation bubbles in your nose that took your mind off your hungover state.

  “Look at us.” She giggled as we simultaneously came up for air from straws on either side of the old-fashioned soda fountain glass. “We could be two teenagers at Pop Tate’s Chocklit Shoppe after the sock hop. Like Cheryl Blossom and Archie Andrews! Gee willikers, and all that jazz.”

  “Who is she, anyway? I only remember Archie with Betty and Veronica.” I sat back and sipped my coffee. The diner got it from Intelligentsia, a local artisan roaster, and it made me long for an all-nighter just so I could drink cup after cup of it.

  “Cheryl Blossom was Archie’s third love interest.”

  “Third time’s the charm, right?”

  Laney snorted. “According to some.” She fiddled with her straw. “Poor Cheryl didn’t last long during their teenage years. Apparently she was deemed ‘too sexual’ for a children’s comic.” She used air quotes to show her disdain for this theory.

  “She does have it going on,” I said, pointing to a strip of Cheryl on the beach in a teeny-weeny bikini. “That’s a lot of junk in the trunk for a two-dollar comic.”

  Laney laughed. “I used to hate Cheryl for trying to steal Archie away from the other girls. She’s the not-so-nice-but-still-sweet kind of rich girl. You know, the kind you love to hate, but you sorta love anyway? Mostly she’s devious and conceited and will stop at nothing to get what she wants.”

  “Oh.” My stomach clenched, partially from hunger but mostly from the fact that I was engaged to a girl who sounded just like Cheryl Blossom. I was thankful when the waitress reappeared with several plates that took up the entire table and covered the vixen smilingly wickedly up at me.

  Laney was much easier on the eyes, anyway. And warm and three-dimensional. A girl who could sit coloring with a little kid one minute, and scarf down a meal fit for a trucker the next.

  “Check it out,” she said shyly, and held out her sketchbook over the eggs and bacon and French toast for me to take.

  Oh, wow.

  In light pencil, she had captured a cartoonlike me in a sequence of three panels across the page. Mostly from the chest up, sitting at the table. She kept my trench coat on and had raised the collar. My hair curled out in darkened points and chunks, falling characteristically away from my face and across my forehead like it did in real life. She had paid special attention to my cheekbones and eyes, I noticed. No speech bubbles or narration, just moments caught in time, capturing me unawares: adding sugar to the coffee cup in front of me, stirring said coffee and looking off into space, lips pursed in a jaunty whistle. I smiled and snuck a glance at her: watching her watching me looking at her work with a proud smile on her face. I wished someone had a camera to capture both of us.

  The last box was my favorite. A close-up angle with elbows on the table, resting my chin in the palm of one hand and raising the cup to my lips with the other. Dark eyes flashing over the rim, one brow arched slightly higher than the other. The hint of a smirk peeked out from one side of the cup. “Is this how I look to you?”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Remotely cool?”

  “In a cartoony, GQ-ish kind of way?” She laughed. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Cartoon Noah looked impish yet aloof. I liked him.

  “You’re really talented, Laney. Why did you leave your job at Marvel?”

  She shook her head as deliberately as she had shaken that Magic 8 Ball on the flight to Chicago. And her answer was just as vague. “Ah, you know . . .” Reply hazy, try again later.

  “How do you do it?” I pressed. “Capturing that on the first go-round . . . with no eraser?”

  She held out her hand for the book. “I’ve learned to tread lightly,” she said, a softness in her voice. “I try not to use an eraser for mistakes, just as another artist tool.”

  With that, she molded a soft, white bit of eraser between her fingers and gently pushed it down on the last panel, making a soft highlight to the graphite darkening my raised brow. It was a subtle but perfect change. She gave me a shy and apologetic shrug before tucking her supplies away.

  We silently dug into our meals, until her phone jangled to life next to her root beer float. “Oh, it’s Danica. Sorry, I’d better grab it.”

  I nodded, taking the opportunity to check my e-mails. Nothing from Sloane, not even a forwarded e-mail through my secretary, Kiwi. And nothing from any of the wedding vendors. Perhaps my trip to Vegas would be good after all, giving Sloane time alone to consider my simple request.

  There was a new text from Tim: What time do you land, slacker?

  Change of plans, I thumbed back. TTYL.

  Tim’s response was almost immediate—and most definitely obnoxious.

  Enjoy your lay . . . over, you lucky bastard!

  • • •

  “Yes, still alive . . .” Laney relayed into her flip phone. “I don’t know, there’s some systemwide bullshit going on now . . . Yeah, he’s with me . . . Oh, get this—he thought you and I were getting married . . . I know! Okay. Hang on.” She leaned across the table, gesturing at me with her phone. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “All right,” I said slowly. This was a little weird. And kind of reminded me of high school, when girls you liked would put their friends on the line so they could size you up. “Hey, this is Noah,” I said, because I didn’t know how else to begin.

  “Oh, good,” came a smoky, radio personality voice. “So you’re not a figment of her imagination. It’s Dani.”

  “No, I’m quite real. Hi.”

  Laney was smiling at me and sipping the dregs of her float.

  “I’m not on speaker, am I?”

  “No. Do you want to be?”

  “Uh-uh. I just wanted to thank you for keeping an eye on my BFF. We’ve all been kind of worried.”

  “Understandable.”

  “And one more thing. Just answer yes or no. Do you know about Allen Burnside?”

  How the hell was I supposed to answer that? I didn’t know how much there was to know. “A bit,” I confessed.

  “All right, then. I’ll take that as a yes. Whatever she told you, though, is probably not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Remember that song ‘Jack and Diane’? Yeah? Well, that little ditty was nothing compared to the classic that was Allen and Laney. Her breaking up with him right before prom was huge. So he left her in the dust for California; it was the cruelest summer ever. And then he propo
sed to her in front of a thousand people, at a concert of all places, ten years later, before earning his goddamned dash. It was like being left at the altar, only worse, because when she goes back home to our tiny town, she has to face tons of those people and see the pity in their eyes. And her mother? She gave Laney a big, fat ‘I told you so’ and Laney hasn’t been able to move forward since. Classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy, you know? Her mother blames Allen, and Laney blames her mother; it’s a total mess. So please know that I will hunt you down and kill you if you cause her any further pain. ’Mmkay? ’Byeee.”

  I found myself saying, “Nice speaking with you,” even though she had already hung up.

  “So when did you live in Chicago?” Laney asked, buttering her toast nonchalantly.

  She either didn’t want to know what Dani had said or didn’t have to know.

  Proposed to . . . like being left at the altar . . . pity . . . mess . . . pain . . . I compartmentalized her friend’s confession, throwing it into the small rubber box section of my brain that allowed “WTF?” items to bounce around for a while until I could analyze and make sense of them at a later time.

  “I came here for grad school at UC . . . the University of Chicago. I ended up staying to work and pursue my doctorate in computer science. I liked it here. But Sloane wanted to move back to New York.”

  She had been at Northwestern when we met, majoring in sociology with a minor in wife-ology. Definitely one of those rich girls with no true academic aspirations.

  “Let me guess, Priscilla’s from the Upper East Side?” Laney asked, stabbing a forkful of hash browns. “Summers in the Hamptons, winters in Aruba and Saint-Tropez? Matching salt-and-pepper Beemers for quick jaunts to the Cape?”

  “Hey, don’t make fun,” I said, reddening. Mine was imperial blue, actually. And Sloane’s was champagne quartz metallic. “But that is eerily accurate. How did you—”

  “I’m a townie for life. I know all about people who summer.” She stole a bite of French toast from my plate. “But I know you’re not a native New Yorker. Home for you was . . .”

  “Before Chicago? Seattle. City seven of nine. I did undergrad there, and that’s where my mom still lives.”

  “Wow.” Laney chewed on her bacon thoughtfully. Which reminded me I had to order Ruel’s milk shake. I flagged down our waitress.

  “Can we also grab a chocolate bacon milk shake?”

  “With or without alcohol?”

  “Seriously?” Chocolate and bacon sounded lethal enough. Since it was for our driver, I added, “Without, please. In a to-go cup, thanks.”

  Turning to Laney, I asked, “Wow, what?”

  “I’m trying to imagine living on the opposite side of the country from my mother.”

  “You’re an adult now. You said you were on tour with a rock band for half a year; you must’ve seen some cool places. What’s stopping you from picking up and moving where you want?”

  Wrong question. She prickled, and a steel door rolled down over her expression. Shuttering her off from whatever pain and guilt her past seemed to hold. I wished I could take it back, take her hurt and box it up and ship it off to parts unknown.

  I thought back to the sketches she had shared the night before. And in the morning. What had really happened between breaking up before prom and Allen earning, as Dani had called it, his dash, at the age of twenty-nine? And why was she still not out from under her mother’s thumb?

  She swirled a bite of pancake around and around her syrup-heavy plate, doing figure eights and loopty loops.

  “Long Island and Manhattan are all I’ve really ever known,” she finally said. “I like islands. You sort of always know where you stand, you know?” She gave a short laugh. “You’re either at the middle of it or at the edge of it. There isn’t this, this . . .” She waved her arm in her search for words. “This whole gray expanse. I guess I’m more small-town-in-a-big-city kind of girl.”

  She looked lonely, and a little lost. I will hunt you down and kill you if you cause her any further pain, her friend’s voice echoed through my ears.

  “Let me show you a bit of Chicago,” I pressed. “It’s not New York. But it’s a great city.”

  Laney finally popped the soggy pancake piece into her mouth and eyed me skeptically. Then she picked up her phone. “What time’s your flight rescheduled for?”

  “Four forty-five. But that could change again.”

  I wanted to keep spending time with her, in the middle of the country. I didn’t want to think about the East Coast, where decisions weighed heavily. Or Vegas, where I had left my best boys hanging. Truthfully, they were probably having more fun on their own without me.

  “Looks like I’m back on the grid,” Laney said, thumbing through her messages. “New flight at four forty.”

  “Perfect, it’s only eleven thirty. What do you say, Mothra?”

  Our waitress arrived with our bill, Ruel’s milk shake, and, instead of after-dinner mints, a small roll of Pez candies. Laney gave a little yip of excitement and dove into her magic bag, coming up with an Incredible Hulk Pez dispenser. She deftly loaded his green cylinder up and snapped it closed. With a smile, she set him facing me on the table.

  “You just happened to have that in your purse, then?”

  “Good-luck charm.”

  “Tell old Jade Jaws he needs to get cracking in the flight department,” I said, sputtering a laugh.

  Laney’s fingers tipped Hulky’s head and a pink Pez candy protruded in my direction, like he was sticking out his tongue at me. I pinched it out and popped it in my mouth.

  “Do you believe in luck?” She cocked her head, contemplating me, perhaps anticipating my answer.

  “I’m a numbers guy. I believe in statistics.” Laney made a face. I spun the Pez dispenser toward her. “I believe in strategy and product placement.”

  “That’s just fancy talk for being in the right place at the right time.” She took two Pez for the road and gave me a grin. “Lead the way, Tech-Boy.”

  Noah

  MAGNIFICENT MILE

  Ruel was happy to sip his milk shake and cruise the town as I played host to Laney. In the city, the main streets were clearer and traffic wasn’t its normal heavy assault for a Wednesday. Laney had fiddled with the heated seats until they were just the right temperature and sidled up next to me in the middle of the backseat so she could easily see through both windows as I pointed things out.

  “Okay, Magnificent Mile might feel a bit like Fifth Avenue,” I explained. “Lots of tourists and rich shoppers.” Sloane could probably name every block from the Chicago River to the Near North Side by each of their landmark stores: Cartier, Escada, Bulgari, Van Cleef & Arpels, Harry Winston, Prada, Gucci, Tiffany & Co., just to name a few. “But it also has five of the world’s tallest buildings.”

  Laney leaned over me, craning her neck and staring in wide wonder, as if she expected to see Batman leaping from one building to the next. I saw her hand reach for her sketchbook, but I gently pulled it out of her hands. “Look now. Sketch later,” I advised.

  She gave me a long look, then acquiesced. I gave a salute to the water tower staidly standing sentinel as Laney pressed her nose to the glass and tried to see how high the hotel next to it rose, its top half enshrouded in morning winter fog.

  “Good thing you weren’t here in December. You’d probably want to sketch the Santa Speedo Run down Michigan Avenue for charity,” I ribbed her.

  Laney shivered. “Brrr, sounds cold. And that would depend.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you were running it,” she said slyly.

  I laughed and flipped back to the diner picture of me. Cool GQ Noah might do something off-the-cuff like that.

  He’d definitely squeeze the toothpaste from the middle of the tube once in a while.

  “May I?” I asked,
my thumb poised to flip back a page.

  “You may.”

  The sketch before mine showed a gentleman also holding a cup of steaming coffee. But, unlike me, he was clasping his cup in both hands, grateful. A frayed cap sat atop what looked like a balding head, but his beard was full and bushy, and Laney had shaded it in various patches for a salt-and-pepper appearance. Wrinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes, and while his lips were pursed to enjoy that first warm sip, you got the feeling his eyes were smiling.

  “Kitchen of Hope,” Laney said, glancing down, and then back out the window again. We were sitting in a bit of traffic, so people-watching was the only touristy thing to do. “I volunteer there sometimes.”

  “I think I’ve seen their sign before,” I said, flipping to the picture before it: a young girl, cornrows in her hair, with a fork poised over a steaming plate. She looked unsure of where to dig in first, but the grin on her face spoke volumes. “Above Union Square?”

  “That’s the one,” Laney said.

  “How did you get involved there?” I asked.

  “It actually started as my bat mitzvah project when I was thirteen. My dad wanted me to understand that there was more to the day than just throwing a huge, lavish party and collecting lots of loot.”

  I fell quiet, thinking about passing the soup kitchen on my way to meet Sloane and her parents at the Altman Building just a few blocks away, the historic carriage house where our decadent reception was supposed to take place. It was staggering to think about spending two hundred dollars a plate on one meal, when that same amount of money could probably feed many more of Manhattan’s hungry and deserving.

  “Your dad sounds like a wise man,” I said.

  Laney made a production of tucking her sketchbook back into her bag. “Yep, Charlie Hudson’s a wise man,” she said, her voice breezy with false cheer. “And, as my mother would say, a born con man. Who else could convince a thirteen-year-old sucker to sign over all her bat mitzvah checks to him?” She ignored my stare. “Yep, that sucker would be me. My mom still hasn’t recovered from that one. Irresponsible, head in the clouds, gullible Laney. Earned those nicknames all by age thirteen.”