Will Work for Prom Dress

by Aimee Ferris

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  EGMONT

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  First published by Egmont USA, 2011

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  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © Aimee Ferris, 2011

  All rights reserved

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  eISBN: 978-1-60684-240-9

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  v3.1

  Will work for Nakoa (happily)

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  “Pepperoni, pepperoni. Cheese, cheese, cheese. Pepperoni, pepperoni. Cheese, cheese, chee—” I yelled.

  “Quigley! Do you have to do that?” shouted Anne, my best friend and the person responsible for my current state of misery.

  “Anne, I have been elbow deep in tomato sauce for six afternoons, now. I have to do something to break the monotony, or I’m going to knock old Helga aside and slit my wrists with her cheese grater!”

  At some point during my tirade, the roar of the assembly-line machinery halted, letting my words sail through the warehouse. I couldn’t be sure exactly when the noise stopped. Judging by the nasty look I was getting from the German-accented lady to my right, I had to assume it was before I called her “old.” Or “Helga.”

  Anne and I had not made many friends here in the frozen-pizza factory. But that was not our goal. We came to make some cash and split as soon as our measly paychecks covered our dress tabs for formal. Four months to find financing and dates. It was a toss-up as to which was less likely to happen.

  The assembly line cranked back up with a roar, and the doughy disks passed by in a blur.

  “Quick!”

  Anne squealed as three pizzas flew by her “untopped.” I tossed what I could at them before we found our rhythm again and returned to our screaming chat.

  “You could have at least found us a gig at a chocolate factory? Like that old TV clip they always show—the I Love Lucy one?”

  “What?” yelled Anne.

  “You know, that one where they’re stuffing chocolates in their mouths, and down their tops, and everywhere else ’cause they can’t keep up?”

  “Chicken cutlets!”

  “What?”

  This was getting ridiculous, my voice was going to go any minute.

  “I said chicken cutlets. The models, they use those things that look like chicken cutlets if they don’t have real implants,” she said.

  “Have the garlic fumes gotten to you? What are you going on about?”

  “You were talking about stuffing your top,” Anne said. “I don’t know why you’re complaining anyway—if anyone needs it, I do. But the models use those silicone thingies they call chicken cutlets. I’ve never seen a raw chicken cutlet. I guess they look the same, or something?”

  “No, no. It was this old TV show. Ah, just forget it.”

  I decided to save my voice and my sanity. Both were liable to leave me for good at any moment. What to do? Halfway done, two more hours to go. I decided to resume the little game I’d started four days earlier. The goal was to make a portrait on the pizza of the lady across the line from me using only my incredible, but as yet undiscovered, artistic talent. And some sausage.

  The first day, the “portraits” looked pretty much like smiley clown faces. It all started with me trying to get a laugh out of Anne without the supervisor giving me “the look.” But I was quite proud of some of my recent creations. The key was to get Anne to double her time and top most of the pizzas herself. That way I could work my magic on the moving line of blank canvas dough discs for a good twenty seconds before they were off to packaging, and then into the wild blue yonder. Or the steel-gray oven of some busy mom or frat house.

  “Check it out!” I nudged Anne and pointed out my muse. Her giggles at my choice could almost be heard over the assembly line.

  We all stood, covered in large white rubber aprons that reached our knees, with nasty damp gloves pulled up past our elbows. This ensemble—the latest in lunch-lady fashion—was topped with the classic, the ever-timeless accessory, the hairnet. Except ours looked like hotel shower caps.

  Basically, everyone on the assembly line looked the same, give or take sixty pounds and sixty years. But my muse … well, she was just different. I don’t think of myself as unkind, but this poor woman had a mole on the top of her nose that protruded so far I couldn’t figure out how she didn’t end up cross-eyed. Anne had a theory. The woman was also afflicted with floofy eyebrows that seemed to fly out at the sides instead of lying flat. Anne was betting, with her superior knowledge of ocular physics, that they might pull her vision focus out instead of dead center, thus compensating for the nose mole.

  This was just the sort of challenge I needed to occupy the rest of my shift. This would take calculation. This would take expertise. This would take—an olive.

  I took careful aim, with Anne poised, ready to assist.

  “Go!”

  Anne’s hands worked at lightning speed as she squirted sauce and tossed handfuls of cheese and meat randomly across the coming pies. I waited for just the right moment, then lunged across her and whipped down a light base of cheese and created a quick jawline with the unnaturally round sausage pellets.

  “Sauce me!”

  Anne shoved the tube into my right hand like a well-trained surgical nurse. I swirled an outline to frame my portrait. Tearing a pepperoni slice in half, I made some mournful eyes. The woman’s eyes were not really mournful, but, in my opinion, they should have been.

  “Cheese!”

  I grabbed great handfuls of mozzarella to create the perfect shower cap–hairnet effect, and la pièce de résistance (who said French class never taught you anything useful?)—the olive mole. This final touch I made while crashing into the sturdy heft of “Helga” before the pizza disappeared under its cloak of shrink-wrap. But the job was done. We’d come close before, but the olive really topped it.

  Anne jumped up and down on her half of the little stepping stool we shared. We high-fived and screamed in victory until “the look” was given, and we bent our backs to our work once again.

  On the way home, Anne and I jogged and chatted. Well, she jogged, and I cursed her back and wheezed as I tried to ke
ep up. It was just my bad luck that I’d picked a friend who lived at the very top of College Hill. This was all part of Anne’s little plan of improvement she’d decided we should undertake to achieve prom nirvana. We saved our bus money and got in shape for those perfect, slinky dresses, all at the same time.

  Personally, I thought we should have been doing something to reward ourselves just for making it through the day. First, eight hours of school—well, seven and a half for Anne. She hooked up with her college-guy boyfriend at his place during the first half of trig. She had worked out that, by school rules, she could be up to thirty minutes late without a parent’s note. Five “lates” got you one after-school detention. Five after-school detentions were worth one Saturday morning detention spent picking up trash in the football stadium. It took five of those before the administration bothered to call a parent for one day of suspension.

  Anne weighed the benefit/risk equation and chose her morning freedom, since her afternoons were monitored, minute by minute, by her mom. By her accounts, she had fourteen more mornings before the big call to Ms. Parisi. By my accounts, after doing all that math, Anne really wasn’t missing much in trig.

  “Wait up!” I put it into overdrive and closed the distance. Sweat stung my eyes, ruining the view of the stately, ivy-covered brick homes on Anne’s steep, cobblestone street. We lived in different worlds, joined together, thankfully, by one arts-centered charter school.

  Slipping back into history and imagining life spent in one of the expensive-looking houses was a good way to distract me from the burning sensation behind my right thigh. Inhaling the smell of fresh-cut heirloom roses from the garden, while sitting for portraits in the parlor or waiting for your horse-drawn carriage … well, that just had to beat sucking in the stench of Bengay, slathered on while yelling out Wheel of Fortune answers in the den of my beige, cookie-cutter, split-level ranch.

  “What?” Anne interrupted my romantic musings.

  “Just thinking. You can’t be running around with Brad all morning anymore.”

  “It’s Chad. And why not?”

  Ah. Chad. They always started as some four-letter name and usually ended the same way. The ending names were a lot more colorful, though.

  “Well, you can’t be pulling afternoon detentions if we’re going to make it to work on time.”

  “Oh, crap. You’re right. Guess I’ll have to save my last thirteen ‘lates’ till closer to the dance.”

  “I thought you had fourteen left.”

  “Fourteen and they call! Can’t have that, can we? Hey, maybe it starts over with the spring semester!”

  “Yeah, good luck with that.”

  “Jealous!”

  “You wish.”

  “Let’s sprint the last half mile. Race ya home!” And she was off.

  “Wench!”

  I huffed as I tried to pick up my knees to follow. At least working in the pizza factory had destroyed any love I once held for my former major food group. I couldn’t even walk down the frozen-food aisle without gagging.

  This was all so much more important to Anne. Her mother was Victoria Parisi, internationally acclaimed fashion designer, specializing in bridal gowns. She always offered to make Anne, and me—her unofficially adopted daughter—our dresses.

  I was thrilled. Anne was not. This might have had something to do with our last three formals when Ms. Parisi claimed to be so busy that she had to finish Anne’s dress the afternoon of the dance.

  This, Anne could deal with. We had fabric swatches for buying our shoes and accessories ahead of time. But suspiciously, despite otherwise exemplary time-management skills, Anne’s mom would always need to sew her into the dress at the last minute. Sewn in, meaning no one still could sample the goods.

  “No time for a zipper! But no problem, dear, let me just whipstitch this back closed.”

  Ms. Parisi was not a stupid woman.

  By the time I panted through the Parisis’ front door, Anne was already sitting with her long, sweaty legs thrown across a velvet ottoman. With one hand she flipped through the channels. The other held a diet soda. A second can’s sweat was sliding precariously down near the high-gloss wood of the coffee table where it sat, sans coaster. I snatched it up, wiped off the ring, and sat down gingerly on the antique sofa.

  Anne laughed at my discomfort.

  “It’s a house, not a museum.”

  “But still—”

  “Don’t be so impressed. Mummy Dear will be replacing all this with the latest trend within the month.”

  “What’re we watching?”

  “News.”

  “No, really.”

  “Really,” Anne said. “Didn’t you read my e-mail outlining the Betterment Plan?”

  “Betterment Plan? The Plan of Improvement has a new name?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t stop calling it POI, which gave me nightmares of my Maui trip and that gray Hawaiian pudding. I could barely down the poi, even though I was trying to impress those hot hula guys.”

  She shuddered. “According to the BP, learning about current events will help us attract men who are more mature and exciting. You don’t want to be tied down to high school boys, do you?”

  “I think I’ll pass on being tied down to any sort of boy for the moment. Sounds more like your area.”

  She threw a small pillow at me, almost toppling a vase so ugly it must have been worth a fortune, which I quickly righted.

  “Hardy har har, Mom. But really, let’s improve ourselves, shall we?”

  She settled on a tabloid-news station. I hid my smirk. After a brief look at the latest little celeb runt named after some piece of fruit or Druid season, a very strange image covered the screen.

  “What is that?” Anne asked.

  I scooted to the edge of the little couch for a better look.

  “Looks almost like a piz—”

  “Oh my—”

  “Holy—”

  “Turn it up, turn it up!” I yelled.

  I sat, staring at the vision in mozzarella and saw Anne’s dream of a zippered dress slowly melt away. A newswoman stood in front of a crowd of Elvis impersonators. A heavyset “older” Elvis spoke with passion into the big black microphone and shook the pizza at the camera. The extra cheese of the hairnet had melted up and browned into a very convincing pompadour the King himself would have been proud to sport.

  “It’s him. We’ve said for years he was still out there. He’s giving us a sign he’s alive! We’ve been laughed at—ridiculed—for believing. We told you, ‘don’t be cruel,’ baby, but you were. It was ‘heartbreak hotel’ for us, but look at this! You can’t deny it’s him!”

  The breathless man in the sparkly white jumpsuit was pushed aside by, well, another man in a sparkly white jumpsuit. In the background, women and men alike clung to each other and wept for joy through their mass rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  “We’ve seen it. And we’re not the only ones! We have another bus on the way to Rockville where they’ve spotted two more. Look at his mournful eyes. ‘Are you lonesome tonight,’ Elvis?” the man pleaded into the camera before turning back to the newscaster. “You can see it—he’s so lonesome he could weep. This is a cry of help from the King. And we will find him.”

  “Well, there you have it. Our investigative reporting team is on the trail of where these ‘Elvi-pie’ originated. We’ll be back after these messages with footage from Rockville, where Elvis’s faithful have set up a shrine in the great man’s honor.”

  The report faded out as the crowd started the first bars of “Love Me Tender.”

  Anne clicked the TV off. We sat in stunned silence for three seconds before bursting into laughter.

  “Helga will be so happy,” Anne said.

  “Yep. This will make her day. We better hit the help-wanted sites.”

  Chapter Two

  I sat in the cafeteria and doodled in my new, fabric-covered notebook. It was more of a journal than a proper school notebook. A little tre
at I gave myself after being unceremoniously fired from my first real job. The man actually used the words “possible criminal assault on an Italian food product.”

  I thought about correcting him and explaining that pizza originated in ancient Middle Eastern cultures. I might be a C+ student, but I was wise in the ways of pizza. But he was already sputtering and turning a disturbing shade of purple. It would be ironic for a man who made his living filling arteries with trans fats to keel over from a stress-related heart attack or stroke.

  I actually felt a little bad for him. The man was still getting death threats printed on fake memorabilia from the pseudo-Elvi. The throngs of faithful followers took offense, thinking the mess was some kind of publicity stunt exploiting their love for the King. Anne’s suggestion that he give up the frozen-food business and open a Blue Suede Shoe Shop didn’t go over very well.

  My journal doodle morphed into a smiling pizza.

  I had a weird fetish for brand-new stationery and school supplies. Sadly, I didn’t find school nearly as thrilling as the smell of freshly lined loose leaf. Most days, I stared at the stains on the badly painted walls trying to find faces or animal shapes, like a depressing version of the old cloud game. I counted the minutes until art class, the sole education-related bright spot in my day.

  Through much haggling and hard work to keep up my other regular classes, I had managed to eke out space for three art classes in each of my previous schedules. After such a lackluster response to my initial round of art institute applications, my parents decided I should concentrate on academics this semester to secure a spot at a regular college, majoring in the arts. So Print Photography it was, the only course not conflicting with one of the pillars of academia.

  Technically, in the photography class, I held the “teacher’s assistant” position—not a true student. I still managed to get my hands into one of my own projects now and then when I wasn’t busy mixing outdated developing chemicals. But without my mental art breaks throughout the day, I felt like a little kid who’d had recess taken away. I let go of the bitterness and reminded myself to be grateful that with Anne’s guidance, I’d talked my way out of PE/study hall and into the TA position. Anne really knew how to work the system.