“Emma! They’re stunning,” Her mother gave her arm an enthusiastic squeeze. “They’re like pieces of art! I honestly can’t get over what you’ve accomplished in such a short time. I’m amazed! Truly.”
Emma suddenly felt uncomfortable, unsure how to react to her mother’s warm praise. She wasn’t used to getting it on anything other than her grades. And even then, it wasn’t especially the gushing kind because Emma was just doing what her mother already expected of her.
“I had some help,” she said.
Her mother shook her head strongly. “Don’t give away the credit. Emma, these were your visions. And not only did you dream up these amazing things, you brought them to life. You are the source. Creative vision is a rare and wonderful thing.”
Emma was relieved that her mother was finally seeing what she had been trying to explain to her for so long.
“Now I’m a little stuck with what we should do about this whole situation.” Her mom and dad exchanged looks, as if speaking a secret silent language. Then they walked outside the filing-cabinet walls and into the hallway for a private discussion. Emma couldn’t guess what the verdict would be.
“Um…hi?” Charlie tentatively entered the studio with a large brown bag of turkey sandwiches in his hand. A glance at her conferring parents, Emma’s stricken face, and the fact that Marjorie had taken off told him all he needed to know. “I hate it when I miss the previews,” he whispered. “And something tells me the movie already started.”
Finally Emma’s parents returned, a consensus reached. “We’ll let you finish and deliver to Paige Young what you promised,” her dad said, “provided you do your homework tomorrow and go to school on Monday. But then on Tuesday, things have to go back to normal. No more sneaking around, going behind our backs, and ditching your schoolwork. And no lying.” “Totally,” Emma said.
“And as punishment, no nights out with friends for the next month. School and then working for me in the afternoon and then home for homework—and that’s it.”
Emma didn’t care if she never left her house again for the next year, if it meant she could finish her pieces.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She leaped toward her parents, grabbing them both in a hug. “Now I just hope I make the deadline. Even with Marjorie’s help, I don’t know if I can get everything done by Monday.”
“You’ll get it done, Cookie. No one knows their way around a sewing machine like Marjorie. And no one is a better designer than you, or should I say, Allegra.” Her dad’s eye twinkle was back.
“Why don’t I go out to the front and get Marjorie?” her mother said. “Seems like you two have a long day ahead of you.”
Her dad returned to Laceland at six o’clock that night. “Hey, Cookie. I saw Marjorie in the lobby. She looked wiped out. She said Charlie took off, too.”
“Yeah, he needed to get home,” Emma mumbled through several straight pins sticking out of the corner of her mouth. “We got through a lot, but I still have more to do. Thanks for coming back.”
“No problem. Your mom and I didn’t have any big plans for tonight. And I have some things I need to organize around here for tomorrow anyway. I’ll order up some pizza for us.”
Three hours and two large slices of veggie pizza later, Emma finally had constructed all the linings. She felt as if she’d hiked to the summit of a mountain. She needed to stretch her leg, which she worried might permanently vibrate from so many hours pressed to the sewing-machine pedal.
As she walked through the warehouse, she heard her dad grunting and groaning. Then something slammed to the floor.
She raced around the corner. “Dad? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he answered, rubbing his lower back. “Just moving some of these boxes. Or trying to.”
“Do you need help?” she asked.
“Nah, I got it. You keep working on your stuff. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to go.”
“Okay.” She took the long way back to her work space, making the most of her stretch break. Back at her sewing machine, just as she was about to press down on the pedal again, she heard a buzz and looked up. It was her phone, buried deep inside her bag on the worktable.
She pulled it out. Two missed calls and four text messages—all from Holly. That’s strange, Emma thought. I guess I didn’t hear the phone with the machine running.
Wanted 2 make sure u have Kayla’s address. I’ll b there early so come whenevs! Can’t wait 2 c ur costume! U wont believe mine! xoH
R u coming? Everyone’s here already & totally in costume, including JC, but dont want 2 ruin the surprise. Come soon! xoH
Em! Why rn’t u picking up ur cell? Where r u?
Fine. Don’t come. C if I care.
Emma sunk her head into her hands. She had forgotten all about Kayla’s Halloween party…and Jackson!
She looked down at the clock on her phone. 9:17 p.m. There’s still time, Emma thought, whipping around in her chair. I can still figure out a costume and get over to Kayla’s. She began to stand and then stopped.
She wasn’t going to any party tonight. She was grounded. And she certainly wasn’t crazy enough to prance over to her dad and ask him to change his mind.
She fingered the long strip of sequined material she’d cut out for the belt. She turned it back and forth, amazed by the patterns of light that played off its shimmery surface. At every angle, the color changed.
She didn’t feel like leaving right now anyway, she realized. Even though the possibility of getting together with Jackson made her lungs forget how to take in air. What she wanted to do, most of all, was sew. She was so close to seeing the dreams from her sketch pad become real. There was no putting the brakes on now. Especially not for a Halloween party.
Holls: So sorry! U wldnt believe what happened 2day—
Emma groaned and deleted the message. This wasn’t the kind of thing you texted. It made her sound like she didn’t care. After everything that had happened between them, Holly would think her not showing meant she didn’t want to be friends.
She needed to talk to Holly face-to-face. She tucked her phone away. It would be better to beg Holly for forgiveness tomorrow. As for Jackson, well, she could only pray to the God of Coco that this hadn’t been her one and only chance.
But Sunday morning Holly wouldn’t answer her cell or respond to Emma’s emails. Emma kept count. Three calls directly to voice mail, four unanswered texts, and two emails sent into the netherworld. Holly obviously wanted nothing to do with her.
Emma had gotten up early that morning to tackle the mountain of homework. Her mother kept walking into the living room with the excuse of needing this book off the shelf or that folder from the desk, so Emma had no choice but to plow through. By lunchtime, she was almost caught up— or at least closer than she had been in two weeks. She tried Holly again. Silence. Total freeze-out.
Then, after lunch, disaster struck.
Emma and her father rode up to Laceland in the empty elevator. The ancient building was eerily silent on a Sunday. Emma’s fingers itched to feel the hum of the machine under them again. She was so close now. Almost done. She practically sprinted to the front door, hopping from one foot to the other as she waited for her father to unlock it.
“It’s open,” he said. “Leo—you know, the building maintenance guy—is here with his team to do some repair work. But they shouldn’t be in your way at all.”
Emma pushed through the door and raced straight back to her work space. She froze, blinking several times. And screamed.
CHAPTER 14
FLIPPED OUT!
She couldn’t believe her eyes. Paint!
White paint…splattered everywhere.
A dirty canvas tarp was draped haphazardly on her worktable. The floor of her studio was littered with cans of open paint, metal trays, and wood mixing sticks. And on her dress forms…oh, God…she couldn’t bear to look.
“No! No! Please no!” Emma screamed. “Dad! Come quick!”
Her father burst in. “What’s wrong?”
She pointed with a shaking hand at one of the dress forms. Her vest. Her beautiful, smooth cotton-sateen gray vest with the silk aquatic-watercolor-design lining had two huge white paint splatters. “They ruined it!” Tears sprung to her eyes.
“I don’t understand it.” Her father stared, horrified. “They weren’t supposed to be back here at all!” He balled his fists, his anger apparent. “Where is Leo? Leo! I paid him to supervise the painters just so something like this wouldn’t happen. Leo!” He took a deep breath. “Are the other two pieces all right?”
Emma slowly walked over to the other two dress forms. She had left all three of her girls, as she had taken to calling them, here last night dressed in her nearly finished creations and looking beautiful. She had said a special good night to each one almost the same way her dad used to do when he tucked her in when she was younger. Wishing each one dreams as sweet as cotton candy. And now…now…
She examined the fabric as if under a microscope. She nodded slowly. The other two were unharmed. The third, oh God. She scrunched her eyes closed.
“I’m so, so sorry, Cookie,” Noah said, shaking his head. “This is awful. Leo has never let me down before.”
“What am I going to do?” Emma choked, as she tried to pick a glob of paint off the outside of the vest with her fingernail. But the paint was already dry. Even if she could scrape off the top layer, the fabric had already absorbed most of it.
“Is there any way you could send two pieces instead?”
“I can’t. I promised—Allegra promised, whoever promised—Paige three pieces. Three, not two!” Emma gulped. “And if I don’t deliver all three on time, she’s going to find a designer to replace me. I’ll be ruined before I ever get started.”
Emma sunk to the floor, her legs too shaky to support her.
Now what?
Sunday passed in a blur. Charlie was summoned, of course. Her father screamed at Leo and his painters. Leo apologized profusely. But, really, what good did that do? The damage was done.
Charlie analyzed the situation from every angle. There was no question that two was not three, and three was what Paige wanted. Charlie advocated the quality-versus-quantity argument for a while. But Emma was no fool. Paige wanted it all—three new pieces, all to-die-for amazing. And Allegra had to deliver.
“So what about you just make another vest, identical to this one?” Charlie suggested. “Shouldn’t it be easier the second time around?”
“If it were that simple, don’t you think I would be working on it already?” Emma shot back. “It’s Sunday. Allure is closed, and I don’t have enough of the outer fabric or the lining fabric left over to start again. And even if I raced to Allure right after school tomorrow and bought more fabric, there’s no way I’d be able to finish it in a couple of hours.”
“Okay, skip school. Problem solved.” Charlie crossed his arms, satisfied with his solution.
“Problem not solved. I promised my parents I was going to school tomorrow. I have to go.” Emma ran her fingers nervously through her hair. She couldn’t battle her mother now about missing school, on top of everything else. “Next idea?”
After a bout of tears and four big Reese’s peanut-butter cups, Emma finally decided she would turn in her two new pieces along with the off-white linen corset dress she had made the previous summer. The dress didn’t fit into her collection, but it was done, which, at this point, was a huge plus. Emma analyzed the dress. If she could include some of the lining material—Charlie crawled on the floor, gathering the useable scraps left over from the vest—and weave strips of it into the corset and maybe have some peeking out ever so slightly from the hem of the dress, the dress might not look like an afterthought. She hoped.
Emma felt as if she were in an action movie. Instead of running for her life, she was sewing at manic speed. She stitched as fast as she could without sacrificing the level of construction. She polished the other dress and the jacket until she felt they were perfect.
Then she tackled the corset dress, incorporating the lining fabric in what she hoped was an innovative design. During the entire afternoon, she could barely look at her ruined vest, still displayed on the dress form. Except for the finishing touches—and maybe a little extra work on the corset dress— Emma finished by Sunday night.
She truly loved the charcoal jacket and the belted dress. She just wished she was happier with her last-minute corset dress. It was good, but she suspected it wasn’t quite good enough. She could envision Paige shaking her head in disbelief, throwing around phrases such as, “overworked,” “tacky,” and “lacking vision.” How humiliating! If she was going to fail at this, she decided, she couldn’t fail with a dress she didn’t believe in.
All night, Emma tossed and turned in bed, redesigning the dress in her mind. Adding fabric, taking away fabric. Changing the hemline. Altering the shape. As the variations appeared and morphed on the inside of her eyelids, she felt as if morning would never come, and then suddenly it was here.
She rode the subway to school next to her mother as usual, except this morning she played a different game in her sketchbook. This game was called: Reimagine the Dress.
Emma waited for Holly at her locker. She realized that Sunday had passed without them talking. She needed to make things right. But Holly didn’t show. Emma shuffled into her first-period classroom and took her seat, her mind still focused on the dress. She now wondered if she shouldn’t reroute to Allure after school and buy more fabric to try to line the skirt. Or was that just ridiculous?
“I’ve never seen Lexie that mad before!” Emma overheard Kayla say two rows in front of her.
“I know,” Shannon agreed. She had the desk next to Kayla.
“You think she’s going to stay mad at Holly forever? If I were Lexie, I would. I mean, Holly stole Lexie’s boyfriend,” Kayla said.
Emma leaned forward slightly in her desk chair to hear more.
“Seriously!” Shannon gasped. “Holly was totally hanging all over Jackson. By the end of the night, she was practically sitting in his lap! It was pretty disgusting, if you ask me.”
“Who knew she was such a major flirt?” Kayla asked. “But what I don’t get is why she flirted with Jackson, when she’s known forever that Lexie likes him. There were a million other guys at the party she could’ve gone after.”
Mr. Whitmore entered the room, and the gossip session was put on hold. Emma tried to make sense of it. She completely expected Lexie to throw herself at Jackson, especially at a party, but how could Holly go after the one guy Emma liked? She wondered if Shannon and Kayla were telling the truth. Did Ivana put them up to it? She couldn’t figure it out.
Out in the hallway after class, Emma overheard two other girls talking about Kayla’s party. And Holly throwing herself at Jackson. Then in third-period English class, Sophia Hodges said knowingly to Claire Giberna, “I hear they’re a couple now.”
“They looked like they’d been a couple forever at the party,” Claire said.
Even though the girls didn’t say Holly and Jackson’s names, Emma knew who they were talking about. The news was clearly all over the school. Was Holly that mad at her for not coming to the party that she flirted with Jackson for revenge?
How could she, the one person who knew Emma best, do something so incredibly hurtful in such a public way? Holly had to know it would get back to Emma. Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she’d always had a thing for Jackson but had kept it from Emma. Maybe that’s why she wouldn’t answer Emma’s calls and texts yesterday.
“Where were you on Saturday night?” Holly demanded. She was waiting for Emma by their lockers. “I thought you got run over by a hot-dog cart or something.”
“That would’ve been even more convenient than me not showing up, wouldn’t it?” Emma met Holly’s gaze.
“What are you talking about?” Holly asked, her eyes narrowing.
“How could you not know? The wh
ole school knows you were all over Jackson at Kayla’s party.”
“Are you kidding me? I wasn’t all over Jackson,” Holly said.
“That’s not the way I heard it. Seems you were in his lap the entire night.” Emma could hear her voice growing louder. She and Holly had never fought before, but after everything that had happened over the past couple of months—all the uncomfortable moments and the feeling that they’d never gotten back in their groove after Holly got home from summer vacation—suddenly Emma couldn’t stop herself. It was all just spilling out.
“What are you talking about?” Holly demanded. She whipped around and glared at a group of girls in the hall who were not at all subtle about listening in. The girls retreated, giggling and whispering.
“Don’t pretend with me. Everyone is talking about how you hooked up with Jackson. Just because I didn’t show up—and by the way, I had a very good reason for that— didn’t give you the right to do that to me. That’s just cruel.” Emma took a deep, almost painful, gulp of air. “And I never thought you were cruel.”
Holly had a look on her face that Emma had never seen before—a mix of anger, disbelief, and embarrassment maybe—and suddenly Emma worried that they’d just crossed some invisible line. In all their years of friendship, she had never lashed out at Holly like that.
“Wow,” Holly finally said. “I can’t believe you would accuse me of doing that, especially since I’ve literally been going out of my way to get you and Jackson together all semester. And you know what else? This was just another time out of maybe like a million that you showed zero effort to be friends with Ivana and the girls—and zero effort to be friends with me. You blew me off, Em, so I really don’t know who you think you are to be mad at me.”
The Allegra Biscotti Collection Page 14