Katie just stared at her, openmouthed. I fumbled to pick up the lookbook.
“But these styles are exactly what Lazenby’s has!” I stabbed one of the pages with my index finger. “We’re giving you exactly what you want!”
Michelle pressed her lips together. “I’m afraid you’re wrong. Right now our clothes have limited appeal to kids, but we’re hoping to improve the existing collection. We’ve also hired a spokesmodel, Trinity Fawn, for that reason. I was hoping when I met you, that you’d be more in touch with what kids want.” She frowned. “But it doesn’t seem that way.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Katie’s head slowly turn so that she was staring at me. Heather was watching me, too, lower lip tucked between her front teeth.
This whole misunderstanding was my fault. The Lazenby’s buyer didn’t want more of what they had; she wanted something different.
And I was something different. So was Katie. But I’d thrown out our unique styles and made us just like someone else.
Michelle picked up her purse and started for the door.
“Uh, wait!” said Heather, stepping in her path. “They have more designs! Better designs!”
“Yes! Right here!” I flipped to the front of the lookbook where our original designs were and thrust it at Michelle. She smiled and stepped around Heather. “Excuse me. I have several more appointments to get to.” She pointed to her watch.
I hurried around the table. “You said you were hoping we’d be more in touch with what kids want, and we are! We were just trying to give you what we thought you wanted.”
Michelle put a hand on my shoulder, the weight of it like a thousand disappointments. “You don’t change your style to suit someone else, sweetie. You find someone whose style matches yours.” She withdrew her hand and lowered it to shake mine. “It was lovely to meet you girls.”
“I upcycled this from an old tuxedo jacket!” I pointed to my bolero.
“Very nice,” said Michelle. Her friendly smile was starting to grow thin as she placed her hand in mine and squeezed it. “It was a pleasure. Keep working on defining your style.”
She reached for Katie’s hand next, but Katie crossed her arms and tucked her hands under her armpits, as if that would keep Michelle from leaving.
“We have our own styles!” she insisted.
“We just wanted to be in your store so badly,” I added.
Michelle sighed and scratched her head. “I’m not sure I can explain this any better. The clothing you made is lovely, but it’s an imitation of someone else.” She pointed to the table with its pile of rejects that I felt a sudden urge to burn. “Lazenby’s wants to buy original designs from original designers. Now, I really have to go.”
She started for the door again, and Heather moved to open it for her but then paused and stepped aside with her hands behind her back. As Michelle left, the door closed with a click, but it might as well have slammed with an echoing thud.
Katie and I were frozen in place, staring at our dream that had just walked away in incredibly fierce flats.
Heather approached our table. “Are you guys okay?” she ventured.
“The Lazenby’s buyer just left,” whispered Katie. “I can’t believe it.”
“She doesn’t think we’re real designers.” I dropped down into my chair. “We’re frauds!”
“No.” Heather came around to my side of the table and knelt beside me. “That is not true,” she said firmly. “The two of you are not frauds, Vanessa.”
I nodded slowly. “You’re right. We’re not frauds. Just me.”
Heather grabbed my hands. “V.”
“I’m only twelve, and I’m already giving up what I want in order to be what other people want,” I said. “Who will I be by the time I’m an adult? A dentist in a clown costume?”
Heather rocked back on her heels. “That is incredibly weird and specific.”
“They’re two of the things I least want to be,” I told her. Heather squeezed my hands.
“How do you think I feel?” asked Katie. “Yeah, you let someone affect your decisions, but I let someone affect my decisions who was letting someone else affect their decisions. If anyone’s more of a fraud, it’s me!”
I got up and reached for Katie’s hands. “I’m so sorry. This was the dumbest idea I’ve ever had!”
“It’s okay,” she told me with a rueful smile. “I’ve had dumb ideas, too.”
Heather put her arms around both our shoulders. “At least you had good intentions.”
“And look where good intentions got us today.” I held up the lookbook before I chucked it into the trash. “We should’ve stuck with what we love,” I told Katie. “And if someone else didn’t like it, so what?”
“Yeah!” she said. “We don’t need that stupid Michelle, anyway!”
The door to the student lounge opened, and all three of us spun around.
“Michelle, I’m so glad you came back!” cried Katie.
But it was Brooke who appeared.
“Hey, guys!” she said. “How was the meeting?” She took in our expressions. “Uh-oh. Did the buyer not like the samples?”
“She didn’t like us,” I said. “She thinks we’re posers.”
Brooke’s eyes widened. “What? She said that to a couple of kids?”
“Well, she said our clothes were just imitations and not showing our styles,” corrected Katie. “And the sad thing is, she wasn’t wrong.”
Brooke nodded. “I didn’t want to say anything, but yeah. The clothes we were sewing were nothing like the fun ones you normally make.”
Even though the situation was dismal, I couldn’t help smiling.
“You think our clothes are fun?”
“Of course! They display your personality.” Brooke picked up one of the shirts. “But these clothes say, ‘When I grow up, I want to run a yarn store.’”
Katie giggled, and Heather said, “Hey! I like that top.”
Brooke threw it at her. “Then take it. Better yet, take them all.” She tossed the rest to Heather. “Katie and Vanessa don’t need them anymore.”
Katie held up a finger. “Actually, we kind of do. For the fashion show.”
I groaned and buried my face in my hands. “The fashion show. A lineup of clothes I don’t even want to promote.”
“So don’t,” said Brooke. “Isn’t it your show?”
I lifted my head. “Yes. Yes it is!” I clapped a hand onto Katie’s shoulder. “Hey, now we can do whatever we want! We don’t have to show off those clothes. Nobody outside this room knew what our final lineup was!”
Katie started to smile, but it fell into a frown. “We don’t have anything for our models to wear. The pieces we fit them for are awful Lazenby’s designs.”
“Hey!” Heather said again with her head poking out of one of the tops.
“We’ll come up with something,” I said. “This is our first-ever fashion show, and people are going to see what KV Fashions can do.” I picked up my phone and dialed Tim. “It’s time to get real.”
CHAPTER
10
Happy Accident
“Let me guess. You’re calling to ask all your friends to change their names to Lazenby,” said Tim when he answered the phone.
I rolled my eyes. “No.”
“Just me?”
“No. But I am calling to ask you to make some changes.”
Tim sighed. “Vanessa, I swear if you want me to make the doilies on the snack table any doilier . . .”
“Doilies? Gross. Go with foil cardboard cutouts,” I said. “And take the Ls out of the plates of K and V cookies. Also, go with purple for the gift bags. Dark purple. Like a painful bruise.”
“V, seriously, your analogies are terrible,” said Brooke.
I shushed her with a look. “And if we can afford it, I want neon glow necklaces on every chair,” I told Tim.
He was quiet for a moment. “Brooke’s with you, right? Can you put her on the phone?”
She looked just as baffled as I felt when I passed my phone over to her. Brooke listened for a moment and said, “No, Vanessa didn’t fall and hit her head this time. Not an evil twin, either. I’m pretty sure she’d be the evil twin, anyway,” Brooke said with a wicked grin at me.
“Give me that!” I snatched the phone back. “Tim, can you put things back to the way they were or not?”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” he said. “But why did you suddenly change your mind? Did the Lazenby’s buyer turn out to be different from what you thought?”
I smirked. “Actually, I turned out to be different from what I thought.”
I told him what happened, and Tim sighed. I could practically picture him smoothing his hair back in frustration.
“I’m sorry, V. I should’ve said something. I knew you weren’t being you, but I got so caught up with turning this thing into a moneymaker. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “You were just being yourself and doing what you love, which is what I should’ve been doing. I just hope it’s not too late to get back to that. Does Berkeley still have the first mix he made?”
There was a muffled sound, followed by Tim shouting a question to someone away from the phone. A second later the volume returned. “Yeah, Berkeley says he still has it.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Tell him I’m sorry for all the extra work he put in to change it, but we’ll be going with the original instead.”
“No problem. It’s good practice!” I heard Berkeley shout when Tim conveyed the message.
“Well, I should really get off the phone,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of calls to make.”
“Sorry,” I said again, biting my lip.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Tim with a smile in his voice. “I’m just glad you’re back to normal. Well, as normal as you can be.”
When I got off the phone with him, I called my mom to come pick us up.
“Hi, honey! How was the meeting with the buyer?”
“I’ll tell you about it when you get here,” I said.
“Uh-oh. That doesn’t have a whole lot of promise to it.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Things didn’t turn out quite like I wanted, but Katie and I are still going to throw one heck of a fashion show.”
This time when I got off the phone, Katie was waiting with her hand raised. “Question. You might have heard me mention this earlier, but how are we going to throw a fashion show with no fashions? We’ve only got two days until the dress rehearsal, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve only sewn a few of my original designs.”
“Maybe we could have another sewing sleepover?” I suggested, glancing at Heather and Brooke.
Both of them looked at each other, and Heather spoke up first.
“I’d love to help, but there’s no way my parents are going to let me go to a sleepover on a school night.”
“Yeah, and sewing isn’t really my thing,” said Brooke. “Not until you get a machine with more horsepower. And sharper scissors for the fabric. Like those ones on the infomercials that can cut a pizza—and anyone who tries to steal the pizza—in half.”
“My dad works for a textile company,” Katie reminded me. “He might know some people we could hire to do the sewing for us.”
I shook my head. “We can’t afford to pay anyone. My mom wouldn’t let me skip school last week, but maybe she’ll let me do it this week.”
That didn’t go over well when Mom picked me and my friends up.
She interrupted me before I even finished my question.
“The solution to your problem isn’t to make more problems for yourself,” she said. “And trust me, getting behind in your schoolwork will only make more problems.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” I moaned, and flopped back against the passenger seat of the car as dramatically as possible.
“You learn from your mistake and move on,” she said.
“But this is a really big one,” I said. “I can’t start my fashion career this way.”
Mom chuckled. “Honey, that’s how everybody gets ahead in this world. You make mistakes and you learn and you evolve.” At the pout from me, she squeezed my leg. “The very first time I tried to sell a house, I locked myself, and some potential buyers, on the balcony. And the property was on the twentieth floor.”
My friends and I giggled.
“I remember that story,” I said with a grin. “You threw your right shoe at the neighbor’s back door. But nobody came out to help.”
She nodded. “So I threw my left shoe at the other neighbor’s back door.”
Everyone in the car laughed.
“But I learned from that mistake,” said Mom. “And after that, I always made sure to keep an extra key on me.”
“And an extra pair of shoes?” I teased.
Mom chuckled again. “The point is that you’re going to survive this, honey.” She winked at me. “And someday, you can tell people your story and laugh.”
After Brooke and Heather were dropped off and Katie was back at her house, I went up to my room and studied the designs I’d been working on. I had the three tops I’d completed before the Lazenby’s disaster started. If I hurried and didn’t care too much about the stitches, I could maybe have two more done by Friday and I could throw in two of the better pieces I’d made for Lazenby’s.
Mom agreed to let me eat in my room again, and while I shoved half a sandwich in my mouth, I prepped my sewing machine for top number four. I would never confess it to Brooke, but at that particular moment, I did actually wish I could make the machine go faster.
I tried to multitask, running the fabric under the needle with one hand while I flipped through my original lookbook in search of what would be the quickest pieces to make. I found a design that seemed pretty promising, but since I couldn’t get up to find a bookmark, I simply set the acorn shirt on top of the page. The leather cover closed over it, and the shirt fanned out above and below the edges.
With the brown leather accenting it, the shirt didn’t look half bad.
And it gave me an idea that was all good.
I stopped working on top number four and disappeared into my closet. On one of the shelves, I kept a box marked “Scraps,” and after a bit of digging, I found a piece of the dark-brown leather left over from my Halloween costume. It was thin and flat enough to sew onto something else, and luckily, there was just the right amount of it left for what I had in mind.
Taking some quick measurements, I cut two squares and two strips from the fabric. Then I sewed each square onto a shoulder of the shirt and attached the strips lengthwise down the sides under the armholes. Now the shirt was sweet and sassy. More my style.
I took a picture of it and texted it to Katie.
What do you think? I asked.
After a moment, she responded with OMG! Is that the acorn shirt? So cute!
Right? You know what this means? We don’t have to make all new clothes! I typed excitedly.
Instead of texting back, Katie called.
“Are you suggesting we upcycle our own creations?” she asked when I answered the phone.
“We’ve got the skills,” I said. “And we can definitely make a few tweaks here and there in two days, no problem.”
Katie gave an excited squeal. “Vanny, you are brilliant! And I’ve got all kinds of stuff we can use!”
“Me too!” I said.
There was a fumbling sound, followed by Katie breathlessly saying, “I’ll be right over!”
I looked at the clock and then laughed. “You’re crazy. It’s almost ten o’clock. Our parents would kill us.”
Katie laughed too. “I guess you have a point. I’m just so excited!”
“We’ll meet before school tomorrow,” I told her. “Bring a box of your best decorative pieces, and I’ll bring mine, and the shirts. We can figure out how to fix each one and save this fashion show!”
Katie cheered, and we said good-bye. I turned
to get back to my sewing and saw Mom standing in the doorway with a big smile on her face.
“Learn and evolve,” she said. “That’s my girl.”
It was way too loud in the student lounge to hear ourselves think. And it was partially Tim’s fault. He was seated on top of a table, surrounded by a sea of girls, but for once they weren’t gazing at him adoringly. They were gazing at the rows of shiny purple bags on either side of him.
“Why won’t you tell us what’s in them?” one girl asked.
“If you come to the fashion show on Friday afternoon, you’ll find out,” he said with a wink. “But trust me, there’s gold in here.” He patted one of the bags.
“There’s gold in there?” a girl screeched, and reached across the table.
“Not actual gold,” Tim said, holding her at arm’s length and rolling his eyes. “I mean the stuff inside is really great.”
Katie and I looked at each other and grinned.
“You gotta give him a gold star for trying,” she said.
I clutched at her arm and gasped. “An actual gold star?”
She laughed. “I feel like we’re kind of giving away the big finale if we work on the clothes here,” she said. “Maybe we should go somewhere else.”
I nodded. “Good idea. I think the newsroom is pretty empty in the mornings. If you’re willing to brave Mary Patrick.”
“Oh, she doesn’t scare me,” said Katie, picking up her box of fashion flair. “I know you think of her like a bear, but to me, she’s more like a growling dog that’s missing all its teeth. You just want to pet her.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend that,” I said, leading the way out of the student lounge. Out of habit, I stopped at the advice box and peeked through the slot to see if there was anything inside. I saw a couple pieces of paper. “Woo-hoo! Looks like we might be back in business.”
“Yay!” said Katie.
“You’d better be,” Mary Patrick’s voice carried from inside the newsroom. “Because Brooke has terrible suggestions for what to do with the column if the requests completely stop.”
Katie drew her lips over her teeth and growled. I snickered quietly and stepped into the room.
“What were her other suggestions?” I asked Mary Patrick. She held up a piece of notebook paper.
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