by A. J. Stern
“All right!” we all yelled back and then changed out of our ugly dresses and put them back into their bag homes. Then I ran out of there and waited for my mother and Elliott. Elliott was eating dinner over at our house, which was the only good thing to happen all day, and it hadn’t even happened yet!
CHAPTER 6
On the car ride home, my mom was so excited about the whole thing, she said she wanted to learn how to sew and make clothes herself. That did sound like fun. I would like to make clothes, too. I had lots of ideas all the time, and I was a very good draw-er.
Elliott was telling us about all of the things he learned about being a fashion designer, and the more he said about it, the more interesting it was. He told us that you could take clothes apart and put them back together if you needed to grow or shrink them. He said you could make anything shorter but only some things longer. He said you could go to any fabric store and pick out your favorite type of fabric and make anything you wanted out of any material.
I looked at my dress hanging on the hook in the car, and all of a sudden, I got some very good ideas.
At dinner, my mom and Elliott were busy telling my dad all about their wonderful, glorious jobs, while I was wondering if I might secretly be a very good fashion designer. Maybe I had a hidden talent for it. I probably have lots of hidden talents. I just don’t know what they are yet.
My dad oohed and aahed at everything they said, and then he turned to me. “You’re awfully quiet, Frannie. Don’t you like being a model?”
“No,” I told him.
This surprised him because he scrunched up his face at this sentence.
“You don’t?”
“No. They make you wear ugly dresses, and they dye your face different colors and pour plants on your head, and you have to walk like an ostrich, and you only get to stand at the end of the stage for one half second. It’s the worst job I’ve ever had.”
My dad tried not to smile. I could tell. I’m really smart about trying-not-to-smile smiles.
“Sounds terrible.”
“It is. It’s the worst job in history. Don’t ever be a model, Dad.”
“I think I can safely promise you that I won’t.”
“That’s a relief,” I told him.
Elliott and I excused ourselves and went to my bedroom where I had a secret mission that I had not yet told to Elliott.
My fashion show dress was hanging from a hook on the back of my closet door. I stood in front of it and stared.
“I don’t like this dress, Elliott. Not even one little bit,” I told him.
“But you looked really pretty in it, Frannie,” he said. That made me feel really special inside, but it didn’t make me like the dress any more.
“But it doesn’t match me. Laura Munn said all of the dresses would match the wearers, but this one doesn’t.”
Elliott bent his head to the side and stared at the dress and studied it. He was probably looking at it as a fashion designer because that was what he did for a living that week.
“Maybe it’s the flowers that don’t match,” he said.
“It is the flowers that don’t match! I don’t like the flowers, and I don’t like that they are pink!”
“There’s not really so much you can do. You’ll never have to wear it again except for tomorrow night.”
“I don’t want people to see me in this dress and think it’s who I am. It’s not who I am at all. If I wear it, it’ll be like I am lying, and I don’t want to lie at my job!”
“Well, what else is there to do?”
“We can make it match me,” I said.
“How?” he asked.
We stared at the dress on its hanger and made scrunched-up faces.
“Got any ideas?” he asked me.
“No. You?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. We were stumpified.
“Let’s go ask my mom,” I said, which he thought was a geniusal idea because he smiled.
Elliott and I went to my mom’s room to ask her expert advice, but she wasn’t there. We heard the TV, so we went downstairs into the living room, and you will not believe your ears about what my mom was doing. She was watching a show about fashion! On it, people were cutting up clothes and sewing and ripping fabric and running around. They looked like mad people trying to make an outfit before the clock struck midnight. That’s what they were doing backstage today, too. That’s when I understood that the way to fix clothes was to cut and draw on them! Why in the world didn’t I ever think of that myself?
I grabbed Elliott’s hand and started to run back to my room.
“But we didn’t ask your mom,” he said.
“Don’t need to,” I told him. “I figured it out!”
Upstairs, I took the dress off its hanger and laid it out on the floor.
“First, we have to get rid of the flowers,” I told Elliott.
“Do you want to cut them out?” he asked.
I wondered about that, but then realized the dress would be made of holes, and I certainly could not walk down the runway with a holey dress. I looked around my room and saw exactly the thing we needed. A magic marker. I ran over to my desk, grabbed a thick, black ink pen, got down on my knees, and started to x out all the flowers.
“Frannie! I don’t think you should be doing that!” Elliott cried.
“Elliott, it’s okay,” I said. “I have hidden talents as a fashion designer.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know that. What are they?”
“Well, I don’t know yet. But if you don’t let me do this, we’ll never find out.”
Elliott thought about this for a second, and when he decided I was right, he said, “You’re right.”
After we x-ed out all the flowers, I went and got my scissors.
“What are you going to do with those?” he asked.
“Cut,” I told him.
“You’re going to cut it?” Elliott’s eyeballs looked shocktified.
“Yes. That’s how I’m going to fix it. Just like they did on the TV show.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Elliott asked me.
It was a very good idea, actually and as a matter of fact, so I didn’t respond with words to that, I just stared Elliott straight in the eyeballs until he shrugged and watched me cut up the bottom of the dress. When we were done, we stood over it and looked down, but it was very hard to tell if it looked beautiful or just great.
“Put this on,” I told Elliott.
“But it’s a dress!” he said.
“I know, but I need to see how it looks on someone else in order to know whether my job is done or not.”
Elliott rolled his eyes, but he picked up the dress and went to the bathroom to change. I tried not to laugh when he came out wearing the dress, but I couldn’t help it, the laugh just fell right out of my mouth.
“It’s not funny!” Elliott said.
“It’s a little funny!”
Then Elliott looked in the mirror and said, “Okay, it is a little funny.”
I stood back and stared at the dress, and I will say for a scientific fact that it looked amazing.
“What about all these snaggley things hanging down?” Elliott asked, staring at some loose threads that were being born at the bottom of the dress. I loved the snaggley things. In fact, I decided that snaggley things would be part of my clothing designs when I was a real-life fashion designer.
“It’s a little messy,” Elliott said.
It’s a scientific fact that he was right. The dress did look a little messy, but I prefer messy to clean, and that is not an opinion.
“You will see hanging threads on all the Messy Miller clothes.”
“What’s Messy Miller?”
“My clothing line!”
That’s when Elliott’s eyes almost flew out of their eye sockets.
“Can I work there?”
“Probably. I don’t have an office yet. But when I get one, t
hen you can work for me.”
This made Elliott very happy.
I stared at the dress again, and while I was very happy with all my Xs and all the cutoff parts, I was not happy that it was pink. But there wasn’t much I could do about that.
I could do something about the shoes, though. A for instance of what I mean is that I did not appreciate the shoes that Laura Munn was making me wear. They were pink and flat, and they were not shoes I would ever make in my Messy Miller business. I knew that shoes were supposed to match their dresses, and that’s why she gave me pink shoes. But now the dress had black Xs on it, and I wanted my shoes to match those.
I looked all over for my rain boots, which matched perfectly. When Elliott put them on, we turned to stare at him in the mirror, and that’s when we decided he looked fabulous.
I could not wait for the next day. Everyone in the entire world would be so surprised about my secret hidden talents as a fashion designer.
CHAPTER 7
I could not stop imagining how people were going to react when they saw the fabulous job I did on my dress. I was going to put on my dress, and before it was time to go on the stage, Laura Munn and the fashion designer who made my dress would see me. They would gasp and clap and cheer and gather everyone around me.
“I had no idea you had a secret hidden talent as a fashion designer,” Laura Munn would tell me.
“What’s your name, little girl?” the fashion designer of the dress would ask.
“Mrs. Frankly B. Miller,” I’d tell her.
“Mrs. Miller, I’d like to officially offer you a job working for me. I want you to design all of my clothes, and none of them will be dresses. You are not a model, my dear. You are a natural-born fashion designer.”
Then I’d turn to my mother, whose mouth would be ready to fall off her face with pride-itity for me, and she’d shake her head in astonishment. “Frannie, I had no idea. No idea at all you were this talented.”
I’d shrug and say, “Me neither, but may I please be excused from being a model now? I’d much prefer to make clothes backstage.”
“Of course! Of course!” everyone would cry, and then they’d give me my very own station to work at, which would be almost as good as an office! I would put all my supplies for clothes-making in my briefcase, and I would tell everyone to throw away all the makeup and flowers.
My mom would call my dad, and he would come running from work to see me at my new job. Then he’d put his arm around my mom’s shoulders, and their eyes would be blinking and wowing in their eye sockets so hard that you’d actually be able to hear how impresstified they were with me. I would be their very own fashion designer daughter of the world.
“Frannie! Frannie!” my mom was saying. I looked up at her, confusified.
“You’re in a trance. Try and have a bite of your toast, and then we have to leave for school, okay?” my mom asked.
I looked down at my breakfast plate and was shocktified to see that I hadn’t even left my house yet. That is how real my imaginary scene felt.
On the drive to school, my mother told me where and when she’d meet me and that she’d bring my dress, and did I zip it back up in the garment bag like she told me to? I nodded yes. Did she need me to bring anything else? I scrunched up my face to think about that sentence. My rain boots were in my briefcase, so she didn’t need to bring those.
“I’m all set,” I told her.
“Excellent. I’ll see you at five for dinner. You can tell me about your day, and then we can go be supermodels.”
I kissed her on the cheek and ran out of the car and into school. I did not know how I was going to be patient until five PM.
Mrs. Pellington said that all the models and everyone working backstage were bringing great pride to the school. This year’s event would bring in more money for the school than a bake sale ever had. Then Mrs. Pellington told us that there were going to be some very important people there tonight.
“Like who?” Elizabeth Sanders called out without raising her hand.
“I think there will be a couple of local magazines and the local news channel,” she said.
Millicent and I looked at each other with I-cannot-believe-we’re-going-to-be-movie-stars eyeballs.
The thing that helps a day go by quickly is when you imagine the amazing things that are going to happen at the very end of the day. I imagined everything I had imagined at breakfast about ten hundredteen times, only each time I made the version different. In one of them, I won a very fancy, gold award. In another, I only got a silver award, but I was just as grateful because a bad sport is something my dad told me he never, ever wanted me to be.
When five o’clock finally came, Millicent, Elliott, and I ran to the cafeteria to eat a special early dinner with our parents. Elizabeth ate with us because her mom was out of town. It felt like a special privilege because it was something I had never done before. It’s a scientific fact that I love special privileges.
CHAPTER 8
After dinner, we had one entire hour before the show. Even though an hour seemed like an awful long time to just put on a dress, my mom explained that everyone had to put on their dresses and get made up and have their hair done. That was when an hour seemed like not enough time at all, as a matter of fact. Funny how time can seem both long and short at the same time.
There was so much going on backstage when we got there, I felt a pang of upset that we ate our dinner in the cafeteria. If we had eaten backstage, we wouldn’t have missed one second of action.
Elliott and Elizabeth ran to their stations, and I felt a little jealousish that they got to do such important work. They got to use really grown-up tools, which is a for instance of something I love to use.
Delilah handed Elliott a very professional-looking wand, which she showed him how to work. What it did exactly was blow smoke out of itself and made wrinkles disappear on all the clothes that he wanded it over. It was really cool, and I wanted to try it, but I didn’t work at the smoking wand stand. Not yet, anyway.
Elizabeth also got to hold a lot of tools. Delilah let her hold a hundredy things at a time. Elizabeth even got to ruffle through the official makeup bag and pull things out. She handed Delilah brushes and potions and bottles, and all of a sudden I wanted to know what else was inside that bag. I felt very envious of Elizabeth that she got to see and touch so many mysterious things.
Laura Munn clapped her hands together and divided everyone up into groups of people. One group had to get dressed and then go into hair and makeup. The other group would go into hair and makeup and then get dressed. I was in the hair and makeup group, and my mom was in the dressed group.
I sat very still while Elizabeth and her boss put all the glop on my face. I didn’t even mind or say one word or scrunch up my face or make a bad noise because I knew that after they were done, I was going to wipe it all off. I worried that they might get their feelings hurt, but I knew when they saw how much better I looked without it, their feelings would be the opposite of hurt.
I was excited to see how professional-acting Elizabeth was, and I wondered whether she was someone I might have work for me in my fashion designer office. I knew that her résumé would be very impressive now because she had done an actual fashion show. I was very impresstified with her, indeed. She held all of the different brushes and smudgers, and when her boss asked her for the eyelash curler, she knew exactly what that was. She knew the names for blush and mascara and lip gloss, too, which I was not very interested in knowing.
However and nevertheless, I knew if I was going to be a fashion designer I would need someone to know the things I did not know. Elizabeth was going to be so flattered when I told her she was hired for a job she hadn’t even applied for.
When my face was all disgusting with glop, it was time to move on to hair. I sat very still in the chair while Kevin put those gross flowers back in and twirled my hair around and pinned it. When he was done planting a garden on my head, it was time for me to change
into my outfit.
My mom was getting her makeup done now, and everyone else was rushing around trying to get ready.
I ran over to my station and hid behind a clothing rack so no one would see what I was doing. Right before I took the flowers out of my hair, I realized something very important: It wasn’t just that I didn’t like having flowers in my hair, I didn’t like having hair that people Wanted to put flowers in! I needed to do something about that fact, fast.
I ran over to Elliott’s station and asked if I could borrow the scissors, and Elliott said yes, which meant he was the boss of scissors.
When I got back to my station, Millicent was there reading. She didn’t even look up. I took a lot of tissues and wiped off all the gross makeup. Then I took all the flowers and pins out of my hair and started to cut it. That’s when Millicent looked up.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Cutting off my hair so no one ever plants trees and flowers in it.”
“Let me see!” she said.
I turned to face her, and she studied me for a minute and then broke out into the biggest smile of ever.
“You look just like Penelope, a character in my favorite book! Could you give me the same haircut?” she asked.
“Okay, after I finish mine.”
Then she stood there very patiently as I finished cutting my hair. We could hear Laura Munn yelling for everyone to line up, so I had to cut Millicent’s hair very, very quickly. When I was done, she looked at herself in the mirror and fell in love with herself.
“Thank you, Frannie,” she said. “I love it.”
Then I rushed over to my garment bag and unzipped it, and when Millicent saw my dress she gasped so loud her mouth almost fell off her head.
CHAPTER 9
“Frannie!” Millicent cried. “Did you do that to your dress?”