to drop a size, and now it had just happened and all I could feel was sad about it. I mean, could I afford to lose anything else?
Not the time or place to be sad, I told myself. These were pounds you didn’t want. Push it, push it, push it away.
“Nana,” I said as solidly as I could. “I love this dress. Don’t you love it?” And Nana had no choice but to nod.
At the register, Bettina 2.0 looked wide-eyed at me as I handed her the dress, as if I were a celebrity she’d just now recognized.
“This is one of my favorites,” she said. She fumbled for the tag and looked at the price. I’d already checked it and knew it was more expensive than any of the prom dresses. It was probably more expensive than anything else in the store.
“Oh . . . this is wrong,” said Bettina 2.0, frowning. “This dress is actually on sale.”
“Isn’t that lucky!” exclaimed Nana.
I looked around the store. “There aren’t any signs,” I said.
“That doesn’t matter,” Bettina said, touching my arm across the counter. Now she looked at Nana. “I’m the owner, and I can put things on sale whenever I want.”
I felt heat rise from the middle of my back. But Nana winked at Bettina 2.0 as she pulled out her MasterCard, and the someone-else dress was thirty seconds away from being mine.
The next day, Meg and I were walking through the senior parking lot on our way out of school when we heard a car driving slowly alongside us. I looked up to see that it was Andie Stokes’s canary yellow VW Beetle.
“Hey!” yelled Andie from the driver’s seat. She was alone in the car. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her without Hannah or one of her other friends. “Laurel! How are you?”
I’d talked to Andie almost every day since I’d come back to school. She was always seeking me out after class or by my locker, touching one finger to my arm as she asked how I was and gave me an update on the memorial fund plans.
Meg and I approached her car. Other students walked by extra slowly to check us out. I am talking to Andie Stokes, I thought, and people are seeing me talk to Andie Stokes.
“Hi Andie,” I said.
“I’m glad I ran into you guys,” she said, letting her eyes bounce between Meg and me. “I was in Mr. Churchwell’s office today, looking at the prom seating chart, and noticed you weren’t assigned to a table yet.”
“We were going to let the guys figure it out,” said Meg, which was sort of a lie. We hadn’t even talked about tables.
“Well, I’ll tell you that we have four empty seats at ours, and we’d love for you to join us.”
Ours. We. Andie moved through life in a collective. I wondered what that would feel like, to always be part of a whole.
“I— Thanks— Cool—” was all I could say. I was still working on the not-a-moron thing with her.
“That’s totally sweet of you,” said Meg, stepping in. “We’ll talk to Gavin and Joe and see if that works.” Suddenly Meg and Andie were entering each other’s cell numbers into their phones. While they did this, other students were forced to squeeze their cars around the Beetle on their way out of the lot.
Business done, Andie waved good-bye and drove off. Meg turned to me.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“What do I think about going to the prom and sitting with the cool crowd?”
“Other than the fact that it reminds you of Carrie and you might end the evening covered in pig’s blood.”
“Could be fun, could be so bizarre our heads will explode.”
“I agree. But I’m going to bank on the fun part.”
We stood there, popping our eyes at each other. The exciting reality of all this was beginning to sink in. The prom! The someone-else dress! Joe Lasky! Andie Stokes!
“Let’s go to my place and put on our dresses again,” said Meg, and I followed her through the parking lot.
In the mornings, right when I woke up, I usually had about two seconds of feeling like nothing had changed. I was in my bed in my room, and the light coming in from my blinds was the same light as always.
Then I’d remember.
And then I’d have to think of something to get me out of bed. Usually it was as simple as walking Masher or a test in English. Today, it was the SAT scores.
They