Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,54

in front of Josie’s full-length mirror while the two ladies pulled out dress after dress, holding them up in front of me, then tossing them in rejection piles on the bed.

Too purple, they’d decide. Or: Too bright. Too dark. Too flashy. Too plain. Too stiff. Too floppy. Too many pleats. Too teenagery. Too old-lady. Too much cleavage. Not enough cleavage. And on and on.

“This is overwhelming,” I said.

“Close your eyes,” Josie said. “We’ll do all the work.”

“I’m just not really a clothes person, you know?”

“We know,” they both said in unison, not pausing.

Then my mother added, “You can’t go to this thing in your bunker gear.”

At last, after what felt like hours, they narrowed the whole closet down to one singular, perfect, life-changing dress. Baby blue, midthigh, with spaghetti straps and a fluttery ruffle across the boobs.

“Really?” I said. It looked a little flimsy.

“Hush,” Diana said, touching her lips, like, Shhh. “Go put it on.”

I hesitated. I didn’t trust their judgment. It didn’t seem to have enough material. And what material there was seemed highly flammable. “It’s not even a dress!” I protested, as they steered me toward the spare room. “It’s a handkerchief!”

“Go!” Diana said.

“She’s such a tomboy,” Josie said, after I shut the door.

Was I? I just thought of myself as me. I certainly wasn’t girly. My dad had hardly sat around on weekends braiding my hair. This stuff was all pretty foreign to me. Not bad, exactly, just unfamiliar.

I slipped the dress on over my head, but the spaghetti straps did not even begin to cover my racerback sports bra. “Do I take off my sports bra?” I called through the door.

“Yes!” they both called back.

I started over. This time when the dress settled over me, it looked more right.

But also like someone else was wearing it.

“So what kind of a bra do I wear with this thing?” I called through the door.

“No bra!” Josie called back.

“None at all?” That seemed a little extreme.

“You could do a strapless,” Josie said, “but you don’t need it, and the ruffle over your boobs gives them enough, you know, coverage.”

The ruffle did provide coverage. On sight, no one would know there wasn’t a strapless bra under there.

Except me.

It was the strangest, most untethered feeling.

It’s important to note that this was not a makeover moment like some teen movie where the homely girl becomes a swan. I wasn’t homely before this moment, and I wouldn’t be homely later, when I clamped myself back into my oxen-harness sports bra and Dickies utility pants. This wasn’t a better version of me I was seeing in the mirror—just a different one.

It was like I was meeting an unknown part of myself for the first time.

The flouncy part.

The soft, fluffy, vulnerable, exposed, half-naked, braless part.

If you go look up the definition of “vulnerable,” in fact, it’s a picture of me in that blue hanky dress.

I felt like a mollusk without its shell.

I’m not going to say that “vulnerable” is a bad thing. Still, for a person who’s spent her whole adult life trying to be the opposite, it’s certainly a change.

It made me keenly aware of every sensation around me—the nubby rug under my bare feet, the silky fabric grazing my thighs, the air moving in and out of my lungs. Not to mention my boobs—unharnessed, with barely a millimeter’s worth of fabric between them and the wider world.

“I don’t hear any movement in there,” Josie called after a minute.

“I’m just getting my bearings,” the stranger in the mirror said.

“Come show us!” Diana called, and so I did.

They both gasped at the reveal when I opened the door.

“I feel like I’m headed to the prom,” I said.

“What did you wear to your prom?” Josie asked.

“Nothing. I didn’t go. Ted had baseball tickets.”

They made me twirl around.

“I feel very naked,” I said.

“Naked can be fun,” my mother said.

Could it? I wasn’t sure. Being so bare was both exciting and deeply uncomfortable. I couldn’t tell if I liked it. “It’s just,” I said, “I usually go for, like, the opposite of naked.”

Josie nodded. “Good to try new things, though.”

Josie pawed through her dresser and found a little cropped cardigan I could put over my shoulders if I got cold, and a matching clutch, and then they started going through the shoe stash. Josie was an eight-and-a-half and I was a nine, but she had a few sandals I could squeeze into. Platform wedges, mostly.

“I feel like a stilt-walker,” I said, once we’d strapped on a pair that