“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 worked.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” my mother said.
“Bethe shoes,” Josie encouraged.
I stared at myself in the mirror. I looked like a whole different person. A person brave enough to go braless. A person open to possibilities. A person in all kinds of trouble.
I looked at all our faces reflected in Josie’s mirror—theirs with delight, and mine with concern.
“I guess it’ll work,” I said, chewing my lip.
If nothing else, it was a hell of a disguise.
SATURDAY CAME QUICKLY.Too quickly. And not quickly enough.
Diana made me sit at her dressing table while she gave me a makeover. “Just a little,” she kept saying, but I think she used every vial, spray bottle, brush, and tube in every drawer. She plucked my eyebrows. She curled my eyelashes. She dusted me with powders and teased my hair. She frowned and fussed while I sat with my eyes closed, under strict orders not to peek.
When she gave me permission at last to open my eyes, I saw the same me, but different. The eye shadow and lipstick were the biggest shockers.My eyes looked twice their normal size, and my lips were dark red and extra plump.
“It’s like the cartoon version of me,” I said.
She gave me a look. “Thanks,” she said.
The biggest change was my hair, which they’d insisted I leave down and loose—instead of my usual low bun. A bottle of hair spray and thirty minutes of blow-drying and teasing later, it wasn’t just hair. It was a mane. I didn’t even look like myself to myself.
The three of us stared at me in the mirror.
“It is a very different version of you,” Diana concluded.
“Which is better?” I asked.
Diana gave me a quick squeeze. “I’m very fond of the everyday you,” she said, somehow knowing the exact words I was hoping for, “but this is fun, too.”
I waited to put on the dress until the last minute so I wouldn’t wrinkle it. Same with the shoes—to lessen my chances of breaking an ankle.
When the rookie was a few minutes late arriving, I felt like I couldn’t take it.
I pulled out my phone.
“I’m going to cancel,” I said, shaking my head at my mom and Josie, who were keeping watch at the front window. “I can’t do this.”
My hands were cold. Everything felt cold. And hot. Both. At the same time. What was I thinking? We were going to get caught, and I was going to get ridiculed, scoffed at, and then fired, in that order, and my life as I’d known it was going to be over.
