Free The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1) by Sophie Nicholls Page B

once,’ said Billy. ‘Some garden party or something. She wasn’t allowed to go inside. Well, only as far as the hallway and kitchen. She was working as a kind of waitress, wearing a right stupid get-up, if you ask me, handing out those tiny snack-things on trays and glasses of champagne. But she sneaked a look through the window and she said just about the same… She said it was a very, very big house…’
    Billy shook his head as if trying to make enough space in his mind to contain the idea of such a house.
    ‘Not surprised it feels sad, though,’ he added, scratching his head. ‘What with the boy dying and everything.’
    ‘What boy?’
    ‘Oh, hasn’t she told you yet? Well, I suppose she doesn’t want to talk about it much. Her brother. The elder brother.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘Some horrible disease. Something to do with his kidneys. He went to our school. It was awful. Towards the end, he started turning all yellow…’
    Billy looked off into the corner of the room as if he were remembering something. ‘And then, all of a sudden, he was a goner. Dead. Just like that. Poor lad. Must’ve been four, five years ago now. He was older than all of us. Katrina would’ve still been at primary school.’
    Then he turned to her, a wicked grin on his face. ‘That house is probably full of ghosts… I mean, if Katrina were my sister, I’d definitely come back to haunt her.’
    He flung himself at Ella, pinning her hands to the floor, tickling her under the ribs, putting his face up close to hers and making whoo -ing noises. 
    ‘Stop it, you idiot.’ She pulled her hand free and swatted at him, laughing in spite of herself.
     
     

 
    8.
    Blue silk dress with net petticoats. 1950s. Lovely detail at décolleté.
    Can be altered to fit size 10-12.
     
    Ella drew the velvet curtain across her body so that she wouldn’t have to see. She hated looking at herself in the mirror. She hated the way that her body felt, the way her stomach pushed at the waistband of her skirt, the way the soft flesh at the tops of her thighs rubbed together when she walked.
    Katrina liked those American films, the ones with pink covers and hearts all over them where girls carried fluffy dogs in their handbags and had perfectly groomed eyebrows. She wanted to look like Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde or the girls in those Californian soaps who drove convertibles and flicked their hair over their shoulders.
    Ella had been brought up on Mamma’s vintage collection: the Audrey Hepburn box sets, Marilyn in Some Like it Hot , Anita Ekburg splashing in the Trevi Fountain, Sophia Loren.
    But when she looked in the mirror, she didn’t see how she could ever look like that. There was her hair, for a start. Long, dark and thick, it was always escaping whatever arrangement she devised for it. When she brushed it, it stood out from her head in a dark fuzz that seemed to crackle with static.
    Ella made a face at herself in the mirror. She felt ridiculous for caring so much. Billy would laugh if he could see her standing here.
    She could hear him now.
    ‘That Katrina’s sending you daft,’ he’d snort.
    But then she felt the panic beginning to rise in her, as if she were bursting out of her skin, as if her clothes couldn’t hold her. She could barely swing her legs under the kitchen table any more.
    ‘A fine young lass, your Ella’s making,’ she’d heard Mrs Stubbs, the owner of the shoe shop on the corner say, collecting a new dress for her eldest daughter. ‘Our Elizabeth just won’t grow. I try to feed her up but she’s all skin and bone.’ 
    Ella vowed privately to eat even less. She hated being taller already than Mamma. She thought this was how Alice must have felt when she ate the cake and felt her body grow so big that it pressed against the walls of the house and she had to hang her elbow out of the bedroom window and her foot out of the downstairs door.
    It was hard not to draw attention to yourself when you felt the