Free Be Strong & Curvaceous by Shelley Adina

“You’re the kindest person I know.”
    “You must not know very many people, then.” My shoulders slumped. “Mac said something about us being friends and I didn’t give her an answer. She hasn’t spoken to me since. Well, except just now when she and Vanessa came in to pack and we sort of got into it.”
    “Tell all.” Lissa settled in for the show. All that was missing was the popcorn and soda.
    I sketched it out for them, and when I was finished, Gillian shook her head. “We might have known she’d gravitate to that crowd. I mean, it was really only a matter of time. I don’t think you’ve lost anything.”
    “You don’t belong with them, Carly.” Lissa came to sit beside me and gave me a hug. “You’re too nice. Too real. You need to get off that stupid committee before you turn into a pod person.”
    “A what?”
    “You know, those things from
Night of the Living Dead
.”
    She really needs to stop watching the SciFi channel. “Uh, no.”
    “Never mind.” She shook her hair back. “The point is, we’re way more fun than they are, and we don’t give a rip what they think. You’re coming to dinner with us, right?”
    I nodded. I knew who my real friends were. The thing that nagged at me was, I’d just read in my online study that it was better to hang a rock around your neck and throw yourself into the sea than to offend somebody. I’d offended Mac, and the knowledge was just like that rock, weighing me down.
    But it would be easier to be chucked into the Pacific to drown than to ask Vanessa Talbot’s new BFF to forgive me.

Chapter 7
    S ATURDAY MORNING, I came up with a plan. By nine I’d made it to the dining room for breakfast and back out again with no one seeing me, and by ten I was on the bus. I needed to find a job far enough away from the school so I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew, but close enough that it would be easy to get to. The bus was the solution. It stopped just across from the Spencer playing fields and went all the way to Chinatown.
    I started there, at Tori Wu’s loft, where I’d made an appointment for eleven.
    “Carly,” she said, shaking hands. “You’re Gillian Chang’s friend.”
    “It’s nice to see you again,” I replied, relieved that she remembered me from when we’d been there in September, buying a Benefactors’ Day Ball dress for Gillian. “Thank you for making time for me.”
    “What can I do for you? A special dress?” She pulled the measuring tape from around her neck and sat, tossing it onto a drafting table behind her. There was no tea and fashion show this time—I was not, after all, Gillian’s aunt Isabel, with all the money of the Formosa-Pacific banking family behind me.
    “No.” I gulped. “I need to find a job to pay for some of my school expenses, and I was wondering if you had an opening.” Her lashes flickered with surprise, and I hurried on. “I’m willing to do anything—sweep up scraps, answer the phone, place orders. I’ve been sewing all my life and I’m taking design classes. See?” I reached into my bag and pulled out a sheaf of spot drawings: a cuff detail, a neckline, a ruffled hem insert.
    She riffled through them. “These are yours? Very nice.” She looked up. “But I’m afraid I don’t have anything open right now. I could use someone this summer, though. My cutter’s assistant is going out on maternity leave, if you’re interested in applying. You wouldn’t get minimum wage. You’d get what the other assistants get.”
    In spite of my disappointment in the short term, I could hardly believe my luck. “Wow. I—I’d be honored to interview. And I’m hoping to enter a dress in the Design Your Dreams show, if you want to see a sample of my work. Have you heard about it?”
    “Oh, yes. They called me last week. I’ll look forward to seeing your sample.” Her keen glance ran down the front of my jacket with its notched hem that, I realized, had begun with the very drawing she held. “Speaking