Free Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck Page B

had to be refitted from the skin out. Tanya had whipped the sweatshirt from around my waist, carried it away in two fingers, and dropped it somewhere.
    I needed a look that said prom night now—that said senior year and then some. Sequin sleeveless top over black skirt that clung, then flared. Heels so high I was practically as tall as Natalie and practically towering over Makenzie. The shoes came to perfect points at the toe. Real instruments of torture—black lizard with ribbons that wound up my black-stockinged legs.
    Nothing about me said tenth grade. Nothing. Nothing.
    It was basically all about bras, as Natalie said. She had gone all through the bra bin and come back with one that had an underwire. Now when I looked down my sequined self, it seemed to be somebody else. And I couldn’t see my feet. And I didn’t look bad for somebody who was in a retainer fifteen months ago. Not bad at all.
    I wasn’t the only one who needed a bra intervention. They’d had to talk Makenzie out of her sports bra. But they did, and now she and I both had bosoms that could take us anywhere. Hers weren’t as spiky as her hair and heels, but they certainly made a couple of points. We looked at each other and screamed.
    Where were we by then? Not the bathroom. No, we were in Aunt Lily’s bedroom, her master suite on the other side of the dressing area. She had a bed in there like Cleopatra’s barge, except it was king-size, not queen. Big, swagging curtains kept out the night. The old disconnected ivory telephone at her bedside had a rotary dial. A strong scent of Aunt Lily’s perfume hung in the room, lily of the valley. There wasn’t a mirror on any wall, and that was better. There’d been thousands of us in the mirrored dressing room. Now it was just us four. Taller in our heels, swirlier in our skirts, bigger and bustier in our bras. I was the only one who didn’t need major makeup. Just a little something to make my eyes pop. Too much makeup too young is always a dead giveaway, Tanya always said. Too much makeup is always about being the most desperate girl in ninth grade.
    Though as Tanya also said, “A little lip gloss wouldn’t kill you, Kerry.”
    There we were in a room that had never changed, the four of us in a dangle of earrings, a wobble of heels, in a cloud of Arpège perfume out of a swag bag. The Arpège fought a little with the lily of the valley, and just under that, apple blossom.
    Jewels smoldered in Natalie’s hair. Tanya’s was simple and brushed back in that usual way of hers that could find all the lights in the room. Everything she did worked. Makenzie in glitter eyeliner was a whole different breed of Makenzie. Our skirts murmured against each other, urging us on. I suppose that was the moment when I was happiest.
    But I wondered. Were we really going out? Not that we needed to. We were our own music and the audience for each other.
    “How can you?” I dared to say.
    And they totally knew what I meant. How could they go out when everybody thought they were—
    “It’s New York, Kerry. It’s not Pondfield Podunk High School.” Tanya’s new eyebrows arched to the moon. “Kerry, it’s the world. Try really hard to keep up.”
    And now we were going, this minute. We’d slung the long cords of our little purses over our stunning shoulders. Tanya’s was a silver clutch. And we were staggering for the front door in our heels.
    The long hall to the front entry was a gallery of giant framed blowups of fashion models from some other time. It was the decade when models had only one name: Carmen. Dovima. All in plain little black dresses and white gloves like Jackie Kennedy or Audrey Hepburn. Dead ladies, and gorgeous, larger than life in full black-and-white.
    Except for the last poster. It wasn’t from a fashion shoot. It was for a Hollywood movie, in full color and then some. A Hollywood movie star with flame-colored hair in a movie with purple mountains in it. Blazing red hair, purple mountains,