Groggily, I turned to look at my alarm clock. The party was starting in half an hour. I was going to be late.
Again. For the second time today.
I ran over to my closet to go through my clothes. I remembered that it was a cocktail party. I didn’t know what that entailed but figured it probably meant a dress.
I didn’t own a dress. Literally, not a single one. I’d never had an occasion to wear one. My grandma had a personal vendetta against the fashion industry, dresses in particular, and I’d always preferred pants anyway. They had pockets.
There was no time to go buy a dress, not to mention that the last time I checked my bank account balance, I had three dollars and twenty-seven cents. I flipped through my clothes, as if pushing each hanger aside would suddenly reveal a dress I’d forgotten buying.
I got all the way to the far end when I did find a dress.
A dress I’d bought to cosplay as Arwen, the half-elven character from Lord of the Rings.
I couldn’t. Could I?
Grabbing my phone, I called Catalina. She answered without saying hello. “I was waiting for you to call me. How are you? Are you doing okay? Did you get online at all today to look for a new job? Because I found a couple that I think would—”
“I need your help,” I said. “The party’s starting and I have nothing to wear and I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be an old magical lady showing up with a pumpkin carriage and some talking mice to help make me a dress.”
“The party?” she echoed my words. “You’re still going to the company party? Even though you quit?”
“Yes.” I said it in a tone that hopefully would shut down this line of questioning. Technically, I no longer worked at Minx, but I had to find Craig and tell him about my feelings. I would have much easier access to him at a hotel than I would in the office. The office where I no longer had a way to get in the building.
Plus, like I’d already told her, he’d basically asked me to go with him and I wasn’t going to miss out on that opportunity.
She took the hint and shifted back to the reason I’d called. “Not a single dress? A prom dress? Something you wore to graduation?”
“No proms, and I wore jeans to both my graduations.”
“You’ll have to go buy something,” she said.
“My bank account has an echo,” I told her, holding the outfit up against me as I looked in the mirror. “The only thing I have is that cosplay dress.”
She hesitated. “The pale green Arwen one?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, okay, we can just accessorize it to make it look more modern.”
“That’s a lie, and you know I have no accessories.”
“I know!” Catalina said with a groan. “No accessory would help. I was trying to make this better. Hold on, I’m pulling the costume up online. I’d offer you something of mine, but that won’t work.”
She was right—she was a good eight inches shorter than me. It would be like me wearing a Band-Aid around my hips and saying it was a skirt. Maybe I could make something. I glanced over at my sheets, but there was no way. It was this costume or nothing.
“The bell sleeves have to go,” she said. “That’s the part closest to your wrist. I think if you remove the bottom half, the top lacy part that goes to the elbow would be okay.”
“Okay. Hold on.” I tried to rip the two sections of the sleeves apart, but nothing was happening. “I can’t get it! I think they stitched this thing together with titanium.”
“Do you have a seam ripper?”
“Do I seem like the kind of person who would have a seam ripper?” I looked at the clock again. I was running out of time, and this entire thing was stressing me out.
“Find a pair of scissors and cut the thread holding the two pieces together. Do not cut the fabric. That will look terrible.” She said that like she knew the entire thing would be awful and it would be hard to make it much worse than it already was.
I opened the top drawer of my desk and sifted through the heap until I found a pair of scissors. I did as she instructed, and it came undone. “It worked! But the lacy part looks frayed.”
“I’m guessing asking you to hem the edges would send you over the edge?”
“It’s fine. I’ll fix it. It will work. Right?” I was sure she’d be able to hear the desperation in my voice.
“People are probably still going to wonder what’s wrong with you, but it won’t be as bad as if you had the bell sleeves.”
“That’s the spirit!” I said, pushing a pile of clothes off the top of my desk until I found what I was looking for. I grabbed the stapler. “I will take not as bad as it could be. I’ll see you later and let you know how things go with Craig. Who might be my new boyfriend.”
“You still think that’s going to happen?” she asked. “What’s your plan?”
“I’m going to go up to him, make some small talk, maybe a joke or two, and then I’ll tell him that I quit my job for him and that I like him.”
She gasped. “Do not say you quit your job for him. That’s . . . too much.”
“Technically that’s not the reason I did it.” Right? It had been a noble thing about how I was being treated. It wasn’t about Craig and the nonfraternization rule. Like, at all.
But then why had I just said it? “Don’t you think he’ll find that romantic?”
“I do not. Also, don’t tell him you like him. You have to let him make some moves here.”
He already made moves. He’d asked for a dance and had stood very, very close to me. I decided to ignore her advice. I was going to go with what had worked nine times out of ten in my imagination. The tenth time it was him kissing me as soon as I walked in the room.
Which probably wasn’t going to happen, but I had faith in trying to do what I thought would make me happy.
With the mess I’d made of the rest of my life, I couldn’t think about whether or not things would work out with Craig. They had to.
“Okay,” I said, more to get her off my back than anything else. Catalina could be extremely persistent.
“Have fun. And if that free-range douchebag likes you while you’re wearing that costume, then he’s a better man than I’ve given him credit for. Good luck!”
I threw my phone on the bed and started doing my best to fix the edges of the sleeves. I could do this. I was an actual scientist. I could make a pattern that would hold two edges together.
It turned out to be considerably harder than I’d anticipated, given the lacy material had too many holes, but I did it.
Slipping the costume over my head, I tugged it into place. It was okay-ish. It could have been worse. This wasn’t too bad.
Or maybe my best friend had been right and I really was kind of delusional.
I considered leaving my hair down, but there was a line across the middle from the rubber band I’d used earlier, so I threw it up into a ponytail. I put on a pair of flats and studied my reflection. I turned around and saw the box on my bed, the one with all my stuff from work. It was a brief, ghoulish reminder of how I’d managed to upend my entire life.
Ignoring that sensation, I dug through it to find the prototype mascara and lipstick that Catalina had given me and put them on. I figured it couldn’t hurt.