All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [86]
“Why, Miss Lane,” Dallas said. “You are lovely. The world can be such a dreary place; you should help light it.”
Amanda blushed so hard, Fiona felt the heat on her skin three paces away.
Before Fiona could figure out how that was possible, there was a great crash outside.
She went to the window and glanced between the boards.
That gang of boys threw rocks at a tiny car that sputtered by on the street. They shouted after it, and then all laughed and took swigs from bottles wrapped in paper bags. What a bunch of creeps!
Amanda, however, was too busy admiring her new hair to even notice.
Madame Cobweb returned then, wheeling a rack loaded with dresses and slacks, gossamer blouses, and carrying a separate tray of necklaces, bracelets, and earrings.
“Pour les belles jeunes dames. Miss Post”—she gestured to the right side of the rack—“and Miss Lane”—she waved to the left side. “Please, help yourselves. The dressing rooms are this way.”
Fiona and Amanda exchanged a look and then shrugged, grabbed an armload of clothes each, and stepped into the dressing rooms.
If Fiona tried on a few things to appease Dallas, then maybe they could find a moment to have a serious talk with her aunt about the League and what it meant to be a goddess . . . surely more than fancy clothes.
She got out of her uniform and wriggled into a gown of gray silk that flared about her ankles.
A perfect fit.
Fiona had never had clothes like this—no puckering, not too long or too short, no binding in all the wrong places. It felt better than her own skin.
She added a string of jade beads and turned to the full-length mirror. Her breath hiccupped in her throat. She looked great. Like a model.
Sure, she was still stuck with her unmanageable hair and her face . . . but that almost didn’t matter with this dress. The silver made her skin look luminous.
She wanted it. And she wanted to wear clothes like this all the time.
She twirled, and smiled, and then stopped.
So why did it also feel so weird? So wasteful?
“This is great,” Amanda whispered from the adjacent changing room.
“Let me see.”
They both stepped out. Fiona was dumbstruck.
Amanda wore spike red heels and a red skirt that fell to her knees and clung about her slender waist, a white silk blouse, raw rubies that flashed against her skin, and a smart little jacket to match. She had auburn highlights in her hair that Fiona had never noticed before. When she smiled, she looked like a princess or a model on the cover of a magazine. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she had something that had eluded Fiona.
“Wonderful!” Dallas clapped her hands. She hugged them both. “Try something else.”
There was a scratch at Fiona’s wrist: the price tag.
She looked and gasped. Dollar or euros, it wouldn’t matter, this one dress cost more than she made working all last summer at Ringo’s Pizza Palace.
She had the credit card Audrey had given her. That was supposed to be for school supplies and emergencies. Did this qualify as school supplies? Hadn’t Aunt Dallas said there might be school dances? Maybe her clothes were a justifiable fashion emergency?
No. It’d be breaking a rule.
“I’ll just change back,” she murmured, so softly that she thought only she heard.
“Oh no no no,” Dallas said. “Don’t worry about price.” She waved her hand toward Madame Cobweb. “Put it on my account.”
“Oui, mademoiselle. Very generous.”
Amanda trembled with joy and took Dallas’s hands. She looked like she was going to cry.
“Thanks, Aunt Dallas,” Fiona replied. “I don’t know what to say. . . .”
She really didn’t know what to say. She was grateful, more than she could express, and she did want the clothes—all of them—but wanting them felt a little like those truffles that she had gotten this summer—delicious and sweet . . . and poisoned. It was too much, too perfect.
Audrey’s often-repeated mantra came to her: Too-generous presents come with strings.
Outside the store came muted shouts.
Fiona moved to the window as Dallas and Amanda fell on the rack of clothes, riffling for a new selection.
Those boys again