Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [44]
“Why’s Mary smiling like that?” asked Paula, loud enough to blast me from my fantasy.
“It must be something I said,” said my mother. “Was it about going back to the electric blue, or was it about mixing softener with the slip?”
I made a face at Paula. “I was just smiling, that’s all. Is it a crime to smile in this family all of a sudden?”
“Not a crime,” said my mother. “But it means you weren’t really listening. It could be considered a misdemeanour.”
I gave her a mocking smile.
Obviously, I couldn’t actually ask Mrs Baggoli if I could borrow Eliza’s dress, if for no other reason than that she’d say no and I would have no recourse. Not only were all the costumes school property, but mine was Mrs Trudeo’s Advanced Dressmaking project; it had to go back after the last performance to be graded. But I couldn’t not ask Mrs Baggoli and just take it home for the weekend, because all the costumes were locked away in the drama club cupboard for safekeeping. Only Mrs Baggoli and Mrs Ludley, the janitor, had a key.
But at least I knew what I was aiming for. I would comb the second-hand clothes stores of Deadwood and all the nearby towns. I was bound to come up with something. I could feel it in my bones.
“So, Lola, you’re all right to do that for me tomorrow?” shouted my mother, rather as if she’d said it before.
“Do what?”
“Pick up the car at the garage. I have to get this order finished by Sunday.”
“In the afternoon,” I said quickly. “I have something to do in the morning.”
That night I dreamed Ella and I were at the concert. We were in the front row, right in the middle. Carla Santini was there, too, of course. She was sitting in the front, but to the side. She was wearing a very expensive and sophisticated dress – black to match her heart – but she might as well have been wearing a blue flannel and a baseball cap with her Calvin Klein jeans as far as Stu Wolff was concerned. He must have walked past Carla at least a hundred times as he danced around the stage, but he never gave her a second look. He noticed me in my red satin dress, my hair down and my eyes dark and passionate, looking like a gipsy queen while he was singing my all-time favourite Sidartha song, “Only with You” (Only with you does this world seem all right … only with you do I see a true light…) From then on he sang every song right to me. I didn’t smile or giggle or do anything silly like Carla would have done, I just sat there, my eyes looking into his, reading his heart and his soul as surely as he read mine. At the end of the last encore, Stu picked up a red rose someone had thrown at him earlier, leaned over the stage and handed it to me as though it were a precious jewel. I stood on my tiptoes to reach his kiss.
I could still feel his lips on mine when I woke up.
I was outside the first store by ten.
“Describe it to me again?” said Mrs Magnolia. Mrs Magnolia ran Second Best, the sixth store I tried.
“It’s the kind of dress Scarlett O’Hara might have worn if she’d wanted to break every heart in Atlanta,” I explained for the third time. “But modern. No hoops or anything.”
Mrs Magnolia shook her head, her eyes moving past the racks of sweatshirts and sweaters that took up most of the store.
“I don’t think we have anything even close to that,” she informed me sadly, “but you’re welcome to look in the formal-dress section.”
“I have looked.” The formal dress section contained nothing but bridesmaid dresses in the colours of cheap candy. I gave her the hopeful look of a kid on a Christmas card. “I was just wondering if maybe you had stuff in the back. You know, stuff that hasn