Olivia Bennett - The Allegra Biscotti Collection

She truly loved the charcoal jacket and the belted dress. She just wished she was happier with her last-minute corset dress. It was good, but she suspected it wasn’t quite good enough. She could envision Paige shaking her head in disbelief, throwing around phrases such as, “overworked,” “tacky,” and “lacking vision.” How humiliating! If she was going to fail at this, she decided, she couldn’t fail with a dress she didn’t believe in.

All night, Emma tossed and turned in bed, redesigning the dress in her mind. Adding fabric, taking away fabric. Changing the hemline. Altering the shape. As the variations appeared and morphed on the inside of her eyelids, she felt as if morning would never come, and then suddenly it was here.

She rode the subway to school next to her mother as usual, except this morning she played a different game in her sketchbook. This game was called: Reimagine the Dress.

Emma waited for Holly at her locker. She realized that Sunday had passed without them talking. She needed to make things right. But Holly didn’t show. Emma shuffled into her first-period classroom and took her seat, her mind still focused on the dress. She now wondered if she shouldn’t reroute to Allure after school and buy more fabric to try to line the skirt. Or was that just ridiculous?

“I’ve never seen Lexie that mad before!” Emma overheard Kayla say two rows in front of her.

“I know,” Shannon agreed. She had the desk next to Kayla.

“You think she’s going to stay mad at Holly forever? If I were Lexie, I would. I mean, Holly stole Lexie’s boyfriend,” Kayla said.

Emma leaned forward slightly in her desk chair to hear more.

“Seriously!” Shannon gasped. “Holly was totally hanging all over Jackson. By the end of the night, she was practically sitting in his lap! It was pretty disgusting, if you ask me.”

“Who knew she was such a major flirt?” Kayla asked. “But what I don’t get is why she flirted with Jackson, when she’s known forever that Lexie likes him. There were a million other guys at the party she could’ve gone after.”

Mr. Whitmore entered the room, and the gossip session was put on hold. Emma tried to make sense of it. She completely expected Lexie to throw herself at Jackson, especially at a party, but how could Holly go after the one guy Emma liked? She wondered if Shannon and Kayla were telling the truth. Did Ivana put them up to it? She couldn’t figure it out.

Out in the hallway after class, Emma overheard two other girls talking about Kayla’s party. And Holly throwing herself at Jackson. Then in third-period English class, Sophia Hodges said knowingly to Claire Giberna, “I hear they’re a couple now.”

“They looked like they’d been a couple forever at the party,” Claire said.

Even though the girls didn’t say Holly and Jackson’s names, Emma knew who they were talking about. The news was clearly all over the school. Was Holly that mad at her for not coming to the party that she flirted with Jackson for revenge?

How could she, the one person who knew Emma best, do something so incredibly hurtful in such a public way? Holly had to know it would get back to Emma. Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she’d always had a thing for Jackson but had kept it from Emma. Maybe that’s why she wouldn’t answer Emma’s calls and texts yesterday.

“Where were you on Saturday night?” Holly demanded. She was waiting for Emma by their lockers. “I thought you got run over by a hot-dog cart or something.”

“That would’ve been even more convenient than me not showing up, wouldn’t it?” Emma met Holly’s gaze.

“What are you talking about?” Holly asked, her eyes narrowing.

“How could you not know? The whole school knows you were all over Jackson at Kayla’s party.”

“Are you kidding me? I wasn’t all over Jackson,” Holly said.

“That’s not the way I heard it. Seems you were in his lap the entire night.” Emma could hear her voice growing louder. She and Holly had never fought before, but after everything that had happened over the past couple of months—all the uncomfortable moments and the feeling that they’d never gotten back in their groove after Holly got home from summer vacation—suddenly Emma couldn’t stop herself. It was all just spilling out.

“What are you talking about?” Holly demanded. She whipped around and glared at a group of girls in the hall who were not at all subtle about listening in. The girls retreated, giggling and whispering.

“Don’t pretend with me. Everyone is talking about how you hooked up with Jackson. Just because I didn’t show up—and by the way, I had a very good reason for that— didn’t give you the right to do that to me. That’s just cruel.” Emma took a deep, almost painful, gulp of air. “And I never thought you were cruel.”

Holly had a look on her face that Emma had never seen before—a mix of anger, disbelief, and embarrassment maybe—and suddenly Emma worried that they’d just crossed some invisible line. In all their years of friendship, she had never lashed out at Holly like that.

“Wow,” Holly finally said. “I can’t believe you would accuse me of doing that, especially since I’ve literally been going out of my way to get you and Jackson together all semester. And you know what else? This was just another time out of maybe like a million that you showed zero effort to be friends with Ivana and the girls—and zero effort to be friends with me. You blew me off, Em, so I really don’t know who you think you are to be mad at me .”

Emma was stunned. “You are so amazingly selfish!” she cried. She brushed by Holly and practically ran to fourth period.

She didn’t stop shaking until the end of seventh period.

By the time the final bell rang, Emma was beyond desperate to escape school and Holly and get to Laceland. She grasped the twenty-dollar bill her mom had slipped her in the hall for a cab. Even her mother knew the importance of an extra fifteen minutes today. Scrambling to shove the right notebooks in her bag at her locker, Emma checked her phone. A text from Paige—no surprise there.

Ms. B: Sending a messenger @ 5pm sharp 2 pick up 3 pieces from ur collection. Model fitting is @ 6. Pls confirm they’ll b ready. No margin 4 error. Ciao, PY

“No margin for error,” Emma repeated, as she sprinted out the front doors. Wonderful. The last twenty-four hours had been nothing but a study in mess-ups. Her vest was messed up, and now her friendship with Holly was completely messed up. She definitely did not want to add to that growing list.

If the messenger is coming at five o’clock, that only gives me a little more than two hours, she figured. She still needed to check everything—make sure all the loose threads were snipped off and every button was secure—and sew in the Allegra Biscotti labels that she had embroidered with hot-pink thread at home. Plus she had to steam out all of the wrinkles.

She knew she had to get creative and make that corset dress work, because there was no extra time to start over. What she was going to do, she still had no clear idea. Her fingers clenched into fists. This dress could end her dream. She tried to take deep breaths, to push away the suffocating stress so she could create.

Sitting in the backseat of the taxi that blessedly was zipping up Sixth Avenue despite the traffic, Emma psyched herself up. This was the final push. Paint splatters or no paint splatters, she would finish what she started and make it great. Emma typed quickly: