Page 48 of Babies for the Big Shot
Maybe it’s stress.
Or bad sushi.
Or a cursed cheese stick from the back of my fridge.
Ugh, I need a distraction. I grab my phone and start furiously texting.
Sara: I’m stuck in a silk sausage casing and Nick just gave me an eyebrow.
Laura: What kind of eyebrow?
Sara: THE eyebrow.
Laura: OMG do you need to fake a fainting spell?
Tempting.
But I can’t even pretend to faint in this thing. If I fall down, I might not get back up. I’ll be trapped in a puddle of red satin and crushed dignity until Bianca and her clipboard gently poke me with a hanger.
There’s a rustling outside. Probably Bianca coming to check on me with another designer death trap. I whisper a prayer to the gods of elastic and body tape and prepare to be emotionally steamrolled by whatever’s next.
Dress number three is… asituation.
There’s a neck ruffle.
A big one.
Elizabethan-court-drama-meets-high-fashion neck ruffle. The dress is black and sharply structured, the kind that probably once strode a runway to polite applause and lofty compliments about its “architectural” design.
I look vampiresque, refined and dark.
Brooding on a windswept castle balcony, reciting poetry to the moon, sipping blood from a vintage crystal coupe.
Halfway through struggling with the zipper, I black out. Between twisting my shoulder into unnatural positions and smelling my own panic sweat, I catch a glimpse of my soul slipping away, hovering near the ceiling light.
I stagger out anyway, dizzy and breathless and fully dead inside.
Bianca lets out a sound. It might be approval. Or concern. Hard to tell with her. She says, “It’s veryeditorial,” and I want to crawl into the coat rack and live there.
Nick’s glance lasts only a blink. No raised eyebrow. He leans against the velvet chair, the picture of effortless control. Calm, detached, absorbed in his phone while I spiral through a fashion meltdown in real time.
I drag myself back into the fitting room and peel off the Vampire’s Revenge, muttering curses in three languages, two of which I made up.
Then comes dress number four.
By the time I force the dress over my hips, my deodorant has given up, my bangs plaster against my forehead, and sweat beads beneath a suffocating mix of Chanel No. 5 and shame.
I step out, but even Bianca looks hesitant this time. That’s when you know it’s bad.
I turn. Look in the mirror.
And lose it.
Not a loud, frantic breakdown. More the silent kind, the kind where my spirit slips away and quietly weeps into a forgotten heap of tulle and regret.
I retreat to the dressing room and collapse onto the tiny velvet ottoman, every inch of me drained, swallowed by the weight of a private defeat no one else sees.
I sit there in my underwear, surrounded by sequins, silk, and moral decay, and question every life choice that led me here.
