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  She took a deep breath. Allegra’s life definitely moved at a much faster pace than Emma’s.

  “I guess she’s going to have to like one of the designs I’ll work up for the pop-up shop. Once I’ve figured out the design, maybe Marjorie can help me out with the sewing.” She bit her lip. “I just hope Paige’s plan is epic, because otherwise I’m really not seeing how I’m going to pull off this meeting.”

  “I can do this,” Emma whispered, staring at the framed Coco Chanel picture in her locker. “I can do this. I can do this.”

  “Em, there you are!” Holly’s voice sang out.

  Emma spun around and watched Holly expertly dodge and weave through the pre-homeroom throngs in the school hallway. Ivana was by her side. Both looked majorly excited, though Emma didn’t have the mental energy to wonder why. It was Tuesday morning, and she’d spent the entire subway ride to school trying to figure out how she was going to fit Rylan’s dress design into her already packed schedule for the next few weeks. Assuming that Paige came up with some miracle solution to the meeting dilemma, that is, which still didn’t seem like a sure thing to Emma.

  Holly and Ivana slid to a stop in front of her. “Huge news!” Holly squealed, grabbing Emma by the arm. “We just found out where Rylan’s Sweet Sixteen is going to be!”

  “Yeah, me too,” Emma said, still distracted by her own thoughts. She visualized her sketches—the babydoll mini, Holly’s velvet smock-dress, a tiered princess-gown concept she was playing around with, and a super-simple, sashed party dress...Would one of these be right for Rylan? “It’s at some fancy new club called Chateau.”

  There was a moment of silence. That finally broke Emma out of her mental sketchbook. She blinked, realizing that Holly and Ivana were both staring at her, shocked.

  “Um, how’d you hear?” Holly asked.

  Her voice sounded fairly normal. But her expression spoke louder than her words. Emma felt uncomfortable as she realized that this was where their friendship was now. Holly was “the cool one,” the one who was supposed to find out about important news like major high-school parties. Emma was the one who would be forever hopelessly clueless, verging on nerdy.

  “Uh...” Emma thought fast. “Charlie told me?”

  Holly seemed willing to accept that. But Ivana narrowed her eyes. “You mean weirdo Charlie Calhoun you’re always hanging around with?” she said. “How would he find out something like that?”

  “I don’t know.” Emma busied herself rearranging books in her locker to avoid their stares. “I guess he overheard some high-school kids talking about it.”

  “Come on, Ivana.” Holly blew a bright citrusy-orange bubble and popped it. “Let’s go find Lexie. She’ll die when she hears this! She’s been talking about Chateau ever since her mom covered the big grand opening last month on the eleven o’clock news.”

  “Okay,” Ivana said.

  Emma didn’t pull her head out of her locker until she was sure they were gone. Even then, she could still feel Ivana’s eyes boring into her.

  “So you’re sure you won’t reconsider my ugly-dress plan?” Charlie asked. “I could help you go Dumpster diving for some awesome materials.”

  Emma laughed as she entered the lobby of her building. Charlie had just called. He had a paper due the next day, so he’d gone straight home from school instead of meeting at Laceland.

  “What’s that music in the background?” Emma asked.

  Charlie groaned. “Don’t ask. Mom’s teaching a class called Musical Theater for Beginners. She should have called it Musical Theater for the Tone Deaf.”

  Emma winced as she heard someone start belting out an enthusiastic but off-key version of “Hello, Dolly.” There was a reason they didn’t hang out at Charlie’s apartment much.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’m going to bring all of the sketches of the dresses I’m thinking about for the pop-up shop tomorrow. I thought that would be a good place to start to see what Rylan likes.”

  Charlie had already agreed to come along for moral support. And Paige had agreed that Charlie could come only after Emma explained to her how unbearably nervous she was about meeting with Rylan. Here was the plan: Emma and Charlie would both be posing as Allegra’s interns, as they’d done before. They had fooled Paige with that routine, for a little while anyhow.

  Emma felt her heart clench. Paige still hadn’t filled her in on the rest of her plan yet. If Emma was going to be an intern, who was going to be Allegra? She stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor, trying not to panic. Paige hadn’t let her down so far, had she? Emma just had to trust her. What choice did she have?

  “Maybe Rylan will just pick one of the designs,” she told Charlie. “I sketched out a bunch of different options.”

  “Oh.” She could almost hear Charlie’s shrug over the phone, even over the cringe-inducing background singing. He was totally invested in Allegra, but he was never too interested in the actual details of the sewing part. “Okay. So back to the pop-up stuff. When are you hitting Allure?”

  “Soon. Maybe Saturday.”

  Emma felt a shiver of excitement. She loved Allure Fabrics, with its floor-to-ceiling racks of textiles of every description. She could—and sometimes did—spend all day wandering the cramped aisles, drinking in the sight and touch and smell of the silks and the poplins, the eyelets and brocades, the crisp cottons and flowing chiffons. Thousands of bolts of fabric in every weight, every texture, every shade of the rainbow. Dreaming of all the clothes yet to be imagined, designed, and created.

  “The best part is,” she added, switching the phone to her other ear, “I won’t be working on a super-tight budget for once. I still can’t believe how much Rylan’s parents are willing to shell out for this one dress. I almost died when Paige told me.”

  “A true silver lining,” Charlie agreed. “Lining, get it? See what I did there? Sewing humor.”

  Emma dug out her keys as she reached her front door. “If you say sew,” she replied. “Ha-ha. I can do it, too. Anyway, I’ll be able to afford really top-of-the-line material...”

  Her voice trailed off as she entered the apartment and heard her mother call out her name. A second later Joan Rose appeared around the corner, looking excited.

  “Emma!” she exclaimed. “Big news!”

  “Got to go,” Emma told Charlie. “Call you later.” Clicking off her phone, she dropped her bag on the worn gingham fabric of the front-hall bench. “What’s up?” she asked.

  Her mother smiled and tugged on a strand of gray-tinged brown hair that had come loose from her sloppy bun. She had one of Noah’s oversized wool sweaters wrapped around her, which probably meant the heat was on the fritz again. The mass of mud-brown wool might be cozy, but it didn’t do much for her look.

  Joan Rose lived in an interchangeable, bland sea of sensible slacks, comfortable shoes, and organic cotton tops that Emma had long ago dubbed Academic Drab. And no matter what Emma did, she couldn’t convince her mother to brighten up her so-called style. She couldn’t even talk her into updating the green plastic glasses she’d been wearing for as long as Emma could remember.

  “I just found out you made the cut,” Joan said, shoving the glasses farther up her nose. “You’re going to be in Betsy’s western civ class next semester!”

  “Oh.” Emma shrugged off her brown velvet trench coat as she took in the news. She’d almost forgotten about that. Her mom had insisted she try out for a special class that her mother’s best friend, Betsy Ling, taught every second semester at Downtown Day. The test had been tough, and Emma had assumed she probably wouldn’t get in. Not that she cared—she certainly wasn’t begging for more homework. “Um, that’s cool, I guess.”

  “Cool?” Her mother sighed. “Humor me here, Emma. This is big news. You won’t believe how much you’re going to learn from Betsy. It’s going to open all kinds of doors for you.” She clasped her hands together, beaming happily. “As soon as this fashion-shop business is out
of the way, maybe you and I can spend the holiday season hitting some museums. You know, get you a little head start before the class starts up in January? What do you say?”

  Emma didn’t know what to say. She was stuck on the first part: “As soon as this fashion-shop business is out of the way.” Did she think that this was it for Allegra? That when the pop-up shop closed down, Emma would just go back to her ordinary life?

  Then again, why was she even surprised? Her mom was pretty cool in a lot of ways. She tried really hard to stay out of Emma’s face at Downtown Day, where she taught English over in the high school. But it was fairly clear that she’d never really understood Emma’s passion for fashion. She seemed to think her daughter’s obsession with clothes was something she’d eventually outgrow, like unicorn stickers and hating cooked carrots.

  At least she’s letting me do the pop-up shop collection, Emma reminded herself. After the way Emma had kept Allegra a secret from them in the beginning, she knew her parents could have put an end to the whole thing. Instead they’d allowed her to move ahead with it and were even fronting the money for materials.

  Okay, so Emma’s dad was probably the more enthusiastic one—after all, he was in the fashion business himself, at least in a peripheral way. Her mom, on the other hand, seemed to be treating the whole situation as some huge extra-credit project, something that would be forgotten as soon as the grades were in.

  Still, Emma figured the least she could do was pretend to be happy about this extra class for her mom’s sake. After all, school was her mom’s life. Emma got that. She just wished that once in a while her mom could at least pretend to understand that fashion was Emma’s life—and that that would never, ever change.

  “Out,” Emma ordered as she stepped into her room after dinner and spotted her ten-year-old brother, William, crouching in front of her bookshelf.

  William scowled at her. “Chillax, spaz girl. I was just checking to see if you have any books about ancient Greece. I have a stupid report due tomorrow.”

  “My room isn’t the public library.”

  William made a mean face at her and stalked out. Emma shut the door behind him and flopped onto her bed, which was adorned with dozens of pillows she had sewn with her fabric scraps, working them into increasingly complicated patterns. When Grandma Grace had first given her the sewing machine, she’d had Emma practice by sewing fabric scraps together. These grew into quilt-like swaths of material that were then stuffed and sewn up to make pillows. Emma still found it relaxing and rewarding to turn her scraps into colorful accessories.

  She reached for the basket where she kept the glossy, exotic foreign fashion magazines she bought at her favorite magazine shop near Bryant Park. Right now she had everything from the French and Italian editions of Madison and the British Tatler to more obscure choices like Baila and Egg from Japan and Unfair from Abu Dhabi.

  Dumping them all out, she flipped through pages, still focused on Rylan’s dress. Could she really pull this off? Could she and Paige convince super-finicky Rylan that she was really working with some big-time international designer like the ones in these magazines?

  She tossed aside the magazines and rolled onto her back. She found herself staring at a drawing hanging on the bulletin board by her desk. Not one of hers. Jackson’s. He was into comic-book art, and he’d sketched a cool action shot of a character that looked like an ordinary kid crossed with a superhero. When Emma had admired it, he’d ripped it out of his notebook and given it to her.

  Now it was hanging where she could see it from every part of the room. At first, looking at it made her shiver. But now that Jackson and Lexie seemed to be so tight, it just gave her one more reason to wonder why everything in life had to be so complicated. She should be excited about the pop-up shop deal, but now she had this extra thing with Rylan to stress about. Just like she should be thrilled that Jackson had given her his sketch, except what was the point when he was with Lexie?

  It was as if every bit of good news had to come with some bad news, too. Like wrinkles in an otherwise perfect dress.

  Her cell phone rang, pulling her out of her thoughts.

  “I just heard the cool news!” Holly exclaimed. “I wanted to call and congratulate you.”

  Emma’s head spun. The cool news? Was she talking about the pop-up shop? About Allegra? Had Holly found out her secret?

  “Um, what?” she blurted out.

  “The Western Civ class,” Holly prompted. “Lexie got in, too. She said she saw your name on the list. Didn’t you hear yet?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Emma’s heartbeat slowed to normal. Holly hadn’t discovered the truth about Allegra Biscotti. Just about the stupid extra class. She couldn’t drag enough pep into her voice to fake that she cared. “Mom just told me, actually.”

  “Oh. Aren’t you excited? You sound kind of weird.”

  Emma hesitated, wishing she could tell Holly about the whole Rylan situation. As strange as it seemed, Holly was now the best person Emma knew at dealing with popular kids. And popular high-school kids—well, forget that.

  But she couldn’t tell her. Not without giving everything away. “No, it’s cool,” she said. “I’m just in a funk about trying to finish all those geometry problems we got for homework tonight.”

  Holly laughed and said something, but Emma hardly heard her. She was thinking that this was just another wrinkle—having something completely amazing like Allegra Biscotti happen, but not being able to share it with her best friend.

  BELLISSIMA

  Emma leaned her elbows on the cafeteria table and stared at Holly, mentally redressing her in the new version of Holly’s pink velvet dress she’d been working on. Emma had decided on a brown plaid flannel to contrast with the girliness of the princess pink. She would add panels of the flannel on the sides to expand the bodice to a grown-up size, and the flannel would be used to extend the puffy, pink cap sleeves so they would end at the elbow in soft, brown plaid. Emma still needed to search for just the right buttons for the French cuffs she’d designed. This contrast of girly and serious, young and sophisticated, was going to set the tone for all of her pieces.

  As Holly laughed and moved around in her seat, reacting to whatever stupid stuff Ivana and the others were saying, Emma desperately hoped she’d have the chance to give the dress to Holly and to come clean about the whole Allegra thing...

  “Earth to Emma!”

  Emma blinked, realizing that Holly was waving a hand in front of her face. “Um, what?” Emma said. “Sorry, I was thinking about something.”

  “Obviously.” Holly smiled. “I said, are you going to eat the rest of your chips? Shaye’s been staring at them like a hungry hyena.”

  “Help yourself.” Emma pushed the half-eaten bag of chips across the table toward Shannon.

  “Thanks.” Shannon grabbed the bag and stuffed a few chips into her mouth. Even Emma, who tried not to pay any more attention to the Bees than she had to, had noticed that Shannon always seemed to be ravenous these days. Probably because she’d been growing so fast that she was almost as tall as Holly, though so far the growth spurt hadn’t added any curves to Shannon’s athletic body.

  “Gross. I don’t know how anyone eats that garbage.” Ivana wrinkled her nose, sipped delicately at her flavored water, and then glanced around the table. “Is someone’s phone turned on?” she added. “I hear buzzing.”

  “Not me,” Kayla said. “Mr. Manning threatened to have me expelled if he caught me texting in the caf one more time.”

  When the phone buzzed again, Emma realized it was coming from the pocket of her heather-gray cardigan. Oops. She had left her regular phone in her locker. There were strict school rules about that. But she’d forgotten that the Allegra phone was tucked in the pocket of her sweater when she had grabbed it from her locker before lunch.

  “I think it’s me,” she said, reaching into the oversized pocket. She glanced down, raising the phone slightly to get a look at the caller ID without letting anyone e
lse see. Paige Young, the readout blinked.

  Holly leaned across the table and caught a glimpse of the cherry-colored flip. “Hey, that’s not your regular phone!” she exclaimed. “Sweet! Why didn’t you tell me you got a new one?”

  She lunged across the table, making a move to grab it. Panicking, Emma jerked back to keep it out of her reach. What if Holly recognized Paige’s name on the readout? She and the other girls read Madison almost as religiously as Emma did. She had to grab the edge of the table to keep from ending up splayed on the floor.

  “Hey!” Ivana complained as the table shook, almost tipping over her cherry nonfat yogurt. “Do you mind? Some of us are trying to eat here.”

  “Sorry,” Emma mumbled, feeling stupid as she pushed the phone down into her pocket. “Um, Holly startled me.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Holly looked confused.

  Ivana’s eyes darted from Emma’s face to her sweater, as if calculating whether what had just happened was worth commenting on. Deciding not to give her the chance, Emma stood. “I just remembered I, uh, have a book I’m supposed to get back to the library before the end of today,” she said. “Better go take care of that. Bye.”

  She hurried away with Holly’s “Later, Em!” floating after her. None of the others said anything. They’d probably already forgotten she was ever there. Not that Emma cared. She only sat with them because Holly pretty much insisted, waving and yoo-hooing the second Emma entered the cafeteria every day.

  So far Emma hadn’t had the heart to ignore her and sit down somewhere else, but it was starting to get tempting. True, Charlie claimed to be allergic to the cafeteria and ate in the student lounge most of the time. But he wasn’t her only other friend at Downtown Day. She could easily find another group to sit with. A group that wouldn’t act as if they were doing her a favor by allowing her brown-bag lunch to rest on the same table as theirs.