“Okay!” I rushed in, eager to rid myself of the clothes I was wearing and put something on that was more me. The dress in my hand was the most vibrant thing I’d ever touched. The yellow color was in the center of a big circle, like the sun, and from it radiated this bright teal and lime that faded into the surrounding white of the dress.
“Here.” Sindi said as a swath of fabric come over the top of the changing-room wall. “This is a headband that goes with the dress, but it’s probably waaaay too much.”
I took the fabric in my hands: bright yellow sequins and beads and bells hung from it. “I love it.”
I whipped my clothes off and then climbed into the dress. It was a maxi, almost touching the floor, and it fell in a way that when you moved from side to side, it swished like water might do. The fabric looked alive. Like it was its own living, breathing creature. The sleeves were long and bell-bottom shaped, gaping open at the elbows and hanging down in long wisps. I wrapped the headband around the top of my head and, when I was happy with it, I pulled the curtain aside and burst back into the room with a flourish, my dress flapping against my legs as if it was being blown by the wind.
“Ta-da!” I announced. I felt like a glowing kaleidoscope of colors. “I love it!”
Noah and Sindi’s eyes were fixed on me.
“What?” I asked, incredulously.
But they didn’t say anything. Instead they shared a look.
“What?” I pressed.
“It looks great,” Noah finally said.
“Amazing!” Sindi echoed. “I love it.”
“You guys mean it?” I asked. But the big, warm smiles on their faces as they looked at me made me realize they did.
“It’s totally nuts. And only you could pull that off,” Sindi said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued by this statement, which seemed to imply a level of knowing.
“Well, you’re clearly really fashionable,” she said.
“I am?”
“Well, I’m assuming. You’ve got great eyebrows, and your haircut—not many women would wear it so short like that. You’re obviously a creative of some kind. And your eyes, so big. You’ve got this whole fun pixie thing going on.”
“Fun pixie? A creative?” I loved the way it sounded. I looked at myself in the mirror again, swooshing from side to side, watching the skirt move rhythmically back and forth.
“Or, maybe you’re actually a hippie, arrived on a time machine from the sixties,” Sindi said, coming up behind me, adjusting the dress. “Or maybe you grew up in a commune in the forest somewhere, which sort of weirdly makes sense because you know so much about trees.”
“You think?” I swung around and looked at her and then Noah, excited by all these sudden theories about me and my possible origins. This was the first time that someone was actually suggesting concrete explanations for who I might be.
“That kind of makes sense, right? Why else would I know about trees? I love that, that maybe I was raised in some wild and free hippie camp. All tie-dye and barefoot. Maybe we lived in treehouses; close to nature. Lots of birds, a babbling brook.”
I glanced at Noah, and he was smiling from ear to ear now. That big, tiny-gap smile. “What do you think?”
“I mean, it does sort of make some sense. You were adamant about watering my pot plants and you knew which one should go where.”
“I did, right?” I turned back to the mirror. Was this who I was? Some free-spirited hippie? Or maybe a fashionable creative? I swished from side to side again, and the colors all blurred into one then came apart again as the dress stopped moving, I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.
“I never thought I would ever hear myself say this,” Sindi said, “but this look totally works on you, and in real life, not on stage.”
I looked over at Noah again now for additional confirmation and I found it when he started nodding.
“It’s you,” he said, in such a matter-of-fact tone that I believed him. This was me, obviously!
“And now you have some more things to add to your list,” he said.
CHAPTER 26
Noah and I climbed back into the car. We’d spent a few hours at Sindi’s drinking coffee and talking. I liked her very much. She was certainly the coolest person I’d ever met and I was thrilled when, at the end of the visit, she gave me her phone number and told me to call her whenever I wanted to—as soon as I got a phone.
