After YouTube tutorials, three safety pins, a belt I borrowed from Ivy, and a gold cuff from a girl down the hall, I’m done. The result is an ivory sheath belted at the waist, both shoulders covered, hem to the calf, plus the synthetic laurel wreath Luca delivered yesterday.
I look like I could be displayed in the Greek and Roman wing at the Met.
But when Ivy steps out of the bathroom, every decision I’ve made in the last two hours becomes wrong. Because while what she’s wearing is technically a toga, it’s a toga in the same way a napkin is technically clothing.
She’s arranged it so the slit is high on the left thigh. Up top, one shoulder is bare, and the other is doing structural work that one drink will undo. Her short bob is tucked behind her ears, and she’s done something with her eyeliner that makes her blue eyes slightly feral.
She catches my expression in the mirror and grins. “You like?” she says.
I squint. “Is that my bedsheet?”
“It was your bedsheet.” She tugs the strap back into place. “It’s a toga now.”
I want to say she can’t wear that, but I can’t, because she is and she looks incredible, which is the annoying part. She looks like she got dressed in forty seconds and landed in a much better place than the one I spent two hours trying to reach.
“You look great,” I say.
“I look like a centurion’s slutty girlfriend,” she says, pleased. “And you?—”
“Don’t.”
“—look like the chaperone who makes sure the chaperones behave.”
I pretend I didn’t hear her and apply a coat of gloss to my lips, because after the night at the Lantern I’m going for demure, especially around Mason. Behind me in the mirror, Ivy adjusts the knot at her hip, which pulls the material away from her chest to offer me alotof side-boob.
She catches my eye in the mirror, suddenly serious. “You good? You’re doing your face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you say you’re fine when I ask.”
“I am fine.”
She keeps looking at me, waiting me out.
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“It’s something…”
“There’s a boy in my head. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s not happening.”
“Mason?” she says. “I thought that was happening?”
I hesitate for half a second, maybe less, but Ivy catches it and her face lights up.
“It’s not happening?”
“No, it is.” I hesitate again. “I just?—”
She squeals, delighted. “You’re dating Mason, and there’s some other boy taking up room in your head. Sloane Avery. You little slut. I could cry. Spill it all.”
“There’s nothing to spill.”
“Who is he?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Sloane.”
