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“Money will buy you anything in the world,” he said in a low, satisfied voice. “It’s all for sale. People’s time. Their dignity. Whatever. Whenever. And most people’s price is shockingly low.”
That’s the lesson he thought he taught Lila, but the lesson she learned was different. It wasn’t money that opened that door. It was fear.
* * *
Lila’s winter friends were different from her summer friends. Her winter friends were real friends—the ones who came to her apartment after school, who went shopping with her and celebrated her birthdays with candles and sleepovers.
Jennifer and Lorraine and Margot. They all went to the small exclusive academy for rich curse worker children—where they fought to be the prettiest, the smartest, and the cruelest. They stole boyfriends back and forth. They shared books and clothes and told one another secrets. They danced to music and lied to their parents so they could stay out late.
Once, Lila tried to explain about her summer friends, about Cassel and his brothers. Jennifer laughed and said they were made up. Lorraine wanted to meet them. Margot looked at the one picture Lila had—a grainy and faded one with a sprinkler in the background where Cassel had his arm thrown over her shoulders and his shirt off—and said that he looked stupid but hot.
“He’s not a worker,” Lila said, and they all laughed, because a boy who wasn’t a worker couldn’t be anything but a plaything to a girl like Lila.
Sometimes Cassel felt made-up. If Margot was angry with her and Lorraine was busy or Jennifer was taking Margot’s side, Lila would call him. He could make her laugh. And she didn’t need to be afraid to tell him all the true things that she couldn’t tell anyone else.
He was her summer friend. He wasn’t part of her real life. Telling him didn’t count.
* * *
Three weeks before Lila’s fourteenth birthday, her mother took her shopping. They walked around the upper levels of Saks, where all the grown-up dresses were.
“Just look around,” her mother told her. “Try on anything you like. It’s your day!”
Lila didn’t mention that she hated parties. She already knew that her mother only remembered facts she liked. Anything else she instantly forgot and would keep forgetting no matter how many times she was reminded.
Instead, Lila brushed her gloved fingers over the rack of gowns until she came to one that looked like something heroines wore at the end of movies. It was sacrificial and beautiful.
“Not white,” her mother said. “You’re not a little girl anymore and this isn’t your wedding.”
Lila moved her fingers to the straps of a red dress and raised her eyebrows.
Her mother laughed. “Your father would kill me, but go ahead, try it on.”
They pulled more—gold dresses and pink dresses, black dresses and dresses as silver as the moon.
“There’s a language of clothing,” Lila’s mother said as Lila came out of the dressing room and twirled around in midnight blue velvet. “Like the language of flowers… or jewelry. For instance, that makes you look older, but not in a good way. You’re saying ‘I’m stuffy before my time.’?”
Lila ran her gloved hand down the bodice. She wondered what it would be like to touch the little beads glittering there like stars, but she knew that if she took off her glove it would upset the sales lady.
She made a face at her mother and went back into the stall to put on the red dress with the deep vee neck. It clung to her waist, to her breasts—already grown too big for the training bra she’d been wearing, and what a relief to have taken it off—and to the newly formed curve of her hip. She looked like a starlet.
“Jailbait prostitute,” her mother said, and Lila blushed hotly.
“I like it,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“I just bet you do,” her mother said, waving her back into the dressing room. “Now tell me what you want your party dress to say, because it won’t be that.”
Since the divorce, her mother and father had fought over Lila by buying her things—the trip to Paris with her father, the party, this dress. And they both wanted not just her love, but her promise of loyalty.
She wanted the people at the party to see her as her father’s heir. Instead, she was afraid they’d see her as his spoiled daughter. She didn’t know how a dress could change that, when the whole party was one big indulgence she never asked for and still had to act gleeful about. And even if a dress could make people see her that way, she couldn’t tell her mother what she wanted, when her mother would only see it as a betrayal.
“A force to be reckoned with,” Lila said finally, hoping that was vague enough. “That’s what I’d like.”
Her mother laughed. “Well, it’s accurate!”
She sounded so condescending that Lila ground her teeth. She went back to the rack of garments and picked one at random. Then she stood in front of the mirror, looking at her hair: shorter and nearly white after her mother insisted the stylist bleach it back from pink. Everything about her was so pale that she felt like a ghost.
While she slipped on the silver dress and smoothed the shining paillettes of it over her hips, she imagined turning fourteen. She hoped that it would transform her somehow, change her in some way that would give her the kind of knowledge older girls at her school seemed to have. She hoped it would make her brave. There was a boy—a boy she had no idea what to do about.
