Chương 10
“No.”
Emily leaned against the doorway.
“That’s guilt.”
Madison looked irritated.
“What is with you and making everything difficult?”
“I’m not making it difficult.”
“Yes, you are.”
“You drove here because you don’t want the bag, but you also don’t want to feel wasteful, so you want me to turn getting rid of it into something noble.”
Madison stared at her.
“That was mean.”
“It was accurate.”
“It can be both.”
Neither spoke for several seconds.
Daniel silently picked up his laptop and moved toward the kitchen.
I followed.
“What are we doing?” I whispered.
“Being unavailable.”
“In our own house?”
“Strategic parenting.”
We left them alone.
Ten minutes later, I heard Madison laugh.
Twenty minutes later, Emily opened the refrigerator.
“Do we have pizza?”
Daniel called from the kitchen table.
“We have frozen pizza.”
“That is legally pizza.”
Madison followed her in.
Her eyes were red.
Nobody mentioned it.
They cooked the pizza.
The Gucci bag remained on the living-room chair.
By the end of the night, it was still there.
Madison drove home without it.
Emily carried it upstairs.
The next morning, she photographed it against a white sheet in her bedroom.
A resale service authenticated it remotely and sent her a shipping label.
She did not mention the sale again until three weeks later, when an envelope arrived from a nonprofit youth arts program in Austin.
Inside was a thank-you letter addressed to Madison.
Emily took a picture and sent it to her cousin.
Madison replied with a single heart.
That was how their relationship began repairing itself.
Not with a speech.
Not with forgiveness.
With a used handbag, a badly planned visit, and frozen pizza.
October arrived before any of us felt ready.
Emily’s school workload became brutal.
Competition attention had not altered the fact that she still had calculus homework, college essays, and a government teacher who considered late work a moral failure.
She would spend three hours answering emails from design programs and then remember at eleven thirty that she had a quiz the next morning.
One Wednesday I found her asleep at the dining table with a highlighter still in her hand.
I moved her textbook.
She woke instantly.
“I’m studying.”
“You were unconscious.”
“Efficient studying.”
“You highlighted your sleeve.”
She looked down.
A yellow stripe ran across her sweatshirt.
“Great.”
She put her forehead against the table.
“I’m dropping out.”
“No.”
“I’ll become mysterious.”
“You already tried mysterious.”
“It was exhausting.”
I poured her water.
“Go to bed.”
“I have twenty pages left.”
“You have a face left.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“It sounded threatening.”
“It was maternal.”
She smiled without lifting her head.
The following afternoon, Celeste called.
The couture house wanted Emily in New York for a three-day mentorship visit during her school’s fall break.
They would cover travel for Emily and one parent.
Daniel and I stared at each other across the kitchen.
Emily stared at both of us.
“Mom.”
Daniel looked wounded.
“You decided that quickly?”
“You hate flying.”
“I hate turbulence.”
“You call turbulence ‘sky betrayal.’”
“That was one time.”
“It was a forty-minute flight to Houston.”
He pointed at her.
“Disloyal.”
I went with her.
New York unsettled Emily immediately.
Not because of the city.
Because of the studio.
For months, she had been working in a garage with one sewing machine that occasionally ate thread for no identifiable reason.
Now she stood in a room where pattern tables were longer than our dining room and people discussed fabrics she had only seen online.
On the first morning, she barely spoke.
A senior patternmaker named Ana placed a muslin sample in front of her.
“What would you change?”
Emily looked around as if checking whether somebody else was supposed to answer.
Ana waited.
Emily touched the shoulder seam.
“This is pulling.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Why?”
Emily hesitated.
“The armhole is too high.”
Ana nodded.
“What else?”
Emily found two more problems.
Then five.
By lunch, she had forgotten to be intimidated.
She ate a sandwich at a worktable while arguing about interfacing with a graduate apprentice from Chicago.
I watched from the doorway until Ana noticed me.
“She forgets you’re here.”
“That’s probably good.”
“It is.”
Ana folded a paper pattern.
“She’s young.”
“I’m aware.”
“No, I mean really young.”
The words made me defensive.
“She knows that.”
Ana looked at me.
“I’m not criticizing her.”
“I know.”
I did not, actually.
Ana smiled slightly.
“She has talent.”
I waited.
“But?”
“But talent is the least interesting thing about working in fashion.”
That bothered me.
“What’s the most interesting?”
“Whether you can keep working when nobody claps.”
I looked through the glass partition.
Emily was laughing at something the apprentice had said.
Ana followed my gaze.
“The runway is easy compared with Tuesday morning.”
That sentence returned to me months later.
At the time, Emily was still living inside the warm aftermath of being discovered.
There were emails.
Invitations.
Scholarship offers.
People who remembered her name.
Then November arrived.
Another emerging designer went viral.
Then a celebrity launched a clothing collaboration.
Then the internet moved on, because the internet always moved on.
Emily noticed.
She pretended she didn’t.
Her follower count stopped growing.
Interview requests slowed.
A boutique that had enthusiastically discussed carrying three of her designs postponed its decision until spring.
One night, she closed her laptop harder than necessary.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Your computer disagrees.”
She sat on the floor beside her bed.
I waited in the doorway.
“The boutique passed.”
“I thought they postponed.”
“That was apparently polite language.”
I sat beside her.
She picked at the carpet.
“They said my production costs are too high.”
“Can you change them?”
“Yes.”
The answer came bitterly.
“I can make everything cheaper.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“I know.”
She leaned back against the bed.
“They want the charcoal jacket.”
“That’s good.”
“No.”
May you like
Her eyes flashed.
“They want it at a price that means changing the wool, simplifying the lining, and outsourcing most of the sewing.”
