Page 29 of The Music of Us
I still had it.
“Well,” he said, eyes purposely looking me all the way down, then all the way back up. “Guess I match you then, Carmen.”
Well played. Stubbornly, I cinched the trench’s belt tighter around my waist. Maybe I’d come back and buy it if the café did better next week.
“Pick at least one other color,” I told him.
Jake shrugged, and reached for a dark-gray shirt.
Be patient, I reminded myself.He’s not used to getting to choose things.
Actually, maybe that was the problem. People kept looking over his shoulder and hovering while he made decisions and not letting him hear his own voice. As much as I didn’t want Jake to pick out the same clothes, I didn’t want him to judge everything based on my opinion either. He had enough people telling him what to do.
“Listen, I’m going to go look over there for some non–international thief fashion for myself,” I said, pointing toward a rack of clothes by the dressing room doors. “We can meet up after you pick something out and try it on.”
Ten minutes later, Jake was in the dressing room trying on something that hopefully wasn’t all-black or all-black with a hint of gray. While I waited for Jake to finish changing, I inspected a row of dresses, the metal hangers making a skittering noise as I imperiously passed judgment like a famous judge onProject Runwayand not just a teen girl in a thrift shop.
I liked dressing up as a kid, and I learned to thrift for quality pieces I’d never be able to afford otherwise once I got into high school. Recently, I got even more into figuring out my style. Mom’s physical therapist always had fashion magazines in the waiting room. Every week, I pored over each glossy photo, absorbed in the clothes. Vintage looks that took me back to another time and place. Silk dresses printed with Van Gogh’sStarry Nightthat turned you into a walking painting. Gowns made for places far fancier than I’d ever set foot in, but I could dream about.
I got lost in the way fashion became fabric artwork, how it told a story.
How it could lie.
If my outfit looked put together, with my hair sleek and pinned back just so, it looked likeIhad it together. That I felt unworried about leaving everyone I cared about behind and heading off to college in the fall. That the cat café was not in danger of shutting down. That Mom would be okay. That I was confident in everything and not just in over my head and trying to think my way out.
I pulled a floor-length, filmy pink dress off the rack. What could this one say about me? Would I feel light if I put it on? Bubbly instead of—
“Lucy?” Jake called from somewhere behind me.
I turned, curious to see what he picked out for himself.
Surprisingly, he was not all in black. Instead I took in sturdy tan boots. Faded fitted jeans. A plain tee beneath an unbuttoned plaid shirt in shades of brown and green, like a forest of moss and pine.
The shades in the shirt made me notice the warm tones in Jake’s hazel eyes—the oak-brown and the sparks of bright copper, like embers in a softly burning winter’s fire. I swallowed hard. Jake looked—
“Normal,” I said out loud, instead ofgoodorcuteor anything else that I’d rather eat an entire alligator belt than tell him. I chewed my stick of gum harder. “You look normal.”
I gestured at his outfit, trying to play off what I’d almost let slip and how flustered I felt.
“This works. Most people who thinkJake Moodyautomatically imagine a really specific look,” I pointed out. “They’re expecting something dark and dramatic. If they’re looking for that, they’ll miss—”
“The real me.”
I cocked my head, curious about the way he phrased that, but before I could ask what Jake meant, his gaze landed on the dress in my hands and he looked up at me curiously, like it reminded him of something.
“Did you go to prom?” he asked.
I nodded, wondering if it was weird for him to know what it feels like to do something so rare like walk the red carpet, but be completely clueless about normal things like school dances. “I did. Ryan—”
“You have a boyfriend?”
What’s the tone for?
“Not anymore. Ryan asked me,” I finished. I gave Jake a sideways glance. “‘Lovely, Aren’t Ya’ was part of his promposal, actually.”
Jake looked like he didn’t know whether to start laughing or just die right there in the middle of the thrift shop. “No way.”
“Yeah.” I grimaced at the memory. Ryan asked me right at the beginning of Jake’s first solo verse too.
