You're Invited (12 page)

Sadie gives me a nervous smile.

I take up my station behind a big table covered in baskets of feathers, beads, sequins, sparkly rhinestones, pieces of cloth, and just about anything else you could think of to put on a dress. If I was going to wear that blue dress, I'd want it to be really simple. No extra frou-frou things. The color is perfect just the way it is.

Not that I'd wear a dress, though. So Not Vi.

I swirl around a dish of beads with my finger as I check out the party. Only a few hours here, and then I can ride by Beach Sports on the way home. Buying those green kayaks later this summer will make this party—and Linney—worth it.

Almost all the party guests arrived while I was blow-drying dresses. It's mostly girls from school, but
there are a few guys here and there. I guess Linney wants them to be the judges or something. Maybe I should give them a heads-up that they'd better vote for her dress or suffer the consequences. Then again, two of them play on the other beach volleyball team, and I could use them off their game at our next match. I wave at Lance, who grins and rolls his eyes. Bet his mom made him come.

Becca's got poor Ryan cornered over by the gate to the dock. He's twisting one of the tails of his tux jacket. Every time he takes a step sideways, Becca does the same. It's like this hilarious little dance, except she's the only one who's into it. Finally Sadie arrives to save Ryan. She points Becca toward the accessories table, which is covered in shoes, purses, jackets, tights, and feather boas. I don't know who'd want to put on a feather boa in this heat, not to mention tights or a jacket. If you ask me, I'd forget all this stuff—pretty blue dress or not—and just stick with a comfy pair of shorts and a tank top. Oh, wait. I did.

Becca's trying on a pink feather boa when Linney peers around the runway and starts snapping her fingers to get Ryan's attention.

“A-hem!” she says, in a not-at-all-quiet voice.

He leaps up onto the runway, holding a microphone.

A microphone? Seriously, where does Sades find this stuff?

“Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the fashion event of the summer: Linney's Sweet Thirteen! May I present your hostess and worldwide supermodel, Linney Marks!”

Three guesses who wrote his script. Hint: not any of us.

Everyone (except me and Sadie) breaks into applause. I give Becca the evil eye and she immediately stops clapping and starts rearranging purses. The feather boa around her neck drags across the table.

Linney sweeps up onto the runway and does this series of model poses. It's so over-the-top and obnoxious, I can't believe I'm the only one having to stuff my fist into my mouth to keep from laughing. Okay, maybe the guys aren't buying it either. Lance has this confused look on his face, and I swear even Ryan cracks a quick smile.

“And now, if the ladies will direct their attention to the tables in back, we have a selection of lovely dresses for you to create your fashion masterpiece, which you'll model for our judges”—Ryan gestures at the boys, who are all clustered together by the snack table—“on this
here very stage, in a fierce competition to determine the winner of Linney's Runway.” He cocks an eyebrow at the crowd. “You have one hour. Make it work!”

Every girl in the yard flies to the dresses. It's like an exploding rainbow at the table next to me as they fling dresses all over the place.

“Ex-cuse me.” Linney pushes through her crowd of guests. “Birthday girl gets to choose first.” She snatches the orange dress from the very bottom of the pile. “Perfect,” she says, with a quick glance at me.

She is so up to something. She
knows
that one is still damp. But I don't have time to think about it, because approximately twenty girls have descended upon the feathers and sequins and stuff on the table I'm manning.

“Do you have any more green feathers?” Anna Wright asks.

“Where are the pinking shears? Please tell me you have pinking shears!” McKenna Dubray waves around a pair of plain old scissors.

“There aren't enough clear beads!” Ella Hernan shoves the basket under my nose. “I need more clear beads!”

I'm under the table, sweat dripping into my eyes, finding more beads, extra buttons, bottles of glue, peacock
feathers—and what in the world are pinking shears anyway?—so I don't even notice the creaking until it's too late.

“Avalanche!” someone yells.

At that second the table bops me on the head. Clutching beads in one hand and lengths of sequins in the other, I can't do anything except watch the legs on one end of the table collapse.

Screams and squeals sound from above. Baskets and beads and scissors rain down from the table into the yard. I can't move. I'm stuck with the table resting on my head and handfuls of . . . stuff.

“Vi? Vi!” Becca's voice is somewhere up there. “Hey, y'all! Boys with the muscles! Help us get this table up.”

The weight on my head lifts, and then both Becca and Sadie's faces appear underneath.

“Omigosh, Vi, are you okay?” Becca's putting the back of her hand against my forehead, like I have a fever or something.

Sadie's dumping the beads and sequins from my hands into a basket, and then she and Becca pull me out from under the table.

“What hurts? Do you have a concussion? Blurry vision? How many fingers am I holding up?” Becca
shoves two fingers, peace sign–style, right in front of my face.

“I'm fine, really.” I push her hand away. And that's when I notice the mess.

Everything—and I mean
everything
—that was on the table is now in the sandy grass in Linney's backyard. Itty-bitty beads and teeny-tiny rhinestones sparkle all over the ground. “Oh, no.” I put a hand over my mouth as if that'll make the mess go away.

“It's ruined! You've messed up my whole party, you—you—” Linney appears out of nowhere, sputtering, with the partially sequined orange dress draped over her shoulder.

Sadie's blinking really fast. She's either trying not to cry or one of those beads got in her eye. Finally she puts her hands on her hips.

“Nothing's ruined,” she says in a voice that sounds just like her mother's. “Everyone go on to the accessories table, where Becca will help you get whatever else you need. By the time you're done there, we'll have this cleaned up and ready to go.”

“Ooh, feather boas!” one of the girls says, and just like that, they're crowding around Becca and the accessories table.

Linney narrows her eyes at us before joining her guests.

“Okay, got that taken care of. Now how in the world are we going to deal with a bedazzled lawn?” Sadie's biting her lip as she studies the ground.

“A vacuum! We could vacuum it up,” I say, all triumphantly, as I rub the top of my head where the table whacked it.

“I think we'd get more sand than beads and stuff.”

We're quiet for a moment as the shouts and laughter go on at Becca's table. “Try this one! Pink and brown are
perfect
together,” Becca's saying to someone.

“If Lauren was here, she'd probably have some amazing idea about how to clean this all up. With magnets or something we'd never think of,” Sadie says.

I twist the ends of my ponytail. I really wish Lauren was here too. “I don't think magnets will work.”

Sadie gives me this look, like
Obviously, Vi
. “The wet dresses were bad, but this is awful,” Sadie finally says. “I don't know how to fix this. We're going to have to refund Linney's mom all the money.”

“No way,” I say, and I'm surprised at how forceful my voice is. “Nuh-uh. Lauren or no Lauren, we'll figure this out, and we're not giving back a cent. You're Sadie
Pleffer, organizer extraordinaire. You do
not
give up this easily!”

“But . . .”

“What is it your mom always says?”

Sadie wrinkles her eyebrows. “Go big or go home?”

“Not that one. The other one. Something about funeral homes or inheritances or . . . wills, I think.”

“Where there's a will, there's a way?” Sadie says.

“That's it! Doesn't that mean if you really, really want something to happen, you have to make it happen?” I kind of feel like I'm coaching a one-girl volleyball team. “And what if your mom showed up right this very second? Wouldn't you want her to see you taking charge and
owning
this party? Not moaning over a bunch of spilled beads.” We both turn toward the gate, but, of course, no one's there.

Sadie stops chewing on her lip. “You're right. But how . . .” Her eyes land on the single basket sitting on the table—the one with the beads and sequins I had in my hands when the table fell. “Wait! We have lots of extra supplies under the table. We'll set those out for now, and while they're working with that, we'll pick up as much of the stuff on the ground as we can.”

Sadie tightens her ponytail and we swing into
action. Just as we finish putting out all the non-sandy feathers and doodads, the girls start trickling back from Becca's accessories table. While I try to keep Table Avalanche Part Two from happening, Sadie plucks sequins and beads and bottles of glue from the ground.

“Five minutes, fashionistas,” Ryan says into the microphone.

“Thank God,” Lance says really loudly from across the yard. I peek past the bent heads of the girls at my table to where the guys have pretty much demolished all the food we'd set out earlier. Some of them are huddled around another's phone, probably playing a game. The rest are just sitting in chairs, looking boreder than bored. I think one of them's even fallen asleep.

The girls cut and glue and sew like crazy. Linney pushes aside baskets full of decorations and grains of sand and the occasional pine needle to lay out her dress on the table.

“Perfect, don't you think, Violet?” She twists her lips up into an approving smirk. “I think the Spanish moss really adds something, don't you?”

Why in the world she picked the damp dress, I have no idea. But the thing is hideous (one benefit of hanging out with Lauren is picking up words like “hideous,”
which is the perfect way to describe Linney's creation). She's cut the hem in a ragged zigzag pattern, so that it kind of looks like the bottom of the witch's costume I wore for Halloween a few years ago. Then she glued long strips of white cloth around the entire dress, so it definitely looks like a traffic cone now. The remaining orange parts are blinged out with so many sequins I can barely stand to look at it.

And the crowning effect? Spanish moss that she plucked from the live oak near the dock and glued to the short sleeves and neckline of the dress. It's possibly the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

“So, do you like?” Linney's looking right at me.

“Um . . . sure.” Sadie's standing nearby, and no way am I going to insult Linney in front of her. She's already had enough happen during this party.

Linney's lips turn up into an ugly smile as she eyes me. “Good, because I made it for you. To model on the runway.”

Did I mention I was going to murder Becca?

TODAY'S TO-DO LIST:

■
 return runway to Chamber of Commerce

■
 drop microphone back at Darling's DJs

■
 arrange for Linney to meet with a horrible accident

V
i's face is turning as orange as the dress on the table next to her, and it's only a matter of time before this gets really ugly (uglier even than that dress, if possible), so I guess it's up to me to save the day.

Again.

I know I'm the one who wanted this business, plus I'm the president so the ultimate responsibility is mine, and I really
am
having fun with it (most of the time), but this party is threatening to be the death of me. For
one thing, it seems like everything that could go wrong
is
going wrong. Mom has a name for these events. She calls them “Throw Up Your Hands.” Like, at a certain point that's all there is left to do.

Of course, it's just an expression, because Mom would never, EVER give up on a wedding, and I've seen her practically kill herself to make a bad day turn around for a bride. (Funny how she doesn't have the same sense of dedication toward her daughter, since wherever she is right now, it's not here.)

During one of the last “Throw Up Your Hands” we did together, Mom and I had to politely convince the bride's second cousin that she couldn't bring her husband as her guest. Why was it a problem? Oh, only because he was in an urn in her arms. Or at least his ashes were.

I know if I want to make this company work, I have to be just as dedicated. But there are regular problems . . . and then there's Linney. And whatever she's scheming with this whole Vi-has-to-wear-the-dress thing is totally beyond me. I could really use some of Lauren's logical thinking right now, but she's got better things to do, I guess.