CALLIOPE TWISTED BACK and forth on the circular podium, utterly disgusted with what she saw reflected in the mirror.
She was wearing what had to be the most appalling bridesmaid’s dress of all time. It was a horrific confection of tulle and satin, with a square neckline and enormous puffed sleeves that tightened at the elbows and extended to the wrists. Layers of tulle were bunched over and over on the voluminous skirt. As if that wasn’t enough, the dress came complete with a cape, which tied around the neck with ribbons.
The only part of Calliope not covered in all these swaths of fabric was her face. She felt as if she were wearing curtains.
On the podium next to her stood Livya, sinking underneath the same monstrosity of a dress. She looked pale and washed out, as always, her hair falling in thin listless strands around her heart-shaped face.
“What do you think, girls?” asked Elise. Calliope didn’t miss the way her mom’s eyes darted anxiously toward Nadav’s mother, Tamar, her future mother-in-law, who was seated in a nearby armchair, her hands clasped primly in her lap. She’d been the one to select these dresses.
“They’re great,” Calliope said weakly. Honestly, she hadn’t known there was a garment on earth that could make her look this ugly. There was a first time for everything, she supposed.
“I think they’re divine,” Livya gushed, moving past Elise as if she weren’t even there and heading straight to her grandmother. She planted a kiss on the old lady’s cheek. “Thank you, Boo Boo.”
Calliope refrained from rolling her eyes at the absurd nickname.
They were in the wedding boutique at Saks Fifth Avenue, which, perversely enough, was no longer located on Fifth Avenue at all, but on Serra Street, toward the center of the Tower. The fitting room looked like a wedding cake come to life, with its peach velvet settees, white plush carpets, even a tray of little iced petit fours arranged on the sideboard.
Most striking of all, though, were the mirrors. They were ubiquitous, so that a girl could see herself from every conceivable angle, and perhaps a few inconceivable ones too.
Normally, being places like this—cool, expensive boutiques full of beautiful things—calmed Calliope. It was something in the proud look of them, the expectant hush as their doors swung open and you saw all those beautiful rich things arranged within. But today her surroundings seemed to be mocking her.
Livya sank into an armchair next to her grandmother and began tapping furiously at her tablet, her face sour. The dress poufed comically around her, making her look like a human-sized loofah with skinny, protruding arms. Calliope would have laughed at the sight, except that she sort of wanted to cry.
“Elise,” said Miranda, the bridal sales associate. “Do you think we could make a final decision on color? The superlooms are fast, but I’m getting concerned about timing.”
The sample dresses that Livya and Calliope were wearing had been spun from smartthreads: the playful, cheap-looking material patented thirty years ago. The final dresses that they wore at the wedding would be real fabric, of course, because who would actually want their bridesmaid dresses to change color? These smartthread models were for sales purposes only.
No one had asked Livya to move, yet she stood with an audible, resigned groan and stepped back onto the podium alongside Calliope. She kept her arms crossed over her chest, as if to convey how utterly pointless she found this entire exercise.
“Let’s start with the purples.” Miranda reached for her tablet. A colorful bar on one side depicted all the colors of the rainbow, red bleeding through to yellow and then purple again. As Miranda’s fingers moved slowly down the palette, the fabric of Calliope’s and Livya’s dresses shifted accordingly, deepening from lilac to violet to a dark wine color.
“I need to see it with the flowers,” Elise said eagerly, turning to a marble console table along the edge of the room. It was littered with sample bouquets that their florist had sent over, everything from simple all-white arrangements to vast multicolored sprays of foliage. The room smelled pleasantly like a garden.
They tried various combinations, switching the gowns to gold and navy and even a dark red. A few times Elise began to smile, only for Tamar to emphatically shake her head. Then Elise would give an apologetic shrug and say, “I guess we aren’t quite there yet. Let’s try another?”
Finally Miranda let out a breath. “Why don’t we take a break?” she suggested. “We should do a fitting on your gown anyway, while you’re here.”
Tamar cleared her throat bitterly. “And the mother of the groom’s dress too, of course,” Miranda hastened to add.
“All right.” Tamar rose, stiff-backed and slow. She was wearing an embroidered navy dress with a matching pillbox hat, her curls frozen in an immovable hairsprayed helmet. Elise offered to help her up, but Tamar shooed her away imperiously. When she waved her claw, the jewels on her rings—she had at least one on each finger—flashed ostentatiously.
When they had all disappeared into their fitting rooms, Calliope crouched down to snatch Miranda’s tablet from where it lay on the nearest table. Her brows lowered in concentration as she scrolled back and forth along the color bar, sending their dresses to fiery red and back again.
“That’s really irritating.”
Calliope shot bitterly through a few more colors before lowering the tablet to her side. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. She wasn’t accustomed to Livya talking to her, at least not when they were alone. They never spoke at school, and at home they limited themselves to a stark three-word vocabulary, volleying “heys” across the apartment before retreating to their separate rooms. It was like a silent contest for which of them could speak less.
“No, you aren’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“You aren’t sorry.” Livya’s eyes widened beneath their colorless lashes. “It’s rude to tell lies. Don’t say you’re sorry if you don’t mean it.”
“I have no idea what you’re—”
“You can drop the act with me. It doesn’t look good on you anyway,” Livya snapped, all the sticky, syrupy sweetness gone from her voice.
Calliope squared her shoulders. Her reflections in all the countless mirrors did the same, tipping up their chins with quiet, unmistakable pride. “I have no idea what you mean,” she said coldly.
“Of course. You’re just a sweet little philanthropist from nowhere, aren’t you?” Livya tilted her head. “You and your mom must have made such an impact through the years, traveling all over the world, saving the planet. Remind me again, why are none of your friends coming to the wedding?”
Calliope reached down to re-fluff the tulle in her bell-shaped skirt, to avoid looking at her future stepsister. “It’s a long way for many of them to travel,” she recited, the lie that she and her mother had told over and over these past months. “Besides, most of them can’t afford it.”
“What a shame. I was so looking forward to meeting them,” Livya said, not at all convincingly. “You see, my dad has a hard time trusting people. Most of the women who’ve dated him in the past were just in it for the money. One of the things he loves most about your mom is how truly selfless she claims to be. That all she cares about is saving the world. That she would never use him like that.”
Calliope heard the challenge in that statement—in Livya’s use of the word claim—but she decided it was safer to let it lie. The fine dark hairs on the back of her arms prickled.
Girls like Livya would never understand. When they wanted something, all they had to do was hold out their hand and ask their parents for it, pretty please. Calliope had been forced to flirt, plot, and manipulate for every nanodollar she’d ever spent.
“You know,” Livya went on, almost conversationally, “I saw the strangest thing in our apartment earlier this week. I could have sworn that I saw someone sneaking out late, on a weeknight, wearing a slutty silver dress.”
Calliope could have kicked herself. She’d grown sloppy, playing the same role for far longer than was good for anyone. This was exactly why their cons usually had a four-month time limit: The longer they stayed in one place, the greater their risk of being found out. No matter how convincing a story you wove, eventually the lies and blank spaces would begin to catch up with you. Eventually you would slip up.
“You might want to be careful, taking too many practice SAT tests in a row,” Calliope replied with remarkable self-possession. “It sounds like you’re beginning to hallucinate.”
“Right. Because a girl like you, out to dig wells or save the fishies or whatever it is you and your mom care about—a girl like you would never sneak out,” Livya said sweetly.
“Exactly.” Calliope had pulled the tablet back up and was scrolling viciously through the color bar, faster and faster, changing the shades of their dresses so rapidly that it was becoming nauseating.
Just then, Elise’s and Tamar’s footsteps sounded from the dressing room. Calliope quickly lowered the tablet to her side, leaving their gowns at a pale dove gray.
“Oh! This is it!” Tamar crowed as she sailed into the room wearing a webbed purple thing with long sleeves that tapered to a point over her wrists. In Calliope’s opinion, it made her look even more witchlike than ever.
Tamar turned to Miranda peremptorily. “The dresses will be perfect in this soft gray. It’s a fall wedding, after all.”
“How lovely!” Elise exclaimed, good-natured as always. She tried to hug her future mother-in-law, who just stood there in stiff-backed silence.
Then Elise stepped forward and wrapped an arm around each of the teenagers, pulling them closer, as if they were all one happy family. “My two girls,” she said quietly.
“Your dress is stunning, Mom,” Calliope replied. Elise’s gown had long sleeves and a high neck, but instead of looking dowdy it was elegant and demure, a swirl of hand-stitched lace scattered with tiny crystals that caught the light.
Livya cut in, not to be outdone. “You look absolutely perfect, Elise,” she simpered, in her prim, kiss-up voice—no trace of the threatening creature who had been there a moment previously.
Calliope looked up to where their three reflected faces hovered together, illuminated by the ambient light. Her eyes met Livya’s in the mirror. The other girl was staring at her hungrily, looking suddenly like a predator, alert and watchful for the slightest sign of weakness.
Calliope held her gaze, refusing to blink.