More than Fashion

13

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped, keeping my voice low. “Want to trade one of your fabrics for one of mine?”

He went back to his sketching. “Sorry, no.”

Jerk. He hadn’t even looked at my fabric. He just didn’t want to trade with me.

I huffed and headed over to Trina’s workstation, but she’d already traded with Dawn. I rushed over to the next familiar face, worried that everything good was already getting snatched up.

“Hey, Molly. I want to trade this brocade for something. Interested in a swap? I’ll take anything at this point.”

“Hmm.” She inspected it, then checked inside her black box. “I’ll give you this tulle for it.”

“Deal! Thank you!” The tulle was thick and fluffy, but I could work with that. We switched fabrics, and I ran back to my station, an idea already forming in my head.

At Gavin’s table stood a girl with wavy black hair and so much makeup she’d probably have to chisel it off. Her name tag said Nika Kazakova, and she wore a dress with a low V that flaunted the goods. A minute later, she walked off with his lace after giving him a cotton fabric identical to the one I had. He caught me glaring at him and smirked.

Asshole.

Ignore him, I told myself as I pulled the sketch pad from my box. I grabbed my pencil and mentally flipped through all the things I’d sketched at home while preparing for the show. Originally I was going to just wing it all, but Carla had insisted I do some prep work first. That was more her style than mine—Carla was always prepared for everything. She was a plotter, a worrier, an obsessive list-maker. She had an unhealthy obsession with spreadsheets, and don’t even get me started on her extensive, color-coded daily planner. I was pretty sure she spent half her modeling paychecks on stickers and fancy pens.

Not me. I tended to jump into things headfirst, confident I’d figure things out as I went along. But now, with a massive hangover and only six hours to come up with a dress, I was happy I’d listened to my friend for a change. Designers weren’t allowed to bring anything that could help them on the show, but there was no rule against studying previous episodes and preplanning some of your designs. It wouldn’t always help, since there was no way to know the challenges in advance, but I’d come up with a bunch of ideas that could work and stored them away in my mind for future use.

I sketched out a basic idea I hoped would both show off my geek chic aesthetic and stand out among the others, while still fitting the challenge. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded, especially since we were limited by our fabrics, but I thought I’d have a pretty good shot at winning the challenge if I could pull off the design I had in mind. Assuming I could finish it in time.

Once my sketch was done, I cut the fabric using Carla’s measurements, which I’d also found in my box. I went faster than normal, silently praying I didn’t screw up, but for this challenge, there was no time to waste. I still felt like total s**t, which wasn’t helping matters either. I’d just about murder someone for some more pain meds for my headache. And, in related news, I was somehow both starving and nauseous. Basically the worst combo ever.

I shoved all of that deep inside while I worked and managed to block out everything around me, including the other designers’ conversations. The few that were going on anyway—most of us were quiet and focused. We didn’t have any time to mess around.

I pinned the cotton fabric to the dress form, trying to get it into the correct shape, making adjustments as I went along. Satisfied, I took my tacked-together dress into an adjacent room with sky blue walls and top-of-the-line sewing machines. With fourteen designers, there were nowhere near enough sewing machines and the room was crowded, but I spotted a free one near the back. I rushed to grab it before someone else did.

At the sewing machine next to me, a black guy with a shaved head and muscular arms was telling that Nika girl a story. I’d missed the beginning, but as I sat down, he said, “The producers told me I needed more experience! Can you believe that? After I’d worked on shows at Paris Fashion Week two years in a row, still they turned me down! But I came back again and again until I finally got picked.”

“They told me the same thing,” Nika said, with an accent that sounded Russian. “I auditioned three times before they finally let me on the show. Three times!”

“It took me three auditions as well,” a man behind us said in a soft-spoken voice. He was older, maybe late thirties, and had short black hair and brown skin. His name tag read Tom Nguyen, and he had a cool geometric tattoo on his upper arm.

“It’s just so unfair! What about you?” the other guy asked me. Derrick Jones. “How many times did you have to audition for Behind The Seams?”

“Um…” Crap. I totally blanked, trying to figure out what to say. I should probably tell them the truth—that I hadn’t auditioned at all, but instead had won a spot on the show at Comic-Con. But somehow I didn’t think they’d want to hear that, not when they were commiserating and bonding about how hard it had been to get on the show.

Nika gave me a long once-over, sizing me up. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those lucky bitches who got picked on the first audition.”

“No!” Great, yet another thing to lie about. Another secret to keep that would probably come back to bite me in the ass.

Derrick snorted. “Yeah, right. I mean, look at you, you can’t be older than what, eighteen? Nineteen?”