It fit. It fit like it had been made for her, which, in a way Junie didn't quite have words for, it had. She stood in front of Pearl's long hall mirror, the one with the crack in the bottom corner, and looked at herself, and she didn't look like Rose, not really, she had her father's chin and his straight dark eyebrows. But she looked like someone Rose would have known.
"Now," said Pearl. "Give me that sash."
Junie unfolded the tissue paper. The green silk lay across her palms, the beads catching the hallway light, river-colored.
Pearl wrapped it twice around Junie's waist, crossed it at the back, brought it round to the front, and tied it low on Junie's left hip in a loose, soft knot, so the two sharp points hung down over the blue satin almost to her knee. Then she stepped back.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
It was, Junie thought, exactly the color of a river at night. A river in summer, with the last light just leaving the sky above it, and the water still holding a little green from the day.
"That was hers, too," Mark said finally. His voice was rough. "That silk. Now you've got both of them on."
"No," said Pearl. She was looking at Junie, not at him. "Now she's got all three of us on. Rose and me and her. That's what a dress is, Mark. Didn't anybody ever tell you? It's everybody who ever touched it."
* * *
The Corbin High School gymnasium had been built in 1961 and had been decorated, for every spring formal since, by a committee of parents and students who believed with their whole hearts that enough twinkle lights could turn anything into anything. This year's theme was A Night in Paris. There was a plywood Eiffel Tower under the far basketball hoop, painted silver and strung with lights, and paper lanterns hung from the rafters, and the bleachers along the east wall were crowded with parents and grandparents and little brothers and sisters holding phones up over their heads.
The Grand March had started at seven-thirty. Junie and her father came in at seven-thirty-four, through the side door by the trophy case, at a dead run in a silver flat and a pair of work boots.
"Hale!" Priya Shah was waiting in the line of couples along the wall, in a red dress, waving both hands over her head. "Oh my God, Junie, where have you—your dad texted, he said—oh my God." She stopped. She stared. "Junie. That's not the green one."
"It's a long story."
"It's a gorgeous story. It's—oh my God, look at you." Priya grabbed her hand. "Theo's freaking out. He thought you got kidnapped. Theo! She's here!"