She'd seen the dress, anyway. Everyone in the house had seen the dress. It was from a boutique in Wichita and it was the pink of the inside of a seashell, strapless, with a skirt made of so many layers of tulle that it moved like smoke when Kenzie turned. It had cost six hundred and forty dollars. Junie knew because Dana had left the receipt on the counter, the way you'd leave a trophy on a shelf, and had said, to nobody in particular, "Well, you're only a senior once." Next to it, still in the boutique's garment bag, was a second dress, a navy one with a beaded neckline. That was Dana's. Corbin High still did the Grand March, an old Midwestern tradition where, before the dance itself, the students were announced in pairs and walked across the gym floor while parents and grandparents sat in the bleachers and took pictures. Some years the parents of seniors walked too, at the end. Dana was on the parent committee. Dana was walking.
Junie had paid for her dress, too, in a way. Her mother had paid for the silk and Junie had paid for the thread, the zipper, the interfacing, and the beads, out of the forty dollars a month she made babysitting the Okafor twins on Tuesday nights, which Dana didn't know about, because Dana thought Junie was at Pearl's on Tuesdays doing homework.
She ran the water hot and started on the glasses.
"Hey."
Brooke was in the doorway to the den. Brooke was fourteen and a freshman and, as far as Junie could tell, a person nobody in the house looked at long enough to notice. She was Kenzie's sister but did not look like her. She was small and freckled and wore her older cousins' hand-me-down sweatshirts, and she spent most of her time in her room with a sketchbook, drawing comics about a raccoon detective. She and Junie had shared a bathroom for three years and had spoken, Junie estimated, about four hundred words to each other in that time, most of them some version of are you done in there.
"Hey," Junie said.
Brooke came in. She picked up a dish towel without being asked and started drying.
"You don't have to do that."
"I know." Brooke dried a glass, carefully, getting the towel all the way down inside it. "Is it done? Your dress?"
Junie glanced at her. "Yeah. I finished the sash tonight."
"Can I see it? Like, tomorrow. When you're wearing it."
"Sure."
Brooke nodded and dried another glass and then said, very quietly, looking at the glass and not at Junie: "She asked me if you were going. Earlier. Mom did. Like she didn't know."
"I told her I was going. I told her in February."