Saturday began, as Saturdays did, with a list.
Dana wrote her lists on a magnetic pad on the refrigerator, in a looping, cheerful hand, with little hearts over the i's. Junie had come to hate those hearts more than almost anything in the world. This morning's list said:
Junie —
Bathrooms (all 3!!)
Vacuum upstairs + stairs
Kenzie's car — vacuum + windows (she has photos!)
Pick up: dry cleaning, Walgreens (my prescription + bobby pins + the GOOD hairspray, not the cheap one), Dillons (see list)
Fold whites
Thx hon! ♡
Junie read it standing at the fridge in her socks at seven-fifteen in the morning. She did the math. She was meeting Priya and Theo and the others at Priya's house at six-thirty for pictures. Pearl wanted to see her first, so she needed to leave by five, which meant showering by four, which meant all of this by three-thirty, which was possible if nothing went wrong and nobody added anything.
She started with the bathrooms, because the bathrooms were the worst. Kenzie's bathroom had makeup ground into the grout around the sink, and a towel on the floor that had been there long enough to smell like a basement. Junie scrubbed it with the green sponge and the spray that made her eyes water and thought about the dress hanging on her door.
She thought about how it would feel on. She'd tried it on, of course, a hundred times, for fittings, but always with pins in it, always with the hem basted, always standing on Pearl's step stool while Pearl muttered with a mouthful of needles. Tonight it would be finished. Tonight it would just be a dress, and she would just be a girl in it, walking across the gym floor when Mr. Abernathy read her name off the index card, and for one minute in the Grand March, nobody would be looking at anything but the thing she had made out of the thing her mother had left.
That was all she wanted. She had examined the wanting carefully, the way you'd check a rope before putting weight on it, and that was really all. She did not want to be prom queen, or popular, or Kenzie. She wanted one minute.
At nine Kenzie came down in a silk sleep mask pushed up on her forehead and ate yogurt standing at the counter, scrolling. She was beautiful in the effortless, careless way that some seventeen-year-olds are beautiful, all long legs and shining hair, and she knew it the way you know your own phone number.