The first person to applaud my stepsister was my father. I saw him from the far side of the theater, his face lifted toward the stage, his hands coming together as Brianna turned beneath the lights in a gown I had spent four months making. Every silver crystal on the pale blue silk caught the spotlight exactly as I had planned. The audience thought they were watching a young designer introduce her finest work. I was standing in the shadows, wearing a black jacket over the dress nobody in my family knew existed.
Brianna smiled the way she always did when she was certain the room belonged to her. Beside my father, Vanessa, her mother and my stepmother, sat in an emerald evening gown with a satisfied little curve to her mouth. She had chosen the earrings that matched Brianna's stolen dress. She had even made sure the camera crew could see her crying proudly in the front row. Six days earlier, she had watched me beg for that dress and told me that talent meant nothing without someone important to wear it.
There was an older man in the balcony, silver-haired and perfectly still, watching Brianna with an expression I could not read. He was one of the judges, the president of the foundation that sponsored the competition. I had studied his work in books whose corners had become soft from being opened too often. He watched my blue gown without smiling, and then he glanced at the next name on the program. My name.
I touched the small brass clasp beneath my jacket. Inside the folded black fabric was a detail even Brianna had never seen, a detail I had kept hidden from everyone because I had been afraid to trust anything beautiful to that house. The stage manager raised two fingers. I had exactly two minutes before I would step into the lights, and for the first time in my life, I was not hoping somebody would give me permission.
Six days earlier, I had been sitting on the floor of my bedroom with pins between my lips and a spool of silver thread rolling against my knee. The pale blue gown rested on a mannequin I had rescued from the back of a closed tailoring shop. Its bodice shimmered with hand-set crystals, and its wide skirt carried hundreds of tiny embroidered lines that curved like water. I had named it Blue Hour, after the brief moment between sunset and darkness when the world looks almost unreal. To anybody else it was a graduation gown. To me it was four months of midnight work and every dollar I had saved from mending other people's clothes.
I was seventeen and six weeks away from finishing high school in Decatur, Georgia. I was also six days away from the final showcase of the Young American Couture Competition, the first serious opportunity anyone had ever offered me. The top award included a scholarship toward fashion school, a summer apprenticeship in New York, and something I could hardly imagine: strangers with real experience looking at my work without first asking why I thought I deserved to be there. My guidance counselor had helped me submit a portfolio. My art teacher had quietly paid the registration fee when she learned I had been saving my lunch money to afford it.