I had never said no to them so clearly before. I told Vanessa that I had earned the right to show my own work and that nobody was taking the dress out of my room. Brianna laughed, reached behind me for the mannequin and pulled the gown free while I struggled to protect the beadwork. Vanessa caught my wrist. Her grip did not hurt as much as the calm expression on her face when she told me to stop making a scene. She took the dress by its hanger and handed it to Brianna.
Something in me broke loose. I followed them into the hall and said they were stealing from me. Vanessa turned so quickly I almost collided with her. Her hand struck my cheek, and the sound seemed to fill the whole upstairs corridor. "You will not accuse my daughter of theft in this house," she said. Brianna stood behind her, clutching the gown like a prize, while I held one palm against my burning face.
They walked away planning shoes, jewelry and photographs. I went back into my room and closed the door without slamming it, because I knew a slammed door would become the story my father heard that evening. My phone lay beside the sewing machine, and on its screen was an email from the competition office reminding finalists to bring identification, process photographs and a short explanation of their design. I read the message twice. The competition was six days away, and my entry had just gone down the stairs in somebody else's arms.
For several minutes I considered begging. I considered calling my father, though I already knew how the conversation would sound: Vanessa would say I was emotional, Brianna would say I had offered the dress, and Dad would ask why we could not settle this peacefully. I even imagined taking the dress back while everyone slept. But I knew Vanessa would be waiting for any excuse to keep me away from the competition, and one accusation of breaking into Brianna's room would give her exactly that.
Instead I pushed the bed away from the wall and lifted the loose floorboard behind it. Underneath sat a narrow storage case wrapped in a faded bedsheet, with a label in my mother's handwriting on the lid: FOR THE DAYS WHEN YOU NEED COURAGE. Inside were folded black tulle, a partially boned bodice, narrow strips of midnight satin and a sketchbook that nobody had ever been allowed to open. I had been working on that second gown in secret for almost a year, adding pieces whenever I had fabric left over from paid alterations. I had not intended to show it until I was confident enough to wear something so bold.
I called it The Night We Kept. The gown was black, but not flat black. Its lower layers were a deep, almost invisible blue, and across them I had sewn scattered points of light with silver seed beads, pieces of mirrored thread and tiny glass crystals. It looked ordinary in the dark. Under a moving spotlight, the stars appeared one after another, as if someone were slowly revealing a sky that had been there all along. The design was difficult, heavy and nowhere near finished.
I had made its original drawing on the anniversary of my mother's death. When I was little and frightened by thunderstorms, she took me to the back porch after the clouds passed and pointed out the first stars returning to the sky. "Darkness doesn't destroy the light," she told me. "Sometimes it's the only way you can see where the light is." After she died, I drew that sky from memory, then stitched the position of those stars into black cloth, one at a time. Blue Hour might have been the dress that could win a contest. The Night We Kept was the dress I had made because I was afraid I would forget the sound of her voice.