"What about a new dress?" Marcus said quietly, from behind us. "Off the rack. I'll —"
"No," I said.
He stopped. Everybody looked at me.
"No," I said again. "Thank you. But no."
Mrs. Kibler looked at the rack against the side wall, where there were maybe six white dresses left at the end of the season, none of them my size, and then back at me, and I saw her understand. I didn't want a new dress. If somebody bought me a new dress, then Hadley's card was just money, and Saturday was just something that happened and got fixed by a grown-up with a credit card, and my six months were gone for good, cut up and thrown out with the garbage bag. I wanted my dress. I wanted what was left of it.
"There's enough here for a tea-length," I said. I'd been thinking about it all of Saturday night, lying on my floor, and all of Sunday. I'd watched footage of seamstresses piecing skirts until two in the morning. "If you cut it off above the slits, at the hip, there's maybe six inches all the way around. And then the strips, some of them are long. If you sewed the strips back together, side by side — pieced them — you could get a skirt down to about the middle of my calf. Tea-length is allowed. The code says tea-length is allowed."
Oksana looked at me with her eyebrows up.
"Pieced," she said. "Eleven seams down the skirt. Twelve. You will see every one."
"Not if something's over it."
"Over it, what?"