You can wear anything white that meets the code, and plenty of girls wear their sisters' dresses or their mothers', but most girls go to Kibler's Bridal and Formal in Staunton, which has been there on Beverley Street since my mother's time, because Mrs. Kibler keeps a whole rack of white dresses every spring that meet the code, and she knows every rule of it by heart, and she does layaway.
I started at Starlite Lanes on the second Monday in November of my senior year. It's out on Route 250 between Bramwell and Staunton, a long low building with a sign shaped like a bowling pin that has a neon star on top, and half the star has been burned out since before I was born, so at night it looks like a pin with a broken crown. I worked the snack bar and the arcade and the mop, but mostly I worked the shoe counter. You take the customer's shoes and put them in a cubby and give them a pair of rental shoes in their size, red and blue with a number on the heel, and when they bring them back you spray the inside of each shoe with disinfectant from a can and put them back on the wall. You'd be amazed what people leave in their shoes.
Twelve dollars and seventy-seven cents an hour, which is the minimum in Virginia. Tuesdays and Thursdays from four to nine, Fridays and Saturdays from five until close, which was eleven-thirty, and sometimes a Saturday or Sunday day shift if somebody called out, which somebody always did. The manager was a man named Ignacio Galvan who had run the place for nineteen years, and he wore a bowling shirt every single day, a different one for each day of the week, like a uniform, and he told me on my first day that he could teach anybody to do anything except show up, and if I showed up he would never have a problem with me. I showed up. I didn't miss one shift in six months. He never had a problem with me.
My paychecks ran between three hundred and eighty and four hundred and sixty, every other Friday, depending on how many extra shifts I got, and I kept them all in a spiral notebook, the stubs folded and paper-clipped inside the cover, the numbers written down the page in two columns. One column was what came in. The other column was where it went.
It went a lot of places. It went to my phone bill, forty-five dollars a month. It went to gas money for Marcus's truck, because he drove me home every Friday and Saturday night, and I'd insisted, and he'd let me insist. It went into a savings account at the credit union for college, which in November I didn't know yet was going to be the University of Vermont, eleven hours north, but which I knew was going to cost a deposit and a laptop and books and a winter coat that could stand up to something worse than Virginia. And thirty-two dollars and twenty cents of every check went to Kibler's.
I found the dress the Saturday after my first paycheck. I'd gone to Staunton with my friend Destiny Rinker, whose older sister had graduated two years before in a dress from Kibler's, and we'd just meant to look. Mrs. Kibler was in her late seventies and wore her reading glasses on a beaded chain and called every girl who came through the door "my dear," and she took one look at me and went to the back of the rack without asking me anything and came out with it on her arm.
"Try this one, my dear," she said. "Don't look at the tag. Look at it on."
I looked at the tag anyway. Four hundred and forty-nine dollars. I put it on anyway. I came out of the dressing room and stood on the little carpeted box in front of the three-way mirror, and Destiny put both hands over her mouth, and Mrs. Kibler said nothing at all, which I found out later was the highest compliment she gave. I looked at myself in the three mirrors. I looked like somebody who was going somewhere.
It wasn't fancy. That's what I want you to understand. It had no beads, no sequins, no lace, no train. It was plain. It was so plain it looked expensive. It looked like it had been made for one person, and it fit like the one person was me, except about four inches too long, which Mrs. Kibler said her seamstress would take care of in the spring, the hem was included, every alteration was included in the price, that was how she'd always done it and she was too old to change.
"I can't," I said.
"Twenty percent down," Mrs. Kibler said, "and six months to pay it off. You have until the first of May. If you miss a payment I'll call you. If you miss two I'll put it back on the rack and refund what you've paid, less a little for my trouble. Nobody has ever made me do that, my dear. I don't expect you'll be the first."