I can still hear how I said it. I've tried in my head to make it sound different, and I can't. I said it the way you'd say there's a hair in your food.
"It's not yellow, it's ivory, it's just the fold lines, those can come out —"
"It's yellow. It's been in the attic since before I was born. It looks like something off one of those wedding shows where everybody cries. It's strapless. I'm not walking down Hupp Field in a strapless dress from 2008 with straps glued onto it. I already have a dress. I have seven payments left on it. I've been working since November."
"I know you have."
"Then why are you doing this?"
She didn't answer. She was holding the lace between her fingers, a little piece of the skirt, rubbing it the way you'd rub a leaf to see if it was real.
And then I said the other thing. I was still angry about Vermont. I was tired. I had blue disinfectant on my hands. None of that is an excuse, and I'm only telling you so you know I know it isn't.
"I'm not you, Mom," I said. "I'm not going to wear your dress and go to your college and live in your town and work at your dentist's office. I'm not going to be you. Okay? I'm not."
She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "Okay," very quietly, and zipped up the bag, slowly, all the way to the top, and picked it up and carried it out of my room in both arms like it was asleep. I heard the attic ladder come down and go back up. When I went downstairs to get something to eat, Hadley was sitting on the stairs, halfway up, in the dark, with her knees pulled up, and she looked at me as I went past, and I didn't say anything to her, and she didn't say anything to me.
My mother never brought it up again. In April, she drove me to Staunton for my fitting, and sat in the chair outside the dressing room at Kibler's and looked at her phone while Oksana pinned up my hem, and when I came out on the box she said, "It's pretty," and that was all. On the second of May I made my last payment, thirty-two dollars and twenty cents exactly, and Mrs. Kibler wrote it on the last line and wrote PAID IN FULL across the bottom of the card and underlined it twice, and gave me the card to keep, and I carried my dress out of that shop over my arm in its plastic bag like it was a flag. I hung it on the back of my closet door. Every night that week I tried it on. Hadley walked past my open door one of those nights and stopped and looked at me in it, standing in front of the mirror on my closet, and I said, "What," and she said, "Nothing," and went on to her room.
I didn't know. But there's a difference between not knowing something and not looking.