Sequins, Secrets, and Silver Linings (5 page)

And so she comes.

She looks at my wall of
Vogue
photo shoots and my
other wall of costume exhibition posters from the V&A, and I can tell she’s in heaven.

She snuggles herself into my favorite armchair, the purple velvet one, and tells us about her sketches and V&A visits and making clothes after school. It turns out she’s on her own a lot, so she goes off to look at clothes, or she just invents them at home with whatever fabrics she can find. And she’s always drawing her ideas. Pages and pages and pages of them.

I ask about her family, but she looks past me and I wonder if she’s heard me. Then she says something about growing up in Uganda, where her parents and several of her aunts and uncles and cousins are, and leaving them to come to England when she was eight.

“Why?” I ask, appalled. I mean, I love England, but leaving your family to come here seems a bit extreme.

Crow looks at the floor and shrugs. For ages, she says nothing, but we wait. Eventually she looks up.

“It was difficult in my country. My dad wanted me to get an English education. When my little sister is older, maybe she’ll come, too.”

“How often do you see your parents?” I wonder. My dad lives in Paris. Mum met him when she was modeling there. I see him twice a year, which really isn’t enough at
all. Harry’s dad is in Brazil (Mum traveled a lot), which is worse.

“Not so much.”

“How much?”

“Never,” she almost whispers. “They send photos. My sister, Victoria, sends me her drawings. She’s four now. Nearly five.” She reaches into her satchel and pulls out some folded sheets of paper. They are covered in pictures of smiling children with stick fingers and triangular, colorful clothes under bright blue skies. They are confidently signed
Victoria
in careful four-year-old writing.

“So who do you live with?”

“My auntie Florence. She came here years ago. She’s a cleaning lady at my school. She works very hard.”

Edie and I both smile encouragingly. We’re not sure what to say.

On Crow’s second visit, my room is a wreck. I’ve had an idea for a minidress and I’ve been raiding my bookshelves for inspiration. The books are everywhere and there are lots of them. I’m not exactly literary, but if it’s a book about fashion, I have to have it. Mum, Dad, and Granny are very generous (although Dad does insist on giving them to me in French, so I can practice). I have
everything from serious histories of couture to cutout paper dolls. I’ve been collecting them since I was seven. Most of them are lying open on the carpet and I desperately try to clear a path so Crow can get across the room without treading on them.

However, she doesn’t move. She’s spellbound. Edie gives me an astonished stare. She’s never seen Crow look enthusiastic about a book before.

The great thing about fashion books, of course, is the illustrations. Huge, full-page photographs and beautiful drawings. Crow’s eyes dart from a Balenciaga ball gown to an Elizabethan ruff. She crouches down and runs her fingers over the pages.

“Does this say Dior?” she asks.

“Yes,” Edie says, instantly switching into teacher mode. “And that says Christian. His … er … Christian name.”

“Dior is my hero,” Crow breathes. “There’s this woman called Yvette who lives upstairs. She worked for Dior. She’s teaching me to knit and sew. She tells me all about him.”

Edie and I exchange glances. We both suspect that someone is taking advantage of this innocent little girl from Africa with romantic, unlikely stories. After all, Christian Dior died fifty years ago.

“May I take it?”

She’s indicating the fattest book in the pile. It’s a history of the House of Dior and it’s written like a textbook. It’s not exactly “See Spot Run.”

“Certainly,” says Edie, looking shocked. “I mean, she can, can’t she, Nonie?”

“Of course.” I shrug. “Take whatever you like.”

To our amazement, Crow chooses five books and happily piles them up. It occurs to me that maybe she’d have learned to read long ago if people had started her off with cocktail dresses and ball gowns instead of kittens and puppies.

Edie texts me after her next tutoring session to say they’ve already finished page one. Which, for someone who struggles with “chair,” isn’t bad going, I think.

Something’s still bothering me, though.

I’m convinced those skirts and knits we got from the bazaar are amazing, but nobody really believes me. It’s not helped by the fact that I have a reputation for wearing anything, including Astroturf (which looks great as a miniskirt, by the way, although it’s a bit scratchy when you sit down). I think the biggest problem is that Crow’s designs are made out of cheap fabrics in gaudy colors, which is all that she can afford. But I have a plan.

I interrupt Harry in the middle of another drumming practice.

“Harry, you know Moaning Zoe—”

“I wish you wouldn’t refer to my girlfriend as ‘Moaning Zoe.’ Especially not to her face. She doesn’t like it.”

“I bet she moans about it.”

“Actually, she does. But I think that’s totally justified.”

“Well, does she have any friends?”

“Nonie!”

“What?”

“Please do not suggest that my girlfriend is sad and friendless.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to. I was just wondering if she knew anyone who made things out of ordinary stuff. Like cotton. Or even silk.”

Moaning Zoe is in her final year at Saint Martins. She’s studying textiles. In Zoe’s case, “textiles” is a loose description, because she mostly makes things out of cardboard, as far as I can tell. Or circuit boards. Or old cell phone covers. All very trendy and eco-friendly, but not exactly what I have in mind. She makes Astroturf look positively normal.

“Zoe is very talented,” Harry sniffs. “In her own way. But she’s got friends who do more conventional things.
There’s a girl named Skye who’s nice. She sings with the band sometimes. Why?”

I explain my theory about providing Crow with better materials but that I have no idea how to get ahold of them for her. I’m convinced that a textiles student would know. Presumably they cover that sort of thing in week one.

And so the following Saturday—the day Jenny’s leaving for New York—Skye comes over. Girls tend to do things if Harry asks them. I like her immediately. She has orange hair with shocking-pink streaks and is wearing a floor-length dress made out of tie-dyed parachute silk, and Doc Martens. No makeup and a constant smile. She’s a walking ray of sunshine.

Crow’s already ensconced in my room, on page three of the House of Dior book, running her finger carefully along each line. She looks up when we come in and gives a shy smile. Today she’s wearing her Wonder Woman cape (rescued from the drain) and a homemade Elizabethan ruff. It’s a look. We all cluster around a pile of multicolored nylon and I do a bit of a fashion show, whipping the skirts on and off over my leggings and showing how beautifully they move when I walk.

Skye is impressed. She instantly gets what I mean
about using silk and offers Crow all the offcuts she doesn’t need. She explains that she’s finalizing her degree show at the moment, so she’s got loads of spare fabric, and she happens to be working with painted silk, among other things.

Her face clouds for a moment.

“This silk’s incredibly difficult to work with. I’ve tried it myself. It’s superslippery. Are you sure you can manage?”

Crow looks relaxed.

“Yvette—she’s the woman who’s teaching me to sew—she used to work for Dior. She specialized in silk. She’s shown me all the techniques.”

Skye throws me a questioning look and I shrug.
Best to humor her
, we silently agree. Anyway, somebody must be teaching Crow to sew because the skirts are beautifully made and very cleverly cut. Skye says they wouldn’t look out of place in a Saint Martins show. I’m amazed, but Crow doesn’t seem particularly impressed. However, she’s excited about getting her hands on new fabrics. It turns out she’s got a notebook full of designs she’s been dying to try, but she simply can’t afford the materials to make them.

“Are you sure that girl is twelve?” Skye asks on the way out.

It’s weird. Crow looks about ten, and behaves like a ten-year-old in some ways. She can be very stubborn, for a start, and she just ignores you if she doesn’t want to answer a question. But as soon as you start to talk about fashion, you’d swear she was at least twenty. And because we talk about fashion most of the time, I tend to forget.

Mind you, I’m only fourteen and I’d swear I was twenty sometimes. And Edie must be at least fifty in her head.

In the evening, Harry’s phone rings at dinner. It’s a text from Moaning Zoe. He starts reading it with his normal, gentle expression, but soon his smile fades and he looks, for Harry, pretty grumpy.

“Is she OK?” I ask.

“She heard from a friend that Skye was here. She wants to know why.”

“Goodness! News travels fast.”

“I’m not sure I like being spied on,” Harry says, running a hand distractedly through his hair.

“But she’ll be OK when you explain,” I suggest.

“Yeah, probably.”

That’s what he says, but he doesn’t look too sure.

Chapter 8

N
ext day, Harry agrees to come with Edie and me to the movies to see
Kid Code
, which Jenny would only let us do when she was safely out of the country. We invite Crow, but she’s already had her first consignment of silk from Skye and she’s too busy inspecting it and deciding out what to do with it. No sign of Moaning Zoe. Harry says she’s busy preparing for her own degree show, but you have to wonder.

Kid Code
is as good as the critics say. With that cast, the producers could have got away with a tired old formula blockbuster, but actually it’s really funny and so exciting that Edie nearly chokes on her popcorn at one point. No wonder the audiences are pouring in. Hollywood’s Sexiest Couple Alive give the best performances we’ve seen them do, and Joe Yule is POSITIVELY EDIBLE.

The only iffy bits are when he’s with his rather wooden sister. Poor Jenny. You can see the sheer terror
in her eyes whenever the camera is on her. Even Joe’s English accent seems better than hers after a while, and he’s from Nevada.