They Dyed My Dress for the Dance. I Left the Group of Five novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Gray Girl

At the shared house Quinn finds the swatch chart and a sponsored account with 214,000 followers built on her face; the handwriting on the chart is her brother's.

By ten the next morning, the video of my face had three hundred thousand views.

I knew because my roommate's phone was face-down on her desk, buzzing constantly.

She had left a granola bar on my pillow with a note that said, "Not a joke. I'm on your side."

I ate it and called nobody.

Then I put on my own gray sweatshirt and walked the ten blocks to the house.

The house was a rented brick duplex on Alder Street with a sagging porch and a lawn full of red cups.

Lance, my brother and Milo lived there.

Kinsley practically did too.

My things were still in the closet of the back bedroom, because for a year I'd spent half my weekends there.

My textbooks, my winter coat, a shoebox of old photos, and the toothbrush I'd kept in the second-floor bathroom.

I wanted them back.

I had picked the one hour when none of them would be home.

Football brunch for my brother, a campaign breakfast for Lance, and Kinsley asleep until noon, if I knew her.

Milo opened the door in socks.

He had a camera strap around his neck and a dark smudge under each eye.

"Quinn."

"I'm getting my coat."

"I tried to say something last night. I was going to say something."

"Then you should have said it last night."

He stepped back.

I walked past him through the front hall.

It smelled like old pizza and the vanilla candle Kinsley burned in every room she'd ever claimed.

I went upstairs.

The back bedroom door was open.

My coat was on the closet floor with a crushed sneaker on top of it, and I stood there staring at that sneaker for a long time.

Then I heard a laptop fan in the next room.

That room was Kinsley's, the one she called her studio.

I'd never been allowed inside.

She'd always said it was messy.

The door was open a hand's width, and the screen inside was glowing.

I pushed it with one finger.

The room was neat.

A ring light on a stand. A white backdrop. A shelf of little lens boxes with a logo on each, a small prism.

And on the wall above the desk, a corkboard, with a strip of paper pinned across the top.

I stepped closer.

The strip was printed in gray squares, from nearly black on the left to nearly white on the right, each with a number under it.

Hanging beside it were little fabric swatches taped to cards, each one a shade I couldn't name.

Next to each swatch, a number and a word had been written in pen.

Shell. Mint. Ivory.

Each swatch had been set against a gray square, and the numbers matched.

Somebody had held pale colors up to a gray scale for hours until every tint was exactly as bright as the white.

I went cold all the way up my arms.

The laptop on the desk was still awake.

It was open to a page called Quinn in Grayscale.

I didn't know there was a page called that.

The number under the name said 214K followers.

I sat down in her desk chair because my knees told me to.

Below the number were rows of video thumbnails.

My face, squinting at two sweaters held side by side. My face, guessing the color of a pepper. My face, laughing at a green traffic light that Kinsley swore was red.

Forty thumbnails of me.

I'd done the first three freshman year, in the dorm, for a joke.

Kinsley had said maybe a couple hundred friends would watch.

She'd said she'd delete them if I ever asked.

She had never mentioned money.

On the shelf below the screen was a planner open to October.

Friday, the seventeenth, said, in her loopy handwriting, "EP 41. THE DRESS."

Under it, in smaller letters: "Prism wants the big reaction by Halloween. Need her crying. $18K."

I read it three times to make sure my eyes had it right.

Eighteen thousand dollars.

My face was worth eighteen thousand dollars, and I'd been told it was a hobby.

I stood up too fast and knocked my knee against the desk.

The corkboard swung.

A loose card fell off the top and landed face-up on the carpet.

I picked it up.

It was a printed copy of the gray scale with one row of tiny numbers written under it, a tint recipe, the kind you'd use to mix a dye.

The handwriting was square and quick, with a loop at the bottom of every seven.

I knew that loop.

It was on every birthday card I'd ever gotten.

It was on the note in my lunchbox when I was nine.

My brother's handwriting.

Colby had mixed the dye.

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