The Outfit Clash: I'm Told to Strip novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Show

I looked down at the letter standing in my doorway.

Then I handed it back.

"Will," I said. "That's huge."

"I know."

"That's the biggest workers' rights firm in New England."

"I know. I've had their logo on a mug since I was nineteen."

He was watching my face, waiting for it to do something.

"What do you want me to say?" I asked.

"I don't know. Something."

I took a breath.

"I'm not going to tell you to stay," I said. "And I'm not going to tell you to go. You'd resent me either way, and I'd deserve it."

"Georgia..."

"It's two hours to Boston. I have a car. I can drive."

"You drive like a Parisian."

"I drive like a Parisian, and I'd still come every weekend." I put my hand flat on his chest. "Decide what you want. Not what I want. Then tell me."

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he folded the letter and put it in his coat.

"Okay," he said. "Give me till spring."

Spring came late that year.

In April the snow finally went, and the quad turned green, and Maddie had her show.

It was in the studio, because she wouldn't have it anywhere else.

She'd cleared the long tables to the walls and run a strip of white paper down the middle of the floor for a runway.

Twelve students modeled for her. Tyler carried every single folding chair down the basement stairs by himself and set them in rows.

"Straighter," Maddie told him.

"They're straight."

"They're lacrosse straight. I need couture straight."

He straightened them.

By seven the room was packed.

The dean of students was there in a tie.

The oldest trustee sat in the front row with her cane and a plastic cup of white wine.

My assistant came in a hat.

Will's mother took the bus down again.

She sat next to me and held my hand through the whole thing like we were at a movie.

The collection was called Two Blue Stitches.

A coat made from her grandmother's tablecloth, the same pattern she'd sewn at fourteen, in real wool now.

A dress built from the cut-up pieces of the Sterne knockoffs the police had released back to the university. Charcoal polyester, made beautiful.

A man's work shirt like the ones from Will's mother's mill, every stitch perfect.

The last piece came out alone.

A pair of overalls in fine charcoal wool, cut like couture, with a pincushion sewn into the bib.

Under the strap, two tiny blue cross-stitches.

The girl wearing them walked to the end of the paper runway and stopped in front of me.

Then she turned around and pointed at the back of the room, where Maddie stood in her overalls with a pencil in her bun.

The whole room stood up.

Maddie came down the runway to take her bow and tripped on the paper.

Tyler caught her.

Everybody laughed, and she laughed hardest, and then she bowed so low her bun fell down.

Afterward, in the crush by the cutting table, Will's mother found Maddie and took both her hands.

"I sewed shirts for nineteen years," she said. "I never made a collar that clean."

Maddie made a noise and burst into tears.

Will found me by the old corkboard.

It held sketches now. Maddie's, and eleven other students', all pinned with red pins.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"I called the firm in Boston today."

My stomach turned over.

"And?"

"I said no."

I stared at him.

"There's a legal aid office on Main Street," he said. "Above the hardware store. Three lawyers and a coffee maker from nineteen ninety. They do housing, wage theft and student cases. They offered me a job in February."

"You didn't tell me."

"Because I wanted to decide it first. Without you looking at me like that." He pushed his glasses up. "Half the people who called the clinic this year were kids from this basement. I want to be the lawyer they call when somebody tells them the scholarship is the pay. Here. Where it happened."

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