Work Text:
“I have a job opportunity for you, if you’re interested,” Janine says suddenly one night, without looking up from the fat, boring-looking textbook she has her nose buried in.
Claudia glances around the living room, in case a brain surgeon or astronomy professor or graphing calculator repair person or somebody else more Janine’s speed is hiding behind the couch, but nope, it’s just the two of them. Mom and Dad have gone to bed early, and Mimi—
Oh. She still forgets sometimes, about Mimi.
Shaking her head to clear away the thought, Claudia replies eloquently: “Huh?” Something about talking to Janine makes her feel clumsier than she is. Stupider than she often feels.
Janine, though, doesn’t react; Dad said once that she has the world’s best poker face. Claudia doesn’t really know what that means, besides the song. “I am in need of styling aid,” Janine says, closing her book and giving Claudia that cool, even stare.
“Oh, wow.” Claudia has been waiting basically her entire life for this moment but tries to play it cool. She gives Janine a quick assessment: light-wash jeans and a navy T-shirt paired with a gray hoodie, all from the Gap, very ‘90s normcore, the usual—before rushing out, “Okay, I have a million ideas. What do you think about crop tops? They’re really, really popular right now and with higher-waisted jeans they’re not as skimpy as—”
“I should explain further,” Janine interrupts, and absently tugs on the hem of her shirt. “Today I asked Ashley to the winter formal, and she accepted.”
“What? ” Claudia squeals. Somehow this is even more exciting than giving Janine a makeover. “How did you ask? Did you sweep her off her feet?” Obviously Janine isn’t the OTT prom-posal type, but maybe she decorated her Animal Crossing island to spell out Ashley’s name in flowers or did some cute computer animation that Ashley can share with her five million TikTok followers or—
“I asked her right before AP US History,” Janine says. “It’s her least favorite class, so I felt it would be romantic to give her something to look forward to.”
“Uh...yeah.” Romantic? At school? Claudia can’t imagine a less exciting place to be asked anything, let alone on a date to the second most important dance of the year. She doesn’t even like being asked about school at school.
“It’s occurred to me that since I’ve never attended a formal dance, I’m uncertain about what to wear. I assume the dress I wore to Mimi’s funeral will not suffice.”
Claudia thinks this is supposed to be a joke.
“But it’s a particular area of your expertise, is it not? Ashley has complimented your ensembles several times.”
Even now that Claudia’s more used to Ashley being around, she still gets a touch of warm-fuzzies from knowing that the coolest girl at Stoneybrook High (who’s dating Janine, somehow?) likes her fashion sense. That might be what makes her say, “So you want me to...go dress shopping with you?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Janine replies. “Ordering online would be easier and less time-consuming. I just...don’t know where to even start.” For the briefest moment, her face contorts, before smoothing back to its usual neutral expression. She’s...insecure?
Claudia’s shoulders are usually way up around her ears when she has to spend too much time around Janine, but now she feels herself soften. “Sure,” she says with a little shrug. “That can’t be too hard, right?”
*
The very next night, Claudia knocks on Janine’s bedroom door and shows her a Pinterest board she’s set up with pin after pin of bland pantsuits in a rainbow of neutral shades.
Janine blinks down at the laptop screen and pushes up her glasses. “A dress is more traditional, is it not?”
“Yeah,” Claudia says with false cheer, because frankly looking at all this gray, brown, and navy has been really depressing for the ten minutes it’s taken her to throw this together. “But girls don’t have to wear dresses to a dance. And see, this isn’t too different from what you normally wear—pants, shirt, and jacket—so you’ll be really comfortable. Then you can liven it up with a fun patterned button-down and a boutonniere that matches Ashley’s corsage.”
“I see.” Janine scrolls through the board before glancing over at Claudia. “I feel up to the challenge of expanding my horizons a bit more than this. I don’t want to risk embarrassing Ashley by wearing the wrong thing.”
Wrong thing? But this is the fancy version of what Janine wears every day. Claudia feels all that fake cheer drain away; she’d kind of hoped to be done with this project sooner rather than later. “Oh. Okay. Sure.”
Back in her own room, she deletes the board, sets down her laptop, and flops onto her bed. Where had she gone wrong? She found the most flattering kind of formalwear anyone would expect for Janine.
She frowns at the ceiling. Maybe that’s the problem.
*
“Is Janine even paying you for this?” Kristy asks before chomping into a Twizzler.
They’re in the middle of a BSC meeting, but it’s the day before Thanksgiving, and no big surprise, but babysitters aren’t in the highest demand for the next few days. Kristy insisted on meeting anyway, because Kristy, and Claudia fills the time usually spent taking calls and booking appointments by telling everyone about her new “job.”
“I don’t know,” she admits. “I forgot to ask. I hope it’s not a sister discount sort of thing.”
“Ha! Sister discount,” Mallory laughs, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Jessi. “I’ll have to remember that one—I can really save some money that way.”
Claudia smiles weakly, but she’s even less in the mood for Mallory’s nervous energy than usual. “Even if she’s paying, I didn’t expect this to be complicated. Between art and babysitting and holiday stuff—”
“And the canned food drive,” Dawn adds.
“Don’t forget school,” Mary Anne pipes in.
All Claudia wants to do is forget school. “—I don’t exactly have much room in my schedule to be Janine’s full-time stylist.”
Stacey looks up from her spot on the bed, where she’s been leafing through an old issue of Vogue. “You know if someone, hypothetically, asked me to a winter formal…”
They all know she’s hoping Sam Thomas will ask her. Kristy warned not to hold her breath, because high schoolers wouldn’t be caught dead taking an eighth grader to a dance.
“...I’d want to make a big, big statement. Think haute couture. Think Met Gala. Think, well...Ashley Wyeth.”
“I love that,” Claudia says, brightening. Ashley’s platform was known for blending fashion and social justice. If Janine wants to look good for Ashley, why not use Ashley as inspiration?
*
The next day, while waiting for the turkey to finish heating up—just the act of making a meal feels so painful without Mimi there, filling up the kitchen with her own personal warmth, so they ordered a premade turkey and sides—Claudia sits next to Janine on the couch and shows her the next batch of formalwear. This time it isn’t depressing at all—the Pinterest board is filled with eye-popping colors and mixing patterns and filmy layers and feather sleeves (ethically sourced, of course!) and tall, rigidly geometric shoulders. She can easily see Ashley, or her date, wearing any of them.
Janine doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “These are certainly...novel.”
“And they’re all dresses,” Claudia says. As a stylist, she can take notes from a client. “Or, well, this one’s a skirt-bandeau set—”
“A bandeau? For winter formal?”
“—but that’s basically the same thing, see?” She points out the outfit with the cursor and accidentally clicks the link to the seller’s ecommerce page.
Janine leans in closer to the screen, her eyebrows shooting up. “Claudia, this outfit costs more than two thousand dollars!”
Oh. She hadn’t actually been looking at the prices. “Um...so you’re on a budget?” she asks sheepishly.
Janine stares at her. “I’m paying for this with my after-school tutoring money.”
Which isn’t a lot, if her hourly pay is similar to the BSC’s hourly rate. “Well, these kinds of designs aren’t cheap...”
“That’s perfectly fine,” Janine says quickly. “I don’t need, ah.” She gestures vaguely at the screen. For the first time in Claudia’s memory, her sister is at a loss for words.
*
Another bust. After dinner (none of it tasted quite right, by the way, like Mimi would have done it, and seriously, who makes yams without marshmallows on top? It’s the best part—otherwise you’re just eating vegetables) Claudia reports this on the BSC group text. Jessi’s the first to respond.
Maybe you’re overthinking this? Start simple, like her favorite color!
It’s good advice and meant well, but it only makes the bad feelings worse. Because Claudia and Janine have been sisters literally her entire life, but she has no idea what Janine’s favorite color is.
*
Over the holiday weekend, Claudia doesn’t get any closer to figuring out Janine’s personal rainbow (unless you count her heather gray hoodie, which Claudia does not), but she does make a different exciting discovery: their mom’s really, really into some sexy history show and hoping no one notices.
All Friday and Saturday, whenever Claudia wanders into the living room, Mom scrambles to change the TV to the news, but not before Claudia gets a brief eyeful of a man’s broad, naked back or a flash of a woman’s bare chest and hip. Kind of embarrassing for both of them, so she pretends not to notice. Honestly, she has no idea why Mom doesn’t just stream it over her phone and watch in her room; Gen Xers, right?
But on the bright side, this gives Claudia an idea, because occasionally, when the screen isn’t filled up with people rolling around together in a grassy meadow, she sees the characters in lush, elaborate ballgowns instead, dripping with pearls and performing intricate curtsies.
Wow, is that what the 18-whatevers used to look like? Because it’s all so gorgeous.
Suddenly Mom’s Secret History Sex Show is Claudia’s official new muse. After making a few quick sketches for potential costume party ideas—for herself, of course—she goes to work setting up another Pinterest board.
*
“Have you mistakenly opened a Ren Faire board?” Janine asks as she scrolls past a pin about how to DIY a hoopskirt. “These sleeves are bigger than my head.”
Ugh. For someone so smart, Janine doesn’t understand sex appeal at all.
*
It’s been the first big family holiday without Mimi, and everyone has seemed kind of adrift. Claudia’s aunt and uncle decided to spend Thanksgiving with his folks, so it’s just the four Kishis this year, and it feels like the glue that connected them is gone; they’re just existing separately. So there’s Mom with her binge-watching and Dad working on crossword puzzles and Janine reading a book on the history of molecular gastronomy “for fun,” and Claudia up here in her room, staring at her phone like it might have the answer to all her problems.
The main one being how to get this Janine project off her plate as soon as possible. School starts back up tomorrow (yuck), and Claudia can only worry about so many things at one time.
After a brief attempt to see if she can bypass the parental blocks and try watching the sexy history show herself (nope), Claudia pokes around on social media, but other than Dawn, who’s boycotting Thanksgiving and posting about various awesome but under-recognized Native people instead, her feeds are pretty quiet right now. Everyone else is too busy with their own families.
Sighing, she switches to investigating last spring’s prom posts, so she can get a sense of what’s hot in high school formal clothes these days. Quickly she realizes this is another dead end—too short and too much bodycon for Janine to ever feel comfortable, and honestly, all the dresses look so similar that Claudia finds them pretty boring herself. It doesn’t really seem like Ashley’s style either, and without really thinking about it she pops over to Ashley’s profile.
Most of it Claudia’s already seen; she started following Ashley on all her main social media platforms before even meeting her, and since she started hanging out with Janine, Ashley’s followed back. (Out of politeness? A favor to Janine? Ugh, Claudia hopes it’s not that.) There are political posts and arty posts and posts about sustainable fashion amplifying marginalized voices, and some spon con, which might be the coolest part of all; getting to make money by doing the stuff you love is the dream, right?
There’s a new post, though, one Claudia probably missed during her own Thanksgiving. She clicks on it—it’s a vid of Ashley doing a silly but joyful dance in her room, mouthing along to the chorus to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” by Whitney Houston with a huge smile and rolling hips that Claudia kind of wants to study for future reference. (Is it okay to think your sister’s girlfriend is really gorgeous? She hopes so, because she does!) The bracelet Mimi bequeathed Ashley is jingling merrily on her wrist the whole time.
The caption is my gf asked me to our first dance, followed by a full rainbow of hearts.
And...wow. Janine can make someone feel like this? Like just so bursting with happiness that the world needs to share a little piece of it? Or at least Ashley’s five million loyal followers.
In one solid punch of realization, it all hits Claudia: Ashley thinks Janine is exciting, inspiring, and maybe, as much as it might blow Claudia’s mind, even sexy. There are all these pieces to Janine, the person in the room down the hall, and Claudia had no idea. And they weren’t even hidden pieces—Claudia has just never bothered looking.
All of a sudden, she’s moving without even thinking. It only takes a few seconds to find herself in Janine’s room, clutching her laptop as Janine sets down her ereader.
“I don’t know what kind of dress you want, but I kind of want to find out,” Claudia says. “How about we look together?”
Janine blinks. “Is that wise? It’s no secret that I’ve never had a particular eye for fashion—”
“I bet there’s more to you than you think,” says Claudia, and for one beautiful second, she feels as wise as their Mimi. “Come on, let’s look.”
*
The sky is starting to darken outside Janine’s bedroom window by the time they finally settle on the dress. It’s a simple A-line cut with plain bodice and spaghetti straps, but the fabric is an unusual, sparkly, almost metallic black that Claudia never thought Janine would’ve gone for; Janine says it reminds her of outer space, which is actually kind of cool. Plus, the skirt has pockets, which they both agree is the best part of all.
Janine is glowing, and Claudia feels all warm on the inside too. Thanksgiving is almost over, and it’s the first time she hasn’t felt lonely, sitting here with her sister. But isn’t that just the way sometimes, figuring out the beginning at the end?