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Three hours before the Heroes’ Day gala was scheduled to start, Chloé called an emergency strategy meeting in her bedroom.
“I’ll be honest,” said Zoé, curled up in her favorite of Chloé’s armchairs. “I’m kind of freaking out.”
“That’s how I can tell you’re my half sister,” said Chloé. “No true relation of mine would crumble under such meager pressure.”
Plagg took a break from devouring his afternoon cheese board to cackle at her. “Yeah, right,” he snorted to Tikki. “You should have seen her before you and Ruby got in here. I haven’t seen one of my holders have such a bad meltdown since the guy who invented sauerkraut. Before he tasted it, that is.”
Plagg floated up to perch on Chloé’s shoulder, ignoring the grimace she made when she smelled his cheese breath.
“So that’s my advice. You have all the ingredients here for either a disaster or sauerkraut. You’d better make sauerkraut.”
“I hate sauerkraut,” said Chloé.
Plagg shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He returned to his assortment of cheeses, looking utterly unconcerned.
“I’m sure things will work out,” said Tikki in the sugary tone of voice that always made Chloé want to punt her out the nearest window. “And both of you have such beautiful dresses to wear at the gala!”
Dresses. Chloé scowled in the vague direction of her closet. That was another problem, one she hadn’t found the words to tell even Plagg about. She did her best to swallow the swirl of anxiety.
Zoé jumped out of her chair and started to pace. “Okay. In three hours, you and I need to be ready to greet your father’s guests at the Heroes’ Day gala. And Obsidian and Ruby Ranger need to be guests. How do we do it?”
Chloé tore herself away from her internal turmoil, grateful for the distraction. “Prince Ali,” she said. “Everyone in Paris knows I want him. When he’s announced, I’ll tell everyone I’m sneaking off to try to get him alone. That’s when Obsidian will arrive.”
Zoé started to smile. “Oh! I’ll introduce myself to Obsidian, mingle for a while, then excuse myself to ‘keep my sister out of trouble.’”
“Exactly,” said Chloé. “We’ll show Obsidian and Ruby Ranger off for a while. Then Ruby Ranger will get some kind of crime alert and drag Obsidian away.”
Zoé rolled her eyes. “That’s certainly in character. What, you don’t want to stage something where you’re the hero?”
Chloé sighed. “No,” she said. “I want to sell it, because I’m actually a hero. No staging necessary.”
“Right.” Zoé tucked a lock of blond hair behind her ear. “Guess I’d better start getting ready.”
Chloé hesitated until her sister was almost out the door. “Wait,” she said.
Zoé turned. “What?”
Now that the moment was here, Chloé was sure she wasn’t ready. She tried to channel Obsidian. After all, Obsidian was just Chloé Bourgeois freed from all the public’s expectations. “I need your help,” Chloé managed. “With something else.”
Zoé closed the door. “A superhero thing or a sister thing?”
Chloé swallowed. Why was opening up to her sister, to anyone, such a frightening prospect? She was being ridiculous, utterly ridiculous. “A me thing,” she said after a too-long pause.
Plagg landed on her shoulder. Somehow his weight was grounding for her.
Tikki poked her head out of Zoé’s hair to study Chloé curiously for a moment. Whatever she saw in Chloé’s face seemed to satisfy her.
Chloé stroked Plagg’s ears for comfort and, paradoxically, luck. “I don’t like my outfit,” she admitted. “The dress.”
Zoé, who was close friends with approximately three-quarters of their school’s nonbinary population, seemed to understand immediately. “What would you rather wear?” she asked. “If you could wear anything at all.”
Chloé had been half anticipating, half dreading this question. “We have three hours,” she said.
“Exactly,” said Zoé. “If you want—I have a lot of friends in this arrondissement. And one of them’s a delivery boy.”
Chloé couldn’t help but smile. “Okay,” she said, looking down. “If you’re sure.”
Zoé pulled Chloé into a tight hug. “One more question. Is there anything you’d change about your hair?”
“Done,” said Juleka. In a barely-audible mumble, she added, “Tell me if you see a spot I missed.”
Chloé felt cold air on the back of her neck. She opened her eyes and gasped at what she saw. Obviously she would go to her regular hairstylist for a touch-up once the gala was over, but Juleka had done a more than decent job of replicating the undercut from the reference picture Zoé had helped her pick.
Chloé looked different like this. She felt different. She liked what she saw in the mirror, and no one who looked at her tonight would be able to deny that she had changed. A warm feeling swept through her. She wanted to keep changing, just to see what else she could become.
“You look amazing,” said Zoé from the doorway. She was already dressed, stunning in spring green.
Chloé smiled at her. A real smile. She hadn’t felt this way in… ever. “So do you. I like the braid.”
Zoé put a hand up to touch it. “Thanks.”
Chloé checked the time on her phone, and her eyes widened. Ninety minutes. “Out, all of you,” she said. “I need to shower before I change.”
“Luka laid the clothes out on the bed,” said Zoé. She was smiling too.
Juleka took a few minutes to pack up her scissors and the guards for her clippers. For just a moment, she and Chloé were alone in the bathroom.
“Thank you,” said Chloé in a voice softer than Juleka’s usual volume. “I didn’t know I could look like this.”
Juleka made direct eye contact. She seemed to look straight into Chloé’s soul, at the tiny, neglected good parts that prolonged exposure to Zoé and Plagg was nurturing. “Now you do,” she said. Then she was gone, and Chloé was alone.
Chloé spent the first two minutes after Juleka left watching herself in the mirror. Her face looked different in a way that was hard to quantify. She looked handsome.
“Glamorous,” she whispered, thinking of Jocasta Clark, an elderly director of her father’s acquaintance who always wore three-piece suits to his dinner parties. With her hair like this, Chloé looked almost like someone who might belong in the same sentence as Jocasta Clark.
She showered, dried her hair, and emerged, towel-wrapped, into her bedroom to find another marvel.
For people who were only helping her because they were her sister’s friends, Luka, Juleka, and the rest had come through. Carefully, reverently, Chloé pulled on the sharp red blouse. She inspected the charcoal colored suit, then put it on as well. Last came the black dress shoes and the red pocket square which, Chloé knew without looking, had been made by Marinette.
With less than forty minutes to go, there was little time to admire herself in the mirror. Still, as Chloé applied her makeup and arranged her hair, she marveled at the way the suit moved. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it was impressively close. Whose clothing was she wearing?
When Chloé stepped back from the mirror at last, she decided it didn’t matter. She was stunning, utterly stunning. And she looked like the person she wanted to be.
Plagg swallowed the rind of his last cheese and whistled appreciatively. “Go get ‘em, kid.”
Looking like this, Chloé didn’t have to channel Obsidian. She could just be, and all the confidence she needed flowed through her.
She fired off a text to Zoé, letting her sister know she was on her way to the top of the main staircase for their grand entrance.
“I will,” she told Plagg.