How I Found the Perfect Dress (16 page)

“You must be, uh, very close.” I wasn't sure what else to say. Twenty feet was still pretty close, in my opinion, but then again I wasn't two feet tall.

“Of course we're close. We're twins! All gnomes are twins, didn't you know that? Except for”—she paused for a moment—“the Occasional Exceptions, I guess. But
practically
all of us are twins. I certainly am! And my sister and I always, always do everything together.”

Uh-oh,
that inner voice of mine cautioned.
Leprechauns do everything alone, and gnomes do everything together.
But surely they could get through one date, right?

“Listen, Glendryn,” I said. “If you want, I can bring your sister Drenwyn over here to be with you, and put Tux and his Frodo act over by the raspberry bush. I'm sure no one will notice.”

Glendryn's gnomishly crinkled face crinkled up even more. “Could you? Oh, Morganne! Everything they say about you is true!”

As amusing as it would be to know what all the gnomes were saying about me, I thought it best to press on. “Okay, but I need you to do me a favor too,” I said. “I have this friend who needs a date for a very special event. It's the Spring Faery Ball.”

“I always
wanted
to go to that!” Glendryn clapped her hands together. They made a little
clunk
, like the sound of plastic hitting plastic.

“Excellent! He's a really nice guy and I'm sure you'd have a great time.” I gestured at her bubblegum-pink princess outfit. “And you already have the dress.”

“This old thing? No, I will definitely need something new. What to wear, what to wear! And he's a leprechaun, you say? How exotic! We'll have to meet first, of course. A proper introduction is required, absolutely required.” She peered up at me. “Sometimes people assume that just because a girl is a gnome, you don't have to treat her like a lady. That is
so
wrong!”

“I can take you to meet him this week.” I pictured myself with Glendryn tucked under my arm like a football as I sprinted through the mirror in Strohman's dressing room.

“First, I have a few questions.” Glendryn fluffed her pink skirt flirtatiously. “What's his name?”

“Jolly Dan Dabby.”

“Profession?”

“Shoemaker.”

“Height?”

I held my hand at knee level. “About this tall. Just right for you.”

“Perfect!” she squealed. “Good dresser?”

I thought of Jolly Dan's buckled boots and funky green leprechaun hat. “He's traditional in style, I would say. He definitely has his own look.”

“Fine, fine.” She nodded approvingly. “Now, of course it's not the most important thing; the most important thing is character! And personality! And what lives inside a person's heart! But tell me the truth: Is he good with money?”

“The best,” I said confidently. “Very hardworking and fiscally sound, from what I hear.”

Glendryn twirled in delight and then curtsied. “It would be my pleasure to make his acquaintance, then. And he has to take my sister too, of course!”

Some noisy night insect buzzed right past my ear as Glendryn was talking; I wasn't sure I'd heard her right. “Sorry, Glendryn, what was the last thing you said?”

“I said, he has to take my sister too.” She beamed. “We do
everything
together.”

 

 

talk about feast Or famine
, i thought, sneaking across the lawn once more with the gnome named Tux under my arm.
Jolly Dan's first date ever, and it's gonna be with twins.

It took me a minute to find Drenwyn in the dark, half-concealed among the raspberry bushes. Not surprisingly, she was a dead ringer for Glendryn, but dressed in a checked gingham frock and lace-up boots. She wore a bonnet on her head and carried a small wicker basket for the berries.

Stamped from the same mold,
I couldn't help thinking, but then I wondered if that was rude.

There was another girl gnome in the berry patch with Drenwyn. She was similarly dressed, but with a cranky expression on her face. Most of the gnomes had bright-eyed, round-cheeked faces that exuded perpetual enthusiasm. This one had more of a shrunken apple look.

When I explained to Drenwyn why I was there, she wept with joy at the prospect of being reunited with her sister. The cranky gnome girl's face puckered even more, but she said nothing and kept picking berries. Raspberries wouldn't be in season until late in summer, but each time she reached for one a berry seemed to appear just in time to get plucked and tossed in the basket. She never looked at the basket, I noticed, but she never missed. Like a mini-Sarah. Definitely UConn material, if they started drafting two-foot-high forwards.

This Tux fellow was hardly dressed for harvesting fruit, but once I helped him take off his tiny cufflinks and roll up his crisp white sleeves, he got to work without complaint. After Glendryn's comment about treating gnome girls like ladies, I figured I should try to introduce him to the cranky, apple-faced girl before I left them alone together in the berry bush. She seemed terribly shy and could barely say her name.

“Tammy,” was what I thought she said.

“Small world. My sister's name is Tammy too,” I offered, in an attempt to bond.

“Taffy!”
she yelped. “Like the stuff that breaks your teeth! And don't brag about your ‘sister' to me. That's
so mean
!” Then she started to cry.

Yikes, I must've said the wrong thing,
I thought. I turned to Tux and Drenwyn for help. Tux gestured for me to bend down so he could whisper in my ear.

“She doesn't have a sister,” he said.

“But I thought all gnomes were twins—”

“Practically all,” he said. “Except for Taffy. She's an OE.”

“A what?”

“Occasional Exception,” he explained. “She's very sensitive about it too. Don't worry, I'll cheer her up. Hey, Taffy!” he said jovially. “Have you seen my Frodo impersonation? ‘No, Samwise, go back to the Shire! I must bear . . . this burden . . . alone!'”

It wasn't a great impression, but he was definitely the right height for it. And it succeeded in distracting Taffy, though not in a good way.

“That's so
stupid,
” I heard her wail between sobs, as I carried Drenwyn back to the azalea bush to be with her sister. “Everybody knows that hobbits . . . aren't . . . real. . . .”

W
ith onlЧ ten daЧs left before the junior prom, this is how things stood: I had a guy I was crazy about who couldn't take me to prom because he was leaving the country (if he didn't end up in the hospital first), another guy who wanted to take me but I wouldn't let him, a pair of stinky sneakers to steal, a fabulous dress on layaway, and a crabby leprechaun who had to be convinced to escort a pair of excitable plastic gnome sisters to the Spring Faery Ball.

I can so totally make this work
, I thought, as I rode up the mall escalators to Strohman's. It was Monday, after school, and I was going use all my powers of persuasion to get Jolly Dan Dabby to say yes to not one, but two dates for the Faery Ball.

Or, if that didn't work, who knows? Maybe he had a friend.

“i don't have ‘a friend,' Чou nitwit! i'm a leprechaun! We're known to be solitary! We hate to mingle! We're seen in public so rarely that half the Faery Folk don't even believe we exist!”

Jolly Dan was not reacting positively to the twin concept.

“Listen.” I took a deep breath, which made me notice how strongly Jolly Dan's shop smelled of feet. “First of all, it was your idea to go to the Faery Ball, so don't give me that solitary leprechaun routine. You're not solitary. You're lonely.”

“Humph,” he said.

“Second of all, these sisters are perfectly nice girls and they want to go with you. I've done my part. Go or don't go, I don't care, but you still have to make the magic shoes for Colin.” I stood up too fast and bumped my head on the ceiling. “A deal's a deal.”

“Don't try to bamboozle me, you double-height half-goddess!” he retorted. “I said find me a date. You found me
two
dates. No deal!”

I stared at him.

He stared at me.

I stared at him harder. I had never, ever lost a staring contest in my life, and believe me, Tammy had given me tons of practice.

“You know,” he finally said, looking away in discomfort, “I do have a customer who came in to get his shoes resoled for the ball.” Jolly Dan grabbed his hammers and a pair of Manolo Blahniks from the shelf. “He was complaining about not knowing who to ask.”

“Perfect,” I said. “A double date. You'll win extra points for customer service, the sisters will be happy and I'll get my shoes for Colin.”

“Not so fast,” he warned. “This guy's an elf. He's very—” Jolly Dan held his hand in the air, as high as he could reach.

“Tall?”

“Grotesquely so.” Jolly Dan cringed. “Even bigger than you.” He turned away from me and started drumming with his hammers. “The ladies might find him repulsive.”

Would they? The word elf just made me think of Orlando Bloom. Sarah was still secretly obsessed with him; she used to keep his picture taped to the inside of her locker before she started dating Dylan. Surely no one could object to being set up with a hottie like that?

“It's what's on the inside of a person that counts,” I said to Jolly Dan. “That's what one of the ‘ladies' told me.” I didn't bother to mention that she'd also inquired about his finances.

“Come back tomorrow,” Jolly Dan muttered, as he began
tap-tap-tapping
away on the Manolos. “I'll tell you what the elf says then.”

 

 

glendrЧn and drenwЧn loved the idea of double-dating, “as long as we stay together the
whole
time,” they said. And the elf concept prompted fits of giggles.

Meanwhile, matchmaker me was feeling pretty wiped out from my middle-of-the-night gnome visits, and this got me even more worried about how long Colin would be able to last with only fitful half-sleep and catnaps to keep him going. During my first free period at school on Tuesday, I went to the library and looked up “Sleep Deprivation”:

 

Death?
This double date
will
happen,
I thought.
There's a lot more at stake here than Jolly Dan's love life.
Or mine, for that matter. Now that I was trying to avoid having any fleeting urges of lust for my male classmates, boys were pretty much all I could think about. I tried to imagine them the way they were in middle school, when they were a head shorter than me with braces and zits and squeaky voices, but the more I tried to downplay their cuteness the yummier they seemed. Changing classes was the worst, with all those boy bodies rushing by, smelling of soap and aftershave—it was like I was trapped in the Hotties of East Norwich High School pinup calendar.

To keep me on track, and also because I was really freaked out about the sleep-deprived rats, I ran into the girl's bathroom between classes, snuck out my cell phone and called Colin to see how he was feeling. He didn't pick up.

Probably busy in the lab,
I thought, trying not to panic.
I'll call him again later.

After school I took the bus straight to the mall to see Jolly Dan. The sales staff at Strohman's were starting to recognize me. I didn't want them to think I was a total klepto or they'd never let me back in the store, so I visited the beige dress at the layaway counter for a while before heading into the dressing room.

“Why don't you just buy it?” the clerk said, taking it down off the rack for me to look at. “It's the nicest dress in the store, but for some weird reason it didn't fit anyone until you tried it on.”

“That
is
weird,” I said, forcing myself to sound surprised. “I probably will. I'm, uh, just not sure I can afford it.”

She shoved the price tag in front of my face. It read:

 

“This has to be a mistake,” I said.

The clerk waved the tag though the barcode scanner and looked at the display on her cash register.