“What?” I said, looking down at my sleeveless black knee-length sheath. “You said to dress up. I’m wearing my dress.”
“Is it your designated funeral dress?” Kara asked, adjusting the strap of her own low-cut royal-blue number.
I huffed out an annoyed breath. I caught my mother, my own flesh and blood, standing behind me, nodding.
“Come on, sweetie, we only have an hour or so to make this work,” Kara said, pulling at my elbow.
“Make what work?” I demanded.
Mo and Kara hooked their arms through mine and dragged me toward the bedroom. Mo wasn’t playing fair. She knew I wouldn’t do anything in front of Kara. She knew I couldn’t just shake her off, phase, and run. Cooper came ambling out of the bedroom, looping his tie around his collar.
“Cooper! Help!”
The coward turned on his heel and walked into the kitchen as if he hadn’t seen me getting frogmarched by the estrogen squad. “Hey! Don’t act like you don’t hear me! Seriously! Remember that time I hid a salmon in your truck and it stank for a month? Child’s play! My revenge will be swift and terrible. Damn it, Cooper!” I yelled as they dragged me into their den of girliness.
They threw me into a chair near Mo’s bathroom and spread out torture devices on the bathroom counter. They glared down at me like supervillians trying to pry information out of James Bond.
“She’s got such beautiful skin,” Kara said, lifting my chin and talking about my face as if I wasn’t even in the room. “No sense in covering it up. We just need to play up the eyes, tame the brows, and gloss the lips. A good, strong blood-red, I think.”
I snorted and muttered something about a quick hunt on the way to the dance, and Mo gave me the stink- eye. Without warning, they pounced. My dress was whipped over my head, and my hair was pulled out of its ponytail. The next half-hour was a haze of stuff rubbed on my face, my hair yanked, and my body pushed and pulled at as if it wasn’t even mine. I was tweezed. A lot.
“Can’t do much about the painfully sensible shoes,” Mo muttered as she safety-pinned the sides of my dress to give it a “silhouette.”
“It’s too cold out for sexy shoes.”
“Tell me about it. The one thing I miss about home is being able to wear peep-toes year-round,” Kara griped, giving my hair a gentle yank to remind me to keep my head up. She was arranging my hair into some weird cinnamon-bun shape on top of my head. I only hoped I wouldn’t walk out of there looking like Princess Leia . . . then again, Nick might dig that.
But I didn’t care what Nick liked, I reminded myself. Clay was my date. Nick was the guy who was currently considering whether he could be a silent witness to my family’s wolfy weirdness.
I hadn’t heard from the good doctor in a few days, and given the fact that the valley hadn’t been overrun with teams of commando scientists, I took that to mean that he was still considering my proposal. I’d had twinges of panic that first day after the “big reveal,” wondering if I’d made a huge mistake in trusting him. But the silence of the last few days had been a sort of balm. Surely, the first twenty-four hours after hearing something like that were the hardest to keep it a secret. But I couldn’t go looking for him to ask him what he decided. Every time I did that, I ended up naked in some way.
This might be harder than I thought. I frowned.
Kara stepped back to look at her handiwork. “She looks like a grumpy ballerina.”
“It’s a little too . . .” Mo took out the pins and shook my hair out, slicking it back with some citrusy goo. “That’s better. More tousle, less froufrou. She needs a smoky eye.”
“That sounds painful,” I said, and was ignored. I shied away when Kara came at me with what looked like a cross between pliers and a speculum. “What the hell is that thing?”
“It’s an eyelash curler.”
“How are you going to curl my eyelashes when that thing rips them all out?” I demanded, jerking my head away when she moved toward me with the sinister-looking device.
“Hold still, and it won’t hurt,” she said, clamping it down on my lashes.
“Owowowow!” I yelled, my eye watering as she pulled the lid away from my eyeball and crimped the hairs. “You’re a damned liar, Kara Reynolds.”
“Beauty is pain, babe,” Mo advised me. I snaked my hand around Kara and took a swipe at my sister-in-law. Since she could freaking move, she just danced out of the way.
“Well, just focus on your breathing, and you should be fine,” Kara said wryly as she went for the other eye.
“You stay away from me, you psycho.”
“You can’t just walk around with one set curled. It looks weird,” Mo protested.
“It can’t make that much of a difference,” I shot back. Mo rolled her eyes and thrust a hand mirror in front of my face. “Oh, I guess it does.”
Since the lift and curve of my newly pressed eyelashes really did make them look bigger, I dutifully sat still while they put three shades of gray eye shadow on my eyelids, followed by eyeliner . . . then they wiped the whole thing off and started from scratch because it was “too much.”
“What’s that called?” I asked as Mo painted a bright, bold red across my lips.
She checked the little label on the end of the lip-gloss tube. “Cabaret.” I frowned, so Mo added, “As in, ‘life is a’?”
“When you wonder why we don’t always understand each other, it’s because of jokes like that,” I told her. Mo huffed and slicked my lips with gloss.
I wasn’t allowed to see a mirror. Kara kept muttering under her breath about killer cheekbones and “lucky bitch who doesn’t even appreciate her teeny-tiny pores.” Finally, they stood staring at me, trying to figure out what to do next.
“Maybe we could. . .” Kara trailed off.
“No, she’s perfect,” Mo said, stopping Kara’s hand as she reached toward me with the powder brush. “Doing anything else would make her overdone.”
“I think I hate her,” Kara said. Mo shrugged.
They turned me around to face the mirror.
I was me but different. My hair looked as if I actually planned for it to fall around my face in dark waves, instead of all messy and wind-blown. My eyelashes felt all stiff and goopy, but they looked damn good. The cinched-up dress showed off the few curves I had, and the satiny red scarf Mo had tied around my dress made my waist look tiny. Don’t get me wrong, I like me. But seeing this hotter, femme incarnation of myself was very cool.
“Let me get this straight. You guys spend an hour scrubbing and polishing your faces, putting on three layers of makeup, and fiddling with your hair so you can like me after I take most of the makeup off ?” I asked, grinning at them.
“Yep, definitely hate her,” Kara decided.
Mom gasped and scrambled for a camera when I emerged from Barbieville, USA.
“Mom,” I moaned.
“Oh, hush, you’re gorgeous. And it’s not like you went to your senior prom. Give me a chance to fuss.”
“This is why I didn’t go to my senior prom!”
Mom snapped picture after picture, from every angle conceivable. Only Eva’s spitting up in my mother’s hair persuaded her to stop. I mentally doubled the amount I’d budgeted for Eva’s first Christmas present.
“Mom, it’s just a party. There’s no reason to make a big deal out of it,” I told her. “It’s just another Friday night at the Glacier.”
* * * AND I THOUGHT so, right until we got to the edge of town and I lost my nerve. I wasn’t about to change for some stupid guy. Even if he was hot and available and a werewolf, I didn’t want Clay to think he had that kind of power over me. Screw this; the minute Mo was in the door, I was going to phase and run home.
Eyeing the way I was gripping the truck door, Mo warned, “You do that, and I’m telling Samson you were too chicken-shit to go to a silly dance.”
I grunted, growling at her and shoving a couple of warm, cheesy mini-quiches into my mouth.
