My wall of fabric was one of my favorite spaces. Staring at the uncut beauties, one word floated in my head: potential. Potential to do or make anything my imagination could come up with. Sewing and creating made me feel alive. It was the only thing I found complete joy in besides reading. It was my own way of creating new worlds and experiencing other people and character’s lives and history through clothes. Complete and total immersion. It was so simple. So pure. So beautiful.
And this dress was my next adventure.
I already had an idea of how to make the pattern, and tonight I was going to attempt it, maybe even cut and sew the basic shape.
Skimming through all the fabric, my eyes finally found what I was looking for. It was a fabric I’d had made. There were a few websites that let the customer upload images and designs for their own personalized fabric, and the site I picked also let me pick the fabric type as well. The design I uploaded came from a picture of the universe on the NASA website. I picked it because it contained the image of a star within its swirling galaxy. A very particular star. The star my parents had named after me for my sixteenth birthday. I had pretended to love it at the time, not wanting to hurt their feelings. But at sixteen, I had wanted anything else, not a star I’d never see. So selfish. So materialistic. So stupid.
I had forgotten about it until after they died.
Looking up at the night sky the day after the funeral, I had wondered where they were, if there was such thing as Heaven, or if their souls were free and floating through space. I needed to believe they were around me, watching me, or just near me, and then I remembered the star.
And I knew.
That was where they were.
And they’d be waiting for me someday, forever dancing on the star that was named after their daughter.
It gave me comfort then and still did today.
The website had been running a sale, so I had bought twenty yards of the swirling Milky Way that held the star “Jeraline” in velvet. It was a lighter velvet than the one in my fantasy because I imagined it wouldn’t be that easy to print images on classic thick velvet, but this would work perfectly. Being twenty yards, it took up almost an entire shelf, and I was so happy I finally had a project I could use it for. The gown was going to be huge, so I hoped twenty yards would be enough, but I’d make it work.
Leaned up against the wall was a large roll of thin paper that I used for patterns, and a folded up cutting table. Pulling out the table first, I opened its two wings, creating a space of five feet by three feet about waist high. It was a tight fit in my little room, but I’d been sewing for so long I hardly noticed anymore. Lifting the four-foot roll of paper up onto the cutting table, I rolled it out enough to cover the entire surface. Grabbing the cloth tape measure from my notions shelf, I was ready.
Now to put what was in my head onto the paper.
I knew my measurements by heart, so at least that aspect of the process was easy, but I had to think through some of the more difficult sections of the dress, like the top. I wanted it to be the gown version of fit and flare, but I also wanted long sleeves and a half collar that dipped into a V in front. I was reasonably sure I knew how to pattern this, but I wouldn’t know until it was made (or sometimes, in the process of being made).
As I sketched out the pattern using my tape measure and my imagination as my guide, my eyes kept veering toward under my bed and what lay beneath. At this point, it was almost like a monster ready to grab my legs if I walked near.
As if hearing my thoughts, Olivia crawled out of The Gateway to Winterbrook book by my bedside and sat on the edge of the bed while I worked.
“Thinking about the gun?” she asked.
“You know I am,” I answered, trying to focus on my dress instead.
“Lots of heroes use weapons,” Olivia said thoughtfully.
“I’m not a hero.”
“Who says? You never know what might happen,” Olivia replied quietly.
“Heroes have to be brave, and I’m the furthest thing from that.”
“I had to learn to be brave. I wasn’t at first either. Remember? I may have been looking for a door to another world, but when I found it, it scared the life out of me. I was like you, escaping into books, not accepting my mother’s death. If anyone understands you, it’s me.”
“I’m not like you. I could never be brave enough to do everything you did. You saved Winterbrook. You overcame your grief. You lived a life of adventure. I couldn’t do that. I want to. I just don’t think I’m capable.”
“What you’re doing now is a start.” Olivia smiled as she examined the sketch of my pattern.
“Making a dress? With nowhere to wear it? That’s hardly the stuff of legends.” I finished drawing one of the pieces of the bodice.
“You’ll find a place to wear it. I have a feeling.” Olivia looked like she knew something I didn’t. “In the meantime, maybe you should think about what your grandmother said.”
“About the gun? I’m too scared to even look at it.” Though that part of me was turning into a strange kind of need for it,
