The giddy high of the lecture hall lasted precisely until Amelia pushed open the heavy door of her dorm room. Reality, in all its stark, unglamorous glory, was waiting for her.
Her roommate, Chloe, was on the floor, surrounded by a semi-circle of nail polish bottles, meticulously painting her toenails a violent shade of neon green. "Hey! You will not believe the drama in my bio lab. Jessica totally stole Kyle's lab notes and—" She stopped, her brush hovering in mid-air as she took in Amelia's shell-shocked expression. "Whoa. What's wrong with you? You look like you just agreed to go on a date with a vampire."
Amelia dropped her backpack. It hit the linoleum floor with a thud that felt symbolic. "Worse," she mumbled, sinking onto her bed. "I agreed to go to a gala."
Chloe's eyebrows disappeared beneath her choppy bangs. "A what? Like, a school dance?"
"No. A gala. As in, black-tie. As in, fundraising. As in..." She took a deep, fortifying breath. "...the Vale Foundation Gala. With Adrian."
The neon green nail polish brush clattered onto the bottle, leaving a smeary green trail on the cap. Chloe's jaw was unhinged. "You are kidding me. Adrian Vale? He asked you to that? The one that's always in the society pages? That's, like, billionaire prom!"
"Please stop making it sound more terrifying than it already is," Amelia groaned, falling backward onto her pillow and staring at the ceiling. "It was... he looked so... I don't know. He made it sound like a life raft."
She recounted the conversation in the empty classroom, Adrian's plea for a shield, his confession of suffocation. As she spoke, Chloe's expression shifted from shock to a sort of awed horror.
"Okay, that is legitimately the most romantic and terrifying thing I have ever heard," Chloe declared. "He's not asking you to be his arm candy; he's asking you to be his emotional bodyguard. That's... intense."
"It's insane," Amelia corrected, sitting up again. "What am I going to wear? My closet consists of jeans, t-shirts, and one sad little black dress I bought for a funeral three years ago. It has pilled sleeves, Chloe. Pilled sleeves."
"Okay, first, panic later. This is a code red fashion emergency, and we are rising to the occasion." Chloe capped her nail polish, her eyes gleaming with the fierce light of a general preparing for battle. "We have two days. This calls for desperate measures."
Those desperate measures involved a frantic, after-class trip to the only place within a student's budget that might possibly yield a gala-appropriate dress: a sprawling, labyrinthine thrift store on the edge of campus known for its chaotic, hit-or-miss inventory.
The air inside was thick with the smell of old books and faint, floral perfume. Rack upon rack of discarded clothing stretched into the gloom. For an hour, they waded through a sea of polyester and sequins, holding up garish prom dresses from decades past and shuddering.
"This is hopeless," Amelia moaned, holding up a fuchsia number with gargantuan puffed sleeves. "I'm going to have to call him and tell him I have bubonic plague."
"Don't you dare," Chloe scolded, elbow-deep in a rack of beaded gowns. "Aha! What about this?"
She pulled out a dress. It was a deep, emerald green, a simple column of silk with a high neckline and an open back that dipped into a low V. It was elegant. It was timeless. It looked terrifyingly expensive, even here.
Amelia reached out and touched the fabric. It was cool and heavy, whispering of a different world. "It's... it's beautiful."
"Try it on! Now!"
In the cramped, fluorescent-lit changing room, Amelia shimmied out of her jeans and sweater and slipped the dress over her head. The silk whispered against her skin, falling into place with a weight that felt both foreign and powerful. She turned to look in the full-length mirror.
She didn't see the messy, coffee-stained scholarship student. She saw someone else. The color made her skin glow and her eyes seem brighter. The simple, severe lines of the dress lent her a grace she didn't know she possessed. It wasn't flashy. It was… formidable.
"Okay, you have to buy that," Chloe breathed from outside the curtain. "You look like a sexy, intellectual spy."
Amelia stared at her reflection. The girl in the mirror looked like she could walk into a room of billionaires and hold her own. She looked like she could argue about post-modern meta-narrative in a ballroom. She looked, for the first time, like she might belong at Adrian Vale's side.
The price tag, when she found it, was a staggering $75—a fortune for a thrift store find, but a pittance for a dress of this quality. It was an investment, she told herself, in not humiliating herself completely.
Back in their dorm, with the dress hanging majestically on the outside of their closet door, the reality of the situation settled back in.
"What am I doing, Chloe?" Amelia whispered, sitting on the edge of her bed. "This is a world I don't understand. I'll use the wrong fork. I'll say the wrong thing. His father probably eats girls like me for breakfast."
"Probably," Chloe agreed with a startling lack of reassurance. "But so what? You're not going for them. You're going for Adrian. He asked you, remember? The girl who tells him he's wrong. He doesn't want some polished robot. He wants the girl in the green dress who looks like she's about to steal corporate secrets and quote poetry while doing it."
Amelia managed a weak smile. The dress was a costume, a suit of armor. But as she looked at it, she realized the reluctant 'yes' she'd given Adrian wasn't just about him. It was a 'yes' to a version of herself she was terrified to meet, but desperately curious about. She was scared, yes. But beneath the fear, thrumming like a live wire, was a thrilling, undeniable sense of anticipation. She was going to the ball. And for one night, at least, she wasn't going to be Cinderella. She was going to be the queen.