Dress Me in Wildflowers by Trish Milburn Read Free Book Online Page A

on her face.
    “I’m fine.” She placed her fork on the saucer next to the half-eaten cheesecake. She wanted the rest of it, but she felt as if everyone in the room was watching her, thinking that at any moment the cheesecake would make her blow up like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. She took a deep breath. “Just tired and . . . relieved the speech is over. I guess I was a little nervous.”
    “Why would you be nervous?” asked Keely. “If you’re famous now, you’ve probably talked in front of lots of people.”
    “Not really. Most of my work is done one on one or on the phone.”
    Keely lost interest and went back to her own cheesecake, but what Farrin had already eaten felt lodged halfway down her throat. Tammie eyed her, evidently searching for the lie in Farrin’s words. But there wasn’t one. She had been nervous. What she was experiencing now must be a bit like post-traumatic stress. She needed to get out of the room for a few minutes, away from the music and the din of conversation and the clinking of forks on saucers.
    “Excuse me.” Without explanation, she headed for the restroom, not the one immediately off the gym but one down the hall so she could have a few minutes alone, time to collect herself and reapply the cool exterior she’d practiced so often in the past month in preparation for this little venture.
    Her heels clicked on the tile as she walked down the hallway. Strange how everything looked so much smaller. The lockers, the desks inside the rooms, the length of the corridor itself. She wasn’t any taller than when she’d graduated, so the case of the incredible shrinking school baffled her. She was still trying to figure it out when she entered the restroom.
    If she hadn’t been so distracted, she would have noticed it was already occupied and backed out without her presence being detected. Too late. A woman with white blond hair leaned over the sink. She held her hair back and alternated splashing water on her face with hanging onto the side of the sink for support.
    Good Lord, was there something wrong with the chicken? Was this unfortunate soul the first one to come down with food poisoning? You heard about those things at gatherings all the time.
    Part of Farrin wanted to turn around and leave, to seek the privacy she needed to alleviate her own swirling head and flushed cheeks. But something about the way the woman was supporting herself made Farrin worry. If the woman passed out in the restroom, no one might find her until Monday morning when classes resumed.
    “Are you okay?”
    The woman jerked and lost her balance. She nearly fell but was able to grasp the edge of the sink in time to steady herself. The look of surprise on the woman’s face registered in Farrin’s brain seconds before her identity.
    Janie Carlisle. If Farrin had never seen Janie again, it would have been too soon. She turned and walked out the door.
    ****
     
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Farrin made it about half a dozen steps down the hall before the sound of a crash halted her. For a moment, scenes from high school whizzed through her overtaxed brain. Janie’s snide remarks about how Farrin had to drive an old car with a broken windshield because she couldn’t afford a new one. Superior looks when Janie and her friends caught Farrin “school shopping” at the church clothes closet. Prom.
    The voices, the music and the memory of the balloon-and-streamer-filled gym assaulted her, snapping her back to April 1988. She heard the exact attacking tone of Tammie’s question to Janie.
    “Care to share what’s so funny?”
    Janie Carlisle, flanked by the other two-thirds of the Terrible Trio, snickered. “Farrin’s dress.”
    Farrin looked down, afraid she’d torn or marred the red satin gown her mother had bought her. “There’s nothing wrong with my dress.”
    “Except that it used to be mine. Your mom must have been shopping at the Goodwill again.”
    Not even sixteen years of