for work,” she said. She laid the clothes on my bed and dug through them, muttering. A moment later, she straightened with a brown skirt in her hand. “Try this.”
“Really? It looks kind of conservative. I thought you said I dress that way too much already.”
She grinned. “Try it on. I’m going to find some things to match it.” She took off for her room again, intent on her mission. I shrugged at my reflection and slipped the pink dress off and put the skirt on.
Whoa.
The deceptively simple cut and the deep shade of chocolate managed to look both sexy and classy. I checked the label. It was from an up and coming designer who had recently been featured on the local news for opening a boutique at Pine Street and Fifth Avenue, the trend hub for fashion-conscious Seattle women. It fit amazingly. I stared in surprise. The pencil cut skirt found and accentuated my invisible curves without being indecent. Quite a trick, that. The finding my curves part, I mean. Sandy and I wear the same size, but we’re not even close to the same shape. My Grandma Jean would have called Sandy “womanly.” She was built for dresses. I, on the other hand, could wear any pair of pants in the mall because I had no hips to interfere with the fit. Sandy insisted it wasn’t fair because she had to buy more expensive pants, but I’m pretty sure her hips didn’t make her pay more than two hundred dollars for her Hudson jeans. She just loved to shop. But I’d lost that argument so many times I didn’t even bother making it anymore. She definitely doesn’t think like an accountant.
Still, I had to give it to her. If paying extra meant I looked like an actual girl in a skirt, I might rethink my shopping strategy. I reached into my own closet and grabbed a new Gap shirt, a white cap-sleeved shell, to see how it looked with the skirt, but I frowned at the result. Boring again. Sandy popped back in. “Perfect.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“With this,” she clarified, and tossed me a pink cardigan.
I pulled the thin material over the blouse and buttoned it in the middle.
“Would you look at that,” she teased me. “It’s a waist.”
And that wasn’t all. The color did good things for my complexion, and the thin knit of the sweater looked feminine but work appropriate. “It’s so soft,” I said, rubbing the three-quarter-length sleeve unconsciously.
“It’d better be. That’s pure Tibetan cashmere.”
I tugged it off. “I’m not wearing it.”
“You have to! It looks so good on you.”
“We’re eating Italian. What if I spill marinara sauce on it before I can give it back to you? I guess I could hide it in one of your laundry piles. That way you’d never find it,” I mused.
“Ha, ha. Get their artisan meat plate with a side of cheese instead of pasta and you’ll be fine.”
“Is it easier to clean out of cashmere?”
“No, but it’s harder to spill. Try these,” she said and held up a pair of BCBG boots. The gorgeous deep brown leather ended in her signature four-inch heels.
“Those are your favorite boots!”
“Yeah, well, for some unexplainable reason, you’re my favorite roommate. Go ahead and try them.”
“No way. I’ll cry if something bad happens to your sweater, but I’ll lose the will to live if I screw up the boots too. Besides, I’d be almost six feet tall in those. What if he’s one of those guys who lies about his height?”
Sandy cocked her head and looked me over for a minute. “You’re right. You’d probably break your neck trying to walk in these.” She put them down and rooted through my shoe collection. I have a lot of great shoes; they just have lower heels than hers. She pulled out a brown pair with a slightly pointed toe and an ankle strap. “These will work. Wear your hair down and some lip gloss, and you’ll be good to go.”
Much like her belief in Oprah, Sandy also believed lip gloss could cure most of the world’s ills. I had a quick mental flash of her