Read Online Starry Night by Isabel Gillies - Free Book Online

you look…” Charlie patted his hair down and to the side, to no avail—it still stuck straight up. “I don’t know, you look ripe—like an apple.”
    I winced. “Oh man, just go,” I said, and pushed him in the direction of the stairs.
    â€œDon’t fall, that dress would pancake me,” he said.
    â€œShut up,” I said as Charlie slowly walked down the stairs.
    â€œYou shut up,” he said, looking behind him to see that I was okay.
    â€œYou shut up.” I laughed and put my hand on his shoulder so I wouldn’t fall.

 
    13

    There were not one, but two sleek black sedans humming outside our door on Eighty-Fourth Street. Rachel-the-hair-lady was going to babysit for Dinah and the two of them bade all of us goodbye, with Rachel making last-minute fixes to our hair and Dinah taking pictures with her phone.
    Yes, it’s weird for a ten-year-old to have a full-on iPhone 12 or whatever model it is, but she is a TV star , and somehow it got justified as part of her “work.” As annoying as it is that she gets to throw the “work” word around and get a souped-up phone, she has already paid for a hunk of her college, so.
    â€œOh, doesn’t everyone look nice!” My mother was decked in a tight-fitting, floor-length brown dress with very long sleeves—they went to her mid-hand. She wore chunky sage-green tourmaline earrings that hung to her shoulders and a bracelet made of the same green stones, coiled around and around her wrist like an Amazonian snake. Her nails were short and painted a dark cocoa brown. “Wren, you and…” She looked around at who was ready to go. Reagan was almost out the door. “Reagan, go ahead and get in the car with Oliver and his friend, and Charlie and Vati, you come with me. Oh, Vati, look at you! You girls have gotten so grown up, I’m telling you.” The disappointment that she didn’t get to ride in the car with Oliver was all over Vati’s face. She did look really pretty in Farah’s mother’s pink halter dress and her braided raven hair. I hate to say it, but she sort of looked like one of the younger Kardashian sisters—the taller one. I hoped that sometime during the party Oliver would notice too.
    â€œWe’ll get there at the same time,” I assured her, heading for the door. “We’ll all go in together.” The enormous red dress thing was feeling very wrong as I watched Reagan slink and sway her way down the stoop stairs and click over to the first car.
    â€œCan you manage the stairs, Wren?” I heard my mother call from inside.
    â€œYes!” I hissed. “Yes, sorry, Mom. Yes, I can do it.” I wasn’t convinced. I was worried that, even though it was a strapless dress and it was freezing out, I was going to make sweat stains on the silk under my armpits. My unruly hair, which I previously imagined I would elegantly twist to the side and hold in place, was at the mercy of all that wind and was sweeping violently across my eyes, plus I was holding my clutch and a shawl my mother lent me, making the risk of a total wipeout closer to a terrifying reality. To make matters very, very much worse, I looked ahead and saw Nolan by the car. He took Reagan’s hand and guided her into it. She gave him a big smile and did the suave ass-first-get-in-the-car move that you see people like Angelina Jolie do on Access Hollywood.
    By the time he looked up at me, I had gotten onto the sidewalk in one piece and had quickly been able to get ahold of some of my hair.
    â€œHo—ly!” Nolan, who was way out of his floppy T-shirt and Chuck Taylors and way into a dark blue full-on suit, called to me over the wind and city street sounds. “That is one serious dress!” And then he didn’t walk, he ran—a cool run, not a teenager mad dash, it was an English-gentleman-coming-to-get-his-girl-out-of-the-rain run—over to the