The Midnight Dress

By Karen Foxlee

Quiet misfit Rose doesn't expect to fall in love with the sleepy beach town of Leonora. Nor does she expect to become fast friends with beautiful, vivacious Pearl Kelly, organizer of the high school float at the annual Harvest Festival parade. It's better not to get too attached when Rose and her father live on the road, driving their caravan from one place to the next whenever her dad gets itchy feet. But Rose can't resist the mysterious charms of the town or the popular girl, try as she might.

Pearl convinces Rose to visit Edie Baker, once a renowned dressmaker, now a rumored witch. Together Rose and Edie hand-stitch an unforgettable dress of midnight blue for Rose to wear at the Harvest Festival—a dress that will have long-lasting consequences on life in Leonora, a dress that will seal the fate of one of the girls. Karen Foxlee's breathtaking novel weaves friendship, magic, and a murder mystery into something moving, real, and distinctly original.

Anchor Stitch
Will you forgive me if I tell you the ending? There's a girl. She's standing where the park outgrows itself and the manicured lawn gives way to longer grass and the stubble of rocks. She's standing in no-man's-land, between the park and the place where the mill yards begin.
It's night and the cane trains are still.
It is unbearably humid and she feels the sweat sliding down her back and she presses her hands there into the fabric to stop the sensation, which is ticklishly unpleasant. She lifts up the midnight dress to fan her legs. It's true, the dress is a magical thing, it makes her look so heavenly.
The shoes she's wearing are too big. She's tripped once already walking in them, across the park, away from the town. She drank some wine earlier, cheap wine, behind the rotunda. She can still hear the harvest festival. A voice over a microphone proclaiming what a wonderful night it is, then music, a slow out-of-time waltz. She can hear the crowd too, the deep rumble of voices and the sudden shrieks of laughter.
She feels excited. The girl doesn't think she has ever felt so excited. It's been building in her for weeks, this breathless rushing sensation. She feels the gooseflesh rise on her arms just thinking of it. She's exactly where she is meant to be; that's what it is, it's like a homecoming. It's like her dreams. She puts a hand on her stomach because she has butterflies and, with the other, adjusts the coronet in her hair.
She doesn't know how she should stand when he arrives. She doesn't know if she should have one leg in front of the other like a beauty queen or legs side by side. Should she lean her back against something as though she isn't so excited, standing in that place, clutching the little black purse in her hands? What will she do with the purse? When he goes to hold her, how will she put it down--will she just drop it? She's trying to sort these things out in her mind.
What should she say? Her mind is perfectly blank when it comes to that. Usually she can think of words, but now she can't think of anything. Maybe something will come when he arrives. Something funny, maybe, or seductive, or both.
When she hears footsteps, her heart nearly jumps out her mouth.
She laughs.
"Where are you?" she whispers, because she can't see him yet.
It's dark. Suddenly it feels darker, as though a cloud has passed over the moon. She looks up to check, but there is the moon, newly struck, white-hot. When she looks back, he's there. He looks as shocked as she, but then he smiles.
"What are you doing here?" she says.
Rose arrives one night in January when the barometer is dipping and there is not a breath of air in the wide empty streets. The palm trees along the main drag hang their despondent heads and women fan themselves in open doorways hoping for something, some little breeze. Old ladies watch the evening news, take hankies from their bra straps, and wipe their top lips; in public bars the sweat drips from chins. And already in countless darkened bedrooms, on beds beneath ceiling fans that thump and whir, girls lie dreaming of dresses.
The rain comes in sudden exhausted sighs and spontaneous shuddering downpours but does nothing to alleviate the discomfort. They drive down the main street and Rose thinks it looks like a shitty little place. She's an expert on such things. They could keep driving except there isn't enough petrol left. The service station is closed. That alone sums up the town. They turn across the train tracks where they see a sign proclaiming PARADISE JUST 7 KM AHEAD.
Paradise is a caravan park. Her father kills the engine and sits still, gripping the wheel. Rose can hear the ocean: the sudden intake of its breath, as though it has remembered something, something terrible, but finding there is nothing it can do, it breathes out again. The night is dark and starless.
"It's as good a place as any," he finally says.
She gets out and slams the door.
"Shit."
Toads leap before every step.
The kiosk is shut too. There's a bell for after-hours arrivals, which she rings, but no one comes. When she gets back to the car, her father is still sitting at the wheel. She reaches in and takes the keys from the ignition. He doesn't flinch. Typical. She knows exactly what will happen next. He will stay there all night thinking. He'll try to solve the problem as though it is a huge and complicated theorem, but in the morning he'll realize it is all very simple. He'll stumble from the car and into the caravan, pulling the little curtain around his bed, and his shaking will begin.
"I'm going to bed, Dad," she says.
"Okay," he says, staring out at the dark.
She can't attach the power until the kiosk is open, so she moves through the dark in the caravan until she reaches her own small bed. She opens the drawer beside her pillow, feels for her brush, undoes her hair. She brushes it out, seventy-one strokes, and ties it in a braid. She remembers her mother doing exactly the same thing. The memory is hazy, golden, like an overexposed photo. She presses both her eyes until the image burns and is replaced by tears.
Stupid. It's stupid to cry.
"Stupid," she says aloud.
It's raining lightly. It patters softly on the caravan roof. When she was small, her father said that was God drumming his fingertips. She can hear the sea very clearly, its sharp breaths and exhalations, the whole night around her, thinking. She lies down, presses her eyes again.
If she had a light, she'd write something in the little green notebook she keeps. The words would be clumsy as bricks, she knows it, and later she'd tear out the paper, ashamed. In the book, she keeps a column of words she hates. First is the word grief. She hates the sound of it. It reminds her of a small wound half healed. The word doesn't encompass at all the emotion, which has no edges. It rises, a giant cumulus cloud. It surrounds her, dark and magical. At night when she presses her eyes, she feels she could quite easily levitate, held up by that cloud, float out the little window above her bed. It would take her over the town, the truck stop, the highway, the cane fields, the paddocks, the bush. That is how she would like to describe grief. She wishes there were a word as powerful as all that.
She goes nowhere. Stays pressing her eyes. She listens to the rain until she falls asleep.
Pearl Kelly half listens to the others talking about the new girl in the seniors' bathroom. She sits on the bench with her legs stretched out while the others are huddled around the dull metal mirror staring at their smudgy reflections. She is half thinking about the kiss too, Jonah Pedersen's kiss, which was cool and wet and not at all what she was expecting. It was different from Tom Coyne's. His kisses had always been small and tight and dry. They had been rhythmical, as though he were beating out a tune with his lips. Tom Coyne had known how to kiss, even in grade seven.
It's disappointing, all of it, because she had waited so long for the Jonah Pedersen kiss when she needn't have. Everyone had been waiting. And now it's there, all messy on her lips, and she just wants to forget it. Worse than that, she could tell afterward that he was embarrassed. That he knew he was bad at it when everyone thought he was so perfect. It's an ugly secret.
She drifts back to the girls' conversation.
"She's really unusual," says Maxine Singh.
"Ugly unusual?" asks Vanessa Raine, who is the most beautiful girl in the school and likes to keep track of such things. "Or odd unusual?"
"I saw her in Mrs. D.'s office," says Shannon Fanelli. "I mean just the side of her. I think she might have really bad skin, or maybe they were moles."
"Or warts?" says Mallory Johnson.
"I saw her from the front," says Maxine. "She's actually kind of an unusual pretty."
"Except for her hair," says Shannon. "She has this crazy hair in two buns tied up with about one thousand bobby pins."
"Hello," says Rose, entering the bathroom.
She doesn't have a bag. She's carrying just one pencil. Her uniform is way too big. She looks at the hem lengths, the hair, the way they are staring back at her with their lip-glossed mouths just a little open, calculates immediately, in a fraction of a second, that she will never fit in.
"Hi," they say in unison.
"Hi," Rose says again. She can tell she'll hate it. She always does. She touches her hair to make sure no stray curls have escaped.
Then Pearl jumps up from the bench, smiling.
"Geography or French?" she asks.
The truth is it should be geography because Rose has never taken French. Rose looks at Pearl and tries to think. The girl is a perfectly normal height, with perfectly proportioned limbs, and perfectly pretty in a golden-haired, sun-kissed kind of way. Exactly the kind of girl that Rose likes the least. But is she a geography or French kind of girl? She doesn't look exotic. Exotic is not the word for Pearl Kelly. She looks like she might like coloring in the layers of the earth. She'd take great pride in it. She looks like a girl who would feel quite at home with vile words like tectonic and magma. She would understand map scale.
"French," Rose says aloud.
"Excellent," says Pearl.
Rose's heart sinks.
The truth is she wasn't even going to go to school except that Mrs. Lamond, who runs the caravan park, vaguely threatened to go to the authorities. Mrs. Lamond is small and leathery. Sometimes she paints her eyebrows on and sometimes she forgets.
"Will you be here for long, then?" Mrs. Lamond had asked.
Mrs. Lamond can tell holidaymakers from drifters. This father-and-daughter outfit are drifters. Another sorry affair.
"Probably," Rose had said.
"Better enroll in school, then," she said.
"I'm fifteen, nearly sixteen," Rose informed her. "I don't have to go to school."
"School would be the best place for you."
Mrs. Lamond doesn't like the scrawny girl with the sad eyes who comes into the kiosk and thumbs through the magazines but never buys. "And while we're at it, this isn't a library."
Rose had put down the article "Seven Sexy Ways to Wear Your Hair," touched her pinned-down curls.
The truth is the first morning she had discovered that the beach was in fact a paradise, a little cup-shaped bay fringed by rain forest. She had stepped out the caravan door and stared at it, rubbing her eyes. She had walked past the car, where her father still slept, all the way to the soft white sand. When she dipped her toes in the sea that morning, she broke its smooth olive-green skin. And when she turned, she saw the mountain, looming behind her, sitting sage in its skirt of clouds.
"Shit," she said.
Her father stumbled from the car into the caravan. He pulled the curtain to his own corner, stripped off, lay beneath his sheets. Over the next days the caravan filled up with the smell of his sweat. He grew oblivious. She wrote that word in her notebook. OBLIVIOUS. He was oblivious to the sea, which changed color through the day, green to blue to turquoise, the huge clouds that raked shadows across its surface and then flung them onto the mountain face. The waterfalls she could see, high up on the rocks. The startling eruptions of rainbow-colored birds.
Rose did exactly what she always did. She performed her ministrations. She made him toast, let it cool on the bench; it was all he could eat. She bought two-liter bottles of Coke from the kiosk, which seemed to soothe him. She wet a towel and he laid it over his body like a shroud.
She brought these things to him soundlessly, went on bare feet, sand still patterned on her legs, said nothing.
"Thanks," he said once.
Once, "I'm sorry."
Rose spent the rest of her time exploring. She climbed over the rocks at the right side of the bay and found another beach, exactly as perfect and completely deserted. She thought about moving her stuff there. A few items of clothing, her green notebook; she could empty out her little drawer into her little black plastic bag. She could build a shelter out of palm fronds. All she'd need was matches and a blanket. She would be able to find water somewhere. She fantasized about these things at length sitting on the beach or floating on her back in the sea. The clouds built all day and each night they burst and the rain that fell obliterated all other sounds: the sea, her breathing, her father's restless turnings.
"What's up with your dad, then?" Mrs. Lamond had asked. "Is he sick or something?"
"A bit," said Rose, running her fingers along the snow globes containing plastic reef scenes. "But he's getting better."
"I like your hair," says Pearl in first period, French.
Rose had used a black rinse. She'd walked all the way to town to buy the stuff and hitchhiked back with a man in a truck full of watermelons. It had cost her nearly twelve dollars on account of all her hair, money that could have been spent on food or petrol.
The rinse made her hair more coarse and wiry than ever.
"Serves you right," her father said, sitting on the edge of his bed tentatively, watching her with his long thin sorrowful face.
The first morning of school she ties her hair in two buns on either side of her head. It makes her look like she's wearing headphones, which makes her laugh. She walks to the caravan park showers and outlines her eyes in thick black eyeliner. There is nothing she can do about her thousand freckles. She examines herself in the mirrors.
"Ugly bitch," she says, then goes and waits at the place that Mrs. Lamond says the bus will pass.
She thinks at the school office they will make her wash off her makeup but the headmistress, Mrs. D'Addazio, doesn't even seem to notice.
"Lovely," she says, looking at Rose. "The girls will be so excited to have a new friend. We're a small school, very small, and how old are you, here, you're fifteen, so that's just lovely, you'll be able to take part in the Harvest Parade, that is on at the end of May, we have our very own float at Leonora High and all the girls are on it, you'll have to find a dress. All the girls have dresses made. We call it dress season here. It's a tradition, I guess you could call it that. Can your mother sew?"