Sequins, Secrets, and Silver Linings Read Online Free PDF

isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. I absentmindedly play with the petals of my new skirt while I try to think of something positive to say.
    “That’s unusual,” Jenny says at last, looking at the skirt. “Did you make it?”
    Relieved at the chance not to talk about Kid Code or Sir Lionel Merritt for a moment, we tell her all about the bazaar. Edie explains about The Three Bitches. I butt in with Edie’s superamazing rescue mission and the library card. We both interrupt each other. Jenny’s eyes swing between us as if she’s watching a tennis match. By the time we’ve finished, her eyes have dried and her streaky face is smiling.
    “If only you had been from Teen magazine.”
    We all look a bit helpless for a minute. We are so NOT from Teen magazine. If it exists, even.
    “Those girls have to be stopped, though. I’m going to complain to the people I volunteer with,” Edie says, miffed. “There must be something they can do.”
    “I think her main problem was the nylon,” I add.
    Edie and Jenny both look at me as though I’ve completely lost it.
    “How can I help?” Jenny asks Edie. She’s obviously given up on me as a lost cause.
    This is tricky. Jenny’s going to be out of the country for the next few weeks.
    “Maybe you could e-mail her descriptions of what people are wearing in New York and Tokyo?” I suggest. “To give her ideas for making stuff.”
    Edie maintains her pitying look.
    “She can hardly read and she hasn’t got a computer. Apart from that, brilliant.”
    I’m crushed.
    “Maybe you could bring her back stuff, then,” I mumble.
    “It’ll do as a start,” Jenny says. Then she suddenly realizes that she’s overrun her break time and is hopelessly late.
    “I’m in such big trouble!” she wails dramatically, then giggles. “What can they do to me, though? Edit me out of the film?”
    We accompany her back to the hotel’s reception area, where FOUR PR people are standing in their black suits, on various phones and BlackBerries, looking out nervously for her. It’s like being met by four angry parents after missing curfew. Much as we love her, we leave her to it. She doesn’t seem to mind too much. She’s used to it by now.
    It’s only later, back in the sunshine, that I realize I forgot to ask her about Joe Yule. Something strange was happening on that red carpet yesterday. Was he deliberately avoiding her? Too late now. I know she won’t trust anything sensitive to texts or e-mails while she’s away—she’s been warned about them being intercepted. Honestly, knowing a couple of Hollywood stars is like joining the CIA. So it may be a while until I finally wheedle the truth out of her.

Chapter 7
    I t’s near the end of the school year, so exams are over, classes are winding down, and homework is minimal. This gives Edie plenty of time to think about The Three Bitches.
    “I’ve told the people in the guidance counselor’s office,” she informs me one day in math. “But I’m not convinced they can do very much. The one thing they did say was that Crow needs more friends. I’d have thought that was obvious. They suggested I should try to befriend her more. I’ve tried, but we don’t really have much in common.”
    She gives me a look and the light comes on in that superbrain of hers. For once, I’m right there with her.
    “Invite her over,” I say. “She can come anytime.”

    And so she comes.
    She looks at my wall of Vogue photo shoots and myother wall of costume exhibition posters from the V&A, and I can tell she’s in heaven.
    She snuggles herself into my favorite armchair, the purple velvet one, and tells us about her sketches and V&A visits and making clothes after school. It turns out she’s on her own a lot, so she goes off to look at clothes, or she just invents them at home with whatever fabrics she can find. And she’s always drawing her ideas. Pages and pages and pages of them.
    I ask about her family, but she looks past me and I wonder if