The Chic Shall Inherit the Earth Read Online Free PDF

beautiful dresses, it kept nagging at me—how they all knew what they wanted to do and I… didn’t. Don’t get me wrong. When you’re seventeen, who really knows these things for sure? People change, circumstances change, you go from school to college to who knows where. Life is change, and you put your trust in God that He knows what He’s doing.
    But I guess what was bothering me most was that my friends had a handle on their talent and I didn’t. I mean, look at Carly. Most people look at five yards of blue chiffon and see five yards of blue chiffon. Carly doesn’t. She sees a Grecian draped sleeve and a high waist and a flowing skirt cut in a fishtail train. And Shani? Well, though they’re night and day to look at, she and Mac are sisters under the skin, which is probably why they’re always e-mailing each other. They’re career girls from the word go, and graduation isn’t so much something to work for as an annoyance to kick out of the way on the road to bigger and better things.
    Even Gillian knows her talent. Talents. She may not know which of them to pick or what school will help her channel them the best, but she knows she has them.
    And what do I have?
    I don’t have a Hearst Medal, despite what Carly said. It was great to be a finalist, but who ever remembers the person who came in second? Other than the admissions people at UCSB, which was good, okay, I get that. But who else?
    I rest my case.
    The Valentino babydoll I’d just tried on made me look fat. Who came up with the dumb idea that bubble hems were cute? They made everyone look fat. I tore it off and hung it up with the rest of the colorful plunder hanging on the back of the door. Clearly I was not destined to find a dress today.
    I knocked on Shani’s dressing-room door. “How are you doing?”
    She opened it in a sleek LBD with crystal beading all over the bodice. “I don’t know why I’m torturing myself. I know I’m not going to buy anything.”
    “It’s your Cotillion dress, Shani. It’s once in a lifetime.”
    “You say that about every school event you get a new dress for.”
    “But graduation really is only once in a lifetime. And you’ve got two mil—”
    “Shh!”
    “Well, you do. You can afford one dress.”
    She shook her head and closed the door. Behind it, I heard the mosquito shriek of a zipper. “Nope. I’ll wear the Lagerfeld. No one will have seen it since the premiere of
The Middle Window
, and who cares if the fashion sites make snide remarks? I’ll be on my way to Cambridge, Mass.”
    “I hope not. I hope you guys will take at least a week and come and stay with me like last summer.”
    Clothes rustled, and then she opened the door again, back in her street look. “That’s a deal, girlfriend.”
    I may not be able to count on myself to know what I’m doing, but I know I can count on my friends.

    NORMALLY, IF WE weren’t shopping, the girls and I would do something fun together on the weekend, like go down to the beach or get a ride up to Napa to hang out with Brett’s family at their vineyard. But Gillian’s work ethic seemed to have infected Carly, too, and when I couldn’t even convince Shani to go over to Telegraph Hill on Saturday to grab a coffee and watch the wild parrots, I gave up.
    Resigning myself to homework, I pulled on a comfy denim mini, a (sloganless, per school rules) T-shirt, and flip-flops and drifted down to the library. May as well start on my English paper. Technically, I could have waived English in my final term of senior year, but I liked it. Papers were interesting, and in this class, The World of Jane Austen, what was not to like? My paper compared
Sense and Sensibility
with Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Wives and Daughters
. All I needed was some literary criticism and some feminist theory to back up my arguments, and I’d be good to go.
    I cruised the stacks, happily debating the merits of books with interesting titles like
Diversionary Tactics: Feminine Authority in the