Grave Apparel (3 page)

Cassandra
hated
Christmas—the
green
and
red
of
it,
the
constant caroling on the radio of it, the shopping,
buying,
and
giving
of it, the candy making and relentless baking of it, the card sending and “happy holidays” of it. In short, she
hated
everything
that most other people
loved
about the annual holi day season.
They
added up to a
litany
of insults.

Ultimately,
however,
it
was
Christmas sweaters that made Cassandra crack:
Food
editor Felicity Pickles and her collection of Christmas and other
novelty
sweaters.

For
most of the
year,
Felicity
wore
shapeless smocks in a de pressing palette of earth tones and
faded
floral prints. But when
fall
kissed the air and the days
grew
shorter,
she suddenly em
braced
her
wardrobe
of
eyepopping,
seasonally
themed
sweaters with a
love
that only a mother could
bestow
on a
balky
child.
She
adored
them
all,
pullovers,
cardigans,
the
occasional
puffy
sweatshirt.

In
September,
Felicity’s
sweaters bore a
harvest
of red ap ples, ABCs, miniature schoolhouses, and the
leaves
of autumn.
On
the
first
of
October,
orange
pumpkins
and
golden
haystacks appeared and ushered in scarecrows, witches,
and
ghosts with
electrified
eyes.

November
called forth a
veritable
Thanksgiving
turkey
of a
sweater,
complete with the real tail feathers of some unfortu
nate
Butterball.
Then
there
was
her
famous
acrylic
Pilgrim
sweater,
sporting the entire Plymouth
colony
sharing their feast with
tiny
Indians.

By
the
day
after
that
harvest
festival,
Felicity’s
sweater
mania
was
in
overdrive.
Christmas
washed
over
her
wardrobe
like
Santa’s
tsunami.
Wool,
cotton,
or
one
hundred
percent
acrylic, her sweaters blazed with Christmas
bulbs,
sang with
choirboys,
shivered
with
snowmen
mufflered
in crimson and green and plaid with icicles in gold and
silver,
hohohoed with
Father
Christmas
in
velvettrimmed
burgundy
Victorian
tableaus,
and
onDasheronDancered
with
Santa
Claus,
the
jolly old elf himself with his sleigh and
tiny
reindeer.
She
was
a
woman
possessed.

Heads turned as Felicity
waltzed
by in the
newsroom,
and not just because she daily
offered
the fruits of her food col
umn’s
labor—whatever
she’d
cooked
that day for research, usu ally something sweet and
fattening.
There may
have
been a
few
giggles behind her back,
but
Felicity
didn’t
mind. She
knew
that
every
Christmas she became the center of
newsroom
atten tion and she
wasn’t
about to
give
that up. Her ostentatious good cheer clashed conspicuously with
Cassandra’s
philosophy
of
ascetic
suffering.
Slights were noted and snarls were snarled. There
was
bound to be a collision soon.

Would
they
really
come
to
blows
over
something
as
silly
as
a
Christmas
sweater?
Lacey
wondered.
It
was
beginning
to
look a lot
like
. . .
disaster.
A
fashion
disaster.
Even
though she
was
the
paper’s
official
fashion
pundit and style scribe, her es
sential
fashion
philosophy
was:
You
can
wear
what
you
want,
but
you
can’t
stop
people
from
laughing.
She
wasn’t
laughing
anymore.
Lacey
and the rest of the reporters in the
newsroom
awaited
the coming
showdown
with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation.

It came during the
first
week of
December,
just days before the annual
company
Christmas
party.
Cassandra trudged
like
a
tiny
troll
down
the hall from her corner and headed to
Felicity’s
desk, where a tray full of starshaped sugar cookies awaited the
overfed
masses. Bright blue
sugar
crystals trailed
down
the aisle that separated
Felicity’s
desk from
Lacey’s,
proof that the cookies were
popular,
as well as colorful and
messy.

Cassandra
didn’t
like
to be
seen
eating,
but
even
she
couldn’t
resist the call of the carbs. She
always
took what Fe licity
offered,
often wrapping it in a napkin and scurrying back to her desk to nibble on her treat
like
a lonely mouse with a for

bidden treasure. Cassandra
now
stealthily
picked
up a cookie
covered
with
azure
sugar.

Lacey
wondered
whether
Cassandra
could
appreciate
the
way
Felicity’s
sweater
colorcoordinated
with the cookies. The sweater
was
ice blue, accented with white rhinestonestudded stars that danced around the
collar,
bordered the bottom of the
garment,
and
circled
the
cuffs.
In
Felicity’s
Christmas
collec
tion, this particular sweater
was
restraint itself.

The shade brought out her aqua
eyes
and pink cheeks, bright
against
her
clear
pale
skin
and
long
dark
auburn
hair,
making
Felicity appear soft and approachable.
To
Lacey,
there
was
still the hint of a chubby
malevolent
doll about
Felicity,
a doll who might whip out a sharp knife and slice more than your
cake.
But
Lacey’s
opinion of her had
begun
to soften. The food editor had recently
fallen
hard for Harlan
Wiedemeyer,
the
newspaper’s
socalled “deathanddismemberment”
reporter,
and
love,
how
ever
it had come calling, had
improved
Felicity’s
disposition. So perhaps it
was
love,
and the Christmas season, and not the sweater that had softened
her,
Lacey
thought.

Restocking the cookie plate, Felicity
waited expectantly
for some
word
of
acknowledgment
from Cassandra. It
was
part of the deal. The
unspoken
agreement. Felicity
offered
fattening
goodies, reporters repaid her with
fawning
flattery.
Lacey
rarely indulged in either and tried to
keep
her mind on writing her “Crimes of
Fashion”
column.

“What do you think, Cassandra?” Felicity prompted
her.
“What do I think?” After
working
at
The
Eye
for more than a
year,
Cassandra
still
didn’t
know
how
to
play
Felicity’s
game.
“Works
and plays well with others”
wasn’t
on her resume. “I think you could feed a village in India with what you paid for that
thing
you’re
wearing,”
Cassandra said. “That and the hun dred other
tacky
travesties
you’ve
been wearing since Septem
ber.
It’s
vile,
it’s
unnatural,
it’s—”

The
words
seemed to spill out of her
uncontrollably,
as if from the mouth of the
smartalecky
thirteenyearold
Mean Girl that Cassandra might once
have
been.
Felicity,
who in
fighting
trim had
fifty
pounds on Cassandra and could probably break her into bitesize pieces with one hand, took a moment for this
to
register.

“What did you say?” She took a step into
Cassandra’s
space.

Cassandra
was
a lightweight,
but
toned and athletic. She could no doubt turn cartwheels around
Felicity,
if
necessary.

“You
heard
me,”
she taunted.
“You
and that
lowbrow
petro leum byproduct you call a
sweater,
that monument to wretched
commercial
excess.”

Blue
sugar
flew
as
Felicity
snatched
back
the
tray
of
treats.
Then she
plucked
the remains of
Cassandra’s
cookie right out of her hands and told her where she could go, and it
wasn’t
back to her desk,
but
to a
region
far warmer
than
Washington
in Au
gust.
Lacey
could
no
longer
pretend
to
be
working
on
a
“Crimes
of
Fashion”
column
when
a
crime
of
passion
was
about to
take
place right in front of
her.

“People are starving in the world—” Cassandra began.
It
was
possibly
her
favorite
way
to
begin
a
sentence,
but
she
didn’t
get
far
this time.

“I’m sure you can
show
them
how
to do it the right
way,
you miserable,
skinny,
bony,
anorexic,
bulimic,
selfrighteous little
runt.”
Felicity’s
eyes
were slits of blue
fire.

“I am not
anorexic!”
Cassandra had quite a shriek for being
so
bony.
“You
glutton!
Obesity
kills
and
causes
high
blood
pressure
and
diabetes,
overconsumes
your
fair
share
of
the
world’s
resources, and leads to global
warming!
And
you’re
not just a victim of it,
you’re
a carrier too!”