The Azuli by Cassidy Shay (best beach reads of all time TXT) 📕

In the past, girls tried on dozens of dresses before they found the right one. I had ten dresses total. What if I don’t find the perfect dress?

I stepped over to the rack and looked through the dresses. Some were long, while others were short. There were long sleeved, short sleeved and sleeveless dresses. Some had lace and netting, others were simple polyester fabric. They were all beautiful, and I didn’t know how I’d possibly decide. Normally, I wouldn’t have cared much. I didn’t care for frills or decorations, but I wanted to select a pretty one for my mother’s benefit.
After about half an hour, despite my fears, I chose the perfect one. It was floor-length, with a sweetheart top and no sleeves. The bodice was fitted, and the skirt flared out at the waist. It was beautiful, but also simple. The next step was getting fitted. I moved to Section A, where a woman had me stand on a stool while she made adjustments and pinned fabric together in several places. Then, she told me to take it off and stand off to the side.
I only had my underclothes on, so I sat instead of standing. That way, if someone walked in, they wouldn’t get a full view of my nearly naked body. In a few minutes, Dr. Pender came in with another rack of clothing. This one only had about ten outfits, and they looked like school uniforms.
“You’ll have ten days when your parents are here when you’ll need to wear the uniforms instead of jumpsuits. The idea of this whole tour is to make people believe that this is, in fact, a high quality academy. We can’t do that if everyone’s walking around in jumpsuits, looking like criminals.” She took an outfit off the rack, looked at it, then handed it to me. “For everyone else, we are giving uniforms that are just the standard small, medium, and large, like the jumpsuits. But there will be more focus on you guys, so your uniforms will be fitted. You need to try each of these on so that we can see what needs to be adjusted.”
She left me alone in the room to change. After each outfit, I knocked on the door and the woman came in and marked the fabric. When she was done, she took everything and left.
I was told that I would receive the uniform outfits after dinner that day, and that I was free to go. As I headed for my cell, I ran into Collin, pushing his cart toward the stairway.
“Hey,” he said, stopping.
“Hey,” I said back. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Some guy puked, so I was sent here to clean up the mess.” It was silent for a moment, and then I had an idea.
“So… what are you doing right now?” I asked him. He shrugged and said he didn’t have any more assignments for two hours, so the only thing he had to do was go sit in his room on the sixth floor. “Why don’t you come meet Macy and Jack then?” I asked. Collin hadn’t met any of them, and I had wanted them to meet each other for a few days. They were all important to me, and I couldn’t think of any rules I’d be breaking by doing this, so I decided to go for it.
He thought for a minute, and then agreed. We walked down the hall together and when we reached the door, I took a deep breath before pushing through.
“Hey guys,” I said, and then let Collin in. “This is Collin. He’s someone I met a few weeks ago. Collin, this is Carl, Macy, and my brother Jack. It was silent for a moment, and then Jack stood up and shook Collin’s hand.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. He looked at the jumpsuit, and then back at Collin’s face. “So… sanitation?” He received only a nod in reply. “Nice. Maybe you should be the one to clean my room. You seem to do a pretty good job of cleaning this one.” He looked around the room, as if double checking that the room really was well taken care of. “Whoever cleans my room does a horrible job at it.”
“Well,” said Collin, “I don’t have to do much. These ladies keep it pretty tidy in here. So maybe it’s you and Carl that are to blame.” They laughed at that, and then sat down. I went and sat next to Macy on her bed, since mine was occupied by three seventeen-year-old boys.
“So, Penny,” said Carl. “What took you so long in there? I was in and out in fifteen minutes. When I left, they said that you hadn’t even chosen your dress yet.”
“I had to find the perfect one,” I stated. “Something pretty, but not too flashy or elaborate. Simple, but elegant.”
“That’s weird. I never would have guessed that you, of all people, would care too much about that. I guess I was wrong, though. Maybe this whole wedding thing is turning you into an actual girl,” he teased. I knew he was joking, and that acting like a girl was nothing to be ashamed of. But I still felt the need to defend myself. However, Collin beat me to it.
“I don’t think she took her time for her benefit,” he said in his deep, familiar voice. “I think that, with all the things coming up, she wants to make sure that she looks nice, especially for her parents. She hasn’t seen them in ten years, and unless some miracle occurs, she won’t ever see them after they leave. She doesn’t want them to have to worry about her, so she feels she needs to look one hundred percent put together when she sees them. That way, they’ll assume everything is okay, even if it isn’t.”
It was silent for a moment at what he said soaked in for everything. I was used to these things by mow, so I was the first to speak.
“You’re exactly right, Collin. How did you know?” Part of me wanted to know, and part of me just wanted to keep hearing his familiar voice.
“Well, I knew you were concerned about your appearance earlier today. And I knew that what I said, no matter how true it was, wouldn’t help much. I knew you’d be concerned, and you’d want to make sure that your wedding was something your mom and dad remember as a beautiful event with their beautiful daughter as the star.”
For the third time that day, the room was completely silent. “What… what did you tell her?” asked Carl. I heard a bit of frustration in his voice, and I wondered why it was there.
“Well, she just asked me to describe what she looked like,” he said. “So I-”
“What did you tell her?” Carl asked again. This time, the frustration had turned into more a mix of jealousy, protection, and the original frustration.
“Well, if you would let me talk, I would have told you already,” Collin snapped. “I told her she has nothing to worry about when it comes to how she looks. She’s beautiful, and if I could, I wouldn’t change a thing. All the imperfect things about her make her perfect.” He looked at me as he said all that, even though he was talking to Carl. I also noticed the “perfects” and the “beautiful”s that he had used twice now. Hearing them again made me start to wonder about how Collin felt.
“Well, I gotta go. Jack, c’mon,” said Carl, and pulled Jack out of the room.
“That was… weird,” I said. “Carl’s been acting pretty strange lately. I’m not sure what it is. It’s probably just all this wedding stuff,” I said. The three of us talked for a little while longer, and then Collin said he had to go.
“I’ll see you soon,” I said as he stood up.
“Tomorrow?” he asked and I shrugged in reply. I knew that, because he had asked, there was no possible way I was going to lunch the next day. Because Macy was there, though, I couldn’t show how eager I was to see him.
It’s not that I wanted to keep secrets from Macy. She was not only my best friend, but she was also like a mother. I didn’t like keeping anything from her.
But I knew that if I told Macy, I’d never hear the end of it. Every day that I stayed back during lunch, she’d tease me about it. If I mentioned his name or anything that had to do with him, she’d smile and glance over with a knowing look. In the mornings, she would wake me with a comment about the things might get to talk about that day with Collin.
And if Macy was teasing me about something, Jack would find out. Even if she only did it when we were alone, he would still know. He’d ask Macy what she was teasing me about, and she would tell him. If he thought that I had a crush on someone, life around Jack would become close to unbearable. Half the time, he would tease me along with Macy, so that I’d be blushing almost all day. This other half of the time, he’d be angry. As a friend, Jack was supposed to tease me. But as a brother, he had to protect me. He didn’t want me to have a boyfriend. Of course, he didn’t want me to get married either, but that wasn’t anything that he could help. If he knew about my crush, he would try his best to make sure that I wasn’t alone with him. And then one day, Carl would find out.
Carl wouldn’t tease me. Well, he might have. But it wouldn’t be as extreme as Jack and Macy’s teasing. But if Carl knew that I liked someone else, it would have made everything extremely awkward. As we went through the mandatory actions like hugging and kissing and holding hands, he would wonder if I was thinking about Collin, wishing that Collin was in Carl’s place. And if Carl thought that, he would act weird, and he’d make everything awkward.
No,

I thought. My feelings for Collin must be kept a secret.

A couple minutes after Collin had left, I told Macy I was going to go out and see what was wrong with Carl. I walked down the hall at a fast pace, but when I got close to Jack and Carl’s room, I slowed down. I heard voices coming from the inside, and I wanted to listen.
“What are you trying to say? That you did it on purpose?” I heard Jack ask.
“I had to,” answered Carl. “I didn’t just do it without a reason.”
“C’mon man! That’s my sister you’re talking about!” I thought you were my friend!” Jack yelled. “Why’d you do it?”
“Would it have been better if she marries me, or some creep stranger?” Carl asked.
“There aren’t any strangers here! I know all the guys on this floor. You do too! And right now, you’re the creep! Tell me the real reason.” Jack was frustrated and mad, but he was pleading with Carl. I knew that Carl didn’t have to tell Jack, and he knew that too. But I