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"He is fit, and you're lying if you say otherwise."
"Mary," chided Piper, furrowing her brow. "That's ridiculous. How would you feel if you were boiled down to your appearance?"
"Quite good about myself, honestly," was her reply, and she pressed another dress against herself in the crooked mirror, her eyes grazing over her reflection. She grinned. "This is it. This is the one!"
"You've said that about these four, too," Lily reminded her, exhaustedly lifting the pile of gowns in her arms as if Mary couldn't see them. "Make up your mind, Maccy. My arms've given out—I can't feel them anymore."
"I don't see what you lads do in Rhys," Marlene put in, as usual ignoring every aspect of conversations except for the bits that interest her. She had draped over her forearm a class act of a silk dress, shimmery and black and just the kind of thing Marlene would have killed in. Not Piper, of course. But she never thought she could have "killed in" anything.
The girls kept insisting otherwise, telling her that every dress she put on was a stunner or that she just had to choose that one like her life depended on it. But that was their job: Piper had learned that girls had similar tendencies to lift each other up, even if the dress they tried on wasn't the right shade of pink for their skin tone or the shape didn't flatter them. So really, Piper thought, if they were just going to tell her she looked beautiful in anything, why should she believe them when she tried anything on in the first place?
It was a frustrating conundrum, especially as Piper had burned through what felt like the entire inventory of the dress shop Gladrags in Hogsmeade; each dress she had tried on didn't truly strike her as "her", much to the disagreement of the repetitive chorus of oohs and ahhs from her friends. Their support had been nice the first go around, but Piper hadn't landed on a dress for the ball yet, and she was growing sick of her friends acting like every single dress she tried was made for her.
So she'd taken a seat in the velveteen waiting chairs set up in the center of all the changing rooms for a breather. Lily was with her, as she'd had her dress picked out for ages—a pink number, not much unlike the silky satin of Marlene's new choice. But Marlene was never one to make up her mind easy, so she'd just ducked back into her fitting room with a deep green version of the dress she'd already decided on.
Piper sighed. "I don't see it, either, Marlene," she replied. "About Rhys, I mean. He's kind and all.. Just not my type, I suppose."
"Your type isn't the ruggedly handsome," came Mary's disbelieving voice from behind her curtain. She wrenched the thing open easily, revealing the newest gown she'd deemed "the one". "What do we think?"
Lily raked her eyes down the dress, nodding. "Certainly a good colour on you. Though so were these four," she added, hefting the dresses in her arms up again to add to her point.
