Ginnie Green, Makeover Queen

New York City, Here I Come?

Chapter One ~ New York City, Here I Come?

"Forget it, Ginnie," my dad said. "You're not going." He pushed the information packet on summer fashion camp back across the dining room table and picked up his dessert spoon. He sort of shrugged, half apologetically, as he pulled his bowl of chocolate ice cream closer. 

"But why not?!" I hadn't expected it to be an easy sell, letting me go all the way to New York City for a month when I'm only twelve-and-a-half years old. But I thought he would at least consider it.  

"Well," he said, "for starters, you've never been away from home for that long." 

"There's a first time for everything." This is something he says to me all the time, usually to get me to try foods I know I'm going to hate. 

My father gave one of his small nods. "True." 

"And you always say it's never too early to start doing what you love." My dad is a painter, and he always talks about how he knew he was going to be a painter from the very first time he picked up a brush in kindergarten. He wouldn't let my grandparents throw away any of his works of art because he thought they were masterpieces, but they didn't want to anyways because they always thought they were really amazing for a little kid. Probably all parents think that, but it turns out they were right. "Maybe I'm no super prodigy like you were -" 

My father made some small dissenting noise to show he disagreed with me, but his mouth was full of ice cream. 

" - but I'm really serious about fashion and design and I want to learn as much as I can as soon as I can from the best possible teachers available."  

"That's all very admirable, Ginnie." 

"And the workshop leaders they're going to have at the camp are people who actually work in the fashion industry. Designers and stylists and photographers. And they're going to show us how to get better at drawing clothes and how to actually use a sewing machine. We are going to actually create stuff." My dad is very big on creativity and what he calls creative output - things you dream up and then make. In his case, it's paintings.  

"I hear you, Ginnie." His bowl emptied, my father put down his spoon. I looked down at my own bowl where my ice cream was half melted in a soggy mess. It looked as sad as I felt. "Go on," he said. "Eat your dessert." 

"Fine." I knew sounded sulky, but I didn't care. "But I still don't understand why not." 

My father furrowed his brow. You know how some people have big features? My dad is like that. He has a huge, craggy forehead and shaggy eyebrows and a big nose. Every expression on his face seems larger than life. If he hadn't become a painter, he might have made a great mime. "Look," he said, "I have a number of concerns. The first, as I mentioned, is you've never been away from home." 

"That's not true! I always go to sleepovers with Mira, Juliet, and Kimiko. And there was Girl Scout camp last year." 

"Yes, but sleepovers are only one night and Girl Scouts was a weekend. A whole month in a city far away from me, on your own, is a completely different thing." 

"New York City isn't that far away from Cambridge." Dad sometimes travels there for art stuff, and we've gone there twice together on weekend trips. "And I won't be on my own. There'll be, like, a dozen other girls my age." Fourteen precisely. Davis Fashion Academy accepted fifteen girls aged twelve to thirteen for their summer program. "Plus I'll make new friends, who share my passion for fashion."  

My dad raised an eyebrow. I was quoting one of the pamphlets. 

"Well, then there's the matter of cost," he said.