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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE, KID?" Dylan frowned at the younger teen at the dress rack opposite of her.
Max shrunk back, sheepish that she was exposed. "Billy would never take me! And I can't just go with the boys!"
"Your mom?" Dylan suggested. "After school?"
"You guys aren't in school either." Max looked pointedly at her and then glanced passed her at a tired-looking Steve on a leather couch.
"Yeah but we're adults," she said with a huff. She turned to Steve. "You're what? Twelve? Steve give this girl a ride back to the middle school."
"No, please!" Max pleaded. "Can you help me pick out a dress? I don't have any girl friends and I'm not sure my zoomer clothes is good enough for a Snow Ball."
Dylan gave the girl a once over — dirty jeans, an oversized t-shirt, and green skate sneakers — and sighed.
"You just had to hit me where I'm weak, didn't you?" Dylan narrowed her eyes. "I'm a shallow girl, Max — I cannot resist a makeover. You should've seen that amount of times I tried to makeover Barb—"
"Hey, hey, hey," Steve stood up, waving his hands in protest. "I agreed to take you out dress shopping. This'll take double the time. Also, I don't want to get caught enabling kids to skip school."
Both girls crossed their arms. "You didn't seem to care about enabling kids a couple weeks ago when—"
"Extenuating circumstances!"
"Which we also having now," she told him, trying to convince him. "We have a young, helpless girl that is going to her first dance and needs a nice dress."
"I didn't say it was my first dance!"
Dylan took another look at the preteen and lifted a brow.
"Okay, it is." Max muttered.
Steve sat back down on the couch. "Alright, fine. Just be quick."
Dylan scoured the whole store, Max following loosely behind, a mound of dresses in her arms. When the pile got too much for the girl to handle, Dylan sent her off to the change rooms. Dylan sat next to Steve on the couch facing the dressing rooms.
Steve smiled at her. "You look happy. I like that — I guess this wasn't so bad after all."
"I used to do this with Barb all the time," she said, her lips twitched as she thought about Barb's displeased face as Dylan dragged her from store to store, pushing her in and out of change rooms. "She was so pretty, she just hid it under homely clothes and those awful glasses. I used to dress her up and when she'd look in the mirror — I knew for a second she felt pretty, cool even. It was fun."
