The Diary Project (ASOUE)

9: The Dance Project

Saturday 18th March

So last night was the dance and it was a strange evening to say the least. Where do I even start? I guess there's only one place I can truly start, and that's with the outfit I had to wear.

Obviously, I didn't have a fancy dress or anything, which is something I wasn't really all that bothered about. Violet, Duncan, Klaus and I were just planning on wearing our uniforms to the dreaded dance that we were being forced to attend. But Carmelita had different plans.

She gave Violet and I one of her dresses each, which would sound like a nice gesture if you didn't know anything about Carmelita Spats. However if you did know something about Carmelita Spats, then you would realise that the only thing this could spell would be trouble.

She gave us the ugliest dresses I've ever seen and told us that if we didn't wear them, we were dead meat. Somehow, I feel like Carmelita always views us that way, but the way she said it just made it sound incredibly sinister, so we decided we would have to wear them.

I feel like mine was the worse of the two, mostly because it didn't fit me at all. I was slightly taller than Carmelita, which made the dress hang kind of weirdly. Plus, there were random bows everywhere and it was pretty confusing as to which was the front and which the back of the dress. Violet's was a bit nicer. She's quite a bit taller than Carmelita, which meant I would've expected the dress to fit weirdly on her too, but instead it hung at a nice length and (as ugly as the dress was) Violet did look pretty nice.

As for me, I looked like a sparkly, frumpy, hot pink pillowcase. I wasn't sure whether to be jealous or relieved that Carmelita didn't have anything for Klaus and Duncan. They got to just wear their uniform, which looked a lot more comfortable than the scratchy dress I had to wear.

I figured that every other girl would be wearing a similar dress and that hopefully Violet and I could blend in, but no, of course not. Every single other person in that room was wearing their uniform, even Carmelita (which was surprising considering I didn't think she owned one). Basically, Carmelita had given us those horrible outfits to make sure that we would stand out for all the wrong reasons.

As soon as she spotted us walk through the door, she made a massive scene about how we hadn't followed the dress code, despite the fact that she forced us into those dresses in the first place. It was so frustrating that Carmelita could find a way to humiliate us in every single situation.

For a large part of the evening, Carmelita left us alone except for a few cocktail sausages thrown our way. That was, until she remembered another part of her "Cunning" plan. She sashayed over and reminded me that Klaus was meant to be my date to the dance. I had been hoping she would have forgotten about that but apparently she hadn't.

So for the rest of the evening, Klaus and I had to do things like a couple: linking arms wherever we went, awkwardly having to dance to the slow songs, basically just laying it on thick whenever Carmelita looked over, which was often. She seemed like she had a fun night dancing around and whatever, but she always kept one eye on us, making sure there was nothing else she could tease us about.

All in all though, I can't help but admit that I did have a fun time with Klaus, even if it was all pretend. Of course it was pretend, why wouldn't it be?

-Isadora