The dress does not budge.
Now I’m starting to hyperventilate.
Only you, Addie, my oldest brother’s voice chuckles in my head, which is irritating as hell too. If women are allowed to have swagger, then that’s what I have.
Swagger.
Earned swagger.
I don’t get stuck in dresses. I don’t trip and fall into random men while walking to work like some romcom heroine. And I certainly don’t intend to die in this dressing room.
But right now, I’m having flashbacks to hyperventilating during an MRI, and I am not okay.
“Somebody? Help?”
No answer.
None.
Heat floods my cheeks as another memory from high school takes hold.
What are you wearing? Is that a dress? Since when do you even know what a dress is? And why do you keep looking at Jacob? Oh-Em-Gee! You have a crush on Jacob! Baddie Addie has a crush on Jacob!
Would you look at that?
Apparently when you’re dying of suffocation while trying to wrench yourself out of a formal gown, your last memories are the worst times of your life.
“Not today,” I huff to myself while I twist and contort myself again, trying desperately to get any kind of grip on the fabric. Islap at the wall, looking for one of the hooks. If I can get this dress anchored to something, I can use that to pull it off.
I’m Addie Fucking Bloom.
I eat professional athletes for breakfast. I hold my own with the rest of the coaching staff for the Copper Valley Fireballs professional baseball team. I can bench one-fifty and squat two hundred. I can run a six-minute mile.
And it was a long time ago that I realized it didn’t matter how other people judged me and my natural body shape and my honed athleticism. I get to wear pretty dresses too.
“I. Will. Not. Die. Here. Today,” I basically order myself as I bang around the dressing room.
Bad idea.
Need that oxygen.
And I can’t find a hook.
Why can’t I find the hook?
Also, banging around in here isn’t helping the oxygen situation.
“Ma’am?” I call once more. “Help. Please—help—me!”
For all that I can lift in the weight room, I can’t get myself out of a stupid dress.
I can’t rip it. I can’t shimmy out of it. I can’t pull it. I can’t tug it.
I’m stuck.
And I’m going to die.
Right here.
