The lipstick was the one truly bold thing: the most intense red I had ever seen. Red like the fire that gave birth to the universe. Red like the lifeblood of everything. It was the sort of red that burrowed into your soul, never to be forgotten.

Wynonna looked beautiful.

I looked beautiful.

That was the strangest thing—that it became very difficult to separate the beauty I was looking at from the beauty I felt. And I felt exquisite.

“Okay, now that you look like an angel princess, maybe I should make myself look not like a hobo,” said Imogen. She leaned into the armoire mirror beside me and examined herself, making odd faces. “I’m thinking of plucking my eyebrows.”

A spike of panic impaled me from top to bottom.

“NO,” I sort of screamed.

Imogen jumped back from the mirror, startled.

“You just have really nice eyebrows,” I said. “Please don’t pluck them. Please. I can’t say ‘please’ enough. I’ll get on my knees and beg if I have to.”

“Okay!” said Imogen, thoroughly amused. “I’ll keep the eyebrows. Although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t totally tempted to let you beg anyway.”

I dropped down to my knees, clapped my hands together, and interlocked my fingers. “Please, please, please, please, pleasepleaseplease.”

Imogen rolled her head back and sighed. “You are way too adorable for your own good.”

Imogen enlisted the help of Mrs. Klutz to do her makeup. Mrs. Klutz was basically a shorter, more diva version of Imogen. Imogen got her height from her dad, who was one nightmare short of the Slender Man. (He worked for the IRS. I had no idea what he did, but I imagined him as an agent/collector of sorts, visiting the tax-delinquent with a briefcase in one hand and a scythe in the other.)

Mrs. Klutz asked what my shoe size was. It was seven. (Thank god I was curious and had looked inside Wynonna’s burgundy boots this morning.) Mrs. Klutz squealed with delight, told me we were the same size, and said I could borrow a pair of her heels.

Mrs. Klutz’s shoe closet was the Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of shoe closets.

Under any other circumstance, I might have been reluctant to try on another pair of heels. But right here, right now, I was a kid in a candy store. Shit, I was Charlie Bucket!

For the longest time, I just looked. There were a lot of shoes, and the concept of “making a decision” was just a little bit overwhelming.

And then I saw them.