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    Chapter Five
     
     
    It rained all day, which exactly suited Angel’s mood. Usually she enjoyed school but today everything seemed to go wrong. Being late meant missing the much-anticipated life-drawing workshop and cleaning the art room instead. As she washed paintbrushes she couldn’t help thinking about Clarissa’s Teen Couture entry.
    If she could pull off that cocktail dress then Clarissa might have a real chance at winning. Of course, Angel hadn’t seen the rest of her entry and if those other sketches were part of it, maybe she’d crash and burn. Angel stopped. Why was she wasting time thinking about Clarissa’s Teen Couture entry when she should be thinking about her own?
    Still, it was hard to push Clarissa from her mind and halfway through biology her distraction proved disastrous. Angel had been imagining what she’d do with that Japanese silk when she knocked over a tray of partially dissected frogs. She spent the rest of the period cleaning up disgusting bits of amphibian guts.
    She wouldn’t have minded so much if Ryan Davies hadn’t seized the opportunity to start calling her “French frog” again. He’d coined the hated nickname in the third grade and tormented Angel with it ever since.
    She threw the last frog’s leg into the trash with an angry flick. She’d never understood why boys like Ryan got such a kick out of teasing her.
    Lily had tried to tell her that boys only teased a girl if they liked her, but that made no sense at all to Angel. Surely if a boy liked you he’d be nice and not horrible? But that wasn’t Angel’s experience and it wasn’t even as if the boys at her school were the worst.
    The prize for the most obnoxious guys belonged to the seniors from the boys-only private school two blocks away. Even Lily admitted some of their so-called banter was over the top—though she still insisted it was how some boys talked when they thought a girl was cute.
    Angel had asked her friends at school about Lily’s theory, but they’d been divided in their opinions. Taylor had agreed with Angel that most of the guys from the boys’ school were just rich, stuck-up jerks, but Katie thought that Lily was right. Either way, boys were still a mystery. Angel sighed, wiped the last bits of frog slime from her fingers and wondered if she’d ever meet a boy she could actually talk to.
     
    ***
     
    When she got home from school Angel went straight to her closet and pulled out the big black portfolio case she kept in the back. Laying it on her bed, she knelt down and opened it.
    Slowly she went through each folder, looking over her draft sketches and rejected designs, then thumbed her way through the sketchbooks in which she’d drawn all the design details of her Teen Couture entry. Finally, she opened the green folder marked Final Teen Couture in which she kept the best sketches of her five designs.
    Angel sighed. Her designs were at least as good as Clarissa’s and maybe better. She stared down at the picture of her ball gown. Clarissa’s Japanese silk was extraordinary—maybe Angel needed to rethink her design. She fingered the pieces of blue velvet and silver gauze stapled to the sketch and an idea began to slowly unfurl in her mind. If she could pull it off…
    Angel pursed her lips, thinking hard. She wouldn’t alter this sketch until she was sure she could achieve her vision, but maybe she could draw an outline now. She glanced at her watch. Where had the time gone? She was due at the Waldorf in an hour and she still had to shower and change. She quickly repacked her portfolio, thrust it back into her closet and grabbed her bathrobe.
    Twenty minutes later she was ready. Angel eyed herself in the mirror. The catering company was fussy about appearance and tonight they’d be especially picky. She buttoned the double cuff on her freshly ironed white shirt and flicked a thread off her black pants. Her flat black shoes gleamed and the ribbon round her