The laughter started before I even reached the punch table.
I had barely stepped into the ballroom when I heard it.
A group of girls from my school were staring at my pale-blue dress, whispering to one another and trying not to laugh.
They weren’t very good at hiding it.
One of them, Lorraine, looked me up and down before leaning toward her friends.
“Did she sew that from an old curtain?”
Another girl pointed toward the waist.
“Look at those stitches.”
Someone else laughed.
“That looks like a shop-class costume.”
Their laughter grew louder.
My hands went numb.
They had no idea what that dress meant to me.
They didn’t know that every bead had been carefully pushed through the fabric by my grandfather’s tired, oil-stained fingers.
They didn’t know that five days earlier, he had died from a heart attack.
And they certainly didn’t know that the dress they were mocking was the last gift he had ever made for me.
