Queen of Babble in the Big City by Meg Cabot Page B

French-accented voice, “Who sent you? Was it Maurice?”
    I blink at him. “I have no idea who Maurice is,” I say, just as a tiny, birdlike Frenchwoman comes out of the back with a big smile plastered on her face…until I say the word “Maurice.”
    “You think she is a spy from Maurice?” the woman asks the man, in rapid French (which I now understand—well, mostly—on account of having spent a summer in that country, and a semester before that learning it in class).
    “She has to be,” the man replies in equally rapid French. “What else would she be doing here?”
    “No, honestly,” I cry. I know enough French to understand it, but not enough actually to speak it myself. “I don’t know anybody named Maurice. I’m here because I understand you’re the best wedding-gown restorer in town. And I want to be a wedding-gown restorer. Well, I mean, I am one. Here, look at my portfolio—”
    “What is she talking about?” Madame Henri (because that’s who she has to be, right?) asks her husband.
    “I have no idea,” he replies. But he takes my book, and begins thumbing through it.
    “That’s a Hubert de Givenchy gown I found in an attic,” I tell them, when they get to the page showing Bibi de Villiers’s wedding gown. “It had been used to wrap a hunting rifle, which had rusted all over it. I was able to get the rust stains out by soaking it overnight in cream of tartar. Then I handstitched repairs to the straps and hem—”
    “Why are you showing this to us?” Monsieur Henri demands, shoving my book back at me. Behind his head is a wall full of framed photographs of before-and-after shots of wedding gownshe’s restored. It’s pretty impressive. Some of them were so yellowed with age, they looked as if they’d fall apart at the merest touch.
    But Monsieur Henri had managed to get them back to their original snowy-whiteness. He either had a way with fabrics, or some kind of wicked chemicals in his back room.
    “Because,” I say slowly. “I just moved here to New York from Michigan, and I’m looking for a job—”
    “Maurice didn’t send you?” Monsieur Henri’s eyes are still narrowed suspiciously.
    “No,” I say. Really, what is going on here? “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
    Madame Henri—who has stood at her much taller husband’s side, peeking around his arm at my portfolio—gives me the once-over, her gaze taking in everything from my perky ponytail (Mrs. Erickson advised me to keep my hair out of my eyes), to the Joseph Ribkoff sheath dress I’m wearing beneath a vintage beaded cardigan (it’s gotten chillier outside since I arrived in New York. Summer isn’t quite gone, but fall is definitely in the air).
    “Jean, I believe her,” she says to her husband in French. “Look at her. Maurice would not send someone as stupid as she is to trick us.”
    I want to yell “Hey!” in an enraged voice and stomp out of their shop in a huff, since I perfectly understood that she’d just called me stupid.
    But on the other hand, I can see that Monsieur Henri has turned the page and is looking at the before-and-after shots I took of Luke’s cousin Vicky’s hideous self-designed wedding gown, which I managed to salvage into something semidecent (though in the end she chose the Givenchy I repaired instead). He actually seems interested.
    So instead I say, “I had to do all that by hand,” referring to the stitching on Vicky’s dress. “Because I was traveling at the time, and didn’t have my Singer.”
    “This is hand-done?” he asks, squinting at the photo, then reaching for a pair of bifocals tucked away in his shirt pocket.
    “Yes,” I say, trying hard not to look at his wife. Stupid! Well, whatdoes she know? She obviously can’t read. Because it says right on my résumé that I’m a University of Michigan grad. Or I will be in January, anyway. The University of Michigan doesn’t accept stupid people…even if their fathers are supervisors at