Girls to Total Goddesses by Sue Limb

giggles at this point.
    By now my agony had subsided into mere pain, though I was pretty sure I was going to be sporting a black eye for the next few days. I blinked blearily at my mirror image. The top of the dress was still somehow jammed under my boobs, and the sequinned edge had turned in on itself and was beginning to itch like mad against my lower ribcage. My hair was ruffled up like a hedge and my right eye was red and streaming. There was mascara all down my cheek.
    ‘How’s this for style?’ I demanded, striking a bold pose whilst still essentially topless and hideous.
    ‘Definitely goddess-like,’ squealed Chloe in hysterics. ‘You could paint faces on your boobs – that would be supernatural! And look at me: I look like a freakin’ cake!’
    ‘Quite a classy one, though,’ I mused, admiring her layers of ruffled pink. ‘You could dust your cleavage with icing sugar.’
    ‘And we could dot my hair with tasteful little blobs of whipped cream!’ screamed Chloe (though as silently as possible: we didn’t want to be asked to leave).
    We struggled out of our dresses (though Chloe had to pull me out of mine) and hastily tried on the others, even though I already had a sinking feeling about the whole project. Chloe’s ruffled prom dress made her look like some kind of weird Amazonian lizard and her long vintage floral number transformed her into a chihuahua lost in a flower bed. My black tiered mini turned me into a stack of car tyres, whilst somehow revealing my legs as a pair of giant sausages, and the thing with the black chiffon scarves hanging down the front suggested an explosion in a curtain factory. We were clearly not going to score here, so we moved on.
    During the next couple of hours we tried on dresses that made us look like giraffes, pizzas, air bags, chickens, wheelie bins, low-budget ghosts, and, worst of all perhaps, airline stewardesses. Then, suddenly, in the window of a funny little boutique called Razzmatazz, I saw it.
    It was a pink satiny number, off the shoulder, on the money, out of this world. It was short, sizzling, slinky, shimmering, sexy, sensational. Yes, I quite liked it in a way.
    ‘Awesome!’ I shouted, grabbing Chloe’s arm. We raced inside, found the rail and, thank goodness, there was still one available in my size. I dived into it in desperate panic, praying it wouldn’t look too awful, like all the other dresses I’d tried on in the past couple of hours. But the result was just amazing. I stared at myself in disbelief: the image in the mirror looked like somebody else, somebody relaxed and even charming. Was this really me?
    ‘Wow!’ breathed Chloe. ‘Now you really do look like a goddess!’ Somehow, I don’t know how, the dress was the perfect thing for me. I had always dreamed of looking like this, but never believed it was possible. ‘You’ve gotta have it!’ urged Chloe. ‘How much?’
    It wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t totally out of reach. I begged the sales assistant to let me put a deposit on it and come back next week with the rest. She was a kind motherly sort of woman, and she agreed. While she was writing out the details for her records, Chloe sighed.
    ‘I’m so happy for you, Zoe,’ she said. ‘But I wish I’d managed to find something.’
    ‘You will, babe,’ I assured her. The sales lady looked up, and smiled at Chloe.
    ‘You’re so tiny!’ she said. ‘So lucky! Have you tried the little black number with the sequinned neckline?’
    Chloe looked doubtful. ‘Black?’ she said.
    ‘No harm in trying it on,’ said the woman. ‘They’re over there. You can’t go wrong with black. Perfect for redheads.’
    Chloe tried it on. It was a really cute mini, in a kind of stretchy material, with a high empire waist and a sparkling neckline. It looked sensational.
    ‘Black?’ frowned Chloe dubiously, looking at me with an uncertain frown.
    ‘Chloe, you look the business!’ I assured her. ‘It’s scrumptious! So elegant!’ I was