My stepmother laughed at the prom dress my fifteen-year-old brother made out of our mum's old jeans. Halfway through the night the music stopped and the headteacher walked across that hall toward her.

PART 1 — THE JEANS

My dad died in the March of last year.

Mum went in 2021. So that is both of them, three years apart, and I was seventeen and Finn was fourteen when the second one happened.

Verena came into the house in 2022 and married Dad in the September of 2023, and when he died she had everything, because that is how it works when nobody has got round to the paperwork and because she was extremely organised about it from about the second week.

Including Mum's money.

There was about eleven thousand pounds that Mum had put aside for us. Not a fortune. It was eleven years of a woman putting forty pounds a month into a building society account for two children, and there was a letter with it that said what it was for.

Driving lessons. University. Proms, weddings, the lot — those are the actual words and I have read them about four hundred times.

By the February of this year Verena had been in control of it for eleven months.

I asked her about a prom dress in the February. I picked a Tuesday because she is better on a Tuesday and I had been working up to it for nine days.

She did not look up from her phone.

"Prom dresses are a stupid waste of money."

And then she put her bag down on the counter — a proper one, with the tag still on it, which I will not put a number on because nobody believes it.

I said Mum had left money specifically for this. I had the letter in my hand. I had got it out of the drawer and brought it downstairs with me.

And Verena laughed and said: "That money runs this house now."

And then, with no particular heat, the way you say something obvious:

"And nobody wants to watch you play at being a princess anyway, Liv."

That was it. No dress, no ticket, no prom.

I went up and shut my door and did about forty minutes of the sort of crying where you put a pillow over your own face.

And my brother heard all of it, because our rooms share a wall and because that house is made of paper.

Finn is fifteen.

In Year Nine he did textiles. Not because he chose it. He wanted woodwork, woodwork filled up in about nine minutes, and the only thing left on that option block was textiles.

And he was good at it immediately, in the way some people just are, and for about four months he could not shut up about it.

Then he stopped. Completely. He has not mentioned it in my presence since the April of last year and I will come to why, because I was wrong about that for over a year and so is everybody who has heard this story.

Four nights after the Tuesday he knocked on my door at about ten at night with an armful of denim.

Mum's. Four pairs of her jeans out of the bag in the loft that nobody has been able to take to the charity shop since 2021.

He said: "D'you trust me?"

And I said what are you doing, and he said again, "Liv. D'you trust me?"

And I said yes.

For two weeks that boy turned our kitchen into a workshop between about nine at night and one in the morning, which is when Verena is out or asleep.

He did it on Mum's old machine, which was also in that loft, and which he had got down on his own and oiled off a video.

I was not allowed in. Genuinely not allowed — he put a chair against the door twice.

What I heard for fourteen nights was a sewing machine going in short bursts, and swearing, and once, at about half twelve, a chair going over.

On the ninth night he knocked on my door at about one in the morning and stood there with his hands behind his back and said: "How tall are your shoes?"

I said what?

And he said, "The shoes you're wearing. How tall." And then: "Don't show me. Just say."

I said about three inches, and he said right, and went back down.

On the eleventh night he came up and said nothing at all. He stood in my doorway for about half a minute, and I said are you all right, and he said yeah, and went back down.

I found out in May what that one was.

He had cut a panel wrong and lost about four hours of work, and he had come upstairs to tell me he couldn't do it — and then he looked at me and went back down and recut it.

He was fifteen. He had school in six hours.

PART 2 — PROM MORNING

He finished it at twenty past four in the morning on the Friday and woke me up to show me.

It is denim. Obviously it is denim; it is four pairs of jeans.

But he had cut them up and put them back together in panels by shade, so it goes from almost black at the hem up to that pale washed-out blue at the top, and the whole thing moves like a proper dress because he worked out how to do a lining out of a sheet.

The bodice is the back pockets. Both of them, turned, so the stitching makes a shape across the front.

And on the inside of the left side seam, where nobody can see it, he had sewn in the label out of one of the pairs, and above it, in chain stitch, in thread he bought with his own money: N.H.

Nola Hartigan. Our mum.

I put it on at about half five in the morning in my bedroom and then I sat down on the floor in it, which I have been told was not good for it.

Verena saw it at ten past nine.

She was coming down for coffee and I was in the hall and she stopped on the bottom step and she looked at it for about three seconds and then she actually laughed.

Not a snort. A proper laugh, with her head going back.

"Oh, Liv. That is the most pathetic thing I have ever seen in my life."

And then: "If you wear that, every single person in that room is going to laugh at you. I'm saying it because somebody has to."

Finn was behind me in the kitchen doorway. I did not know that until afterward.

I wore it.

Not because I was brave. I want to be really clear about that because of how this gets told.

I wore it because my fifteen-year-old brother had been up until four in the morning for a fortnight, and there was no version of that evening where I came downstairs in something else.

Verena came to the prom.

Parents do, at ours — there is a bit at the start where they stand round the edge of the hall and take photographs of the arrivals, and then they are supposed to go.

I had about four hours in that dress before anybody else saw it, between half five in the morning and getting ready properly, and I want to put one of them in.

At about seven I went down for water and Finn was asleep at the kitchen table with his head on his arm and the machine still out.

He had not gone to bed. He had finished at twenty past four, come up, woken me, shown me, and then gone back down and sat there.

I did not wake him. I put a blanket over him and went back up and he was still there at nine when Verena came down, which is how she came to see it on me in the hall with him sitting eleven feet away.

Prae's mum picked me up, because Verena wouldn't drive me. That wasn't a scene. It was a fact arranged by text on the Thursday.

And when I got out of that car at the top of the school drive, I'll tell you what happened, because it isn't what Verena said would happen.

Nothing happened.

Nobody laughed. Two people I don't really know said it was sick, which is a compliment. A girl in my maths set came over and asked who made it, and when I said my brother she said "shut up" and then asked twice more.

Somebody's grandmother stopped me by the doors, took the side of the skirt between two fingers, looked at the seam for a moment, and said: "Who did this?"

I said my brother did.

And she said: "He's got a proper hand on him, that boy."

Verena was there at seven with her phone already out.

My friend Prae's mum told me afterward, in the car park, that Verena had been saying to three different parents that she could not wait to get footage of the dress.

Those are the words. Get footage.

PART 3 — THE MUSIC

They do a thing at Larkhall where everybody who wants to gets walked across the front of the hall at about half eight and announced.

It is nine seconds each. It is for the parents and it is a bit naff and everybody does it.

I did not want to. Prae made me.

And I got about four steps across that stage and the music stopped.

Not faded. Stopped, like somebody had pulled something out, and a hall with two hundred and eleven people in it went from a noise to no noise in about a second and a half.

I thought I had done something. That is genuinely what I thought, standing in the middle of a stage in my mum's jeans, that I had broken a rule.

And then Mr. Pryce came out from the side with a microphone.

Alun Pryce has been the head at Larkhall for nine years. He is fifty-six, he is not a dramatic man, and in five years I had heard him raise his voice exactly twice.

He came to the middle of that stage, and he did not look at me.

He looked out into the hall at the parents along the back wall.

And he said: "Can I have the house lights up, please."

They went up. Two hundred people blinking.

And he said: "Mrs. Hartigan. Would you come down here, please."

Verena was about forty feet away with her phone up at chest height, filming.

She did not move.

And Mr. Pryce said — and he said it in a completely level voice, which is why nobody has been able to stop talking about it —

"Mrs. Hartigan. I know what you applied for in February. I'd like you to come down here, and then I'd like you to come to my office on Monday morning, and I would very much like you to stop filming that girl's dress."

And then he put his hand over the microphone and said something to the technician, and the camera on the stand at the side swung round.

I did not know what any of it meant.

I was standing four feet away from that man in a dress made out of my dead mother's jeans and I had no idea what he was talking about.

Finn did. He was at the side of the hall with Prae and he told me afterward that he had it before the house lights were fully up, because he is fifteen and quicker than me.

He has told me what he did with the next minute and a half, and it's the only part of that night I would show anybody.

He didn't go after her.

He came across that hall to the front of the stage and stood at the bottom of the steps with his hands in his pockets — so that when I came down, I came down to somebody.

Two hundred and eleven people were looking at the back of that hall.

My brother was the only person in the room facing the other way.

Verena went out of that hall through the fire door at the back.

A man I didn't know held it open for her. That's the detail I keep — some dad, standing nearest the door, doing the automatic polite thing for a woman leaving in a hurry.

She didn't come to my office meeting on the Monday. She sent an email on the Sunday night saying there had been a misunderstanding about the account details.

That was the last time I saw her in a room with other people in it.

And the music came back on about ninety seconds after she went.

That's the bit nobody believes either. Mr. Pryce gave the microphone back to the boy running it, and said something quietly to him, and the boy put the music on, and two hundred and eleven people had a prom.

I danced. I was on that floor until half eleven, in my mum's jeans, with Prae and about nine other people.

I have been asked whether that felt hollow and it did not. It was the best night of my life and both things are true at once and I have stopped apologising for the second one.

PART 4 — THE NOLA HARTIGAN FUND

My mum worked at Larkhall.

Not teaching. She was in the office from 2010 and then she was the attendance officer from about 2016, which means for six years she was the woman who rang your house when you did not turn up.

She was there eleven years. She died in the November of 2021.

In the February of 2022 the staff raised some money, and the PTA put in some, and somebody's dad who does something with money set it up properly.

It is small. It runs at about two thousand a year and it pays for trips, and kit, and prom tickets and dresses for kids whose families cannot do it.

It is called the Nola Hartigan Fund.

There is a plaque by the office. I walked past it every day for three years.

On the eleventh of February this year, an application was made to that fund in my name.

Four hundred pounds. For a prom dress and a ticket.

Submitted by a parent or guardian, which is how the form works, because a sixteen-year-old cannot do it alone.

Signed by Verena Hartigan.

It was approved in nine days, because the application has my mother's own name on both ends of it and because Mr. Pryce signed it himself and did not even take it to the panel.

The money went out on the twenty-fourth of February to the account on the form.

Which is Verena's.

And on the twenty-fifth she told me that prom dresses were a stupid waste of money.

She was holding a phone with a shopping app open on it. I could see the screen from where I was standing. I did not look at what was on it and I have thought about that since and I am glad I did not, because I would have had that in my head for the rest of my life.

Twenty-four hours.

She took four hundred pounds out of a fund named after my mother, for a dress for me, and then stood in our kitchen the next day and told me nobody wanted to watch me play at being a princess.

Mr. Pryce had known since about the ninth of May.

That's when the fund's accounts get done for the year. What happened is that Ms. Adebayo was going down the list of what had gone out, and she said — to nobody, in an office, with four other people in it —

"Oh, that's nice. Liv got hers."

And one of the other people in that office was my form tutor, who had been standing next to me in a corridor in April when I told Prae I wasn't going to prom.

She said: "Got what?"

That's the entire mechanism. A woman reading a list out loud, and another woman saying two words.

He had been trying to get hold of Verena for eleven days. Two emails and a phone call that she did not answer.

He has told me since that he had no intention whatsoever of doing any of it at the prom.

He had the meeting set up for the Monday. He had the file printed. He had, in his words, "every intention of being extremely boring about it."

What changed it was walking into that hall at about ten past eight to do the announcements and seeing a woman standing against the back wall with her phone up, filming a girl in a dress her brother had made, while telling the woman next to her what she was filming.

He said: "I had about thirty seconds and I made a decision I'd have told any member of my staff not to make."

I asked him whether he regretted it.

And Mr. Pryce said: "Not yet."

PART 5 — THE DRAWER

Now mine.

In the January, Ms. Adebayo kept me back after registration.

She was Mum's friend. They did eleven years in that building together and she came to the house twice after Mum died with a dish of something.

And she said: "Liv. There's a fund. You know there's a fund."

And she gave me the form. Two sides of A4, in a plastic wallet, which she had clearly gone and got.

I said thank you and put it in my bag.

I did not fill it in.

I am going to say exactly why, because I have had about four months to work it out and I know the answer now.

Partly it was writing it down. You have to put your household income on the back and you have to tick a box and the box is about hardship, and I was seventeen and I could not make my hand do it.

But that is not the main one.

The main one is that it has my mother's name on the top of the form.

And I could not be the girl who took money out of her own dead mum's fund. I could not stand at that plaque having done that. I thought — and this is the bit I have had to say out loud to Ms. Adebayo and then again to Finn — I thought it would look like I was using her.

So I took it home and I put it in the drawer in my room, the one with the chargers and the old phone in it.

Verena found it in the February when she was going through my room for something, which she did about once a month and which I had stopped being angry about.

I did not hide that form. I did not even remember it was there.

I put a loaded thing in a drawer in a house with that woman in it, because I was too proud to fill it in myself, and she found it and used it and signed her own name on it.

If I had filled that form in in January, I would have had a dress in March and none of the rest of it would exist.

Finn would not have been up until four in the morning for a fortnight. That dress would not exist.

I have gone round and round on that and I have stopped, because the other thing is bigger.

The reason Finn stopped talking about sewing is not the boys at school.

It is Dad's wake.

About forty people in our front room in the April of last year, and my brother had made something. A cushion cover, out of one of Dad's shirts, in about three days, because that is what he does when something happens.

He had it on his knee and he was showing our auntie.

And Verena came past with a plate and took it off him.

"Give me that, Noah—"

She called him Noah. That is not his name and never has been; she has done it since 2022 and nobody has ever corrected her, including me, including that afternoon.

"Give me that, Noah, not today. Honestly. Stitching, at your dad's do. Go and hand the sandwiches round."

And about four people laughed, because it was being said lightly.

And my brother got up and handed the sandwiches round for an hour and a quarter.

He did not touch that machine again for eleven months. Not the boys. Her, in a front room, in front of forty people, on the day we buried our father.

And then in the February his sister cried through a wall, and he went up to a loft on his own and got a sewing machine down.

Where it is now, briefly, because people always want it.

Verena is out of the house. That took until the August and it was solicitors and it was dull and about eleven thousand pounds of Mum's money is gone and is not coming back.

The four hundred has gone back into the fund. She paid it, through her solicitor, in the July, and she has not been charged with anything and I was asked and I said I did not want her to be and I have changed my mind about that twice since.

We live with our auntie Mel, who is Dad's sister, in a house that is too small, and it is the first time in four years that I have slept properly.

Finn has four commissions. Actual ones, with money. Two girls in the year below asked him in the September and then it went round, and he has a notebook with measurements in it and he charges sixty pounds and I have told him it is too cheap.

He is doing textiles at A level. He told Verena's sister at a thing in the October, out loud, before anybody asked.

And the dress is in my wardrobe in a cover.

I have worn it once since, in the August, to nothing in particular. I put it on in my room at my auntie's and stood in it for about ten minutes and then took it off and hung it back up.

The label is still sewn into the left side seam where nobody can see it. N.H.