“Sheri Agniello got that Mandatum job,” Tamara told her daughter early one Saturday morning. “Saw her going to work yesterday in that bright blue colour they all seem to like so much.”

Nicole pulled a face. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Last I heard, Louise was thinking about quitting her job too.”

“Louise McKenna?”

Nicole nodded.

Tamara laughed. “That’s crazy. The woman is an amazing cook. She’s got a job for life at Ridge’s. What’d she do, go work in their staff canteen reheating microwave meals?”

Nicole shrugged. “I’m just saying what I heard,” she said. “It’s just weird is all. Aren’t you always telling me how much you love Bankhaven’s pride in local business?”

“Yeah,” Tamara said slowly. “That’s definitely what I thought. Seems like quite a few of my fellow business owners have been looking for the chance to sell out.”

“Someone ought to do something,” Nicole said. After a moment of reflection she followed up the trite musing with a more useful “Not sure who could, though.”

“Actually,” her mom replied, “I think there’s a good option out there.” She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m going to go open up,” she said, “but I’ll make a call once Joe Mac’s been served. See if I can get a slot to speak at the next town meeting.”

Nicole took her time over breakfast, as she always did once her mom had left their home for the bar. It wasn’t easy to get peace to yourself in Bankhaven, but until she left the house she had it. She was finding it more and more necessary to have that quiet time and marshal her forces before she wandered out into town.

Tamara’s comment had been on the money; a huge number of women in Bankhaven wore Mandatum blue at least somewhere in their outfits now. Nicole found herself thinking, with increasing frequency, that she should add something in the same blue to her collection, and it almost seemed at times as if she felt a pressure in her head to buy.

This was so obviously fanciful that she’d said nothing about it to her mom, and instead it had simply become a point of pride not to give into it. So what if she wasn’t following the latest fashion? Fashion was just a way to part fools from their money anyway, she told herself firmly.

Once she felt sufficiently ready to take on what the world had to offer, she headed down the stairs from their home, out past the connecting door into the bar, and into town itself.

She stopped off at Madison’s, picking up a frappe to go. The sign over the door still said Madisons, but it was a new one, and the backing was in bright Mandatum blue. This made Nicole twitchy - honestly twitchier than made a lot of sense to her, though part of it was seeing that Charlotte seemed grumpier since her parents sold out. At the same time, she grudgingly admitted that the syrups Madison carried to flavour coffee now just tasted better.

Charlotte wrinkled her nose with distaste as she rang up Nicole’s order, and Nicole offered a silent inquiry, but Charlotte waved it off. “I’m not a fan of the new syrups,” she said simply. “But everyone seems to love them, especially the salted caramel. We do so many more now.”

It surprised Nicole slightly that she was following a trend in any way, but over the past month she’d really started enjoying them, ever since Charlotte’s mom had pumped a serving into her coffee absent-mindedly. It hadn’t been part of the order, but she’d enjoyed it, and she’d started ordering them herself.

Her next order of business took her into Boutique Emilie, founded and run by her mom’s longtime friend Emma. Where Rocky Wear had specialised almost exclusively in fitness and outdoorswear until recently, Boutique Emilie catered for everything else a woman might want to add to her wardrobe, and guarded information about what customers had bought with the kind of seriousness more usually found around government documents.

Given that Emma was close friends with her mom, this confidentiality had been a long time saving grace for Nicole. She preferred jeans and flannel to just about any other option and with her bust size, it was often much cheaper to buy something bland and supportive in her size than anything decorative. Nevertheless, from time to time Nicole wanted to wear something she knew would catch the eye, even if she had nobody to see it, and the few pieces of eyecatching lingerie she owned had been bought there. She knew many other girls felt the same; Vanessa Carter certainly didn’t want Janet knowing what she’d bought.

Today, though, her mission was a simpler one. She waited for Emma to finish with the previous customer and stepped up. Into Emma’s practised smile she quietly said “I’d like re-measuring, please.”

“Of course,” Emma replied immediately. “Step this way.”

There was no denying it; she was going to have to replace her bras; once she’d shrugged the flannel shirt off Emma clucked her tongue, just looking at the way the fabric of the tee beneath hung, and said “Oh, yes. I’d say you’re up a size from last time we measured.” She glanced up to meet Nicole’s eyes and smiled warmly. “Growing up has been good to you.”

“They’re a hassle as much as they’re a bonus,” she muttered. Emma laughed.

“Sometimes it’s hard to believe you’re your mother’s daughter,” she said. “By the time we were your age, she was using her cleavage like a scalpel.”

“A scalpel?”

“Mm.” Emma chuckled. “Surgically parting fools from their money.” She picked up her tape measure. “I’d say just by looking you need one cup up, but let’s make sure,” she said, and measured.

Nicole couldn’t help but smile at Emma’s pleased little grin when her assessment proved to be right on the money. It was always pleasant to see an expert prove their skill, even over something so tiny. “So,” she asked, “are you happy you could do it, or are you just happy you get to sell me some new bras?”

To her surprise, Emma appeared to take the question seriously. “If I’m honest with you,” she said, “I’m just glad you aren’t arguing with me about it.”

Nicole frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not the only one who’s checked their measurements again lately.” Emma grinned mischievously. “Considering I think people are just finally paying proper attention now my competition’s changed their wares, it does please me to no end that they still check in with me, not her, for their measurements.

“Problem is, a whole bunch of them lately have told me I must be making it up.”

“Making what up?”

“Most of them are up about what you are,” she said, and lowered her voice to admit, “A couple of them had to buy bras two cups up past where they had been, so they must have been uncomfortable a long time.”

She shrugged. “I get it, you know? You reach a certain point and you assume the girls are going to be the same size, but over time diet and exercise make fools of us all. I’m just the messenger, but so many of them have told me flat they must always have been that size.

“Well, they weren’t buying in that size. That’s all I can say.” She pursed her lips primly. “Now, are you just looking to stock up or do you want something to show off?”

Nicole opened her mouth to say she just wanted to stock up - after all, there was no man in Bankhaven whose eye she wanted to catch - but after a moment of hesitation she found herself saying “Well, it couldn’t hurt to look at the show off side, could it?”

*

By the time Nicole had settled on two rather nice (and not blue) lingerie sets and picked up three soft, comfortable bralettes to suit her new size, four other customers had been in and out of the shop. Emma had taken breaks to serve each one, and they had infallibly been quick to decide, purchase, and depart. Nicole didn’t recognise two of them, even Bankhaven being big enough to know only most of the town, not all of it, but she had nonetheless picked up a common theme, which was a bright blue, as close to the Mandatum blue as they could get.

One of them had even done her eyeshadow in that same blue, and very elaborately at that; two of the four had sported blue lipstick, which had stood out strikingly well against their pale skin. Three of four had bright blue nails.

“Blue isn’t everyone’s colour,” she had remarked to Emma, between the third and fourth other customer. Emma had smiled the polite smile of an expert in clothing who must, occasionally, take money for clothes she wouldn’t advise that customer to wear, and said nothing.

With her first two steps complete, Nicole headed for the town library. Her path took her by the bandstand which stood in a small grassy patch in front of Bankhaven Town Hall. There were always people at the bandstand unless there was snow on the ground, and lunchtime on a weekend saw the eldest high school kids mingled with any young adult not away at college there.

Someone in the bandstand was shouting at someone else. Nicole slowed her pace as she grew closer; she told herself she was simply being cautious in case there was trouble ahead. All the same, she was paying close attention.

Theo Jackson was doing the shouting. He’d always been a bit of a young stud at high school, but not long after graduating Bethany Lyons had put her foot down and delivered the ultimatum which had eventually brought him to heel. The two had been engaged for two years at this point, and just about everyone who knew them understood that they were just waiting on saving up enough money for the wedding Bethany wanted before they’d tie the knot.

As she got closer, she saw that Theo was shouting at Bethany, who was standing with her arms folded, her expression unreadable. Nicole felt Bethany was shooting for stoic but had ended up instead just looking pissed off.

She stopped to listen.

“...cannot believe you would do this to me,” Theo was yelling, and then, “to us. We’ve been together long enough, you know? We’ve invested in each other. And we love each other!” He screamed that last like an attack.

Bethany waited quietly until he came to a halt. She had always had stubbornness on her side, Nicole thought, remembering their courtship, where Nicole had been struck by the immediate and easy comparison of an angler with a fish on the hook, waiting until the struggle against inevitability is done.

Finally, once he had shouted himself almost hoarse, she asked “Are you done?”

He nodded, mute, staring at her with an intense uncertainty.

“Good,” Bethany said simply. “So are we, then.”

She turned and walked away, not hesitating, not glancing back, while behind her Theo sagged like his strings had been cut. It was the first time Nicole had felt some sympathy for him; the audience seemed awful to do that in front of, though she didn’t know which of them had orchestrated an audience.

“Rough time to be a young man,” one of the women watching said. A young man stood next to her gave a heartfelt nod.

“It’s like you’re all taking yourself off the market,” he said. The woman looked sideways back at him and gave vent to an exasperated noise.

“Look, it’s time to get serious,” she said. “If you can’t understand that, don’t be mad because we can.” And with that she walked off herself. Nicole watched her go thoughtfully. Hard not to notice she was wearing the Mandatum-blue V-neck, one with a deep enough cut to be daring anywhere, let alone Bankhaven; it was as she walked off that Nicole saw, as the tee rode up her back, what looked like the lower legs of an M tattoo on the small of her back.

Nicole suppressed a shudder. All this was starting to get too weird.

As she set off again for the library, a blue van in Mandatum livery pulled up by the side of the town hall. Two men got out and began carrying large TVs into the hall, a gift to the civic government from its newest corporate citizen.

*

The town meeting took place in the middle of the following week and, accordingly, Nicole didn’t attend; her mom felt better if Nicole was helping watch the bar when she was away. It must have run late into the bargain, as Tamara hadn’t returned home before a tired and somewhat frustrated Nicole had gone on to bed.

She was annoyed with her own frustration. All around her, the women of Bankhaven looked better than they ever had. Gym memberships, she’d read on social, were up, but many of them seemed curvier as well (a phenomenon Charlotte was insisting was most prominent - if that was the word - in those who ordered the most coffee from Madison’s) and they seemed, without exception, to be putting more effort into their presentation.

That much was true whether or not they embraced the blue; Nicole speculated privately that the others felt driven to it because of the way those in blue were presenting themselves now.

All the same, colour wasn’t the only difference. It was…

Nicole felt awkward even thinking about it. Putting it into words, she instinctively understood, would make it seem more real. But - face up to it and bite the bullet - there was no denying that those in blue were dressing sexier.

Those blue leggings Janet Carter was selling in particular, they were tight enough you could tell if the wearer had any underwear on beneath them, and the answer was almost universally no - and being shapewear, they left nothing to the imagination. When Nicole passed Ms Roth in the corridors in school now, it took an effort of will to keep her eyes above the waist rather than remind herself that a teacher was showing up for her day job like that.

(Benton Allen seemed to be delighted. Heather, Vanessa, and Ms Roth were all competing for his attentions and seemed to be challenging each other for who could reveal the most.)

And despite being quite determined to stay on the non-Mandatum side of things, Nicole had begun pausing as she passed mirrors, glancing sideways at her own reflection, contemplating the way her shirts hid the lines and arcs of her figure. And every time, there was the insidious thought: Why not use her body? Why not show it off?

She put it down to just how obsessed everyone else had become with the way they looked, some aspect of their excited desperation bleeding over into her own psyche. She just didn’t like the suggestion that she could be so easily influenced - and after all, why would she?

When she went down to breakfast her mom was cooking happily in the kitchen. “Morning, honey. Sit down, I’ve got breakfast coming up,” Tamara reported cheerfully. Nicole broke off from the time-worn path to the cereal box and sat down, smiling. It wasn’t often that mom got up early enough for this sort of thing, and those mornings often felt like treats when they did.

“How was the meeting?” she asked, and Tamara laughed.

“So I found out what Sheri Agniello’s doing at Mandatum,” she said. “They’re setting up a new Marketing department up here. Sheri’s been placed in doing HR for them. Recruitment and such.”

“No, really?” It wasn’t what Nicole would have imagined for Sheri, but now the idea was out there she felt like she could understand it. Most likely she would be pretty effective. So she smiled and wondered how the interview must have gone. “Any other juicy gossip?”

“Louise McKenna’s been signed up too,” Tamara said. “And Natalie Doyle. Only they’re calling themselves Lulu and Nattie now.”

Nicole pulled a face, but didn’t pass comment. “Did you bring up the Mandatum stuff?”

“Yeah,” her mom answered, turning to set plates on the table. Nicole bit down a comment about how her mom’s neckline had plunged even deeper. “Of course, near half the attendees last night either work there or they’re trying to. I guess Mandatum left some recruitment pamphlets in Rocky Wear.” Tamara pulled a face of her own, very expressively. “So the vote was kind of a failure.”

“That’s a shame,” Nicole answered. For once when her mom was talking about local politics, she actually meant it. “I didn’t realise it was going to come to a vote.”

“You said someone should do something,” Tamara pointed out. “I couldn’t see another way where I could get someone to, so I tried this. But democracy…” She shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, honey. Sometimes it fails.”

Nicole sighed. “I guess.”

“They had a representative there.” She exhaled slowly, eyes distant, remembering. “They’re investing in the town. I don’t just mean buying out a lot of us, but they’re donating a lot of resources to local organisations. People tend to like that. Even I can see the benefits.”

“But you can see the slippery slope, too.” Nicole didn’t put it as a question. It was an affirmation, waiting ready for her mom to agree with. After a moment, Tamara nodded.

“But we’ve always been cynics, honey,” she said. “A lot of Bankhaven residents are optimists.” Nicole wondered briefly if that was the difference between the blue ladies and the other women, but dismissed it pretty much immediately. Optimist wasn’t a description anyone would ever use for Sheri.

On the way to school she saw Ms Roth driving in, the sporty convertible that used to be the one hint of a more interesting person she let show now fitting with her long, flowing hair, tight blouse that left her arms bare, and the leggings Nicole knew would adorn her legs, too low down to see.

Sitting next to the teacher was Benton Allen. As he passed he slid his sunglasses down his nose to look at Nicole, then smiled and blew her a kiss.

Affronted, Nicole kept on walking.

*

The next week, on her walk back from school, Nicole stopped dead in her tracks on the sidewalk. She stared, open-mouthed, at a car rolling past. A brand new police cruiser, bearing the Bankhaven PD shield. Immediately recognisable as a new vehicle, not just because there was no dirt on it at all, but because the black and white of the old cruisers was instead a single paint job - Mandatum blue.

Impossible not to have grown up living above and occasionally working in Bankhaven’s most popular bar without knowing all the local police officers by sight. In that car, Officers Shaw and DeLeon were on patrol.

Rick DeLeon was career police and near the end of that career, comfortably into his fifties, a former high school jock gone fully to seed. In changing his uniform shirt from navy blue to Mandatum blue, almost nothing had changed, though he did seem somehow more like a security guard than a police officer.

Maggie Shaw, on the other hand, had on a bright blue dress shirt with no buttons above around the braline which was therefore open to display her cleavage by design. It was also tight around her chest, which seemed more generously proportioned than the occasional peripheral glance in the local gym had previously suggested to Nicole.

It was no wonder she was staring.

So this was part of what her mom had meant about Mandatum donating resources. Apparently resources included uniforms now.

Nicole shuddered and moved on. Rounding a corner, she saw the new town centre Mandatum office. Lulu McKenna and Kiki Morgan worked there now. What had been old Jerry Gander’s unnamed hardware store had been cleared out and the two Mandatum zealots now spent their days there recruiting any townsfolk looking to work for the big company.

It was strange, Nicole thought again, just how enthusiastic some of these people were being. She’d grown up hearing Bankhaven residents pour scorn on big business chains. Now she could stand there and watch a lot of women who’d done part-time work while raising children suddenly eager for a full-time corporate role, mixed with a slowly increasing number of men.

As she watched, Rob McKenna entered the office. Nicole thought it was probably for the best if she didn’t try to loiter and see how that turned out, in spite of her curiosity. Word had got around town that Rob and Lulu had separated a couple of weeks back, around when Louise applied for the job.

She headed on to school, where the crowd streaming in through the front door were more than half bright blue these days. She saw leggings, skinny jeans, short skirts, hot pants, V-necks, halter tops, tight tees. Even the usual holdouts among the girls were wearing makeup.

Her nose wrinkled in distaste, but almost as soon as she was in the door she caught sight of her own reflection in the glass of the trophy cabinet and paused to consider.

It was so annoying, she thought. She had a better body than Vanessa Carter or Heather Monroe. But nobody knew.

“Fuck it,” she muttered under her breath, sourly. She dropped her satchel to the floor and shrugged her flannel shirt off, then balled it up and stuffed it back in the satchel. Her tee was still loose, her jeans tight but not as figure-hugging as some, but at least she wasn’t hiding it anymore.

It was strange how much it felt like a weight had come off her shoulders with the action. She walked on proudly.

*

The blue was still spreading, much to Nicole’s dismay. She made it home after another week, pushing open the door to the bar, and immediately it stood out that Mandatum blue was even infiltrating the bar, especially as Rob McKenna was sat there nursing a beer, still in his work uniform.

It had been all round Bankhaven the previous weekend that while Lulu had abstained from the interview, her friend Kiki had taken Rob on for janitorial. It was generally agreed that going from a reasonably-paid job as an electrician to base level janitorial was a hell of a sacrifice to make for your wife, although more and more of the men were starting to say that it made sense. After all, the theory went, any role in Mandatum had plenty going for it.

Nicole could only name a couple of male Mandatum hires from in town who seemed to be doing anything interesting or high-paying. The recent arrivals running the Maple Street complex were the ones doing most of it, though a couple of women had some kind of technical role or other.

Otherwise, the company was building out a big marketing function in the complex, with Bankhaven women becoming models, photographers, copywriters, editors… a whole range of positions, many of them executive. It had set even women quite happy in their current roles talking about change.

She dropped into her usual seat by the bar and helped herself to a can of soda. Tamara, just finishing up serving Joe Mac, didn’t mark it down on her tally.

It was such a minor thing that Nicole didn’t realise what had happened - rather, what hadn’t happened - for a matter of minutes, when the niggling annoyance at the back of her mind made its presence properly known again. When her mom next looked her way, she raised the can and made eye contact, and Tamara smiled.

Rather than mark it down, she made her way over to her daughter and stood, one hand on hip, one on the bar, looking down at her. “Your friend was in again this afternoon,” she said. Nicole frowned, trying to think which friend that could be.

Her mom sounded cheerful about it, so she guessed “Charlotte?”

Tamara shook her head. “Benton,” she said.

“He’s not my friend,” Nicole retorted, quick and hot. Her mom smiled indulgently.

“Well, he seems to want to be,” she said. “He’s been working on his dad to get a better offer for the bar.”

“The buy-in?” Nicole sat up sharply. “You’re not going to, are you?”

There was a moment of hesitation. “Not unless I get the right offer,” she said after it had passed. “We’ve seen what they’ve done elsewhere in town. It’s not like taking the deal before we could have known that.”

Nicole looked at her mom, shock and horror writ large across her face. Tamara frowned.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she bit out. “So you don’t like the boy. It’s not his company, and he doesn’t make the deal a bad one.”

Nicole was grasping for anything that could help her to make even a little more sense of this. “Wait,” she said. “When you said he was working on a better offer for the bar, why?”

“I thought that was obvious,” Tamara said. “He’s hoping you’ll give him a date.”

“He wants to buy me?”

“He wants to buy your attention,” Tamara corrected. “I’ve told you before, that’s a big part of how I built this business. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“Hm.” Nicole wasn’t sure what to say, but it seemed to her that if Benton was trying to buy her attention, paying off her mom was a strange way to go about it. Of course, Tamara Delaney had a reputation in town for getting what she wanted, if she set her mind to it. So it might be he was playing on that assumption.

Her mom sighed. “You know,” she said, “the situation has changed. Mandatum backed businesses are going to have the edge in this town. How long do you think it’ll be before they decide they need to set up their own bar, if we hold out?”

Nicole snorted. “They’d turn it into some kind of company scrip Hooters.”

“And that would probably do plenty well enough, young lady,” Tamara pointed out quite firmly. “Don’t forget that.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Nicole could feel herself chastened. She thought again of the fact she’d cast off her shirt for the past week, was putting her figure out there to be seen, even if she wasn’t doing it with as much abandon as Ms Roth, or even as her mom, come to that.

Nicole found herself thinking that Tamara at least had the courage of her convictions; once she’d decided to show off her body for profit, she’d assembled the wardrobe for it. Nicole’s tees weren’t tight enough to paint the clearest picture of her figure, nor were her jeans. Her mom, on the other hand, wore tight black leggings with very little concession to modesty, and her button-down sleeveless denim V-neck had a neckline that drew the eye. You could even see a hint of bright blue bra cups inside the plunging V.

“Honestly,” Tamara was saying, “I’ve never asked you to do more than work hard around here and I’ll never ask you to put out for anyone’s benefit but your own. But you don’t seem to appreciate the situation we’re in.”

She looked at Nicole, and for a moment the two of them were heedless of the others in the bar, their focus on the things they needed to say to each other and the things they wanted to keep from each other so intense that they seemed the only ones there. “Why can’t you be more like Nessa Carter?” she asked. “At least Jan doesn’t need to worry about her daughter’s future.”

It was a slap in the face. Nicole stared at her mom for a long moment, mouth open, trying to find the words to undo it or offer a counterstrike, but her mind was too much in turmoil, trying to find a thread in all this that would make it make sense.

Everyone knew Tamara Delaney usually got her way, not least her daughter. Nicole’s mom always won when they clashed, and got her own way most of the rest of the time too. Her lips thin, Nicole stood up, grabbed her satchel, and walked out of the bar again, onto the street, too angry to follow the conversation any further.

She had been walking for five minutes or so, replaying what she’d heard and thinking of all the things she should have said, before her anger reached a low enough simmer for her to start thinking about anything other than the words exchanged.

When she did, it finally occurred to her that the blue of those bra cups her mom had been wearing was probably, if seen in daylight rather than the bar’s softer yellow bulbs, Mandatum blue. The thought stopped her dead in her tracks, sending a shiver up and down her spine.

And yet, realistically, her mom hadn’t seemed different to usual. Not in any ways that mattered. The stress of the way her town was changing could get to Tamara just as easily as Nicole, and for Tamara there was an additional financial dimension to it all.

She started walking again. She might see logic to her mom’s position, but it still made her angry. And it wasn’t as if her mom didn’t know her opinion of Benton. Sure, he seemed to be collecting new friends and sycophants on a regular basis, but that didn’t include her mom. That was localised to school.

Wasn’t it?

*

The day afterwards, Tamara had switched from V-necks and skinny jeans to hot pants and a thin halter top just the day before, both in Mandatum blue, and Nicole had raised no objection to it, not because she didn’t want to argue with her mother (although she never did) but because she simply didn’t think to.

The argument over Benton Allen had likewise gone unresolved. By the time Nicole had returned home, having spent the evening on her phone at the bandstand, it had slipped her mind, and by the time she remembered she could understand her mom’s perspective even if she didn’t necessarily agree with it.

Joe Mac was now staring exclusively at her mom, instead of dividing his time in the bar staring at each of them, and Nicole did not find this a relief as she might have supposed she would two or three months earlier; part of her felt affronted. It was the same feeling she’d had before, when she had been hiding her curves and resentful of the admiring looks her peers were collecting.

Nicole came to a snap decision. Rather than head straight back to the bar and settle in, she instead went over to what had been Rocky Wear, freshly rebranded as MaxiMart Fashion.

Janet Carter, wearing Mandatum skirt and tee, her eyes shadowed Mandatum blue, bustled over to serve her. “Nicole! This is a surprise. We don’t see you in here often.”

Nicole gave her a thin smile. “Well… I’ve been reconsidering my fashion decisions,” she said cagily, far from sure how much she wanted to admit.

Her mom would have asked her to elaborate. Emma would have giggled in a way that invited confession. Janet Carter simply smiled, dimples emerging into a sunny beam, and waited quietly.

It turned out to be as effective as the other strategies, if not more so. “What do you have that’ll help me… you know…” She cleared her throat awkwardly, but the next words still came out as a quiet mumble. “Show off the girls,” she finished, her feet fixed on the floor.

“Oh, I think we can help with that,” Janet gushed. “Come on back where we have some privacy and your Auntie Jan will get you sorted.” With that, Jan Carter turned on her heel and marched into what was, in fact, a very discreet back room with three changing rooms attached; there were people in two of them, but no way of knowing who.