The List

Danielle fluffed up her pillow, and she and Andrew clicked through their respective televisions together, as if their remotes were in sync. They laughed at the bizarre late-night infomercials that populated the cable channels in the middle of the night. Spray-on hair. Home gym contraptions that could double for medieval torture devices. Skin remedies for swollen, zitty faces. Diet pills based on ancient Chinese secrets.

Danielle fell asleep with her cell pressed to her ear, images of before and after flashing in the dark. Her battery died around four thirty A.M. Her alarm died with it.

For love, or something pretty close to it, she missed the bus.

Danielle reaches for her phone to call home, when she spots a notebook lying open in the street, pages fluttering. She picks it up. Using it to shield her eyes from the orangey sun, she sees, at a distance of roughly three blocks, her school bus bouncing along to the next designated stop. She missed it, but not by much.

She lowers her chin and stares out the tops of her eyes.

A second later, she’s running.

Her body isn’t warm, and she worries about possibly pulling a muscle. Chasing down the school bus definitely isn’t worth a stupid injury that might keep her out of the water. But after a few strides, Danielle slips into a comfortable rhythm. A pleasant heat ignites her pumping arms, her whirling legs.

The school bus stops for a car pulling out of a driveway. Danielle quickly closes the gap. “Hey!” she calls out when she gets close enough to recognize the students in the back windows. “Hey!”

But the kids are too busy socializing with each other to notice Danielle. The bus accelerates and a cloud puffs out from the tailpipe, stinging her eyes. She veers to the right and centers herself in the driver’s side-view mirror. She shouts again over the roar of the engine. She bangs her fist against the side.

The bus slams to a stop. The kids look down at her, shocked. Danielle pushes a few wisps of brown hair out of her face as the folding door opens.

“You could have gotten killed,” the bus driver barks.

Danielle apologizes in between heaving deep breaths. She climbs the steps, holds the notebook over her head like a trophy, and waits for someone to claim it.

After stashing her coat in her locker, Danielle heads straight to the cafeteria with Hope. She woke up too late to eat breakfast, and there is no way she can last until lunch without food. She passes up the student council bagel sale, because carbs make her sleepy and she’s tired enough as it is. Hopefully there’ll be something in the vending machines besides potato chips and chocolate bars. Danielle has been eating more and more since making the freshman swim team, her body always desperate for fuel. She wants to be careful to feed it well.

An older boy passes the girls as they enter the cafeteria. “Hey! Dan the Man!” he says, and slaps Danielle on the back.

“Was he talking to you?” Hope asks.

Danielle is too startled to react. She tries to get a look at the boy’s face to see if maybe she knows him, but he disappears as quickly as he arrived. “Um … no clue.”

The girls continue over to the vending machine. The entire glass front is covered over by papers. Danielle assumes it’s an overzealous school club desperate for members until she pulls a sheet down and reads it.

Dan the Man?

Ugliest?

A cramp spreads inside her, contracting each and every muscle.

To be called ugly is one thing. Of course Danielle has heard the insult before. Is there a girl in the world who hasn’t? And while she certainly isn’t happy about it, ugly is something people say about each other, and say about themselves, without even thinking. The word is so generic, it’s almost meaningless.

Almost.

But the Dan the Man thing is different. That hurts, even though Danielle knows she isn’t a particularly girlie girl. Wearing dresses makes her feel weird, as if she’s in a costume, pretending to be someone else. She only puts makeup on for the weekends, and even then only a little bit of gloss and maybe mascara. She’s never had her ears pierced because she’s deathly afraid of needles.

But Danielle still has all the essential girl parts. Boobs. Long hair. A boyfriend.

Hope rips down a list of her own and sucks in a big breath, the way she usually does before plunging underwater. “Oh, no, Danielle … What is this thing?”

Danielle doesn’t answer. Instead, she stares at her reflection in the newly exposed square of vending machine glass. She hadn’t had time to shower this morning, so she just threw her hair up in a bun. A haze of short brown strands spike up around her hairline. It shouldn’t surprise her — bits of broken hair fill the inside of her swim cap after every practice — but it does. She tries to smooth them down with a suddenly clammy hand, but the strands pop right back up. She pulls off her elastic and shakes out her hair. It is dry and dull from chlorine and doesn’t move like normal hair should. It suddenly looks to Danielle like a bad wig.

Danielle turns away from her reflection. She sees that the lockers outside the cafeteria also have papers taped to them. She chokes out, “Hope, I think these lists are hanging all over school.”

Without further discussion, the two girls leave the cafeteria, split apart, and begin running, one on either side of the hallway. They tear down every copy of the list they pass.

Though Danielle is glad for something physical to do, it is also her second sprint of the morning without any breakfast. She searches deep down inside for the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other, like a straw rooting around the bottom of a soda can. She makes it to the end of the hallway, and then runs smack into Andrew, who’s standing with a few other sophomore guys from the football team.

Including Chuck.

“Yo! It’s Dan!” Chuck calls out in a deeper-than-usual voice. “Dan the Man!”

The boys stare at her and laugh.

They’ve seen the list.

Which means that Andrew has seen it, too.

“Come on, Andrew,” another boy says, giving him a big shove in her direction. “Go give Dan a kiss!”

“Yeah! We support gay rights!” shouts Chuck.

Andrew laughs good-naturedly. But as he walks toward Danielle and away from his friends, his smile slips into a look of concern. He leads her into a stairwell. “Are you okay?” he asks, careful to keep his voice quiet.

“Not bad, considering the sex change operation I apparently had last night,” Danielle says, a desperate joke to break the tension. Neither of them laugh. She holds up the copies of the list she’s torn down. “What is this thing, Andrew?”

“It’s a stupid tradition. It happens every year at the start of homecoming week.”

She stares at him. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

Andrew runs his hands through his hair. It is still light from the summer, but his roots are growing in darker. “Because I never thought you’d be on it, Danielle.”

This makes her feel better, but not much. “Do you know who wrote it?” Danielle doesn’t have a ton of friends, but as far as she knows, she doesn’t have any enemies, either. For the life of her, she can’t think of one person who would hate her enough to do something this mean.

Andrew glances at the copies of the list in her hands and quickly shakes his head. “No, I don’t. And look, Danielle — you can’t go running around tearing these things down. These lists are everywhere. The whole school knows about it. There’s nothing you can do.”

Danielle remembers the boy who slapped her back in the cafeteria, the heat from his hand on her spine. She doesn’t want to do the wrong thing. She doesn’t want to embarrass herself any more than what is already happening. “I’m sorry,” she says, because that’s how she feels. For many reasons. “Tell me what to do.”

Andrew rubs her arm. “People will want to see you looking upset. They’ll want to see you react. Everyone still talks about this girl Jennifer Briggis and how she freaked when she got put on the list her freshman year. Trust me — doing the wrong thing now could ruin the rest of high school for you.”

Danielle’s chest gets tight. “This is crazy, Andrew. I mean, this is crazy.”

“It’s a big mind game. It’s like we tell the kids at camp: If you pretend like the teasing doesn’t bother you, it will eventually stop. So don’t give anyone the satisfaction of seeing you upset. You need to be stone cold.” He anchors his eyes on hers. “Game Face. Okay?”

She bites her lip and nods, fighting back tears. She knows Andrew can see them, but thankfully he pretends not to. Apparently, he has his Game Face on, too.

Danielle takes a second to compose herself and follows Andrew out of the stairwell, though a few steps behind.

Hope stands in the middle of the hallway looking around in a panic. She spots Danielle and rushes over. “Hurry up, Danielle. I grabbed every copy in this hall and in the science wing. Let’s go check near the gym.” She gives Danielle a huge hug and whispers, “Don’t worry. I swear on my life that we’re going to find out who did this and make sure they get what they deserve.”

“Forget it, Hope,” Danielle says. She drops the copies she’s holding into a trash can.

“What? What do you mean?” Hope turns around to glance at Andrew, who has rejoined his friends. “What did Andrew say?”

“Don’t worry. He said all the right things.” Which is how Danielle feels, without question.

CHAPTER THREE

“What the f?”

Though it’s posed as a question, the three words aren’t delivered like one, with the last syllable ticking up to a higher, uncertain pitch. And yet Candace Kincaid is clearly confused by the copy of the list taped to her locker door.

She frees a strand of brown hair stuck in her thick coat of shimmery lip gloss, then leans forward for a closer inspection. She drags a raspberry fingernail down the list, linking the word ugliest and her name with an invisible, impossible line.

Her friends pop up behind her, wanting to see. They’d all come to school looking for the list today. Candace was so excited for its arrival, she’d barely slept last night.

“It’s the list!” one says.

“Candace is the prettiest sophomore!” another cries.

“Yay, Candace!”

Candace feels the hands pat her back, the hands squeeze her shoulders, the hugs. But she keeps her eyes on the list. This was supposed to be her year. Honestly, last year should have been her year, but Monique Jones had modeled in teen magazines, or at least that’s what she’d told people. Candace didn’t think Monique was pretty pretty. She was way too skinny, her head was too big for her body, and her cheekbones were … well, freakish. Also, Monique only made friends with guys. Classic slut behavior.

Candace had been very happy when the Joneses moved away.

She pinches the corner, flattening the blistered embossment between her fingertips, and then tears down the list, leaving an inch of tape and a rip of paper stuck to her locker door.

“I hate to break this to you, girls … but apparently I’m the ugliest sophomore girl at Mount Washington,” Candace announces. And then she laughs, because it is honestly that ridiculous.

Her friends share quick, uneasy glances.

“On the plus side,” Candace continues, mainly to fill the awkward silence, “I guess we know for sure that Lynette Wilcox wrote the list this year. Mystery solved!”

Lynette Wilcox uses a Seeing Eye dog to lead her through the hallways. She was born blind, her eyes milky white and too wet.

So it’s a joke. Obviously.

Only none of her friends laugh.

No one says anything.

Not until one of the girls whispers, “Whoa.”

Candace huffs. Whoa is the absolute understatement of the year. She turns the list around and goes over the other names, expecting other mistakes that might explain what the hell is going on. Sarah Singer is definitely the ugliest junior. Candace has a faint memory of who Bridget Honeycutt is, but the girl in her mind is kind of forgettable, so she isn’t sure she’s thinking of the right person. Everyone in school thinks Margo Gable is gorgeous, so seeing her name as prettiest senior makes sense. And, of course, Jennifer Briggis is the obvious choice for the ugliest senior. Honestly, any girl other than Jennifer would have been a total letdown. Candace doesn’t know either of the freshmen girls, which isn’t a surprise because she’s not the kind of girl who gives a crap about freshmen.

There’s one other name she doesn’t recognize. Weirdly enough, it is her sophomore counterpart. The prettiest to her ugliest.

Candace flicks the list with her finger and it makes a snapping sound. “Who’s Lauren Finn?”

“She’s that homeschooled girl,” one of her friends explains.

“What homeschooled girl?” Candace asks, wrinkling her nose.

Another girl nervously looks over both shoulders to make sure no one else in the hallway is listening, and then whispers, “Horse Hair.”

Candace’s eyes get big. “Lauren Finn is Horse Hair?”

She’d thought up the nickname last week, when everyone was forced to run a mile in gym class and Horse Hair’s horsey blond ponytail kept swishing back and forth as she trotted along. Candace had made a point of neighing as she passed Lauren because it was gross to let your hair grow that long. Unless, of course, you had layers. Which Lauren didn’t. Her hair was cut straight across the bottom at her waist. Probably by her mother with a dull pair of scissors.

“Well … I think Lauren’s pretty,” another girl says, shrugging her shoulders apologetically.

Someone else nods. “She could use a haircut for sure, but yeah. Lauren’s definitely pretty.”

Candace lets out a pained sigh. “I’m not saying Horse Hair isn’t pretty,” she moans, though she’d never actually considered Lauren’s looks. And why would she? This conversation isn’t supposed to be about Lauren. It’s supposed to be about her. “It doesn’t make any sense that I’d be picked as the ugliest sophomore.” Her eyes roll off her friends and on to other sophomores walking down the hallway. Candace sees, in the span of a few seconds, at least ten other girls who it should be. Ugly girls who deserve this.

“I mean, come on, you guys. This is total crap!” Candace gives her friends another chance to defend her, though she feels a little pathetic at having to bait them. “Pretty girls are not supposed to end up on the ugly side of the list! It, like, undermines the whole tradition.”

“Well, the list doesn’t actually say that you’re ugly,” someone gently offers.

“That’s true,” adds another girl. “The ugliest girls are seriously ugly. The list just says you’re ugly on the inside.”

It isn’t the rousing defense Candace is hoping for. But as the words sink in, Candace nods slowly and lets a new feeling bloom inside her. So what if people think she is ugly on the inside? Clearly her friends don’t believe that, or they wouldn’t be friends with her! And pretty on the outside is what really counts. Pretty on the outside is what everyone sees.

One of the girls says timidly, “So … should we go discuss what we’re doing for Spirit Caravan?”

Candace had announced this as the plan for the morning. Spirit Caravan happens on Saturday, before the homecoming football game. It’s an impromptu parade where the students at Mount Washington drive around town with their cars decorated, beeping their horns and getting people excited for the game. This is the first year Candace and her friends can drive themselves, since a few, herself included, had gotten their driving permits over the summer. Candace has everything planned in her notebook, like whose car they should ride in (her mother’s convertible, obviously), how it should be decorated (streamers, tin cans, soap on the windshield), and what the girls should wear (short shorts, kneesocks, and Mount Washington sweatshirts). Still, Candace stares at her friends slack jawed. “I can’t say I’m in a very school spirit-y mood at the moment.” The fact that they didn’t pick up on this annoys her. “Let’s table that until tomorrow, okay?”

One girl shrugs her shoulders. “But we only have until Saturday to figure things out.”

Another adds, “We can’t leave it until the last minute. We need to come up with a concept. We’re sophomores now. We can’t just, like, throw something together.”

A concept? Seriously? Candace rolls her eyes. But it occurs to her, as her friends nod along with each other, that they are going to talk about the Spirit Caravan with or without her. It is the strangest feeling to have, even stranger than being called ugliest.

She quickly changes her strategy and rips her page of ideas out of her notebook. “Fine,” she says, handing it off. “Here’s what I’m doing. Figure out who’s riding with me, because my mom’s convertible can only fit five of us.” She quickly does a head count. There are ten girls standing at her locker. “Maybe six, if you squeeze.”

Candace opens her locker door and stares through the metal slats as her friends walk toward homeroom without her. Her eyes move to the magnetic mirror hanging inside the door. Something about her face seems off, imbalanced. It takes her a few seconds of close inspection to realize that she’s forgotten to put eyeliner on her left eye.

Why didn’t any of her friends tell her?

After digging in her makeup bag, Candace inches close until the tip of her nose nearly grazes the mirror. She gently pulls the corner of her left eye toward her ear and traces a creamy band of chocolate pencil, one of the samples her mother gave her, across the lid. Then she lets go, her skin snapping pertly back into place, and blinks a few times.

Candace’s eyes are her best feature, as far as she is concerned. They are the lightest blue, like three drops of food coloring in a gallon of ice-cold water. People always commented on them, and even though Candace finds that predictability annoying, she of course still relishes the attention. How a salesgirl would suddenly look up from the register and say, “Wow, your eyes are amazing!” Or, better yet, a boy. Her eyes get more attention than her boobs, and that is seriously saying something. She is, after all, a true C cup without any of that ridiculous padding, which is false advertising, in her opinion.

A small sense of relief washes over her. List or no list, Candace Kincaid is pretty. She knows it. Everyone knows it.

And that is all that matters.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lauren Finn and her mother agree the sedan still smells like Lauren’s dead grandfather — a musty blend of pipe smoke, old newspapers, and drugstore aftershave — so they drive to Mount Washington High School with the windows open. Lauren splays her arms across the window frame, resting her chin where her hands overlap, and lets the fresh air rouse her.

Mondays are always the most tired mornings, because Sundays are always the worst nights. The anxiety of the coming week speeds Lauren up when she wants to be slowed down. She feels every lump in the old mattress, hears every creak and sigh of her new old house.

She is three weeks into this new life and nothing is comfortable. Which is exactly what she’d expected.

The wind whips Lauren’s long pale hair like a stormy blond ocean, all but the section pinned with a tarnished silver barrette.

She found it last night, after the first hour of tossing and turning in the same bedroom, the same bed, where her mother had slept when she was a fifteen-year-old girl. The slender bar stuck out like a loose nail where the wood floor met the wall, its cloudy rhinestones blinking in the moonlight.

Lauren crept across the hall in her pajamas. Her mother’s reading light cast a warm white glow out the seam of the open door. Neither of them had been sleeping very well since moving to Mount Washington.

Lauren cracked it wider with her foot. Pairs of caramel drugstore panty hose hung on the coils of the wrought-iron bed frame to dry after having been washed in the sink. They reminded Lauren of the snake skins shed in the warm dunes behind their old apartment out west. Their old life.

Mrs. Finn looked up from the thick manual of tax laws. Lauren weaved through unpacked boxes and hopped onto the bed. She opened her hands like a clamshell.

Mrs. Finn grinned and shook her head, looking a bit embarrassed. “I had begged your grandmother to buy me this when I started high school.” She pinched the barrette between her fingers, examining the fossil of her youth. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had this feeling, Lauren, but sometimes, when you get something new, you trick yourself into believing it has the power to change absolutely everything about yourself.” The corners of Mrs. Finn’s mouth pulled until her smile stretched tight and thin, turning it into something entirely different. With a sigh, she said, “That was quite a lot to ask of a barrette, don’t you think?” Then Mrs. Finn threaded it into Lauren’s hair, securing a sweep over her daughter’s ear, and pulled the quilt back so Lauren could lie beside her.

Lauren hadn’t experienced the feeling her mother had described, but one much more unnerving. Like with Randy Culpepper, who sat one desk away in her English class.

On her very first day at Mount Washington High, Lauren had noticed that Randy smelled strange. Woodsy and sort of stale was how she’d first categorized it, until she overheard in the hall that Randy was a small-time pot dealer who smoked a joint in his car each morning before school.

That Lauren now knew what an illegal substance smelled like encapsulated how much her life had changed, whether she’d wanted it to or not. She swallowed this secret, along with so many others, because knowing them would break her mother’s heart. She could never confirm that things in her new school were as bad as she’d been told.

If not worse.

A while later, after Mrs. Finn had finished studying and turned off the light, Lauren stared into the dark and held on to her mother’s words. Despite all these changes, she would stay the same girl. Before falling asleep, she touched the barrette, her anchor.

Lauren reaches for the barrette again as the sedan slips into a free space along the curb.

“How do I look? Like an accountant you’d want to hire?” Mrs. Finn turns the rearview mirror toward her and regards her reflection with a frown. “It’s been so long since I’ve had an interview. Not since before you were born. No one’s going to want to hire me. They’re going to want some beautiful young thing.”

Lauren ignores the sweat stains in the armpits of her mother’s blouse, the small run in the panty hose that betrays the paleness of her mother’s skin. Paler still is Mrs. Finn’s hair, blond like Lauren’s, but dulled by gray.

“Remember the things we talked about, Mommy. Focus on your experience, not the fact that you haven’t worked in a while.”

They’d done a mock interview last night, after Lauren’s homework had been finished and checked. She’d never seen her mother so unsure of herself, so unhappy. Mrs. Finn doesn’t want this job. She wants to still be Lauren’s teacher.

It makes Lauren sad, their situation. Things hadn’t been good the last year out west. The money left by Lauren’s father was running out, and her mother cut back on the cool field trips they used to take to get a change of scenery from The Kitchen Academy — what they called their breakfast nook between the hours of eight and four. Lauren hadn’t even known her mother had stopped paying rent on their apartment. Her grandfather dying and leaving them the house was a blessing in disguise.

“Lauren, promise me you’ll talk to your English teacher about the reading list. I hate the idea of you sitting in her class for the whole year, bored to tears with books we’ve already read and discussed. If you’re afraid to do it —”

Lauren shakes her head. “I’ll do it. Today. I promise.”