The List

Mrs. Finn pats Lauren’s leg. “We’re doing okay, right?”

Lauren doesn’t think about her answer. She just says, “Yeah. We are.”

“See you at three o’clock. I hope it goes fast.”

Lauren leans across the seat and hugs her mother tight. She hopes for that, too. “I love you, Mommy. Good luck.”

Lauren walks into school, barely a force against the tide of students flowing from the opposite direction. Her homeroom is empty. The fluorescent lights are still off from the weekend, and the legs of the upturned classroom chairs spike four-pointed stars, encircling her like oversize barbed wire. She turns one over and takes a seat.

It is terribly lonely at school.

Sure, a couple of people have talked to her. Boys, mostly, after daring each other to ask her stupid questions about homeschooling, like if she belonged to a religious cult. She expected as much — her male cousins were just as goofy and awkward and annoying.

The girls were only slightly better. A few smiled at Lauren, or offered tiny bits of politeness, like pointing out where to put her dirty cafeteria tray after lunch. But no one extended herself in a way that felt like the start of something. No one seemed interested in getting to know her beyond confirming that she was that weird homeschooled girl.

It shouldn’t have surprised her. It is what she was told to expect.

Lauren lets her chin rest against her chest. She pretends to read the notebook lying open on the small patch of desk attached to her seat. Really, though, she discreetly watches the girls filter into the room and take chairs beside her. She picked up the trick from Randy Culpepper, who used the same posture to sleep, undetected, in second period.

She doesn’t see the girls’ leader with them, the pretty one with the icy eyes. It’s a rare sighting.

The girls are frantic, whispering like crazy. Stifling giggles and laughs. Completely consumed with whatever they’re gossiping about. Until one notices Lauren watching them.

Lauren lowers her eyes. But she’s not fast enough.

“Oh my god, Lauren! You are so lucky! Do you even know how lucky you are?” The girl puts on a big smile. Huge, even. And she runs on tiptoes over to Lauren’s desk.

Lauren lifts her head. “Excuse me?”

The girl ceremoniously places a piece of paper on top of Lauren’s open notebook. “It’s a Mount Washington tradition. They picked you as the prettiest girl in our grade.” The girl talks slowly, as if Lauren spoke another language, or had a learning disability.

Lauren reads the paper. She sees her name. But she is still completely confused. A different girl pats her on the back. “Try to look a little happier, Lauren,” she whispers sweetly, in the same way one might discreetly indicate an open zipper or food stuck in her teeth. “Otherwise people will think something’s wrong with you.”

This throwaway line surprises Lauren most of all, because it completely contradicts what she’s already assumed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Sarah Singer’s plan is to break it to him fast, so there’s no scene. Forget dressing it up, explaining things. That’s only going to make it worse. She’ll just say something like, I’m done, Milo. Our friendship, or whatever the hell you want to call it now, is over. So go ahead and do what you want. Live your life! Become best bros with the captain of the football team. Feel up the head cheerleader, even though everyone knows Margo Gable stuffs. I’m not gonna judge you.

That last part will be a lie. She’ll totally judge him for it.

Sarah sits on her bench, nibbling the edges off a strawberry Pop-Tart. The tangy smell of smoke on her fingers sours the sweet. She forces down what’s in her mouth and chucks the pink frosted center — her favorite part — into the grass, because all this sugar clearly isn’t helping. Let the squirrels eat the crack; she needs to calm the hell down. She moves a tangle of tarnished necklaces off her chest and feels for her heart. It flutters like a hummingbird’s, so fast the individual beats blur together and make a steady, uncomfortable hum.

She rips the cellophane off a new pack of cigarettes, lights up. A lift of wind carries away the smoke, but she knows Milo will smell it on her when he gets to school. He’s like a police dog, trained to sniff out her vices. Last night, when she was hanging half out of his bedroom window, she smoked the third-to-last cigarette in her old pack and told him, after his depressing play-by-play of his aunt’s final days of lung cancer, she’d seriously think about maybe quitting.

Remembering that now makes her laugh, puff out smoke signals. Both dissipate into the chilly morning air.

Last night, she talked a lot of shit.

But Milo … apparently he’d been talking shit since the day they met.

Whatever. Let him bitch about her smoking. It would be a relief to replace her anxieties with something simple and clear, like being annoyed with him.

Sarah watches two junior girls scurry along the sidewalk. Sarah knows who they both are, but what she thinks is: All the junior girls at Mount Washington look the damn same. The shoulder-length hair with highlights, the stupid shearling boots, the little wristlet purses to hold their cell phones, lip glosses, and lunch money. They remind her of zebras, keeping the same stripes so predators can’t tell them apart. Survival of the generic. It’s the Mount Washington way!

The two girls stop in front of her bench and huddle, shoulder to shoulder, each clutching a piece of paper. The smaller one hangs on her friend and chokes out a series of high-pitched laughs. The other simply sucks air in and out, a rapid fire of hiccupping wheezes.

Sarah’s nerves can’t take it.

“Hey!” she barks. “How about you ladies hold your little powwow someplace else?” She uses her lit cigarette as a pointer and jabs off in the distance.

It seems like a fair request. After all, these girls have the entire school to roam undisturbed. And everyone at Mount Washington knows that this is her bench.

She discovered it freshman year. It had always been vacant, because it was positioned directly beneath the principal’s window. That didn’t bother Sarah. She wanted to be alone.

That is, until Milo Ishi came along last spring.

He’d been adrift on the sidewalk one random day, a new boy tossed around between currents of students who looked nothing like him. He folded his arms and tucked them tight underneath his chest, the chosen defensive posture for skinny vegan half-Japanese boys with shaved heads. Milo didn’t look like Sarah, either, but maybe a more-evolved version. His sneakers were only available overseas. His headphones were expensive. His black eyeglass frames were crazy thick and probably vintage. He’d even gotten his first tattoo already — a Buddhist proverb scrawled on his forearm.

After a few minutes of watching, Sarah took pity on him and called out, “Hey, New Boy!”

Milo was terribly shy. Almost cripplingly so. He hated talking in class and broke out in hives whenever his parents argued. It was hard to get him to open up, but when he finally did, Sarah felt like she’d found a kindred outcast. She liked begging Milo to torture her with stories of his former life in West Metro, what going to an arts-focused high school in a city had been like. Milo said West Metro was a third-tier city, but to Sarah it could have been New York for how it stacked up against Mount Washington. At West Metro High, field trips were to fine art museums, there were no sports teams, and the drama club wasn’t just a showcase for girls who aspired to be another Auto-Tuned voice sugaring the radio.

The bench is where they wait for each other before and after school each day, where they do their homework and split a pair of earbuds for the right and left sides of an illegally downloaded song. An oasis where two kids who once kept to themselves suddenly keep with each other.

Once, Sarah tried to carve their names in the bench, but discovered the wood was that new space-age treated stuff and broke the knife she’d nicked from the cafeteria after the third stroke. So she makes sure to have a black marker in her book bag to trace a fresh layer of ink over their initials whenever they begin to fade.

As Milo’s bus pulls in, Sarah tucks the long front pieces of her inky black hair behind her ears. Milo had shaved the back of her head for her a few weeks ago, after he’d finished shaving his own, but it’s growing in fast. That hair, pure and healthy, is soft, like a puppy dog’s, and a golden brown that totally clashes with the dyed-black front. Her natural color. She’d almost forgotten what it looked like.

Milo, all lanky bones and sharp angles, walks toward her with a manga split open in front of his face. His knobby knees pop past the army green fringe of his cutoffs with each step. Milo claims he wears shorts no matter the weather. Sarah says that’s because he’s never lived through a winter on Mount Washington. She will give him such shit the first time she sees him in jeans.

She catches herself smiling and quickly resets her mouth with another drag.

“Yo,” she says when Milo reaches the bench, and gets ready to let the ax fall.

Milo looks up from his manga. A grin spreads across his face, so deep his dimples appear. He says, “You’re wearing my T-shirt.”

Sarah looks down at herself.

Milo’s right. This is not her black T-shirt. There are no white spots from bleaching her hair. She always strips it before she dyes it, so the new color sets as pure and saturated as possible. It’s the only way, really, to make sure what’s underneath doesn’t show.

“You can keep it,” he mumbles coyly.

“I don’t want your shirt, Milo.” In fact, if Sarah had other clothes with her, she’d change out of it right now. “Obviously I grabbed the wrong one last night. And I haven’t done laundry, so I just threw it on again this morning.” She clears her throat. Damn. She is already off her game. “Look. I want my shirt back. Bring it tomorrow.”

“No problem.” Milo falls next to her on the bench and goes back to his manga. From her seat, Sarah can see the page. An innocent school girl with doe eyes and a pleated skirt cowers in fear before a wild, snarling beast.

She moves her eyes and thinks, Makes total sense.

Milo’s quiet for a few pages and then says, out of nowhere, “You’re acting weird. You said you wouldn’t act weird.”

He is wrong.

“Let’s not make this weird, okay?” is what Sarah had said when she’d come out of the small space between his wall and his dresser without her jeans. She left everything else on — her hooded sweatshirt, her socks, her underwear.

“Okay,” he’d said, eyes wide, lying on a set of faded Mickey Mouse sheets, ones he’d probably had since he was a kid.

“No talking,” she’d said, and dove under the covers.

The rest of her clothes came off shortly thereafter. Not her necklaces, though. Sarah never took off her necklaces. Milo climbed on top of her and his weight pressed the tiny metallic links into her collarbone.

She reached out to his nightstand and turned his stereo up as loud as it could go; it was playing one of the mixes she’d made when they’d first met. The vibrations shook the crap piled on Milo’s dresser, buzzed the window glass. But even with the music blaring right next to their heads, Sarah could still hear Milo breathing, hot and fast in her ear. And every so often, a moan. A tender sigh. From her own mouth.

The memory of her voice fills Sarah’s head now, like an echo, mocking her over and over.

She turns away from him. “I’m not acting weird. I just don’t want to talk about last night. I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Oh,” Milo says glumly. “Alright.”

Sarah won’t let herself feel guilty. This is all Milo’s fault.

She takes a drag and blows the smoke down against his school bag. She knows his sketchbook is in there. She could reach in right now, flip to that page, and ask him straight up, How come you never told me?

That’s what she goes to do. But she’s drowned out by the girls standing near the bench.

They’ve doubled in size, from two to four. The girls scream with laughter, completely oblivious that there is a relationship about to implode right next to them.

Sarah feels the heat on her fingertips. Her cigarette has burned down to the filter. She flicks her fingers, sending the orange butt soaring in their direction. It bounces off one girl’s fuzzy yellow sweater.

Milo puts his hand on her arm. “Sarah.”

“You could have lit me on fire!” the girl who’s been hit screeches, and she spazzes out, checking herself for burn marks.

“I asked you nicely to go somewhere else,” Sarah points out. “But I’m not feeling nice anymore.”

The girls shift their weight in one unified huff.

“Sorry, Sarah,” one says, shaking the paper. “This is just really funny.”

“That’s how inside jokes usually are,” Sarah snarks back. “Funny to those inside, annoying as shit to the rest of the world.” Milo laughs at her barb. It makes her feel marginally better.

After sharing plotting looks with the rest of her group, another girl steps forward. “Well, here,” she says. “Let us clue you in.”

As soon as the paper is dropped in her lap, Sarah realizes what it is. That damn list. It makes her want to barf year after year, watching how the girls in her school evaluate and objectify each other, tear girls down and build others up. It’s pathetic. It’s sad. It’s …

… her name?

It’s like she’s trying to be as ugly as possible!

Sarah looks up. The four girls are gone. It’s like a sucker punch to the gut, the surprise worse than the hurt itself, and no chance to hit back.

“What’s that?” Milo takes the paper.

Milo transferred in last spring to Mount Washington, so he doesn’t know about the shitty tradition of the list. Sarah’s head hurts, watching him read it. For a second, she thinks about explaining, but ends up chewing her fingernail instead. She says nothing. She doesn’t have to. It’s all right there, on the stupid fucking paper.

His mouth puckers. “What kind of asshole guys would do this?”

“Guys? Please. It’s a coven of secret evil sluts. This happens every year, a masochistic prequel to the homecoming dance. I swear to god, I can’t wait to get the hell off this mountain.” She means it for so many reasons.

Milo reaches into Sarah’s back pocket. His hand is warm. He grabs her lighter. After a few clicks, a flame hisses up. He holds it under the corner of the list.

It’s nice, watching the list burn until it’s nothing but char. But Sarah knows that there are copies hanging up all over school. Everyone will be staring at her, wanting to see her embarrassed, belittled. The tough girl knocked down, forced to admit that she does care what they think of her. When the paper breaks into tiny pieces of flaming ash, she grinds them out with her sneaker.

I’m such a dumbass, Sarah thinks. Believing that she could do her thing and they could do their thing, both sides coexisting in a fragile but still-functioning ecosystem. It started every morning on the bus. She’d plop herself in the front seat, put up her hood, tuck her headphones into her ears, and sleep with her head against the window. It was easier to completely tune out than to overhear girls talking the cruelest shit about each other one day and pledging themselves as BFFs the next.

The phoniness is what sickens her most about the girls of Mount Washington. Their charade of undying friendship and love is as badly acted as the high school musicals, yet everyone plays along and pretends that in twenty years, their cheap FRIENDS FOREVER charm necklaces won’t have a bit of tarnish.

Other girls have been knocked out of favor, the same way she had back in seventh grade. But Sarah is the only one who never tried to get back in, and she knows it makes them hate her even more.

Evolution provides clues to the clueless. Animals bear the kinds of markings and bright colors that show how dangerous, how poisonous they are. Sarah has taken great pains to make sure everyone won’t think she wants to be like them.

The maddening thing is that she could have tried. She could have made the decision to shop at their stupid stores, to buy the ugly boots and the teeny purses, to bounce along to their crappy music.

If they think she’s ugly for trying to be different, that’s fine by her.

Mission accomplished, in fact!

“Forget it,” Milo says. “Those so-called pretty girls are completely deluded. They’re the ugly ones.”

She stares Milo down. Had he said this yesterday, before she’d found out the truth about him, she could have believed him; she would have felt better. But today was today, and now she knew better. Whatever they had was over. It had to be. She can’t pretend Milo is something he’s not.

But Sarah is glad he’s here right now. Glad for the moment, anyway. Because she needs Milo’s help.

She hoists her book bag onto her lap and pulls out her black marker from the front pouch. “Do me a favor. Write UGLY as big as you can across my forehead.”

Milo shrinks back. “Why would I do that? Why would you want to do that?”

Sarah stutters for an answer, and settles on, “Do it, Milo.”

He swats the marker away. “Sarah, we had sex last night.” He’s all earnest. It’s infuriating.

“Milo! You do not want to piss me off right now! I’d do it myself but I’d write it backward. Please.”

He groans, but he climbs onto his knees and pushes the hair up off her forehead.

The marker drags across her skin. As Milo writes the word, she glances up at the windows in the second-floor bathroom. There are girls staring down at her; they know where to find her, so they’re checking to see if she’s heard yet. Sarah salutes them with her middle finger. “Make it as big as you can,” she tells Milo.

The spicy scent of the ink makes her woozy. Or maybe it’s the anticipation. Milo caps the marker, and the click is like a movie clapboard. The show’s about to start.

“For the record, I am totally not cool with this,” Milo whispers as they enter the main door of Mount Washington.

“Then don’t walk with me,” she bites back. “Seriously. Don’t.” She gives him the chance to leave, to take the easy out.

Milo opens his mouth, then thinks better of it. “I’m walking with you,” he says. “I walk you to class every day.” His eyes go again to the word on her forehead, and the corners of his mouth sink.

It makes Sarah’s throat tight. She can’t fucking deal with Milo right now. So she starts walking, fast. The speed flutters her hair off of her forehead, so people can see the word. And they do. They see it.

But only for a second. Once the people in the halls see what she’s done to herself, they quickly find another place to set their eyes. Their shoes, their friends, their homework. They’d rather look at anything but her.

The list is so powerful, its judgment so absolute, and yet no one wants to deal with it in black Sharpie on her face.

Fucking cowards.

But knowing this doesn’t make Sarah feel better. In fact, it makes everything worse. Not only do they think she’s ugly, but they want her to be invisible, too.

CHAPTER SIX

Bridget Honeycutt is halfway to school when her sister, Lisa, starts begging to put on a little bit of her lipstick.

“No way, Lisa. I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup until sophomore year.”

“Come on, Bridge! Please! Please! Please! Please! Mom won’t know.”

Bridget puts a trembling hand on her temple. “Fine. Whatever. Just … be quiet, okay? I have a serious headache.”

“You’re probably just hungry,” Lisa says, and then reaches into the backseat for Bridget’s purse. She rummages until she pulls out a slender black tube.

Bridget watches from the side of her eyes as her sister flips down the visor. Lisa traces her lips with the stub of peachy pink, presses them together, and blows a kiss at Bridget.

The pink makes Lisa’s braces look extra silver, but Bridget doesn’t say that. Instead she says, “Pretty.”

Lisa touches up the corners of her mouth. “I’m going to wear red lipstick every single day when I’m your age.”

“Red won’t be good with your skin,” Bridget tells her. “You’re too pale.”

Lisa shakes her head. “Everyone can wear red. That’s what Vogue says. It just has to be the right red. And the right red for girls with dark hair and pale skin is deep cherry.”

“Since when do you read Vogue?” Bridget wonders aloud, thinking of the rainbow that the spines of Lisa’s horse books make on the shelf over her bed.

“Abby and I bought the September issue and read it cover to cover on the beach. We wanted to be prepared for high school.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Don’t worry. Besides the red lipstick thing, we didn’t learn much. But we did get ideas for homecoming dresses. Abby will be happy you like the one she wants. It’s a red-carpet knockoff.” Lisa pouts. “I hope I find something nice, too.”

Bridget wipes away a smudge of lipstick left on Lisa’s chin. “I said I’d take you shopping this week. We’ll find you a dress.”

“Do you think Mom will let me wear makeup to the dance? I was thinking that if I ace my Earth Science quiz, I’d show her the grade and then ask her. Isn’t that a great plan?”

“Maybe … if Mom didn’t already expect you to get As.”

“I guess I could sneak it on once I get there. I’ll just have to make sure no one takes any pre-dance pictures of me.” As Bridget parks the car, Lisa sets the lipstick on the dashboard and grabs her things. “See you later!”

Bridget watches Lisa sprint across the yard toward Freshman Island, weaving in and out of human traffic, her overstuffed book bag slapping against her legs, her long black ponytail stretching down her back. Lisa is growing up so fast, but there are plenty of glimmers of the little girl that shine through.

It gives Bridget hope for herself. That there’s still a chance to be the girl she was before last summer.

She turns off the car and sits for a few minutes, collecting herself. It is quiet, except for her deep, measured breaths. And the voice in her brain, calling out instructions that reverberate inside her hollow body.

You have to eat breakfast today.

Eat breakfast, Bridget.

Eat.

This is her life every morning. No, every meal, every bite chewed to a monotone mantra, mental cheerleading needed to accomplish a task that would be no big deal to a normal girl.

She picks up her lipstick and drags a finger through the thin layer of dust on her dashboard. Bridget wants to feel proud that she’s been doing much better. Eating more. But the victories feel bad, if not worse, than her failures.

A girl Bridget knows taps hello on the glass. Bridget lifts her head and manages to smile. It’s a fake one, but her friend doesn’t notice. No one does.

It’s scary how fast things got messed up. Bridget thinks about this a lot. The timeline of her life had been linear and sharp and direct for most of her seventeen years. Until something went jagged.

She could trace it back to, of all things, a bikini.

Every summer of Bridget’s life began and ended the same way — with a trip to the Crestmont Outlet Mall.

It was the halfway point between Mount Washington and the beach cottage where the Honeycutt family spent the entire summer. The family stopped at the Crestmont outlets to eat lunch, fill the gas tank for the second leg of the drive, and shop for clothes. In June, Bridget and Lisa stocked up on summer things. And then, on their way back to Mount Washington in August, they’d search for back-to-school deals on cardigans and wool skirts.

With summer vacation beginning, Bridget’s shopping bags were full of new tank tops, shorts, a jean skirt, and two sets of flip-flops. The only thing missing was a new bathing suit.