The Prettiest

by Brigit Young

  She certainly didn’t want him anymore.

  Or even her “friends,” whose words—I mean, have you ever seen her without makeup?—echoed in her memory.

  Sophie couldn’t wait to get home to Bella.

  She leaned her head against the icy cold window, sleep overtaking her, only to wake up mere moments before the bus passed Silver Ledge. She threw her backpack on and hopped off the bus and into the apartment building, where Bella lay asleep in front of Mrs. Jackson’s TV, Cheetos crumbs all over her purple sweater.

  Sophie thanked Mrs. Jackson and took Bella back to their apartment for bed.

  She tried to focus on her homework, but those Spanish verbs still wouldn’t stick, and the math swirled in her brain. In the past, she’d always been so good at all of this. Had being number one been a lie in other ways, too? Was she less smart than she thought? Was school getting too hard for her?

  Sophie dropped her pen and paper and went to stand in front of the full-length mirror.

  Her eyelids sagged from trying to stay up on her mom’s late shift nights to see her. Her hair, out of its ballerina bun, lay damp and limp on her shoulders, looking as tired as she was. The highlights she’d done with a box of hair dye had begun to fade from daffodil yellow to dead autumn grass. She puckered a few times in the mirror. Her lips were just too, too thin. Maybe one day she’d buy that collagen-infused lip gloss that supposedly made your lips plumper. One day, when she was rich enough to buy her mom a house in California on the beach, and get massages every day from a personal masseuse, and get her nails done every week with Bella …

  Sophie put on her headphones, applied her mom’s red lipstick, and lip-synched into the mirror. This was always when she felt the prettiest, when she pretended to be someone else.

  Maybe tonight wasn’t a night to finish her homework.

  What did it matter, anymore, now that, for the time being, everyone at school would look at her like she was “less than” Eve Hoffman?

  Sophie wiped off the lipstick.

  Maybe she didn’t even need to wear it tomorrow. Who cared, anyway, if everyone was looking at her differently already?

  No. No, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t be herself without it. Plus, like Liv, Hayley, and Amina had said, the lipstick was what made her so pretty.

  Soon, after they exposed Brody and the list stopped mattering, and all anyone cared about was the drama of Brody Dixon’s downfall and Sophie Kane’s detective work and fight for justice, Sophie would eclipse Eve Hoffman and take back her rightful place at the top.

  For now, Sophie collapsed into bed to the dependable drone of her sister’s snores.

  16

  EVE

  “Hey.” Abe cracked open Eve’s door later that night.

  Eve lay in bed watching her and Nessa’s favorite reality show, Dance House, in which a bunch of dancers live in a house together while they audition for some big dance scholarship. Each week another dancer gets cut. Eve and Nessa texted throughout all of it every week.

  One sec, she wrote to Nessa before looking at Abe. “What’s up?” she asked her brother.

  “So how’d it go?” He walked in and leaned against her bookshelf.

  “Okay, I guess,” she lied.

  “And what the heck are you watching?” he asked as one dancer tried to pull the other one to the ground by her ponytail.

  “Oh, nothing.” Eve turned the laptop away.

  Abe came over to sit on the edge of her bed. “This list thing absolutely blows, doesn’t it?”

  “It hasn’t been the best week.” Eve shrugged.

  “Middle school is the worst,” he said. “You’re gonna love high school.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, everyone is older and, like, chills out a little bit.”

  “Cool.”

  “And at Rockson they have the best English teacher: Mr. Melby. He’s this dude with Albert Einstein hair who’s always quoting Shakespeare and stuff. You’d go nuts for him.”

  “That sounds awesome.” Eve grinned.

  “I’m just saying, one year and you’ll be out of Ford.”

  If she could even last the year! “Yeah, I know,” she told him.

  But that didn’t change the fact that she had to go back to school tomorrow, and be stared at, and pretend to like Brody Dixon, and let Sophie do some weird makeover on her that weekend, and just pray things went back to normal after it was all over.

  “I understand your skepticism,” Abe said. “Just don’t let this crap change you, okay?”

  It felt odd to have Abe speak to her this way, because she didn’t know what about her he thought might change. He was the one who had changed. They used to race their bicycles in the park and build legendary forts out of shelves and blankets where they would play Slapjack and War for hours at a time. But now he wasn’t around much, and the forts were years behind them. Plus, he was always fighting with their dad about articles and books she’d never read. Sometimes it even seemed as if he liked making their dad angry.

  She couldn’t imagine changing as much as he had.

  “I won’t,” she answered.

  “Okay. Good.” Abe headed out of her room and hollered, “Night!” as the door closed.

  Eve called Nessa.

  “Is this ‘number one’ calling? Number one? Oh my god.” Nessa fake-hyperventilated.

  “Oh, be quiet.”

  “Too soon? Sorry.”

  “Okay, so…” Eve turned the laptop back around. “What’d I miss?”

  “Well, Teeny might get kicked out of the house for the hair pull, but she’s so talented the judges are having a hard time doing that and might give her another chance.”

  “’Kay.” Eve snuggled under her covers to watch the final dance numbers.

  “So how about that Sophie Kane, huh?” Nessa asked as one of the girls performed. “Do you trust her?”

  Eve took a moment before answering. Sophie had been so angry with her, and then so certain that it was Brody mere moments later, like she just wanted someone—anyone—to blame. “I’m not sure.”

  The girl who was performing did a triple pirouette.

  “Wow,” they both said at the same time.

  “I don’t trust her,” Nessa admitted. “She’s smarter than I thought she’d be, though. I’ll give her that. Oh my gosh, first Teeny pulls a ponytail and now she’s yelling at a judge?”

  “Wait, why didn’t you think she was smart?” Eve pressed her. “Isn’t she good in classes and stuff?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But look at her.”

  Eve tried to remember if she’d ever assumed that Sophie was stupid. She had never really considered it, but if someone had directly asked her before that night if she thought Sophie was smart, she probably would’ve said no. Why?

  “So do you think if I do this makeover thing that everybody will think I’m stupid?” Eve asked. “Will you think I’m stupid? Because of how I look?”

  “No! Of course not. I just mean—forget it.”

  A dancer fell midflip.

  “OW!” both Nessa and Eve hollered, and then giggled.

  They watched in silence as the judges assessed the performance.

  “Hey.” Eve tried to sound casual, but one thing Nessa had said earlier that night kept coming back into her head. “It seems like you really hate Brody.”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “He hasn’t made fun of you in a long time, though, right? Like since we were kids?”

  Eve heard a grunt on the other line.

  “Just because I’m not sobbing about stuff all the time doesn’t mean I’m not getting made fun of, okay?” Nessa answered with a sharpness Eve hadn’t expected.

  “Okay!” Eve backed off. “Sorry if I ‘sobbed’ tonight.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean!” Nessa arghed into the phone. “Well, yeah, I guess I don’t tell you everything that everyone says to me sometimes. Brody’s not my biggest fan. I’m not his type of girl. You don’t get it.”

&
nbsp; “What? I can get it, I—I—” Eve stammered before Nessa interrupted.

  “Hey—why didn’t you tell me that Brody asked you to the Halloween dance? That’s huge, and you didn’t text me all day!”

  “I’m sorry! I just … felt weird.”

  They sat in silence.

  “I should finish my homework,” Nessa told her, sounding far off.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Eve wanted to cry again. She wanted to say to Nessa, “Tell me everything that everyone says to you, and I’ll come after them!” But she knew she wouldn’t come after them, because that was terrifying. And she wanted to say, “I kind of liked the feeling of Brody asking me, and I couldn’t tell you that,” but that, too, didn’t escape her lips. She felt like saying either would make Nessa angrier.

  The judges huddled for their final elimination process. Teeny wept in anticipation of getting cut. She really needed that scholarship if she wanted her dance dream to come true.

  “We’re not in a fight, right?” Eve asked.

  “No, no. Come on. We’re best friends.”

  But instead of Teeny getting axed, the girl whose ponytail had been pulled got cut! Apparently, she had let the ponytail pull affect her final dance performance, which the judges deemed unacceptable. After Nessa and Eve ranted about the inequity of this for several minutes, they blew kisses into the phone and said good night.

  Within seconds Eve’s phone buzzed, and she instinctively went to pick it up, but what she saw made her drop the phone as if it were piping hot. Another boy. Another text. This one gross. So gross it was mean.

  The words from the texts had begun to repeat themselves in her mind on an endless loop, like her favorite poems once did only days ago.

  She wondered if Sophie got these kinds of texts. And then she wondered why, after they left the choir room, Sophie had walked toward the street in front of the school, headed toward the bus stop.

  Eve turned her phone off and threw it on the carpet. With no phone, no alarm would wake her up in the morning. She’d be late. Or maybe she could just miss school altogether. Maybe she would never go back.

  Maybe she was already changing.

  17

  NESSA

  “And so,” Nessa said, launching into an explanation of her life plan over family dinner a couple of days after the choir room meeting, “after I get my college degree in musical theater—”

  “Wow. Now that’s a terrible idea,” her sister Delma mumbled into her plate.

  “I’ll easily get a couple of regional theater gigs under my belt, and then I’ll have my Equity card—”

  “Huh?”

  Nessa sighed. “The union. The actors’ union? Anyway. Then I’ll be pretty much set. If you think about it that way, it’s a pretty reasonable career choice, you have to admit.”

  “Are you just going to let her chatter all dinner without asking me about my day?” Delma put her fork down and challenged their parents.

  Her dad smiled. “You’re right, you’re right. Go ahead, Del. How was your day?”

  Delma shrugged. “Fine.”

  “See?” Nessa hollered. “She doesn’t even have anything to say!”

  “It’s the principle,” Delma whined.

  It was a miracle that Nessa’s boring family—a pediatrician dad, an occupational therapist mom, and a math-whiz older sister—created a star like her.

  When she took a breath to eat some of her casamiento, her dad asked her if the uproar over the list had died down at all. She told him no, which was true, at least for people who weren’t her.

  Nessa was determined not to let the list get to her. Because the thing was, Nessa was fabulous. She knew what happened when she walked onto a stage. The room stilled. And she heard the sound that echoed back into her ears when she sang in the shower. She had a gift. And when it came to the mirror, well, truth be told, Nessa loved looking into it. She loved the freckles her dad had given her, and the thick, black hair her mother had passed down (well, she had a love/hate relationship with her hair, but mostly love).

  So what if her Dad’s Irish Catholic parents in Grand Rapids told her she should focus on “eating healthier”? She ate healthy, but also not, sometimes. Just like anybody else. And it was none of their business! Especially when Gram and Gramps were pouring butter all over everything they touched! Geez, they’d probably put butter on sushi!

  And when she visited El Salvador every other winter break to see her mom’s parents, they would say the opposite. They’d say to Delma, “You’re too skinny.” To be honest, Nessa loved when they said that. Take that, Delma. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, everyone had his or her own opinions about how other people should look, and those opinions were different all over the world, so how could any one opinion be true?

  But, of course, no one in school cared about that. And it didn’t feel good to have kids make fun of her for practically her whole life. It was the worst! One time, in sixth grade, two boys fought over whether she was “fat” or “chubby,” like her body was a visual presentation in debate class or something. They acted like she couldn’t even hear them, pointing at her the whole time. That infuriated her. And, boy, did she let them know. And when people made jokes on TV about “fat girls” or whatever, she could feel her whole heart burn up in utter rage. She wished she could let those people know how obnoxious they were, too, just like she had to those sixth grade boys.

  She could fill a book with the obnoxious things people said.

  And, yes, fine, it kind of bothered her that even though she knew that she was super cute, no one else seemed to.

  It bothered her a lot, actually.

  But she didn’t like to let people know it. Not the kids who said awful things to her, and not even Eve. Eve couldn’t ever understand, anyway. Eve had it a lot easier than she realized.

  Nessa’s dad turned the conversation over to her. “How are you feeling about that list?” he asked, clearly pretending not to be worried.

  “Whatever,” she said. “You know me. I don’t care about that stuff.”

  Her mom shook her head. “So sad,” she muttered. “So cruel.”

  “Yeah,” Nessa agreed. “Cruel.”

  “You’re all perfect, exactly as you are. Each one of you,” her mom went on, sounding like she could cry.

  Nessa looked away.

  “Cheers to that,” her dad added.

  As they cleared the table and did dishes, her dad started kissing her mom’s neck and Nessa and Delma groaned.

  Her mom and dad were disgusting. But kinda sweet. How could two people who were so different be so obsessed with each other? They didn’t even like the same music and movies!

  “What’s the problem?” her dad said as he turned to them, grinning. “Your mother happens to be quite kissable.”

  “Oh man, it’s getting vomit-worthy.” Delma wiped her hands and went upstairs.

  * * *

  The read-through for The Music Man took place the next day, a Friday. The moment had arrived for her to shine, and to keep an ear and eye out for the holes in Brody Dixon’s mask of innocence.

  At the read-through, they just had to speak the lyrics of the songs, not sing, so Brody might actually do okay. Add a melody and he’d flounder on the floor like a fish on land.

  And Nessa wasn’t too annoyed with him to admit that his acting was good.

  At auditions, when he’d looked at her all googly-eyed during their romance scene and professed, “I can’t go … For the first time in my life, I got my foot caught in the door…,” Nessa almost liked Brody for a second. She peered into his baby blues and felt her insides flutter a bit. Because, like a good actor, he meant it when he said it.

  Unfortunately, when the audition had ended, Brody was Brody again, which was just sad for everybody.

  Good actor or no, Brody Dixon would not get away with what he’d done to the girls of Ford. Nessa would make sure of it. Of course he was the guilty one. Only someone like him, who thought it wa
s “nice” of Mr. Rhodes to give her the lead role, who didn’t see that she deserved it in every way, could do something as horrible as rate the girls. She couldn’t think of anyone else in school with a pile of ashes in place of a heart.

  Nessa was a frickin’ Gryffindor. She knew she had courage. She knew she had heart. And she was going to protect her best friend, Eve Hoffman, who had definitely not figured out how awesome she was yet. And she was going to help Sophie Kane, too, because even though she didn’t trust Sophie, nobody deserved to be treated the way all the girls had been treated.

  Nessa was going to put on her cape and teach them that you need to show the world a brave face, whether you feel brave or not.

  Plus, a little revenge would be nice.

  18

  EVE

  Sophie Kane had announced she would come over on Saturday. Saturday was Shabbat, and Eve had resisted, but Sophie texted her, This is what works for me.

  Eve relented. Only at two, can’t do earlier. For some reason, she couldn’t find it within herself to say no to Sophie Kane.

  Did Eve’s parents have to choose to live in a town where they were the only Jewish family? She could hear her mom’s answer: “People get sick and need help everywhere. There’s a perfectly fine Conservative synagogue twenty minutes away.”

  When her family got home from synagogue, Eve sat in the kitchen with her mom and waited for Sophie.

  “Who is this girl again?” her mom asked as she brought over a bowl of apple slices to the table.

  “Her name is Sophie Kane.”

  “She’s number two!” Hannah hollered from all the way down in the TV room.

  Of course Hannah had the list memorized.

  “How can you even hear us in here?” Eve’s mom shook her head but smiled. “You two have a class project? You and this Sophie Kane?”