by Brigit Young
“I like it,” Sophie said, cutting them off.
“I think we’ve got the name of our little group here!” Nessa declared.
“What? The Vigilantes?” Eve asked, incredulous.
“No. The Dark Knights,” Nessa explained, as if such a leap were obvious.
“A knight is usually a boy. No, thank you. Not for this group,” Sophie asserted.
“Okay, fine.” Nessa pulled out her phone and spoke into it. “What’s the name for a female knight?”
Her phone answered in its robot voice: “A female Viking warrior is called a Shieldmaiden.”
“Yes!” Nessa and Sophie squealed.
“Vikings?” Winston questioned. “When did we ask about Vikings?”
“I’ll take it,” Sophie said. They were Shieldmaidens, going to war for the sake of eighth grade girls everywhere. Or at least at Ford.
“Changing the chat name right now and adding Winston!” Nessa hummed to herself as she fiddled with her phone.
The sounds of the dance down the hall drifted under the slit of the choir room door.
“Worst dance ever, right?” Winston said to all of them as he leaned his back against the piano.
“Winston, you have bad friends. I can relate,” Sophie said.
Nessa hopped over to the piano, and a few notes floated into the room. “Let’s make our own dance.” And Nessa began to sing. Her voice, smooth and pure, made Sophie feel warm all over, like drinking eggnog or eating pumpkin pie, even if the song sounded a century old.
As Nessa crooned, Sophie saw Winston slip his Green Hornet mask onto Eve’s face.
Eve grinned.
“Hey. Even if they stare, with this on they won’t be able to really see you,” she heard Winston say.
“I’d rather be blue over you…,” Nessa sang.
Sophie hopped up and grabbed Eve’s and Winston’s hands. They put their arms around one another and swayed side to side.
Eve moved just as awkwardly as she had in her bedroom a month earlier.
At the memory, a huge laugh burst out of Sophie. “Eve Hoffman, I’ll say this about you,” Sophie said, feeling lighter than she had in a long time. “When I’m with you, I end up dancing. I don’t know why.”
Sophie grabbed Eve’s hands and they spun and she let the world outside the room drift away. Now that everyone knew about her, or maybe admitted what they’d always known, that she didn’t actually fit in at all, the world she’d be returning to in the hallways would be a very different one. A world she didn’t yet know how to conquer.
30
EVE
They must have known she could hear them.
They spoke lowly, but not in whispers.
Looking up and down the hallways, Eve swore that everyone’s eyes glowed red, like demons’. Even the hall monitors and teachers seemed to look at her differently. Did they all know about Brody’s accusation at the dance?
On Monday afternoon, as she walked by the science lab, she heard Curtis Milford say to a friend, “I told you she wrote it, dude. Just look at her. Yuck.”
Principal Yu approached her to find a time they could talk. She probably believed Eve wrote the list, too. Eve made up an excuse and escaped.
Tuesday morning, when she entered homeroom, Miranda Garland muttered to those who sat behind her, “Did you know she’s Jewish?”
“What? Really?” someone asked in shock, like Miranda had told them Eve was secretly half-human, half-crab.
Eve clenched her palm around her hamsa necklace and kept her head down.
During PE on Wednesday, as they did laps, she saw a group of boys making fun of her chest. She told Ms. Meijer she felt nauseous, and she headed to the nurse’s office to lie down.
As she lay on the office’s cot, she heard her phone buzz. She didn’t need to check it. She knew what it said. The texts when she’d been “the prettiest” hadn’t been great, but now that she was the school’s lying fraud, they were much worse.
How could a person be so stuck-up?
Pathetic
U didn’t fool me who could believe u would be no 1
You’re a _____
You’re a _____
You’re a _____
Fill in the blank. It went on and on.
They could all think and say whatever they wanted. They could hate her and call her names. Eve could take on all the venom that the school spat out. Maybe she deserved it. She’d stayed silent when the Sophies had called Sophie “pathetic,” and when Brody claimed Sophie was “crazy.” She hadn’t said a thing when Brody told her Nessa didn’t “fit the part.”
How ironic that her mom had always said, with a twinkle in her eye, that she’d named Eve after “not just the first woman, but the first rebel.”
Eve wouldn’t remain quiet again. She’d find a way to speak out. Somehow.
She pulled her notebook out of her backpack and tried to do a poetry exercise. Shut out the noise. Just shut out the world. It had worked during the October assembly.
What was a poem she knew well?
Maybe a line from one of her new favorites, one she’d found in her hours spent clicking on random poems online: “The Cloud” by Percy Shelley.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky …
I am the daughter of…, she wrote. And all she could think of was her mother’s name. Deb. I am the daughter of Deb. Deb and Joe. What could be less poetic?
So she started two words back. I am … I am … Usually her mind came up with something, even if she later recognized it wasn’t very good. But now … it was like her mind had gone as blank as a snowy field.
All weekend, since the Halloween dance, even with her notebooks and Emily Dickinson surrounding her, she’d had no words.
All she could hear were the voices of what other people said she was. A chorus behind her singing “liar, fake, phony, yuck.”
Even though Eve liked to imagine Emily Dickinson’s life, and how tranquil and full of beauty it must have been in her room of words and solitude, Eve had to admit that sometimes she mentally glossed over a pretty big part of what she’d read in All About Emily Dickinson. Before Emily Dickinson had disappeared into her room forever to write, she’d lived a life out in the world, just like everybody else. A normal life. But then one day, she’d written in a letter to a friend, “I had a terror since September, I could tell to none…” And around that time, Emily stopped going outside.
It wasn’t some magical devotion to poetry that kept her indoors. It was a “terror.” What had that terror been?
As Eve lay in the nurse’s office, she wondered if this list had been the start of her terror. And for her, the terror took her words away instead of allowing her to write them down.
But she had words for Brody. She dreamed of going back in time, saying to Brody, “Sophie isn’t ‘crazy.’ She never was. She is the sanest person I ever know to have turned you down.” And she wanted to say to him, “Nessa has more talent in her finger than you could ever dream of!”
But those moments had passed her by.
Eve got back up and returned to the gym. She didn’t have Emily Dickinson’s life. There was no safe room to hide in.
On her way out of school that day, she spotted Principal Yu coming toward her in the hall. She pretended not to see her and left the building as fast as she could.
On Friday, Eve arrived at her locker to find LIAR scrawled across it in bright orange spray paint. Briefly, Eve rested her forehead against the locker next to hers and took a breath. She could take this. She could. She straightened herself back up and opened the lock.
“This is vandalism!” Sophie pronounced as she appeared by Eve’s side. “I’m getting Principal Yu.”
“Don’t get involved,” Eve said as quietly as possible. “They’ll hate you, too.”
Eve ignored the spray paint and shoved her coat and backpack into her locker. She heard someone say from behind her, “Look, I’ve been telling you, it’s all tissu
e in there.”
As she turned to see who was talking about her, a sudden shock of cold hit her body. Two eighth graders, a boy and a girl, stood before her as the girl splashed a bottle of water right onto the middle of Eve’s chest. She felt the water drip down her stomach and onto the floor.
Sophie hollered something at them as they scurried off, their laughter echoing down the hall.
* * *
At the start of her next class, Eve’s social studies teacher informed her she’d been summoned by Principal Yu.
Eve could no longer avoid her.
“Eve, come on in.” Principal Yu welcomed her into an office dressed up as a greenhouse. Plants hung from the walls and sat in the sunny windowsills. A row of succulents lined her desk.
Eve sat down and fixed her eyes on the plants. “Hi.”
“What happened to your shirt?” Principal Yu asked.
“Just clumsy. Spilled my water bottle.”
“I see.” Principal Yu paused. “I’m sorry you have to miss social studies for this. But maybe you’re not,” she joked.
Eve couldn’t politely pretend to laugh like she might have two months before.
“How are you, Eve?” Principal Yu sounded casual.
Was she going to expel her now, for writing the list?
“Fine,” Eve answered.
“Hmm.”
Eve, still staring at the plump green leaves, sensed Principal Yu nodding.
“Your parents say they’ve noticed some changes in you recently,” Principal Yu said. “As have I.”
Huh? Her parents? Eve looked up. “They talked to you?”
“A bit,” Principal Yu said like it was no big deal.
How embarrassing! Why would they do that?
“They said there have been some new friends in your life lately, and that you’ve been wearing some makeup, dressing differently.”
During the Brody days, Eve had put on her makeup in the bathroom at school and taken it off with wet tissue before she got home. Apparently it hadn’t fooled them.
“And now,” Principal Yu went on, “it seems you’ve had a tough week. It has been a difficult few days, yes?”
Eve bit the insides of her cheeks. “Ha. Few days…”
“I can imagine that being number one on that appalling list was hard for you.”
Eve swallowed. “Yes.”
“It would be too much for anybody.”
Eve thought of Sophie, how much she had wanted that kind of thing for herself. Would it have been too much for Sophie, too?
“Truly. Anybody. Even if they don’t know it,” Principal Yu said as if reading Eve’s thoughts.
“Wait, so this isn’t about the spray paint on my locker?” Eve looked up. She saw that Principal Yu looked a bit sad herself.
“Well, not entirely,” Principal Yu answered.
“And this isn’t about you thinking I wrote the list?”
“No.” Principal Yu shook her head emphatically. “No, I don’t believe you did it.”
“Wait.” Eve shifted in her seat and leaned in toward the desk. “Maybe that’s a problem, Principal Yu. Maybe you should suspect me. Because this all should have been investigated right away. Every claim should be taken seriously.” All her fury about how long this had been going on began to come out. “Why has no one gotten in trouble for all this? Sophie Kane lost her friends! Winston Byrd, too! Girls are crying in bathrooms! And adults don’t do anything!”
Principal Yu said nothing.
“And is this seriously the first time you’re trying to talk to me about it? Did you think I was happy before, like it was some ‘compliment,’ like my dad did? What is wrong with you all?”
“We offered counselors, Eve. We can’t force you to speak to us,” Principal Yu responded calmly.
“No! No.” Eve felt her hands turn to fists on her lap. “You should have helped.”
Principal Yu allowed a moment of quiet to go by. The corners of her mouth turned up slightly. “I assure you, we have investigated every claim thoroughly.”
“Oh, really?” An angry voice came out of Eve that she didn’t recognize. “Then why isn’t it all over yet?”
“We’ve conducted several interviews with students, and we do think we have an idea, but we can’t make anything public until we’re certain, Eve,” Principal Yu said with a quiet confidence that stopped Eve from saying anything more.
“Okay,” Eve said. “I’m sorry.”
“And Eve, I do wish we’d called you in to talk to the counselor. We didn’t want any girl to feel unfairly targeted for counseling due to that particular individual’s”—she paused as if to think of the right word—“position on the list. I wish…” Principal Yu sighed. “I wish I’d known better what to do.”
Eve didn’t know what to say.
“When I was in eighth grade,” Principal Yu said slowly, “I remember…” She paused. “There was this boy, Wes. He had short, bleached hair.”
“What?” Eve couldn’t imagine any of the guys in school with bleached hair.
“Yup. That was the style then.”
“Wow.”
“An unfortunate period.” Principal Yu laughed and then paused again. “Wes wouldn’t stop grabbing me. And snapping my bra.”
Eve tried to picture Principal Yu as an eighth grader. She was tiny now, so she was probably tiny then. She had kind, delicate features with eyebrows in a permanent state of listening-face.
“He thought it was hysterical. And I told him ‘Ow!’ I told him to stop. I probably used foul language of some sort.”
Eve could not imagine Principal Yu cursing. She was so put together, so classy.
“And I told the school counselor. She was nice, but ineffective. I think she thought that what Wes was doing to me was just … normal. And I think, to her, normal meant okay. Well, one day, Wes snapped my bra so hard that I got a small cut in the back from the metal of the clasp.” She reached toward her back as if to point to it. “I bled through my shirt.”
Eve instinctively covered her mouth. “Oh my gosh! What did they do to him?”
Principal Yu tapped her fingers on the edge of her desk and sighed. “Nothing.”
“Oh.” Eve wished she had something smart or kind to say. “Did you do anything? Did you say anything to him?”
Principal Yu shrugged. “No. I wish I had, though.”
It was hard to know what to say. Hard to see how to make it all stop.
“We’re getting your locker cleaned off as we speak,” Principal Yu said. “And we won’t stop looking for answers.”
Eve glanced toward the door and back to Principal Yu, unsure if she could go or not.
“You can head back to class now,” Principal Yu told Eve. “And Eve? You can come to me with anything, okay? Anything.”
Eve nodded. Before she left she turned back to Principal Yu and said, “Wes shouldn’t have gotten away with it.”
“You’re right,” Principal Yu answered.
* * *
As Eve headed past her ruined locker, she saw Mr. Glaze, the school custodian, scrubbing off the paint. And, to her utter surprise, Winston Byrd stood alongside him, holding a sponge. He lifted a hand to acknowledge her and then returned to removing the orange stain.
31
NESSA
“Hey, Lara! Wait up!” Nessa caught Lara in the hallway.
“What’s the story?” Lara usually responded with this greeting. And as other people spoke, she always played with her array of colorful bracelets, creating a jingly background in all conversations.
Nessa gave Lara her pitch. “Still mad you’re not on the list even though you’re obviously fabulous? Mad there’s a list at all? Well, have I got an answer for you.”
“This is a strange infomercial,” Lara answered. Jingle, jingle.
“I’ll cut to the chase.”
“Thanks.”
“We know that Brody Dixon wrote the list. We have a witness. And Brody has been bullying girl after girl after
girl, and”—Nessa eyed the people around them—“and we are going to find proof that he did it and show it to a packed crowd at final curtain call of The Music Man. We need all awesome girl hands on deck. You in?”
“Um.” Lara put a finger up in the air. “Reminder. Your best friend wrote the list.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“And no one cares about the list anymore, because we’re all just mad at her.” Lara turned to walk away, and Nessa grabbed her arm.
“Why do you believe him and not her?” No answer. “Why?”
Lara paused. “Well…” She seemed to truly think about it. “Eve hasn’t said anything to defend herself.”
“What would she say?”
“She could say something.”
“What?”
Lara just stared at her. She had nothing.
“And if she did say something, you’d believe her then?” Nessa went on.
Lara raised one eyebrow in a very cool move that Nessa envied.
“I wish I could do that,” Nessa admitted.
“Okay.” Lara gave in. “Tell me more.”
32
EVE
After school, Eve tossed all the clothes Sophie had picked for her into the back of her closet in a pile.
It was time to make a change. Not just for her friends, but for herself. For everybody. Just because something was normal didn’t mean it was okay.
Eve remembered Winston’s words at the Halloween dance as he’d put a mask over her eyes: Even if they stare, with this on they won’t be able to really see you.
Eve didn’t want to hide anymore. Not inside her brother’s big shirts. Not in the nurse’s office. But she also didn’t want to allow anyone to stare at her like her face and body were open for judgment.
When people looked her way, she’d give them something to think about. She’d be the one in charge. She’d send them all a message: Back. Off.
Hey, Eve texted Winston, whose number she’d grabbed from the Shieldmaidens chat, Thank you for earlier.
