The Hot List

by Hillary Homzie

  “And I can actually see two Hot Listers’ heads swelling right now,” said Nicole in her usual lightning-fast way of speaking. “I agree. It’s annoying.”

  I had considered telling Heather and Nicole that we were the ones who started the Hot List. But we weren’t really close, in the sharing-your-deepest-darkest-secret kind of way. I guess we all had a friendship of convenience. We were more like two sets of best friends that ate together versus an official group.

  “The whole school’s whispering about the Hot List, don’t you think?” said Heather, who always spoke like she was asking a question.

  “I saw Teddy combing his hair, like, ten hundred times,” Nicole said, “between third and fourth. And he made it look flat.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Heather. “Flat hair. He’ll get knocked off the List. Someone should warn him, right? The Listmaker might see.”

  The Listmaker? Wow. That was us. Maddie and I glanced at each other, trying not to give ourselves away. It was really hard not to burst into giggles.

  “I even overheard Maura Hogenhuis in the hallway saying maybe she should dump Brad Jeffries since he wasn’t on the Hot List,” said Nicole. “Can you believe it?”

  I couldn’t. Someone wanted to get rid of an actual boyfriend because he didn’t make it onto my list or Maddie’s? It was just a list. Written in a bathroom. How much credit could you really give it?

  Apparently lots.

  In my head I wondered what other kinds of lists I could create. The food list? Like if I put mushrooms as my favorite food, would everyone start packing hydrated fungi for lunch?

  Or the friend list, which would name the girls who are best friend material. Would those ten girls get friends and nobody else?

  Or the color list? If Maddie put her favorite color as purple, would the whole school start dressing in shades of it?

  Probably. Through lists, it’d be so easy to become the invisible dictator of Travis Middle School. Tempting.

  After the bell rang for fifth period, a clump of eighth-grade girls passed by us in the hallway. I watched one of them show her friend a photo of the Hot List on her phone.

  “Whoa!” Maddie needled me with her elbow. “Looks like it’s going to be posted everywhere soon. Soph, we’re going to be seriously famous.” Maddie hustled down the hallway, only her backpack wasn’t quite zipped, so a couple of books tumbled out and crashed to the floor.

  “Hold up!” I said. “Your books.”

  I helped Maddie pick them up and secured them in her backpack.

  “Thanks,” she said. “You’re the best.”

  “No, you’re the best.”

  “No, you.”

  “NO, YOU!” And then we both burst out laughing.

  I cupped my hands and whispered something into Maddie’s ear: “We’ve got a secret.”

  “We do,” said Maddie, giggling.

  And we just looked at each other, smiling and knowing that there was just one other person on the entire planet who also knew something that everyone was talking about, and that someone was your very best friend.

  Chapter Five

  The next day something weird happened. During lunch, Nia waltzed over to Maddie and then asked if she’d like to eat with her group. I mean, I realized that Nia and Maddie had become texting buddies ever since they took that art class, but their semifriendship never really spilled over into the actual school day too much.

  But this felt different. Nia, hippie-chic queen, was publicly asking her to sit at her table, which was a big deal. And she didn’t just ask, but insisted, like if Maddie didn’t, the school would collapse or something.

  It happened as we were heading to our usual lunch table, which was near the serving line. Nia swooped down on us, swept her long, corkscrew blond curls out of her face, and grabbed Maddie’s arm. “You’ve got to eat with us today!”

  Maddie blinked and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “What about Sophie?” she asked.

  “Sophie too. Definitely.”

  I didn’t like being an afterthought. “What about Heather and Nicole?” I mouthed.

  Maddie smiled at me weakly, “It’s fine,” she said. “They’ll understand.”

  I wasn’t so sure that they would. But I could see Maddie’s huge grin as she glanced at Nia’s table, which was on the other side of the cafeteria next to the bank of windows facing the courtyard.

  That’s what everyone called it: Nia’s table. I guess it would now be now known as the Hot List table since the entire clan (Nia, Ava, McKenzie, Sierra, and Amber) had gotten onto the Hot List. The group pretty much did EVERYTHING together. Like, right now, they were hugging and jumping and gushing about something. Probably waiting to see what kind of thing Nia would organize, like the next school dance, paint-a-mural day, or rescue un-clan girls and lasso them into their table. Even though she’d been a student at Travis for only a year, Nia was easily elected head of seventh-grade leadership, which was sort of like student council and seventh-grade class president combined into one major power trip. After going with her mom to Sedona for some kind of a purification weekend, she’d tried to convince my dad that the caf should be serving only raw foods, and they actually did it for one day.

  “Hurry, let’s get out of here,” said Nia, glancing at the lunch line. “The smell. Ewww.” Plugging her nose, she waved one hand in front of her face. “The scary, scary smell.”

  “You mean, the meat loaf?” I asked, glancing at someone’s tray as they passed by us.

  “Exactly,” said Nia. “It’s going to putrefy. It’s red meat. From a factory where cows are lame and live squished together butt to mouth.”

  “Yuck,” said Maddie. Nia was a very vocal vegetarian (a “Triple V”), and made anyone else who didn’t follow the way of the carrot feel a little guilty or, in this case, grossed out.

  As she dragged Maddie through the crowded lunchroom, with me following, it was like watching the parting of the Red Sea.

  “Step aside,” Nia cracked. Groups of guys, who were aiming their mashed-up napkins into the trash, jumped out of the way, and a clump of band girls held their trays of food up over their heads to protect Nia from the harmful effects of being too close to dead animal food. “It’s Nia, the number one hottie,” I heard someone call out.

  Okay, it was weird to be publicly seen with Nia. But it didn’t suck. I mean, Nia definitely had the queen bee thing down.

  Maddie turned back to give me a look, like Isn’t it great that Nia’s asking us to eat with her?

  But I pretended not to notice. Instead, I couldn’t help glancing at Squid as he shouted, “Look at me!” and stuck French fries up his nose.

  As we continued to follow Nia across the room, I noticed that she was more developed than the rest of us up top and carried herself like a dancer, never slumpy like me. (Sorry, but it’s freaky to stand up straight when you’re five inches taller than everyone, especially the boys.)

  “Move, girls! Move!” Nia ordered, as she shoved our two seats into a maximally crowded table. “Say hi to Sophie and Maddie.”

  Some of the girls, including Amber and Sierra, did little half waves and McKenzie and Ava nodded. Maddie stared at her sandwich and grinned, like she was Dorothy arriving in Oz. Why did everyone decide that being part of the clan at Nia’s table meant you were popular? “Exclusive” was more like it—Hot List exclusive. Mostly I thought it was dumb, even if part of me had occasionally fantasized about being at this table.

  As we sat down, most everyone at the table was having a conversation about how annoying this new song was on the radio.

  Nia demonstrated the song by singing it extra badly. And then someone said, “Thank you.”

  And everyone replied, “You’re welcome” at the same time and then cracked up.

  “Why don’t you sing it for us, Sophie?” suggested Maddie. She turned to the others at the table. “She’s got an awesome voice.”

  I shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  Nia peered at me knowingly. “C�
��mon, Sophie. Do it. You can sing badly. It’s the point.”

  “Nah, it’s okay. You do it so well.” Then I clapped my hand on my mouth. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean you sing badly. I mean you sing badly on purpose well.”

  “We get what you meant,” said Ava in an I’m-so-over-you voice.

  Then Nia went back to singing, and I noticed that Maddie was laughing superhard, along with the rest of the girls. It wasn’t that funny. Really. The whole thing was kind of dumb, and I couldn’t help feeling bad about saying that Nia was a bad singer. Even if she was.

  Then they started to talk about the Hot List. I didn’t know if it was my imagination but they seemed to be smiling and giving Maddie and me lots of eye contact. I am paranoid, I thought.

  “It’s weird,” said Nia, cutting her vegetarian burrito. “Don’t you think? It’s so weird. All the guys on the Hot List really and truly are the hottest.”

  “And girls, too,” said Amber, smiling smugly.

  “The List knows,” said Nia.

  “Totally,” said Sierra. “It’s weird.”

  “Like, if the List had come out last week,” said Nia. “Auggie would have never gotten on. I mean too many”—she squinched her nose—“freckles. But something happened to him over the weekend. He really is cute. The way he struts and stuff.”

  “Yeah, even his voice is hot,” said Amber.

  “It’s so sad how some of the guys think they can suddenly get onto the List. They should accept what they are and not try so hard. Like Squid. It’s so sad,” said Nia.

  It was sooo hard not to raise my eyebrow and look knowingly at Maddie. I tried to glance at her to give a quick little secret look, but her eyes were trained on Nia.

  Nia, you are being ridiculous, I wanted to say. The List is not magic. But I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, especially as my dad, who sometimes did lunch patrol, was approaching our table.

  Dad smiled extra big when he saw that I was sitting with Nia and her crew. Not because she was popular but because he had been hinting around that it would be nice for us to get together. I heard him say it on the phone to Mrs. Tate. Now he was going to get the wrong impression, like we were friends, which meant he’d be expecting me to be friendly and maybe invite her over to our house for a sleepover. Ugh.

  I really didn’t want him coming over to table and asking questions. But Maddie raised her hand. “Hi, Mr. Fanuchi!”

  “Hi, Maddie, Sophie, Nia, Amber, Sierra, McKenzie, Ava.” My dad was pretty amazing with names and faces. He probably knew the first name of each and every person in school, as well as their dog. I still don’t even know all of the names of everyone in seventh grade. Travis has over four hundred kids in seventh grade alone.

  Dad walked over and put on a French accent. “How is ze food?”

  The girls responded back to him in bad French accents, and then when he left everyone waved. “Au Revoir.”

  “Your dad’s really cool, for a principal,” said Nia.

  “The best,” chorused a few other girls.

  Maddie glanced at me, as if to say, See how nice Nia is? I peered down at my chicken Frisbee sandwich on my tray, which would probably start another Nia lecture about the cruelty of eating animals with Maddie nodding along. She’d definitely been hypnotized by Nia. I looked longingly back at our regular table. I could see Heather and Nicole chatting together about something. I couldn’t wait to go back to our old table tomorrow and tell them what it had been like sitting with Nia and the rest of the crew.

  As the bell rang for fourth period, Nia turned to us and smiled. “See you later, goddess.” This was Nia’s new word of the week.

  “See you, fellow goddess,” said Maddie overenthusiastically. And a little geekily. I thought the word “fellow” sounded especially nerdy. Maddie had to watch it. Then when Nia was out of earshot, Maddie gushed, “She’s so much nicer than I thought.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, although I was thinking, I’m not so sure. She set me up with the singing thing.

  “I mean she looks a certain way. You know, with that hair and groovy clothes. But she went out of her way to include us and be nice.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Didn’t you think she went out of her way?”

  “She did do that,” I admitted. “It’s not like we’ve ever eaten with them before.”

  “I think Nia really likes us, Sophie. I’m thinking that seventh grade is going to be very interesting.”

  I didn’t want seventh grade to be interesting. I wanted seventh grade to be just like sixth grade. I’d walk to Maddie’s home, we’d have a snack, do some homework together. Chat when we got home while doing more homework. Spend Saturday night together, and my dad would get us Slurpees. We’d hang out with Heather and Nicole sometimes. That was all just fine with me. I wasn’t so sure that I needed “interesting.” But it looked like now that the Hot List was out, I didn’t have much of a choice. I fantasized again about wiping it clean, but then I remembered it was permanent. I could sneak a can of paint to school, but that wasn’t a good idea, especially for the principal’s kid.

  The next day at school, Nia invited us to eat with her again, which I thought was even weirder. I realized that Nia and Maddie had the art thing together, but I still didn’t get why she’d wanted us—well, mostly Maddie—to eat at her table. I tried to protest and say what about Heather and Nicole, but Nia insisted that they were fine eating on their own. I considered going over to sit with them myself but that would be weird. I mean, it was Maddie who I really wanted to sit with anyway.

  One more day of eating at Nia’s table became two more days, and two more days became three more days. And suddenly, I found myself expecting to sit with Nia and the rest of the crew. On the second day, though, Heather and Nicole had approached me by my locker. “What’s the deal with you and Maddie eating over with Nia and all of them? Can’t sit with us since we’re not on the Hot List?” She looked and sounded pretty hurt.

  “Well, we’re not on the List either. It was Maddie’s idea. I’m missing sitting with you guys, though.” And that was partly true. I didn’t miss Heather and Nicole so much as sitting at the quiet end of a table alone with Maddie.

  “Why don’t you say something to Maddie?” asked Nicole.

  “I’ll try,” I mumbled. Nicole frowned but didn’t say anything more.

  Meanwhile, Maddie seemed to be spending more time with Nia. She went over to her house to work on some videos. And then, using her calligraphy skills, she helped Nia decorate the Hot Listers’ lockers with bolts of lightning and fire.

  When I asked Maddie about it before lunch, like what was the deal with their sudden, close buddy-buddy friendship, she said, “Nia and I have stuff in common.”

  “Like?”

  “Cool parents and art.”

  I clenched my teeth when Maddie said “parents,” since that sort of left me out. I have a parent. Not parents. I can’t ever remember having parents with an s because I was so young when my mom died. “Whatever,” I said to Maddie. “I still can’t see you guys hanging.”

  Maddie gave me an intense eye lock. “Why don’t you like Nia?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that she’s going out of her way. And it seems weird.”

  “You’ve got to start trusting people,” said Maddie. And I thought about that. Could she be right? Was I too paranoid?

  Probably not. Two weeks ago, at a class field trip to the Denver art museum, I had been paired up to be Nia’s buddy. As we walked through the exhibits, she had spent the entire time texting on her phone. Nia had gotten a chance to know me and was not interested. Then last Thursday when she had asked me if I wanted to go swimming after a soccer game, I had said no because I was pretty sure her mother had put her up to it.

  I was about to explain it all to Maddie when Nia rushed up and dragged us to her table.

  We talked about a TV show everyone was watching and how dumb the new school dress policy was about no more sandals. �
��Like toes are evil,” said Nia. “It’s healthy to air out your feet. I’m going to bring this up to student leadership.”

  As my dad strolled by she waved at him. “Mr. Fanuch.”

  “Fanuchi,” I corrected.

  Nia smiled. “I know, of course. But I like Fanuch. It sounds fun.” She waved her arms with all of those colored hair bands and called out more loudly. “Mr. Fanuch, I have something to talk to you about.”

  My dad walked over to the table. “Yeeeees, I’m listening.”

  “It’s the new dress policy,” said Nia in her self-important voice. “No more open-toed shoes. It’s prejudiced against sandals.”

  “And toes,” reminded Ava.

  “Exactly. They need to be aired out. Feet expand in the heat and closed shoes actually might cause damage, which could lead to lawsuits.” Nia’s eyes narrowed. She thought she was so clever.

  “I see your point,” said Dad, talking in a mock-presidential way. “But I can tell you that you wouldn’t want to see some people’s toes. They can be kind of scary. If you want to call a toe summit, it’s fine with me.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Fanuch!” gushed Nia. After Dad was out of earshot, Nia said, “He’s pretty awesome.” Then I waited for her to add And my mom thinks so too. I still hadn’t told Maddie that our parents were dating for a couple of weeks solid. So much time had passed, I feared telling her. I wasn’t sure when it had moved from casual to seeing each other all of the time, but it had.

  “Yeah, he’s a pretty great dad,” I admitted, relieved that Nia hadn’t said anything about the dating situation. “Even if he’s clueless about anything to do with technology. He doesn’t know how to change the wallpaper on his phone.”

  “That’s so sad,” said Nia.

  “Luckily, I save him,” said Maddie, grinning. We high-fived each other, and, for a split second, I saw this look in Nia’s eyes. Almost like she was a little jealous, which was weird because she was always surrounded by her groupies. I didn’t get it. Why would she be jealous of us? “That’s my job, saving people,” continued Maddie.

  “And you saved us from complete boredom this year by creating the Hot List.”