The List Page 2

  rom a block away, Danielle DeMarco realizes that she’s missed her bus. It is too quiet, especially for a Monday. Nothing in the air but the typical morning sounds — chirping birds, the click click click of rising automatic garage doors, the tinny rumble of empty trash cans being dragged back up driveways.

  Late to school, starving for breakfast, utterly exhausted. Not such a great way to start off the week.

  But Danielle still thinks last night was worth it.

  She’d been asleep for two hours when her phone rang. “Hello?” she asked, her word wrapped in a yawn.

  “How can you be sleeping? It’s only midnight.”

  Danielle checked that her bedroom door was shut. Her parents wouldn’t like Andrew calling so late. They still referred to him as her friend from camp, despite the million times she’d corrected them. As if boyfriend was a tongue twister. Or maybe that was the thing they worried about, because Andrew was a year older. But for someone her parents lumped in the same category as her best friend, Hope, they certainly had a lot of rules about when, where, and how Danielle could spend time with Andrew.

  That had been the hardest part about coming home from Camp Clover Lake, where they’d both worked as counselors this past summer. They’d lost the freedom to hang out when they wanted, talk when they wanted. There were no more nights of Andrew sneaking through the dark and scratching the screen in the window above her bed. No more taking the paddleboats out to the center of the lake and waiting until the breeze brought them back to the dock.

  Summer already felt like a million years ago.

  Danielle pulled her comforter over her head and kept her voice low. “Lights out, campers,” she teased.

  Andrew sighed. “I’m sorry I woke you. I’m just way too amped up to sleep. I’ve got tons of adrenaline stored up from the game and no way to get rid of it.”

  Danielle and Hope had watched from the stands that afternoon as Andrew was stuck in a perpetual warm-up routine on the sideline while the football field got torn up by other players’ cleats. He’d bounce on his toes, do jumping jacks, or run a sprint of high-knee lifts to stay warm. After each play, Andrew glanced over at the varsity football coach, fingers laced around the face guard of his gleaming white helmet. Hopeful.

  She felt terrible for him. It was the fourth game of the season, and he hadn’t seen one minute of playing time. What would it have mattered, giving sophomores like Andrew a chance? Mount Washington was losing by three touchdowns at halftime. The Mountaineers hadn’t won a single game.

  “Well … I thought you looked cute in your varsity jersey,” she said.

  Andrew laughed, but Danielle could tell by the dryness that he was still upset. “I’d rather not get called up if I’m not going to see any playing time. Just let me start on JV. It’s humiliating, standing on the sideline, doing absolutely nothing while we get our asses beat game after game. I could have had nachos with you and Hope in the bleachers for all it mattered.”

  “Come on, Andrew. It’s still an honor. I bet there are a ton of other sophomores who’d kill to be on varsity.”

  “I guess,” he said. “You know, Chuck got to play the whole second half. I wish I were big like him. I should do more weight room work and maybe try those nasty protein shakes he’s always chugging. I’m way too skinny. I’m, like, the smallest guy on the team.”

  “You are not. And anyway, why would you want to be like Chuck? Yeah, he’s big … but it’s not like he’s in good shape. I bet you could run circles around him.” Danielle was pretty sure Andrew knew she wasn’t crazy about Chuck. Andrew once told her that Chuck had a special shelf for his cologne bottles, which he displayed proudly, and wouldn’t leave the house without a splash on. Chuck would even put some on before he’d go lift weights in his garage. According to Andrew, Chuck was really grossed out by the smell of sweat, even his own.

  Andrew considered it. “That’s true. The dude does eat crap. I don’t think Chuck even knows what a vegetable is, unless it goes on his Big Mac. No wonder he can’t get a girlfriend.”

  They both laughed at that.

  It had taken Danielle a few weeks to understand the way Andrew and his friends acted around each other. The guys were super competitive, but especially Chuck and Andrew. Everything between those two was a rivalry — grades, new sneakers, who could reach the water fountain first. It seemed to Danielle like normal boy stuff for the most part, but every so often, Andrew would take some stupid “loss” really hard. Danielle was also competitive, and while she sympathized with Andrew’s pangs of defeat, she also never pitted herself against her friends. She didn’t even want to think about how sucky it would have been if she or Hope hadn’t both made the swim team.

  That said, Danielle did take special pride in knowing that, when it came to the boys having girlfriends, she’d tipped the scales in Andrew’s favor.

  “Hey,” Andrew said. “Guess what I found out today. Even if I don’t play a single minute this season, I’ll still get a varsity jacket.”

  “You’ll look hot in it,” Danielle said. It was kind of a silly thing to say, but she knew it would make Andrew feel better.

  “I don’t care about the jacket. It’ll just be cool seeing you in it this winter.”

  “You’re sweet,” Danielle said, blushing in the dark. It would be cool to wear Andrew’s varsity jacket, at least until she could earn her own.

  “Will you stay on the phone with me a little longer?” he asked quietly.

  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 ven
ding 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.

  hat 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 to
o 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?”