The List

Abby combs her strawberry blond hair with her fingers. “Pretty please? I just got too caught up in looking at dresses last night. It’ll be the last time.” She puts her hand over her heart. “Promise.”

Lisa sighs, but she heads into the school to get it from her locker.

Abby calls out, “Love you like a sis!”

A few minutes later, Lisa sprints back outside, her black ponytail swishing wildly. “Abby!” she screams, loud enough so that everyone at Freshman Island turns to look. Lisa dives forward the last few feet and grabs Abby to keep herself from falling. “You’re the prettiest freshman girl at Mount Washington High!”

Abby blinks. “I’m what?”

“You’re on the list, dummy! The list! My sister is on it, too.” Lisa looks at the other girls, her braces twinkling in a proud smile. “Bridget got named the prettiest girl in the junior class!”

Abby’s jaw goes slack with surprise. Even though she isn’t sure what Lisa is talking about, it is clearly news to be excited about. Luckily, one of their other friends asks, “What list?” and then everyone turns to Lisa for an explanation.

As Lisa fills them in, Abby nods along, pretending that she isn’t as clueless as the rest of them. Of course Fern hadn’t bothered to mention this very important thing, just like Fern wouldn’t have a clue about which dresses were right for the homecoming dance. Sometimes Abby wished that Bridget was her sister.

Okay. Lots of times.

Abby’s friends take turns bouncing her around with congratulatory hugs, and each squeeze makes her heart flutter a little faster. Though the freshmen boys act uninterested in their celebration, Abby notices their game of hacky sack inch closer to where she is standing.

But it still hasn’t sunk in. There are a lot of pretty freshmen girls at Mount Washington, and Abby is friends with most of them. Did she really deserve to be at the top of the pack?

It is a strange, foreign place for her to be.

“I’m sorry you girls didn’t get picked,” Abby says suddenly to everyone, and she partly means it.

“Please,” Lisa says, pointing at her mouth. “Who’s going to vote me prettiest of anything with these railroad tracks running across my face?”

“Shut up!” Abby cries, knocking into Lisa. “You’re so pretty! Way prettier than me.” Abby honestly thinks so. In fact, she is lucky to have made the list this year, because when Lisa finally gets her braces removed, all bets will be off. Lisa is at least five inches taller than Abby, with long black hair that always looks shiny and a tiny little mole at the top of her left cheek. She has a great body, with curves and boobs. Really, the only thing that isn’t perfect about Lisa is her braces. And maybe her feet, which are kind of big. But people usually overlook that sort of thing.

“You are the worst at taking compliments, Abby,” Lisa says with a laugh. “But this is seriously huge. Everyone in school will know who you are now.”

Abby smiles. She’s never been more excited about the next four years than she is right this minute. “I wish I knew who picked me so I could thank them.” The idea of one girl, or maybe even a delegation, bestowing this honor on her is extremely exciting. She has friends, older girls, she didn’t even know about. “So … where did you see the list?”

“I saw a copy on the bulletin board near the gym,” Lisa says. “But they are everywhere.”

“Do you think I could take one?” Abby wonders. She wants to keep the list someplace special. Maybe in a scrapbook, or a memory box.

“Definitely! Let’s go grab one.”

The girls hold hands as they run into school.

“So who else is on this list?” Abby asks. “Besides me and your sister?”

“Well, the ugliest freshman is Danielle DeMarco.”

Abby slows down. “Wait. The list names ugly girls, too?” In the excitement, she’d missed that part.

“Yup,” Lisa says, pulling her along. “Wait until you see it. Whoever wrote it this year put funny things underneath everyone’s names. Like Danielle’s called Dan the Man.”

Abby isn’t friends with Danielle DeMarco, but they are in the same gym class. Abby had watched Danielle kill it during the mandatory mile run last week. It was admirable, and Abby could have probably run faster than the crappy seventeen minutes she ended up with, but she didn’t want to be sweaty for the rest of the day. Of course she feels bad that Danielle has been named the ugliest girl in their class, but Danielle seems tough enough to handle it. And, hopefully, Danielle will understand that there are other girls who could have been named the ugliest, too. Just like in Abby’s case. It’s truly the luck of the draw.

“What did it say about me?”

Lisa lowers her head and whispers, “It congratulated you for overcoming genetics,” before letting out an embarrassed giggle.

Fern.

Abby bites the inside of her cheek and then asks, “Is Fern the ugliest junior?”

“Oh, no,” Lisa says quickly. “It’s that freaky girl Sarah Singer, who scowls on the bench near Freshman Island.” Abby lowers her eyes and nods slowly. She guesses Lisa can see her guilt, because Lisa pats her on the back. “Look, Abby. Don’t worry about the genetics thing. It doesn’t mention Fern by name. I bet a lot of people don’t even know you two are sisters!”

“Maybe,” Abby says, hoping what Lisa says is true. But even if most of the kids at school don’t know they’re related, her teachers sure do. It has been one of the worst things about going to Mount Washington: watching her teachers realize, after the first week or so, that Abby is nowhere near as smart as Fern.

Lisa continues, “Anyway, Fern always gets the recognition. And every time she does, you’re so happy for her. Remember last year, when you made me sit through that three-hour Latin poetry reading contest Fern competed in at the university?”

“That was actually a big deal. Fern got picked out of the whole high school to recite it, and she won a bunch of scholarship money.”

Lisa rolls her eyes. “Right, right. I remember. Now it’s your turn to get some attention.”

Abby squeezes her friend’s hand. Yeah, the genetics comment is kind of mean. But Lisa is right. It’s not like Abby herself said it. And she is always cheering on Fern for her academic stuff. She never even complained once about those early-morning wakeups or all the college visits they’d gone on this summer instead of a vacation.

Not out loud, anyway.

When they get close to the gym, Lisa jogs a few steps ahead. “Here it is,” she announces, tapping the paper with her finger. “In black and white.”

Abby finds her name near the top of the list. Her name! Seeing it makes the whole thing way more real, feel more earned. Abby is, officially, the prettiest girl in her freshman class.

She’s not sure how long she stands there staring at it. But eventually Lisa pinches her arm. Hard.

Abby tears her attention off the bulletin board. Fern is marching down the hall with incredible purpose, her book-bag straps pulled tight over her shoulders, the tails of her French braids swinging side to side.

If Fern knows Abby is on the list, Abby certainly can’t tell. Fern walks by exactly the same way she usually does at school — as if Abby doesn’t exist.

Abby waits until Fern rounds the corner. Then she pulls the list off the bulletin board, using her pinky nail to ease out the staples, careful not to tear the corners.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_d4275971-eeae-5524-a8c4-3ae665911747)

From 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.