The Prettiest

by Brigit Young

  I’m afraid of spirits. Like … I seriously can’t breathe when I think of haunted houses. But, also, sometimes I wonder if it’s because I can secretly, like, talk to them or something. Like I’m a ghost hunter.

  My mom is my hero. I wrote a paper saying it was Susan B. Anthony, but it’s my mom.

  I love my hair. It’s frizzy and all this “bad” stuff or whatever and I know I’m supposed to hate it, but I just love it. I think it’s cute. And I’m not going to change it.

  My dad took me to a psychic and she told me my soul is the color of lime. I don’t believe in psychics, but I believe that.

  My brother gets really sick sometimes. He has this disease called sickle cell. We spend a lot of time in the hospital, but we try to make it fun for him. He’s only eleven, but he’s tougher than anybody. Sometimes I’m sad about that at school, and people just think I’m stuck-up. I’m not. I’m just worried.

  I write My Little Pony fan fiction. But it’s not stupid. It’s about what they really feel, as if they were real people. And no one should laugh at me about that! It makes me happy!

  And on and on and on. People kept adding more, secrets and stories and facts into the hundreds. Some wrote from anonymous accounts, but many didn’t. Each time Sophie checked, there were more. And on each comment were a dozen responses. Girls saying “I feel that way, too!” or “I’m so sorry about your brother” or “I want a lime soul! So neat!”

  The list had officially been replaced. And this time, every girl was on it.

  * * *

  Sophie read and reread her favorite line in what Eve had written about her:

  Sophie Kane, a girl with the courage of an army inside her.

  That night, as she sat with her mom by the sewing machine, working on their new project—a red jacket for Bella for the spring—Sophie Kane announced, “Mom. I’d like to have friends from Ford over during winter break. They won’t think less of me.”

  Her mom stopped fiddling with the spool and sighed. “Honey, I—” she began, like Sophie didn’t already know.

  “Mama,” she said, calling her what she’d called her until she was just a little older than Bella. “I know you didn’t want my friends coming over here because you just didn’t want me to be bullied.”

  Her mom opened her mouth as if to speak, but didn’t.

  “But these kids … they’re not like that. And I’m not ashamed of Silver Ledge or anything. I’m proud of you.”

  Her mom didn’t have to say “I love you” or “I’m proud of you, too,” because her eyes did. Because everything she did in life showed Sophie how she felt about her.

  “Okay, baby girl. Okay.” After a beat, her mom lifted up a bag of bright red buttons. “Perfect for Bel, right?”

  “Perfect.” Sophie smiled.

  50

  NESSA

  On New Year’s Eve, it snowed. Flakes dotted Eve’s curls as Eve and Nessa hopped out of Nessa’s dad’s car.

  “Are you ready to see him if he comes?” Nessa asked her.

  “I think so.” Eve gazed up at the sky. “I love how purply orange the sky gets when the snow falls at night.”

  “It’s nice.” Back to business. “Are you gonna forgive him, because he knew not what he did?”

  Eve laughed.

  Another car pulled up, and Lara and Erin tapped on the windows from inside Erin’s parents’ car.

  Erin came down the ramp with a noisemaker in her mouth and a party hat.

  “She’s been blowing that thing nonstop. Please help me,” Lara deadpanned. Lara wore a white flower headpiece in her hair.

  “You’re the classiest person I know,” Nessa told her, nodding to the flower.

  “And you’re the cutest,” Lara said, taking Nessa’s hand and twirling her around.

  “Is you-know-who coming?” Lara asked as they all headed into the building together.

  “I think so,” Nessa answered.

  “His apology was really nice,” Erin told them. “I milked it for all it was worth. He felt really bad.”

  “Yeah, he wrote me an actual letter,” Lara said. “In the mail. I liked the whole pigeon-carrier feel to it.”

  Nessa laughed.

  They spotted the right entrance.

  “Guys!” they heard a voice call out from a few yards away.

  Amina bounded toward them. “Wow! The snow!” she said, clearly still a bit nervous around them. Weather talk always meant someone was nervous.

  “Want a noisemaker?” Erin held one out.

  “Ooh, yes, please.” Amina took it.

  “Don’t forget me!” Nessa put out her palm.

  And as Sophie came on the intercom to say, “Guys? Is it you?” they all blew into the speaker, so loudly that probably the whole neighborhood could hear them.

  51

  SOPHIE

  Her mom had cleaned the place like a fiend, and Sophie understood. But when her mom started dusting the lampshades, it was Sophie’s duty to stop her.

  “Mom. Enough. Go take a nap or something!”

  When the girls arrived, Sophie twirled as they entered. “My newest creation!”

  She’d made a black dress out of a nightgown from the thrift store, an Audrey Hepburn thing, but with a frill on the bottom and trimmings of lace around the sleeves. She looked fantastic. Her muscles showed in it, but she was trying not to mind. It was hard. But she was trying.

  “Awesome!” Nessa high-fived her.

  “You are seriously talented,” Lara declared, and looked at her from all sides. “Well done!”

  “Hannah begged to come see Bella, but she’s not allowed to stay up until midnight,” Eve told her. “You look so cool,” she added.

  Sophie motioned Eve toward her and Bella’s bedroom and pointed inside. Bella lay spread out in her clothes on her bed, fast asleep.

  “They’ll have to hang out sometime,” Sophie whispered. “You look awesome, by the way.” Sophie’s hand shot to cover her mouth, and she added, “Not that it matters what you wear!” She had a new rule for herself to make people’s looks one of the last things she ever pointed out. But Eve did look awesome. She wore her old black jeans like she used to, but her top, a lavender sweater, fit her just right.

  “You look like”—Sophie thought for a moment to find the right word—“you.”

  “Popcorn time!” Sophie’s mom yelled from the kitchen.

  After an hour or so of sitting on the couch, half watching the lead-up to the ball drop, and chatting nonstop about the past three months, Sophie heard the buzzer.

  She jumped up. “Got it!”

  She opened the door a crack and watched him walk down the hallway toward her, his nose nearly purple from the cold.

  “Hey. Don’t worry, you’re welcome here,” she made sure to tell him before he came in. “Join us!” She heard herself sound chirpier than ever. So embarrassing. But she was happy, she supposed. Maybe being happy made people chirpy.

  “More friends?” she heard her mom say. “Where have you been hiding these people?”

  Sophie shrugged and looked around at her very full apartment.

  52

  EVE

  Winston stood in the doorway. She had known he would come, but it still felt strange to see him. She hadn’t seen him since he’d told her what he’d done, and she didn’t know if he would look different to her after that.

  As Winston remained frozen by the door, Nessa yelled out, “Just get in here!”

  Eve got up to talk to him as he took off his gloves and untied his scarf. He remained out of earshot from the rest of the group. With the doorway on one end of the room and the couch and TV on the other, everyone could see what was going on, but not hear it.

  “Hey.” Eve nodded to Winston.

  “Hey.”

  Eve could feel Nessa glancing over at them and waiting to see what happened.

  “So…” She felt relieved to find she wasn’t blushing.

  “I loved what you wrote,” he said.

&
nbsp; “Thanks.”

  “I love your…” He paused and pressed his lips together like he did when he thought hard about something, focused on the mission, or the locker, or the lights. “Your voice.”

  “Thank you,” Eve repeated. “It felt good to use it.”

  “I bet,” he uttered under his breath. “Look … I’ve apologized to each person in there except you. And that’s because I betrayed you worst of all. I made you think I was safe, and I was the opposite of that.”

  “What did your mom do when you told her?” From the little bit she’d seen of Winston’s mom at the assembly, she could only imagine how intimidating she must have been after he admitted what he did.

  “Let’s just say I’m only allowed to come here tonight because I’m apologizing, and I won’t be out in the world much this winter. Or this year. She seemed … I think the right word would probably be ‘heartbroken.’” He took a breath. “When I told her, she said, ‘You know what you need to do,’ and she wrote down Principal Yu’s number for me. And then she left the room.” Winston bit his lip. “Anyway, Principal Yu was pretty nice about it. Disappointed, though. She said she had to do some thinking about how to handle it, so … my fate is uncertain. Caleb’s, too.” After a beat, he added, “She told me how you guys had already told her about Brody. How it wasn’t him.”

  At that, Eve smiled. They’d gone to Principal Yu the day after the show to tell her they knew Brody didn’t do it. They didn’t say how they knew. For some reason, though, Principal Yu hadn’t probed them further. She’d said she understood and thanked them.

  “What’ll happen to Brody, you think?” Eve wondered aloud.

  “He’ll get in trouble for the stuff he did do, I bet. I also heard he might transfer to Greenmount.”

  Eve allowed a few moments of silence to pass between them.

  “I stood by and watched Caleb write it,” Winton said finally. “I could have stopped him.”

  “Yes,” Eve said.

  “I’m so sorry.” Winston met her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Eve.”

  “I know you are.”

  Though their friends’ roars of laughter were only yards away, at that moment it felt like miles. Like she and Winston were on their own island.

  “Guys! The ball is gonna drop soon! Come on!” one of the girls called out to them.

  Winston hadn’t even taken his boots off, she noticed, as if he’d assumed he’d be kicked out.

  Eve turned to join the group.

  “You coming?” she asked him.

  After a brief pause, he slipped off his boots and followed.

  Erin sat right next to the couch, and the rest of them all squeezed in so tight on it that Sophie ended up on Nessa’s lap and Eve’s legs rested over Amina’s. Lara stood up and said, “I can’t do this,” and sat cross-legged on the floor.

  “Well, hi, Byrd!” Nessa reached over to pat his back as a greeting.

  “Hi, everybody,” Winston said in a shy mumble.

  “Everybody do their resolutions?” Eve grabbed the paper and colored pens from the coffee table and handed some to Winston.

  “Yup. I’m going to get the lead in Oklahoma! this spring,” Nessa announced.

  They all burst out laughing.

  “I don’t think that’s a resolution, hon,” Sophie said. “That’s, like, a goal.”

  “A resolution is a goal for how you’re going to change,” Lara told her. “Like, for me, I’m going to care less about what people think.”

  “Such a good one!” Sophie grabbed her own paper. “Give me a pen. I have to add that.”

  Eve wrote down that she would write once a day. She’d share her writing with someone. And she’d show her true self to the world. Whatever that meant in the year to come.

  Eve looked over at Winston and saw him writing furiously, filling up the page.

  After a few minutes of watching ball-drop banter on TV, Sophie spoke. “You all hear there’s another list?”

  Nessa nodded, her expression grim. “And Rose Reed is number one. Blech. Not ‘blech’ to Rose Reed. ‘Blech’ to more lists.”

  “Plus, being number one’s not so easy,” Eve added.

  “True.” Sophie caught her eye.

  “It’s really sad,” Amina jumped in. “I think. Am I right? It’s sad?” She looked from person to person, maybe wondering if she’d said the wrong thing.

  “‘Sad’ is the only word for it, in my opinion!” Lara pronounced before digging into some guacamole.

  “Hey, maybe we should try to talk to her,” Nessa suggested.

  “Always worth a try,” Sophie said with a look of determination.

  Erin threw a popcorn kernel toward the ceiling, then opened her mouth wide and caught it.

  “No way! Skills!” Nessa tried to do the same thing, and it landed in her eye.

  “All right, guys, it’s almost midnight—which channel do we want to go with?” Sophie fiddled with the remote.

  Eve had read some wonderful New Year’s poems online earlier that day. She began to recite one: “There’s a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox that goes: What can be said in New Year rhymes, that’s not been said a thousand times?”

  “Here we go…,” Nessa groaned.

  “What? I’m a poet!”

  Nessa sighed. “Fine. Go on.”

  “The new years come, the old years go. We know we dream, we dream we know. We rise up laughing with the light. We lie down weeping with the night. We hug the world until it stings…”

  “Okay, please get to the ending, Evie, please,” Nessa pleaded.

  “Okay, okay!” Eve skipped ahead. “We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear, and that’s the burden of the year.”

  “Nice!” Amina encouraged her.

  Eve had lost the rest of them to the TV. “Thanks, Amina.”

  Winston leaned in to Eve and said softly, “That poem? It’s really pretty.”

  “Isn’t it?” She smiled at him.

  “Okay, everybody!” Nessa stood up, and they all held hands. “It’s time!”

  And, together, they counted down to a new beginning:

  Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one …

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Eternal thanks to Melissa Edwards, my outstanding agent, for wholeheartedly supporting this book from the moment I had the idea for it. Thank you to Connie Hsu and Megan Abbate for so sensitively and masterfully helping me find the heart and soul of this story. Thank you to Madison Furr, Mekisha Telfer, Patricia McHugh, Nancee Adams-Taylor, Jessica Warren, and Taylor Pitts for your expertise and hard work, and to the entire team at Roaring Brook Press for your support. And thank you to Cassie Gonzales and Anjali Mehta for the cover of my dreams!

  Nick Shoda, your insights made this book better in every way before I’d even written a word. Thank you.

  Laura Hoffman-Hernandez, you and your beautiful family have my endless gratitude for sharing your stories with me.

  Paul Gross, thank you for helping me deepen Eve’s world.

  Thank you to Natalie and Audrey Compare for being two of my most valued readers. You are both destined for greatness, but, more importantly, you are infinitely kind. I can’t wait to see what you choose to do in this world as you grow up.

  Thank you to Risa Sang-urai Harms, Sasha Lazare, Brita Loftus, and Kristina Tomlinson for sharing your memories of middle school and girlhood with me.

  Alexander Whatley, thank you for debating gender politics (as well as everything else) with me for going on twenty years. I’ve learned a lot.

  Kelly Granito, thank you for helping me find the right perspective for this story.

  Thank you to Laura Mulcahy for standing by me in middle school and forever after.

  Thank you to Margery Ross for making my husband read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret when he was a kid. You raised a mensch. Thank you to David Ross for trading outraged emails with me.

  Thank you to my dad, Ernest P. Young, for your gentle nature, your inspirational act
ivist past and present, and for reading my work with such love. Thank you to my mom, M. Brady Mikusko, for infusing my life with anger at injustice and for letting me know that my voice has value.

  Thank you to my niece, Claudia Maschio, for keeping me in touch with the reality of life as a young, strong girl.

  Thank you to Aunt Kate, Aunt Suzi, Sarah, and my late grandma, Alice, for the lifelong coven.

  Thank you to my love, Jonathan, for keeping me in the light.

  And thank you to my precious daughters, Ingrid and Simone. I hope the world grows along with you. We will never stop trying to make it better.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It happened to me. In my life, the lists took a slightly different form, and the texts existed as written notes, but they created the same feelings of pressure, confusion, and shame. Some of these characters’ experiences mirror mine quite literally: the water thrown on Eve’s chest, Principal Yu’s encounters with Wes, and the endless accusations of a stuffed bra, for example. In all honesty, some moments of harassment and sexism felt too painful to even include. Throughout the years, my strategies of handling such treatment shifted. At times, I felt like Eve—desperate to hide, to disappear into myself, to escape the outside gaze. In other moments, I lived as Sophie—playing the game, and working hard to reflect what I’d been told would help me conquer the system. I figured it was better to fit into what I felt I should be rather than discover my own truth. And, at times, I was Nessa. I ignored the prevailing power structure and understood my worth, even as I felt sorrow and rage that others couldn’t see it.

  In some notable ways, I was Winston, too. I had moments in which I could have stood up for others, but the fear of being bullied myself took precedence. And, of course, like all the characters, I wasn’t immune to judging girls on their appearances, or letting that be the first thing I saw. In fact, to this day, I still have moments in which I struggle with all of this. In a world that too often presents “good looks” as girls’ and women’s central quality, and defines “good looks” in a very particular and narrow way, I continue to work on tuning out the noise. I try to remember the oft-shared wisdom that in a world that feeds on self-doubt, loving oneself is a revolutionary act. But it’s not easy.