The Hot List (19 page)

What did she mean interesting? I didn't like Nia's idea of interesting. My eyes slipped to the names on the girls' list.

NIA TATE

AVA ALLEN

SIERRA BLACKSTONE

MCKENZIE DARLINGTON

ADIA STILLER

AMBER SMITH

MEI WONG

ALYSON HERNANDEZ

SOPHIE FANUCHI

Whoa!!! Did I read that correctly? Somehow, I had made it up to number nine on the Hot List. How did that happen? I wasn't in Nia's glamour group. I didn't play girl drama games to get onto it.

“Congratulations,” said Nia. “You're officially hot.”

“But it's not like I was campaigning or something.”

“Definitely not,” said Nia, smirking, as I read the rest of the List.

MADDIE NARITA

SIERRA STEVENS

LESLIE GOTTFRIED

SARAH RUINSKY

JANE COCKRELL

LIESA SALEEM

CLARA PESSEREAU

SHERRY WARE

RUBY KUMAR

JENNY GOLD

LEAH PFEIFFER

I was trying to process that I got onto the List, when Nia broke out laughing again. “Guess you better prepare to wear that fuzzy boa, sparkly shoes, and tiara to school tomorrow,” she said, “and look like an idiot in
front of your crush. Hayden—I mean Blue, right?”

“Maddie told you that?”

“Don't be mad. It slipped. Should be an interesting lunch tomorrow.”

I slammed the locker shut on a piece of my finger. “Ouch!”

But Nia didn't look back.

I barreled down the hallway and turned the corner. My finger throbbed, I had lost, and I was on the List.

I stood in terror as the bell to end second period rang, and, within minutes, hordes of students stampeded toward the lockers in the west wing.

Maddie headed the pack of mostly girls. They were moving at a fast clip down the hallway. As she approached, she called out, “Hey! I'm sorry you didn't win.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “Apparently, news travels fast.”

“Yeah,” said Maddie, waving her cell phone. She probably got a text from Nia. I noticed she was wearing her lavender Barcelona scarf, which surprised me because I thought she was so done with lavender. And our twin scarves.

“I'm sorry about Squid not getting on,” she said.

I turned to her. “Okay. Sure.”

“Seriously.” She needled me with her elbow. I couldn't help it, but I started to cry. Not in an obvious way or anything. But I could feel my eyes getting all teary.

Suddenly, Maddie was hugging me. “You did a really good job, Soph. Seriously. With Squid.” She was calling me Soph. Like old times. She whispered, “I know what you did. And it worked for a little. Squid, like, totally changed. But then he went back to himself,” she said, shrugging. “Just with a better haircut.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nia must be soooo happy about it.”

“When I was heading here, I saw her skipping and singing down the hall. She did look pretty happy. I figured good news for her meant bad news for you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That's about it.”

After a few of the domino girls left the hallway where the List was posted, they passed by Maddie and me. One of them with short hair smiled at Maddie. I think her name was Crysta or maybe Chrisa. “I heard Nia's going to have a Hot List party?” Crysta/Chrisa said.

“Probably,” Maddie said. “Maybe this weekend.”

“Cool,” said Crysta/Chrisa, who then left with her posse. And that made me remember who Maddie's best friend was and it wasn't me, even if for a second, we had a close moment. So I quietly scooted away down the hall.

I felt like everyone in the hallway was staring at me. A black cloud of awfulness had descended. And it had settled on me. My breath felt shallow.

Maybe I should go home and crawl under the rock of shame, I thought.

When the bell rang, I heard a cart clattering down the hall. It was the hall monitor Mrs. Heidegger with her walkie-talkie crackling.

The crowd immediately scattered. All except for me. I stood there dumbfounded. And dumb.

All of that work on Squid for nothing. Nothing! Maddie was still Nia's best friend. And it hit me. The reason I had done the whole thing, in a weird way, was to show Maddie that I knew more about something than Nia. Maybe I'd make up a new list for myself—a list of people with no best friend.

N
icole and Heather called me twice, and texted five
hundred times, to see how I was doing. The answer? Not great. For tomorrow, I had put a pink fuzzy boa into a bag, along with sparkly sandals, and a tiara that I had saved from a princess birthday when I was eight. It was too small and made my head look ginormous. On five separate little notes I had just written up the five things that I liked about Hayden. And each note, I had cut into the shape of a heart.

My embarrassing little heart-shaped notes:

I like how you don't carry around a backpack.

I like how you carry around your lacrosse stick because

it means you're really dedicated and that's cool.

I like how your favorite candy is Jolly Ranchers

because that's one of my faves too.

I like how you showed Squid how to skateboard, even

if he's a goof.

I like how you asked if I was okay when I almost

stapled myself to Mrs. McGibbon's desk.

I was pacing in the living room, with Rusty at my heels, when the door opened and Dad casually strolled through the door like it was just another day in the Fanuchi household.

“You're finally home,” I said, sounding snappier than I intended.

“Sorry,” said Dad. “Lots and lots of meetings.” He looked at me. “So what's going on?”

“Do I have to go to school tomorrow?”

“Are you sick?” Dad put his hand on my forehead. “You don't feel warm.”

“I'm feeling bad, trust me.”

Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “Did something happen? Today at school?”

“No,” I said. And that part was kind of true. “See, this thing that was supposed to happen didn't happen, and the thing that wasn't supposed to happen, did.”

“Not sure I'm following you here. But you want to not go to school. I need details and facts.”

“Those are the facts.”

“Okay, when you're ready to talk, I'm here.” He looked at me carefully. “Does it have anything to do with me dating Mynah?”

“Not really.”

“That sounds vague-ish.”

“It's not that. Mynah's all right.”

We both sat there for a moment, not saying anything. All I could hear was the knocking of the heater and Rusty drinking his water downstairs. “But you're going to need to face up to whatever you're avoiding, okay, Sunflower?”

Sunflower was the name Dad called me when I was little. He always said I was as tall and beautiful as a flower that reached for the sun, and in that moment, I really wanted to roll back time and be that little girl again.

But I was a seventh grader, who had made a huge mess out of things and was going to have to face the cafeteria tomorrow in a tiara, sparkly shoes, and pink fuzzy boa. Hayden would think I was such a dork. And Maddie, of course. I already knew what Nia thought. And I thought I was a dork. By tomorrow even Squid, the king of dorks, would think I was such a dork. Wonderful.

The next morning Dad set a stack of pancakes in front of me. I gazed at them and my stomach twisted. “Sorry, Dad. Can you, like, save these? I'm just not hungry right now.”

“Eat, Sophie,” Dad said, putting on a silly Swedish
accent and pointing to the stack of pancakes. “I reheated them in the microwave from a genuine box.”

Oh, wow. That explained how he was able to whip them up so fast. He nuked them even though he had put out whipped cream and chopped bananas and strawberries. I just wasn't in the eating mood. I forced myself to eat one silver dollar–size pancake, just to please him.

Then he pulled something out of his pocket. “I thought you might want this.” It was the scarf that Maddie had given me when she went to Barcelona. The one that I had thrown away.

“But I thought—”

“I found it in the trash, along with some postcards, and I was thinking that, maybe, just maybe, you really wanted to keep it. And the postcards. I put them in my room, if you want them. As a memory.”

I didn't know what to say so I said, “Thanks,” and stuffed the scarf into my backpack, kind of for good luck. Because today, after what I had to do in the caf, I really needed some luck.

At school, Squid was pretty much doing the opposite of everything I had ever told him to do on my Hot List plan, except I did notice he had closed his mouth when he chewed his food when he whipped out a PowerBar.

Like in Mrs. Tate's class, he was singing the Spider-Man theme song, and the crazy thing was that Hayden,
the
Hayden Carus, started singing along with him, using his lacrosse stick as a conductor's baton.

Squid took out a Spider-Man pencil and swung it up and down like he was conducting an orchestra. Everyone was singing along. Mrs. Tate was laughing as she wrote up the whiteboard. Even Nia was smiling. But why not? She'd proven her point, and I was about to humiliate myself BIG-TIME during lunch.

Each time I glanced up at the clock, I was getting closer and closer to my little humiliation show in the caf. I put the fuzzy pink boa, the sparkly shoes, and the tiara in a bag in my locker. Today, time didn't go slow. It sped by.

Right before lunch I went to my locker to get my bag.

“Are you okay?” asked Heather.

“Not really,” I admitted. “I'm going to have to work myself up to it.” My stomach grumbled like I hadn't eaten in hours. Oh, right. For breakfast, I had only eaten one mini pancake. Somehow, I found myself standing in the line glancing over at Hayden's table, and Mrs. Daltry, the caf worker, was mumbling something at me. “Do you want a hamburger or do you want to continue staring at the boys?” she asked in her jokey way. “I know I'm not as good looking as those hunks, but …”

“What?” I stared at the meat loaf, and suddenly, I thought about becoming a vegetarian like Nia. “I'll take the bean taco,” I said.

Why did I get that taco again? There was no way I was going to eat that. It had all of these little black flecks that were so random. I thought tacos were just plain tan. How come I never noticed that before? And I realized that there's a lot that I never noticed before. My stomach bunched up as I spotted Hayden, kicking a hacky sack under his table.

I went to sit for a moment with Nicole and Heather when I found myself face-to-face with Nia. “Ready?” she asked.

I fluffed my boa. “Uh-huh.” I snuck another glance at Hayden, who was sitting next to Auggie and across from Trent.

“Awww, she's turning red,” said Nia. “That's so sweet.”

I could feel my face growing all hot, which meant it looked red and blotchy. And I could feel my hands shaking.

“Be quiet,” I said as quietly as possible.

Then Maddie walked up next to me and lightly pressed on my shoulder. “Don't worry, you'll be fine.” She smiled. “You look kind of cute.” Was she trying to act nice? I hated how she kept being nice to me. It was so confusing.

She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Blue will love the glitz.”

“Blue?” asked Ava, who suddenly appeared next to Nia, along with Amber, Sierra, and McKenzie. I remembered that Ava had curly hair last year, but now she got it straightened and her hair flowed silkily on her shoulders.

“Blue is a guy who Sophie is crushing on,” explained Nia.

“Yup,” I said, thrusting out my chin. “Hayden Carus.” Suddenly, I felt a little braver. Maybe because I was thinking about Squid in Mrs. Tate's class and how everyone was singing the Spider-Man song along with him. That he completely didn't care what anyone thought, and that was okay. Like right now, in the caf, Squid was doing yo-yo tricks with Elio and Gabriel. And even though they were knocking their chocolate milks over and stuff, you could tell they were having fun.

Nicole and Heather rushed up to me and my little entourage who were all eager to watch my Hayden humiliation.

“I can't believe you're really going to do it,” said Nicole.

“Breathe, okay?” said Heather.

I felt the five little pieces of paper, each shaped in a heart. The five embarrassing things that I liked about Hayden. “I'm breathing,” I said.

I expected Maddie to be smiling all smug. After all, I was about to about to humiliate myself in front of this entire school. Or at least in front of an entire cafeteria full of seventh graders. But instead, she whispered, “Good luck, Sophie” almost like she meant it.

Okay, that was it. “I'm going in.” I put my boa on over my shirt, slipped on the tiara and the shoes. “If I'm going to do this, I'm really going to go for it,” I said and marched, with my shoulders back, standing tall, right into the middle of the caf.

My stomach flopped and wiggled like the Jell-O on my tray.

That was when I started to self-talk.
I had been crushing on Hayden Carus for a while. If Squid could be Squid, I could have the guts to confess that I actually liked Hayden. Maddie didn't think I was an honest person in the feelings department anyway. And I didn't hate Maddie for this. I was thinking the same thing myself. I hadn't been real about my feelings. So, Hayden was a start.

I stepped past the Quik Cart where they sold oranges and bags of chips. I kept my head up so the tiara wouldn't slip. As I was halfway across the cafeteria, Maddie raced up to me, yelling, “Stop! You don't have to do this.”

“Yes, I do,” I said. I pushed up the tiara. “I'm so doing this. I promised.”

As Maddie stepped back, I waltzed up to Hayden's table, so I could face him front and center.