THERE WAS SILENCE ON THE line for a bit, and A. A. heard nothing but the sound of, what else, a video game in the background—the rat-a-tat of an automatic weapon, the shrill cries of decapitated zombies. Then Tri came back on the line. He sounded hesitant. “From you? You want me to rank . . . you?”
“Yes, from me,” A. A. said. “Just do it, okay?”
“Okay,” said Tri, still sounding uncertain. “Hit me.”
A. A. looked down the list. Maybe she should start with an easy one. “Personality?” she asked.
“I dunno,” Tri said.
“You’ve accepted the call, Tri,” Ashley butted in, elbowing A. A. aside for now. “You know the rules.”
“Who’s there?” Tri asked sharply.
“Everyone—me, Ash, Lil, Lauren,” A. A. told him. “The usual.”
“Personality . . . uh . . . I give you a ten,” said Tri.
A. A. noticed Ashley raise her eyebrows, but a ten for personality wasn’t such a surprise, considering that she and Tri were best friends. Of course he would think she had a good personality. Okay, next one.
“Hair?” she asked. God, this was truly moronic. How could she ask Tri—the guy who once showed her how to stick a noodle in her nose and make it come out her mouth—what he thought of her hair? Did he even think of her hair? She pulled on her pigtails anxiously.
“Okay. Hair. Uh. I dunno. . . .”
A. A. wished he would spit out a number, any number, just to get this thing over with. He didn’t have to take it so seriously—except that was the thing. No one ever joked around with the rank calls. That was what made them so special. It was like getting a little sneak peek into a boy’s mind, and somehow they had convinced the boys this was a good thing to do. A. A. was convinced that Ashley had come up with the game so she could lord it over everyone how all the boys at Gregory Hall were in love with her. Ashley was the rank call queen.
“Hair,” Tri repeated. He clucked his tongue. “Ten?”
Was he serious? A. A. wrote down “10” and kicked Lili on the ankle for snickering. Lili and Ashley had teased her about Tri forever, and this was so not helping.
In the end, Tri gave her the highest rank yet in the history of rank calls: a perfect one hundred. Not even Ashley had merited that from Jonathan Tessin, the Gregory Hall eighth grader who had such a huge crush on her he used to send her slobbery IMs every day until she had to change her online handle.
A. A. didn’t know what to make of it. She knew he had to be sincere, since Ashley and Lili had called Tri for their rank calls last year and he’d given Ashley a “4” for personality, while Lili had merited a “10” for intelligence—which meant he was being sincere, since she knew Tri thought Ashley was a nightmare and that Lili was really smart.
“Wow. One hundred. I don’t think that’s allowed. Nobody’s that perfect,” Lili teased. “He must be really into you.”
“He’s my friend,” A. A. emphasized. If she had to rank Tri, she’d probably give him the same score, not that she would ever get the chance, since the girls never ranked the boys—the calls only went one way. Although she’d have to take a few points off for height, if she was being totally honest.
“Girls can’t be friends with boys, everyone knows that,” Ashley said. Ever since she had made them watch some old movie that was her mom’s favorite, Ashley had taken to quoting from it as if it were a manual on modern dating. Which was silly, since everyone knew that movie was from, like, the Dark Ages.
“Ashley, that is so stupid,” said A. A., but she kept hearing Tri’s low voice—when did it get that low? Had she never noticed before?—amplified on the speakerphone and wondered if Ashley could possibly be right.
Did Tri like her? Did he want to be more than friends? She thought back to the last time they’d hung out. He’d come over the other week so they could watch a Dr. Who marathon together. Then she’d beat him on the Xbox as usual, and then he left. He had acted exactly the same way he always did. He certainly didn’t act like he was in love with her or anything ridiculous like that.
She wondered what laxjock would think if she told him about Tri. Would he be jealous? He seemed too cool to be jealous. And besides, Tri was just her childhood friend. Laxjock was older, wiser, hotter. Dex’s image came to mind.
A. A. pulled her legs up and rested her chin on her knees, curling into a ball. Next to her, Lili was getting ranked by a guy from St. Aloysius, Ashley was trying on her new Chanel lip gloss, and Lauren was passing around mugs of hot chocolate her housekeeper had just brought up to the room.
She took a sip of the dark, rich drink. It was made the way A. A. liked it—not too sweet, with only a dollop of whipped cream on top instead of a melted marshmallow. Tri always made the hot chocolate when they hung out at his place, since A. A. tended to burn it. Cooking was not one of her strong points. He always remembered to add the whipped cream.
A. A. imagined the two of them as a couple, holding hands when they walked down Union Street, Tri waiting for her in front of Miss Gamble’s, the two of them meeting for coffee. Tri kissing her. His handsome face leaning in toward hers, his eyes closing—he did have the longest, darkest lashes she’d ever seen on a boy, she had noticed once when he fell asleep on their couch watching television—and pictured their lips touching over a steaming mug of hot chocolate.
She made a face. She could sooner imagine Tri beating her at Call of Duty.