“So what’s your plan?” Nessa asked her.
Right to the point. Sophie liked that.
“Wait,” Eve broke in. “The adults back there … they’re trying to work it out. If it’s Brody, they’ll handle it.”
Sophie couldn’t stop herself from muttering “Snow White” under her breath. Nessa jumped in.
“Evie,” Nessa said as they all stood up and faced one another in a triangle under the dim lights. “Did you hear those adults out there? They have no idea what our lives are actually like. And they are a mess! Just bickering among themselves.”
“Exactly!” Sophie jumped in. This Nessa girl saw the situation for what it was.
“And Brody Dixon can’t go around making people cry in choir rooms,” Nessa continued. “Choir rooms are for the majesty of song. For joy! This sucks, what he did.”
“I’m gonna ignore that you just said ‘majesty of song,’” Sophie had to say.
“You’re right,” Eve relented. “I just want this to go away.”
“Good.” Sophie felt herself begin to focus. “Because we’ll need you. Before we can get justice, we’ll need proof he did it. Here’s our strategy.”
Like she did when she led school projects, or led the Sophies, she made the decisions and gave assignments. They needed hard evidence, so Eve’s job was to make Brody think she really liked him back, to get him vulnerable, and then maybe get his phone password, or look on his laptop, or ideally even ask him sweetly about the list and record his answer. Then they’d bring the confession to Principal Yu. But to achieve this, Eve would need a total makeover. He may have wanted Eve as number one, but she needed to act like number one if Brody Dixon was going to go out with her long enough for them to catch him. Sophie understood this, even if Eve didn’t.
And Sophie was obviously the expert in how to look like number one, so she’d teach her.
“And then I can get my old life back?” Eve Hoffman asked her.
“Sure,” Sophie said. What was her old life, anyway?
“But you’ll have to be the actress for a little while,” Nessa told Eve with a grim expression on her face.
“I’ll be at your house this weekend,” Sophie decreed. “I’ll text you.”
“I’ll create a group text. I’ll call it”—Nessa paused for dramatic effect—“the Choir Room Trio.”
Sophie grimaced at the name, but she moved on.
She declared that Nessa could use her position as the other lead in The Music Man to watch for any whispered bragging about the list and any signs of weakness. As for Sophie, well, she was the captain. She’d manage the plans and, in the meantime, welcome Eve into the Sophies. The task was enormous. But she’d make it happen.
They heard a commotion in the hall. Assembly was ending.
“Let’s get justice.” Sophie made a beeline toward the exit.
“Justice,” the two other girls repeated.
Sophie threw the doors open and headed off.
Justice. Sure. There was justice involved. The justice of her being back in her rightful place as number one. The place she’d earned. Did little Eve Hoffman deserve to be there? Not a chance.
As the bus rolled down Greer Road in the rapidly darkening evening, she pressed her forehead to the glass of the window and watched the landscape of Glisgold go by. Police department, fire department, Santa Maria Parish, Harmony Chapel, a big sign that read WE ALL SIN, JESUS SAVES, two McDonald’s restaurants, and a couple of outlets. The bus flew by her mom’s diner, and Sophie tried to catch her mom’s silhouette in the windows’ reflection, but all she could make out were groupings of families, warm and seated, probably waiting for her mom to bring them a meal.
She wondered if Brody Dixon’s dad had ever eaten at the diner and ordered a meal from her mom. She wondered if Brody had been there, too.
He really was a jerk. If she could talk to her mom about this, her mom would say Brody was just like her dad. Not that her dad was rich, or was used to things going his way, but he wanted things to go his way, and that was what he cared about most. And her mom said that, for her dad, if things weren’t going his way, he just left. Like how he’d been tired of Glisgold and had given up his job in town and taken up a touring gig playing bass for his old band. She’d never forget the fight her mom and dad had, going on two years ago now, as he packed his bags. He came every few weeks, for holidays and stuff, but less and less.
And she’d never forget the way Brody had pretended to laugh it off when she hadn’t kissed him back, but how he’d been planning something awful.
The bus neared the edge of town. As an old lady stepped off it, carrying several tote bags filled to the brim with who knows what, she gave Sophie a stare of concern, maybe, or disapproval. Sophie looked away.
She used to think of Brody as just … the boy who came with being at the top. Like the nude heels that go with a mint green dress. But maybe there were other options. Something funky or Christmasy, like red flats—a random boy in the school who no one expected she’d be with.
She certainly didn’t want him anymore.
Or even her “friends,” whose words—I mean, have you ever seen her without makeup?—echoed in her memory.
Sophie couldn’t wait to get home to Bella.
She leaned her head against the icy cold window, sleep overtaking her, only to wake up mere moments before the bus passed Silver Ledge. She threw her backpack on and hopped off the bus and into the apartment building, where Bella lay asleep in front of Mrs. Jackson’s TV, Cheetos crumbs all over her purple sweater.
Sophie thanked Mrs. Jackson and took Bella back to their apartment for bed.
She tried to focus on her homework, but those Spanish verbs still wouldn’t stick, and the math swirled in her brain. In the past, she’d always been so good at all of this. Had being number one been a lie in other ways, too? Was she less smart than she thought? Was school getting too hard for her?
Sophie dropped her pen and paper and went to stand in front of the full-length mirror.
Her eyelids sagged from trying to stay up on her mom’s late shift nights to see her. Her hair, out of its ballerina bun, lay damp and limp on her shoulders, looking as tired as she was. The highlights she’d done with a box of hair dye had begun to fade from daffodil yellow to dead autumn grass. She puckered a few times in the mirror. Her lips were just too, too thin. Maybe one day she’d buy that collagen-infused lip gloss that supposedly made your lips plumper. One day, when she was rich enough to buy her mom a house in California on the beach, and get massages every day from a personal masseuse, and get her nails done every week with Bella …
Sophie put on her headphones, applied her mom’s red lipstick, and lip-synched into the mirror. This was always when she felt the prettiest, when she pretended to be someone else.
Maybe tonight wasn’t a night to finish her homework.
What did it matter, anymore, now that, for the time being, everyone at school would look at her like she was “less than” Eve Hoffman?
Sophie wiped off the lipstick.
Maybe she didn’t even need to wear it tomorrow. Who cared, anyway, if everyone was looking at her differently already?
No. No, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t be herself without it. Plus, like Liv, Hayley, and Amina had said, the lipstick was what made her so pretty.
Soon, after they exposed Brody and the list stopped mattering, and all anyone cared about was the drama of Brody Dixon’s downfall and Sophie Kane’s detective work and fight for justice, Sophie would eclipse Eve Hoffman and take back her rightful place at the top.
For now, Sophie collapsed into bed to the dependable drone of her sister’s snores.