“Hey.” Abe cracked open Eve’s door later that night.
Eve lay in bed watching her and Nessa’s favorite reality show, Dance House, in which a bunch of dancers live in a house together while they audition for some big dance scholarship. Each week another dancer gets cut. Eve and Nessa texted throughout all of it every week.
One sec, she wrote to Nessa before looking at Abe. “What’s up?” she asked her brother.
“So how’d it go?” He walked in and leaned against her bookshelf.
“Okay, I guess,” she lied.
“And what the heck are you watching?” he asked as one dancer tried to pull the other one to the ground by her ponytail.
“Oh, nothing.” Eve turned the laptop away.
Abe came over to sit on the edge of her bed. “This list thing absolutely blows, doesn’t it?”
“It hasn’t been the best week.” Eve shrugged.
“Middle school is the worst,” he said. “You’re gonna love high school.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, everyone is older and, like, chills out a little bit.”
“Cool.”
“And at Rockson they have the best English teacher: Mr. Melby. He’s this dude with Albert Einstein hair who’s always quoting Shakespeare and stuff. You’d go nuts for him.”
“That sounds awesome.” Eve grinned.
“I’m just saying, one year and you’ll be out of Ford.”
If she could even last the year! “Yeah, I know,” she told him.
But that didn’t change the fact that she had to go back to school tomorrow, and be stared at, and pretend to like Brody Dixon, and let Sophie do some weird makeover on her that weekend, and just pray things went back to normal after it was all over.
“I understand your skepticism,” Abe said. “Just don’t let this crap change you, okay?”
It felt odd to have Abe speak to her this way, because she didn’t know what about her he thought might change. He was the one who had changed. They used to race their bicycles in the park and build legendary forts out of shelves and blankets where they would play Slapjack and War for hours at a time. But now he wasn’t around much, and the forts were years behind them. Plus, he was always fighting with their dad about articles and books she’d never read. Sometimes it even seemed as if he liked making their dad angry.
She couldn’t imagine changing as much as he had.
“I won’t,” she answered.
“Okay. Good.” Abe headed out of her room and hollered, “Night!” as the door closed.
Eve called Nessa.
“Is this ‘number one’ calling? Number one? Oh my god.” Nessa fake-hyperventilated.
“Oh, be quiet.”
“Too soon? Sorry.”
“Okay, so…” Eve turned the laptop back around. “What’d I miss?”
“Well, Teeny might get kicked out of the house for the hair pull, but she’s so talented the judges are having a hard time doing that and might give her another chance.”
“’Kay.” Eve snuggled under her covers to watch the final dance numbers.
“So how about that Sophie Kane, huh?” Nessa asked as one of the girls performed. “Do you trust her?”
Eve took a moment before answering. Sophie had been so angry with her, and then so certain that it was Brody mere moments later, like she just wanted someone—anyone—to blame. “I’m not sure.”
The girl who was performing did a triple pirouette.
“Wow,” they both said at the same time.
“I don’t trust her,” Nessa admitted. “She’s smarter than I thought she’d be, though. I’ll give her that. Oh my gosh, first Teeny pulls a ponytail and now she’s yelling at a judge?”
“Wait, why didn’t you think she was smart?” Eve pressed her. “Isn’t she good in classes and stuff?”
“Yeah, I guess. But look at her.”
Eve tried to remember if she’d ever assumed that Sophie was stupid. She had never really considered it, but if someone had directly asked her before that night if she thought Sophie was smart, she probably would’ve said no. Why?
“So do you think if I do this makeover thing that everybody will think I’m stupid?” Eve asked. “Will you think I’m stupid? Because of how I look?”
“No! Of course not. I just mean—forget it.”
A dancer fell midflip.
“OW!” both Nessa and Eve hollered, and then giggled.
They watched in silence as the judges assessed the performance.
“Hey.” Eve tried to sound casual, but one thing Nessa had said earlier that night kept coming back into her head. “It seems like you really hate Brody.”
“Um, yeah.”
“He hasn’t made fun of you in a long time, though, right? Like since we were kids?”
Eve heard a grunt on the other line.
“Just because I’m not sobbing about stuff all the time doesn’t mean I’m not getting made fun of, okay?” Nessa answered with a sharpness Eve hadn’t expected.
“Okay!” Eve backed off. “Sorry if I ‘sobbed’ tonight.”
“No, that’s not what I mean!” Nessa arghed into the phone. “Well, yeah, I guess I don’t tell you everything that everyone says to me sometimes. Brody’s not my biggest fan. I’m not his type of girl. You don’t get it.”
“What? I can get it, I—I—” Eve stammered before Nessa interrupted.
“Hey—why didn’t you tell me that Brody asked you to the Halloween dance? That’s huge, and you didn’t text me all day!”
“I’m sorry! I just … felt weird.”
They sat in silence.
“I should finish my homework,” Nessa told her, sounding far off.
“Yeah, me too.”
Eve wanted to cry again. She wanted to say to Nessa, “Tell me everything that everyone says to you, and I’ll come after them!” But she knew she wouldn’t come after them, because that was terrifying. And she wanted to say, “I kind of liked the feeling of Brody asking me, and I couldn’t tell you that,” but that, too, didn’t escape her lips. She felt like saying either would make Nessa angrier.
The judges huddled for their final elimination process. Teeny wept in anticipation of getting cut. She really needed that scholarship if she wanted her dance dream to come true.
“We’re not in a fight, right?” Eve asked.
“No, no. Come on. We’re best friends.”
But instead of Teeny getting axed, the girl whose ponytail had been pulled got cut! Apparently, she had let the ponytail pull affect her final dance performance, which the judges deemed unacceptable. After Nessa and Eve ranted about the inequity of this for several minutes, they blew kisses into the phone and said good night.
Within seconds Eve’s phone buzzed, and she instinctively went to pick it up, but what she saw made her drop the phone as if it were piping hot. Another boy. Another text. This one gross. So gross it was mean.
The words from the texts had begun to repeat themselves in her mind on an endless loop, like her favorite poems once did only days ago.
She wondered if Sophie got these kinds of texts. And then she wondered why, after they left the choir room, Sophie had walked toward the street in front of the school, headed toward the bus stop.
Eve turned her phone off and threw it on the carpet. With no phone, no alarm would wake her up in the morning. She’d be late. Or maybe she could just miss school altogether. Maybe she would never go back.
Maybe she was already changing.