“Not everybody has it as easy as you, okay?” Sophie couldn’t stop herself. This girl knew nothing. “Some of us have to work a little harder, let’s just say that.”
“You’re so pretty, though. You don’t have to work hard.” Eve kept turning her head to respond to Sophie, and Sophie kept shifting it back to the right angle in order to straighten her hair.
“Ha. Pretty is different than prettiest, I guess,” Sophie groused. She immediately regretted saying it. It made her sound jealous. “But whatever,” she added.
“So you do all this every morning?” Eve turned her head back to Sophie. “Really?”
“Of course!” Sophie adjusted Eve’s head again, a little more forcefully this time.
“Why would you even want to?” Eve went on. She was getting chatty. “Didn’t you say that what people think of as pretty could change really easily? Like if the list changed, everyone’s opinions would change? So just decide what’s prettiest to you and do that!”
“I’m not the one who gets to decide! Don’t you get it?” Sophie felt her voice begin to crack, and she stuffed her anger in deep.
The word “pretty” was starting to swirl around in her head until it didn’t mean anything anymore.
Eve’s curls steamed.
“That’s confusing.” Eve wouldn’t let up.
Little Eve Hoffman wasn’t so quiet all of a sudden. Maybe this was what happened when you had the bad luck of having to get to know her in her big, fancy house. It’s also what happened whenever you did anyone’s hair. Sophie had heard lots of secrets from people in her building when she cut their hair for them.
“Ya know what?” Sophie felt a wisp of the anger slip out. “You’re judging me for the way I look, okay? You’re judging me for liking to look a certain way. So maybe you’re not the saint you think you are.”
“Oh my gosh!” Eve turned around all the way to face her, nearly burning a cheek in the process. “No, I wouldn’t judge you! I’m not!”
But Sophie put an end to it. “Let’s turn on some music.” She picked up her phone and put it on shuffle. Some country music came on.
They didn’t speak again for the amount of time it took a country singer to tell the story of how he got his favorite truck.
“Do you know who Emily Dickinson is?” Eve finally asked her, breaking through the sound of the twangs.
“Um, no.” Sophie watched the ends of Eve’s oak brown curls turn into streams of flattened strands.
“She’s who I’m doing the biography assignment on. What about you?”
Eve was trying to be nice now. Fine. “Audrey Hepburn,” Sophie told her.
“Oh, cool! Well, Emily Dickinson was a famous American poet. Like, the most famous.”
“Gotcha.”
Eve probably assumed Sophie didn’t read. Not true. Sophie read every school assignment. She got As on every paper. Eve probably thought Sophie was stupid just because she wore makeup. She probably didn’t even know that in addition to being a famous actress, Audrey Hepburn also spent most of her life helping people all around the world. Both things were awesome.
“She inspired me to write poems, actually, even though mine are pretty bad,” Eve went on. Maybe getting your hair done was like the confessionals at the church where her dad used to take her sometimes. When you couldn’t see someone’s face, it made it easier to tell the truth. “Anyway, I learned that Emily Dickinson never went outside! Like … ever. She just read and wrote poetry and letters in her room, all the time. Does part of that sound great to you? I think it sounds amazing.”
Sophie could see from Eve’s neck that she was blushing. Eve really was a Disney princess, Sophie thought. She probably sang to birds.
“She didn’t want to have to go outside and deal with the world, I guess,” Eve went on. “And I just don’t quite fit in in the hallways with a hundred people, you know?”
“This Emily Dickins sounds just sad to me. And loaded. Staying in your room all day writing ‘roses are red’ or whatever? Ignoring the world?” And it must be nice not to need to go out and make an actual living, Sophie didn’t say out loud.
“No, it wasn’t like that!” Eve insisted, shaking her head.
The more she talked, the less Eve sounded like the quiet girl from school. Sophie found this Eve much more interesting.
“Stop moving your head!” Sophie commanded. “And don’t forget that when you’re doing this, you need to start from the scalp and slowly pull the straightener down to the tips, okay? Actually, try it yourself real quick.” Sophie handed Eve the straightener and smirked as Eve struggled. “Anyway, I’m just saying, it’s okay to be romantic and stuff, but it’s not always the real world. Maybe Emily Dickins could have used some time in the hallways.”
Eve said nothing except “Dickinson” and handed the straightener back to Sophie.
“Is that her?” Sophie nodded to a book on Eve’s bed stand with Emily’s name and a picture of her, she assumed. “I wonder what number she would’ve been on the list,” Sophie said, and, to her surprise, Eve chuckled.
“That’s pretty funny!”
“She’s kinda cute, really.” Sophie found herself giggling, too.
Sophie heard her phone ding. She went to check it. “It’s the Choir Room Trio text.”
“Yeah? What’s it say?” Eve asked.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to use your phone,” Sophie teased.
“You can tell me what’s on your phone!”
“Nessa says that Brody, Caleb, Winston, Aidan, and Tariq are posting a bunch of nasty comments under girls’ pictures about what number they are on the list.”
“Disgusting.”
“Typical.”
The phone dinged once more.
“What else?” Eve asked.
“Oh, Nessa asks how the makeover is going.”
“Well?” Eve asked. “How is it going?”
“Finished,” Sophie answered.
She stood in front of Eve and took in the full view. Wow. Sophie had turned this girl into a movie star. She led Eve to the full-length mirror on the back of Eve’s bedroom door.
“Voilà.” Sophie couldn’t help herself—she smiled, thin lip and all.
Eve gasped. “I look—I—I look—”
“Like a goddess,” Sophie said. She curtsied in her jeans.
Eve spun in a circle, even though her skirt didn’t twirl at all.
“See? Kind of fun, right?” Sophie went to Eve and adjusted her skirt a bit.
Then, still staring at herself, Eve awkwardly moved her shoulders in a little shimmy.
Sophie laughed. “Glad you like it.”
“Oh my—” Eve said.
“For a famous poet wannabe, you’re pretty bad at saying words,” Sophie said, still laughing.
Eve turned to her and declared, “I love the eye part!”
“It’s called eye shadow.”
Eve flipped back to the mirror and kept moving her shoulders, but then her fingers started snapping and her whole body joined in. “And I love this song! Who is it?” she asked, dancing without any of the grace of a Snow White. More like one of the Disney sidekick characters. It was kind of funny.
Sophie knew this song too well. “My dad’s band,” she said, dismissing it and grabbing her phone to change it. How embarrassing.
“I love it!” Eve repeated.
Sophie changed it to a Top 40 playlist. “Don’t.”
“But it’s so—”
“He’s a jerk,” Sophie cut Eve off.
Sophie kind of couldn’t believe she was saying this to Eve Hoffman. She didn’t talk about her dad. Ever. But there they were, doing that.
Eve didn’t speak for a second, and she stopped dancing. Then she looked back into the mirror as she said to Sophie, “Nessa and I call jerks ‘Malfoys.’ And if they’re really bad, then ‘Voldemorts.’”
“Sooo nerdy.” Sophie cringed, but laughed. She turned up the new song as if to drown out the sound of her dad and erase it from the room.
The door burst open, and their little sisters danced their way inside, both dressed up in Eve’s mom’s clothes.
“I THINK HANNAH IS MY BEST FRIEND!” Bella yelled to Eve as the music pounded.
Sophie gave in and danced, too. She grabbed her little sister’s hands, and they spun around together. Eve continued her goofy moves, her fingers snapping and her knees wobbling side to side. Maybe this was the Eve Hoffman that Nessa got to see.
As the song ended, they turned to the door and saw Eve’s mom standing in its frame, a bemused look on her face.
“How’s that school project going?” she asked, but not in a stressed-out way. More like she actually knew they weren’t doing one and didn’t care.
But when she took in Eve’s face and hair, her smile disappeared.
“Oh, honey,” she said as Sophie went over to her phone to turn off the music. “You look … so different.”
Sophie knew in that moment that Eve’s mom was judging her. She probably thought Sophie was a “bad influence.” Maybe Eve’s mom could tell that Sophie’s clothes looked fancy, but were really used. Some of them homemade, sewed on her grandma’s old sewing machine. Her mom had taught her how. Maybe Eve’s mom saw the smudges all over Sophie’s makeup bag, sitting next to Eve’s chair, and wondered why her stuff was so dirty. Maybe she’d even figured out that Sophie wasn’t from their neighborhood. Did parents know about other kids’ parents in town? Maybe Eve’s mom knew that the Kanes lived in Silver Ledge Apartments, or that her mom served people at a diner on the side of Greer Road. And even though there was nothing wrong with that, a lawyer or a doctor or something, which Eve’s parents totally must have been, might think there was.
“We should go,” Sophie said to the rich girls and their mom as she grabbed her stuff and threw it into her backpack. Bella came to her side.
“Oh.” Eve’s mom sounded surprised.
“Oh,” Eve parroted in the same way.
“You need a ride home, honey?” Eve’s mom asked.
“No, it’s so close,” Sophie answered, and she headed off from the huge, happy Hoffman home with Bella, still bopping around and singing, unaware that she would never be in the same world as someone like Hannah Hoffman.
She would have to make her own world.