The Hot List (10 page)

I easily spotted Squid because he was trying to walk up the front of his locker, just like those guys on YouTube. He charged forward, blasted halfway up, and then jumped down onto the floor, almost knocking down a couple of girls like they were bowling pins. I recognized them from being in the talent show last year.

They screamed, and he looked at them, wide-eyed.

“What do you think you're doing?” said the taller girl with a cool pixie haircut.

The smaller girl readjusted her glasses, which had slipped down her ski-jump nose. “Dude, get a grip,” she said. “You don't have superpowers.”

Squid grinned at them and pointed to his locker. “Oh, yeah, I do!” He rolled up his sleeves.

I could handle this. I cleared my throat and tried to act calm. “Um, Squid. I need to talk to you.”

“About the bathroom incident?” He pulled a detention slip out of his pocket. “Nice, huh? Your dad personally gave it to me.”

“Squid, I—”

He raised his hand. “Hold up and prepare to be a-mazed.”

Instinctively, I stepped backward, as I had seen Squid do this maneuver once before on the aspen tree by the soccer field. Actually, he tried it, like, eleven times, and then on the eleventh, he fell on his back. It looked
really
painful.

He zoomed toward his locker, but then suddenly stopped. “Sorry, it's my dumb backpack.” Squid glared at his orange backpack with its crazy assortment of stickers. Then he tossed if off, and it thwacked onto the ground. The two girls—I didn't know them that well—looked at each other, rolling their eyes as he tried it again, this time backing up farther so he could get a running start.

Squid sprinted faster and walked up even higher, landing harder on his rear. When he gazed at the muddy footprints, he gave a thumbs-up. It had been snowing a few days ago, but then it thawed, creating puddles of mud. And now that mud was on Squid's locker.

The girls tittered and strolled away.

Elio McMan, a chunky boy with a bowl haircut and wearing a
Star Trek
T-shirt, stared in admiration. “I think you're twenty inches from the top,” he lisped.

“Maybe, possibly,” said Gabriel Chowdry, a tall skinny guy with curly brown hair that stuck out like it had been shocked. He used his arm to measure the length of the muddy footprints. “But you can't be sure, since we don't have a measuring tape.”

Squid sat up, bounced over to the locker and patted his hands onto the mud-spattered locker. “Twelve and a half inches, dude.”

“Hey, Squid,” I said. “I seriously have to talk to you.” But he didn't hear me because he and his buddies were too busy arguing about how high up the footprints went on the locker.

“You don't know,” persisted Gabriel. “Not unless you measure it.”

“I can tell,” said Squid, putting his hand over his heart. “My hand is exactly eight inches tall.”

“My yo-yo string's exactly twenty-two inches. I could measure it with that.” Elio cupped the yo-yo, then released it and put the string against the door. “Uh-huh. Twenty and a half exactly.”

“Squid!” I practically shouted. This was not what I wanted. I did
not
want a scene. This was bad. “Squid!”

“You like my footprints? Want me to walk up your locker, Sophie?” This was SOOOOOOOOOOOO wrong. What was I thinking?

“That's okay,” I said, trying not to scream. I was smiling, in fact. Squid shouldn't see that I was annoyed. I was happy about this, really.

“Can we talk?” I said, keeping my voice even.

“Sorry.” Squid waved his hands in front of his face. “Whatever else I did to you. Sorry.”

“You don't have to apologize. I wanted to talk to you. About something. In private.”

“Private! She wants to talk in private!” yelled Elio, who was spinning his yo-yo around with his fingers so that it practically jumped off the string. “Ewwwww.”

“The digs chick me,” said Squid, grinning. Then Elio and Gabriel started slapping their thighs and shrieking just like two monkeys I saw in the Denver Zoo. Only those monkeys were way cuter.

Squid edged toward me. “What do you want to talk
about, huh? Huh?” He opened his lips so I could see the red braces railroading his teeth.

“I'd like to help you, Squid. I'd like to help you get on the Hot List.”
Ugh, did I really say that?

“Help me get onto the Hot List? Okay, now I know I'm really being punked.” He backed into his locker and mud from his footprints caked into his hair. “You didn't want to help me less than an hour ago. So I want to know why. Be honest.”

“Why? Now, that's a great question.”
Why? Because of Nia, that's why. Think happy thoughts.
I smiled like Peter Pan (who I used to have a crush on when I was six) was about to carry me off to Neverland, which would be a much better option than being here with Squid.

“Why do I want to help you? Because I want to prove something to someone who's extremely lame,” I said, which was the true part. “And you've got natural potential. The most of any guy in the school.” That was probably the hugest lie I'd ever told.

Elio and Gabriel were edging toward us. “Tell them to go away,” I urged. “This is strictly a private conversation.”

“But they're my bros.”

“Squid,” I warned.

“Shoo,” he said. “Dudes, go away.” They, unbelievably, did take a few steps back.

“I still don't get it,” said Squid. “You think I'm a freak.” He bugged out his eyes and pulled them down so I could see the whites. “Which I am.”

And he was happy about that fact, which I
so
did not get.

I smiled harder. “I like to pretend to be annoyed with you, but I'm so sure, with a little help, you'd get on the List. I seriously love doing makeovers and stuff.” Okay, that was an exaggeration. Back in fifth grade, Maddie and I did like to pretend to be models, and we would do runway shoots in my room with her dad's digital camera. But that was pretty much the extent of it.

“What's in it for you?”

“I get to prove that I know more about the Hot List than anyone else. Well, except for the Listmakers,” I said, shrugging.

“I get it, I think,” said Squid. “Maybe I'll do it.”

“I'll take that as a yes. But you can't tell anyone I'm helping you to get onto the Hot List. Got it?”

“What about them?” He flicked his eyes over to Elio and Gabriel, who had been progressively creeping closer to us.

“NO!” I boomed, and they both ducked like I was going to take a swing at them.

“But they're my friends.”

“This works much better if you can concentrate fulltime and not get distracted. If the entire school knows what we are up to, then it'll be much harder, trust me.”

“Aw, c'mon,” said Squid. “Please? Double please?”

“Squid,” Gabriel called from down the hall. “Elio's scrounging the dirt off your locker and making a beard with it.”

Elio grinned at us. He had smeared the dirt all over his face in some sort of third-grade approximation of a beard.

“See,” I said.

“You have a point,” said Squid.

S
ophie. J'ai faim!” says Squid, rubbing his hands together.
“Pour le kiss.”

I shut my eyes and scrunch up my face. “Never!”

“Calmez-vous,” says Madame Kearns, narrowing her eyes at me and putting her fingers to her lips.

Hayden, who sits three rows in front of me, turns around and laughs. My stomach clenches. He is not laughing at me. He is laughing at Squid. He can't be associating kiss and Sophie and Squid because I clearly said, “Never” and said it in English so there was no confusion.

—Nightmare French conversation dreamed by
Sophie Fanuchi

In fifth period my French teacher, Madame Kearns, who was as prim-looking as a porcelain doll, was firing questions at us about masculine and feminine nouns. She
wore an Eiffel Tower necklace and rocked on her little black flats that had ribbons at the toe, the colors of the French flag. “
Écoutez, le pain
or
la pain
?”

Pain
means bread but it's spelled exactly like pain, which was what I was in when I thought of all the work that I had to do with Squid in order to get him Hot List–ready.

“
Le
or
la
?” repeated Madame, with her hands clasped in front—fig-leaf position.

I raised my hand, and, of course, Maddie, my brainiac former best friend, was raising her hand higher.

So I stretched a little bit, and Maddie stretched a lot higher. Madame Kearns nodded at Maddie.
“Oui?”
She smiled tightly.

“Le pain,”
said Maddie. “Masculine.” Nia smiled at her approvingly as if she had just solved world peace and found the cure for cancer.

“Bravo,” said Madame. She turned to face the rest of us. “
Écoutez
, I want you to work with a partner, whomever is sitting across from you, and ask him or her about what they would like to eat for dinner.
D'accord?
”

I turned across the aisle to face my partner. That would be Squid. I wasn't sure whether this was good or bad.

Bon
or
mal
?

Mal
or
bon
?

He got a huge grin on his face. With his arm extended backward, Squid was rolling his pencil across his blank piece of paper. It was easy to see where he got his nickname, since he apparently was so flexible he didn't have any bones in his body.
“Bonjour, la partner,”
he boomed.

“Bonjour, le Squid,”
I said back.

“Remember to say
le pain
. Not
la
,” cautioned Madame Kearns.
“Répétez après moi: le pain.”

The whole class repeated in unison,
“Le pain.”

Then as we started working on our conversations, I noticed Nia and Maddie whispering together and glancing back at me.

I was finding it hard to concentrate on asking Squid what he wanted to eat given all of the Maddie/Nia giggles. As they loudly whispered, I could make out the words “shirt” and “so sad,” but that was it. Mostly, it was—laugh, laugh, laugh, and then stares back at me. I crunched down on my teeth as Squid fished his French textbook out of his backpack.

One more whisper did it. I whipped around and snapped at Maddie and Nia. “Shut up.”

“I'm not hearing
français
,” corrected Madame Kearns.

“Fermez la bouche,”
I said, which meant
shut up
, only in French.

Madame Kearns locked her fingers together and rocked forward on her heels. “Sophie, I appreciate you're speaking French, but that's not what I had in mind. So, pardon your French. I want you to turn around and talk to your partner, Henry.”

Madame Kearns happened to be the only teacher in the school who called Squid by his first name. I had even forgotten that his real name was Henry. Squid was so not a Henry.

Reluctantly I turned toward Squid, and he told me, in French, that he was hungry. “Sophie,
j'ai faim
.” Actually, it was more spitting than French because, as he exaggerated the
f
sound, spittle flew onto his bottom lip. He was also wiggling his body and patting his tummy. I think some sauce was coming off on his hand. The hand with the orange Magic Marker on it.

Then for a moment, he turned, and I saw
exactly
what Nia and Maddie must have been whispering about—Squid's T-shirt. It was bad enough that it was a Power Ranger one with some holes, but there was red sauce smeared all over the side shoulder and some on his back. Sometime between fourth and fifth period, he must have smacked into a pepperoni pizza. Reminder to self: introduce Squid to napkins.

Today I had on my brown hoodie. Underneath I had
on a baby doll T-shirt with straps that were definitely
not
two inches thick.

I had to give Squid my hoodie, so he could cover up his scary T-shirt.

No, I couldn't do that. Then I'd be wearing only spaghetti straps in the middle of class.

I turned away and kept on staring up at
The Little Prince
poster that Madame Kearns had behind her desk, which showed a weird little kid who lived by himself on a planet the size of a hot air balloon. Squid looked like an even weirder version of the little prince.

I had to do something about that.

Kids were staring at Squid, as the holes in his T-shirt appeared to have grown larger. And the sauce, saucier.

I had to save Squid from himself. From that shirt. From his crazy mullet hair, and teeth with food stuck in them. He needed to get off of his weird planet. I would introduce him to the concept of a haircut, of dental floss. It might be wise to ban stringy-type foods from his diet.

But I could at least start with the shirt.

“You so need my hoodie,” I stated to Squid as he contorted one of his legs in a strange position around the chair leg.

Madame Kearns, stood in front of the class, surveying all with her small French ears, which had earrings that
look like the Arc de Triumphe on them. “En
français
,” she corrected, glancing over at me. “Speak en
français
!” Jiggling her little gold charms, she placed her hands back into the fig leaf position.

I struggled in French to tell Squid that he needed my hoodie, but I managed something French-sounding and then said, “Le hoodie.”

Squid sat up, his eyes grew round and moist. “I
need
your hoodie?” He leaned forward, peering at my sweatshirt.

“En français!”
reminded Madame Kearns, who was rocking on her heels even faster. English words definitely upset her.

Squid also mumbled something French-sounding and then said something like,
“Le cool.”