The List (16 page)

argo hovers over the lunch table, casting a shadow on her empty seat. She hates that it suddenly feels like she needs an invitation to sit with her friends. As if her chair is now reserved for Jennifer.

Rachel and Dana don’t look up from their cups of yogurt. They just peel the lids back and quietly stir them, plastic spoons swirling in unison, the thick white cream slowing turning pink.

Margo sets her tray down and takes her seat. She thinks about giving her friends the silent treatment back. But she is too angry not to say something.

“Is Jennifer going to be joining us for lunch today?” she asks.

Dana says, “She’s either in the library or still talking to Principal Colby.”

“What about?”

“Why do you care?” Rachel asks, finally making eye contact with her. “Unless you’re nervous.”

The boys arrive. Matthew, Justin, and Ted. They slap down their trays.

Margo narrows her eyes and whispers, “Why would
I
be nervous?”

Dana leans over and whispers back, “People are starting to wonder if maybe you were the one to make the list. And now you’re pissed off that it’s backfiring. Because Jennifer might win homecoming queen instead of you.”

“Are you guys serious?” Margo struggles to keep her voice low. She doesn’t want the guys, Matthew mostly, to hear this conversation. “Is that what Jennifer is telling people? That
I
made the list?”

“No,” Dana says. “It’s only some people talking.”

Some people.
Margo wonders how many people equaled
some people
. Was Matthew one of them? She’s never had to worry about the things other people said about her, because the things people said about her were nice things, were compliments.

“And just so you know, Jennifer hasn’t said anything bad about you to us.” Rachel shares a look with Dana before adding, “In fact, she thinks you’re helping us with the whole ‘Vote Queen Jennifer’ idea. And … that you invited her to your party tomorrow.”

Margo shakes her head. “No. No. No.”

“I don’t understand you, Margo,” Rachel says. “I thought you didn’t care about being homecoming queen. I thought you said it was no big deal.”

“I
don’t
care about being homecoming queen,” Margo says. She says this part loud, so Matthew will hear. Even though a part of her still does care, despite everything, she feels compelled to hide it like a guilty secret. She can’t let go of what she’d hoped would happen the minute she heard she’d made the list: that she’d be the homecoming queen, and Matthew would be homecoming king. They’d have their dance, and he’d finally see her the way she’d always hoped he would. As someone he wanted to be with.

Dana tilts her head to the side. “Then why are you trying to sabotage Jennifer’s chance at winning?”

“I’m not trying to sabotage anything. I think it’s embarrassing
to basically beg people to vote for her. I wish you two would stop pretending that homecoming queen is a grand, benevolent prize that you guys are bestowing on Jennifer.”

Rachel cuts her off. “First off, we’re not begging. We’re
campaigning
to make up for the fact that she’s been told she’s the ugliest girl in school for the last four years straight. Don’t you think Jennifer deserves one night of feeling beautiful? After everything she’s gone through?”

Margo chooses her words carefully. “I know that you guys think you’re doing a nice thing, but let’s be honest. There’s not one person who’ll be voting for Jennifer because they think she’s pretty. It’s either a big joke, to get the ugliest girl up on that stage, or people who want to give themselves a nice big pat on the back and feel better about treating Jennifer like crap all these years.”

Dana laughs. “You mean like you have, Margo?”

Margo can’t believe her friends are going to go there. “Are you saying I can’t decide who I want to be friends with and who I don’t?”

“Of course you can. But everyone knows why, Margo.”

Margo takes a big sip of her milk. It is lukewarm and the cardboard container has a funny smell, but she keeps drinking it down. Once it is all gone, she says, “Okay. I’m not going to lie and say that how Jennifer looked didn’t have something to do with it. It did.” She lets this hang in the air for a few seconds, since some of the pressure to drop Jennifer had come directly from Rachel and Dana. Had they conveniently forgotten that part? Or maybe it was their own guilty consciences spurring their plan along. “But that wasn’t the only reason.”

Margo takes a deep breath and tries to clear her mind, which is suddenly all muddy with feelings and thoughts that she’d kept buried, that she didn’t want to think about. “Jennifer … she used to make me feel bad about myself.”

She steels herself for Rachel and Dana to react, because Margo knows it sounds crazy. How could Jennifer have any power over her? She was the one who left Jennifer. She chose to end the friendship. She walked away.

Dana gently pats her on the shoulder. “We know. And now this is your chance to make things right. To clear your conscience.”

Margo wrinkles up.

Clearly, the girls have misheard her.

Or had she misspoken?

What she’d meant was that those bad feelings were there
before
she’d ended her friendship with Jennifer. Not something she’d felt after it was over. In fact, looking back, when Margo was friends with Jennifer, she felt like an entirely different person. Insecure. Awkward. Nervous. All those things went away after her friendship with Jennifer ended.

“What’s going to happen after the dance, huh? Are you guys still going to be hanging out? Inviting her to my parties?” Margo already knows the answer, of course. They’d drop Jennifer. And honestly, she can’t wait for it to happen. For the homecoming dance, for everything, to be over. “Maybe it was
you
guys who made the list. And now
you
feel guilty about it.”

“Do you think we did?” Rachel asks, dead serious.

“Do you think
I
did?” Margo answers back, just as intensely.

Dana gets between them. “We know you’re a good person, Margo. And that’s why you need to listen to us.”

“You’re the only one who can come out looking really, really bad here. We’re trying to protect you.” Rachel nudges her chin down the table at Matthew. The boys, all of them, have their heads down. But Margo knows they are listening.

“Don’t let your pride screw this up.”

“Come on, Margo. Let Jennifer go to your party.”

Margo wants to keep arguing, but she is tired. And anyway, it’s not like she really has a choice. Barring canceling the party altogether, Jennifer will be there. Jennifer wouldn’t pass this opportunity up.

arah lifts her arms and arches her back in a deep stretch. Not because she is sore, or tired, or anything like that. She fakes a yawn for the hell of it, mainly because Principal Colby’s office is way too quiet. And also because her breath is just as bad as, if not worse than, her B.O.

She can almost see it, a smog floating out from the armpits of her filthy black shirt and her open mouth, skimming the top of Principal Colby’s tidy desk. Principal Colby lifts her teacup to her mouth and breathes in the steam as she takes a small sip. Sarah bites her lip to keep from laughing. It’s hilarious watching Principal Colby try to pretend like Sarah isn’t as ripe as the Freshman Island ginkgo tree will be in the springtime. Principal Colby doesn’t even set the teacup back down on her desk. She holds it under her nostrils and says, “There have been some complaints, Sarah.”

Sarah is not surprised. She’d spent the day participating in her classes like never before. Volunteering to every question, her hand rocketing skyward again and again and again, unleashing her scent on the room. Teachers caught on quickly, and they tried their best to ignore her. But that didn’t stop Sarah from raising her hand. In fact, it only encouraged her. She didn’t give a shit if she got called on or not.

Sarah is quiet for a minute. She tries to appear contemplative, scratching her dirty fingernail across her cheek, filling the underside with a paste of dead skin. “I’m not sure I understand
what you mean, Principal Colby.” The smart-ass tone adds extra bite to her breath.

To think, she’d nearly given up this morning in a moment of weakness.

When Sarah sat down to cereal, her mom offered her a hundred dollars cash to shower, fifty dollars if she put on different clothes. Sarah’s cover for her behavior was that this was an experiment for a school project, which wasn’t even
that
much of a lie, and she stuck to her story.
Do you want me to fail, Mom?
Sarah laughed into her OJ and took a big sip.

It startled her that the juice had practically no taste. It could have been water, for all she could tell.

Sarah went up to the bathroom, opened her mouth, and stuck out her tongue. It was covered in a thick, fuzzy film. Like dense forest moss, the kind that covered the rocks of Mount Washington. Only this moss was the color of a dead body — pale and sickly gray.

Her toothbrush hung right there, over the sink. Right. There. It tempted her worse than cigarettes had so far this week. She closed her eyes, ran her tongue over her slimy teeth, and dreamed of how it would feel to foam everything up with some bright blue minty toothpaste. And mouthwash, too. It would probably burn like acid in the best way, sizzling the grit off her teeth and her gums. She’d spit it all into the bright white porcelain sink like wet sand. At least her insides could be a bright, healthy pink again.

She backed up from the mirror and turned out the bathroom light. She couldn’t quit. Not now. Not when she was this close.

But before walking out, Sarah grabbed the dental floss from inside the medicine cabinet. She ripped a few inches of waxy white string and scraped it down the length of her tongue, raking the film up off the muscle like someone shoveling slushy snow off a sidewalk. The act didn’t make her feel any better. If anything, it made things worse. She’d removed the barrier that kept her from knowing what the inside of her mouth tasted like.

Sarah wishes Principal Colby would get on with it. She wants to go back to class. She’s missing a Bio II review. She’s about to say as much when there’s a knock at the office door.

Sarah twists in her seat. Milo stands nervously in the doorway. They lock eyes and she sees the disappointment drag on his face. Red hives have already begun to speckle his neck.

“You wanted to see me, Principal Colby?” he asks weakly.

“Take a seat, Milo,” Principal Colby says.

Sarah knows her mouth is hanging open, and she doesn’t care to shut it. Why has Milo been called down to the office, too? He’s not involved with her plans. He isn’t even her accomplice. This rebellion is
her
doing. And she’ll be glad to take the credit for it, thank you very much.

Principal Colby clears her throat. “Sarah, I’m going to cut right to the chase here. Why are you doing this?”

Sarah cocks her head. “Doing what?”

“I’m concerned, Sarah. I’m concerned about you.” Principal Colby gives her a pleading look. “This isn’t healthy. You’re leaving yourself open to infection, not to mention that you can’t be comfortable in those clothes.”

Sarah’s not comfortable. But that hardly matters. She gives them both a phony smile.

“Milo, please. I know you care about Sarah. I see you together every day. You don’t want to see her torture herself like this, do you?”

Milo looks at Sarah with sad eyes and his lips part, like he might say something. Like he might actually beg her to give this up. Sarah stares back hard. As hard as she can. A stare that says
Don’t you fucking dare
.

Principal Colby leans back in her chair. She is not amused. “I’m going to ask you both one simple question.” Her eyes dart from Sarah to Milo and back again. “Are you planning any sort of stunt for the homecoming dance? I know you have both bought tickets.”

“No. I swear, I’m not,” Milo says emphatically.

Sarah shakes her head as well. “Of course I’m not,” she says, though she knows it doesn’t sound all that believable.

“I hope you both are being honest with me right now. I want to make this perfectly clear: If you
do
cause any sort of disruption, there will be serious consequences. I will not hesitate to suspend both of you.”

Milo looks like he’s about to shit himself, but Sarah curls her upper lip. She finds it funny, in the unfunny way her sense of humor typically skews, that Principal Colby wants so desperately to protect the homecoming institution. There was none of this vigor, this effort, put behind finding who actually made the list. You know, cutting the thing off at the source, like Principal Colby had pledged to work tirelessly for during Monday’s meeting. But all Sarah has to do is skip a shower or five and suddenly
she
might get suspended?

They get dismissed. Sarah follows Milo out into the hallway.

“She can’t do that, you know. She can’t suspend me for not taking a fucking shower.” When she looks up, she sees that Milo is already halfway down the hall. “Milo! Wait up.”

“I have to get to class,” he says, and keeps walking.

“Why are you being so bitchy?” She grabs his arm, forces him to slow down.

“Because I just got called into the principal’s office. I’ve never been called into the principal’s office before.”

She groans. “It’s not a big deal.”

“It is to me. And I’m not sure I want to go to the dance anymore.”

Even though Sarah hadn’t wanted Milo to come from the beginning, it pisses her off that he suddenly wants to bail on her. “Why? Because I’m not going to be in a pretty dress? Because you’re embarrassed to be seen with me? Because I don’t want a corsage like Annie would?”

He wraps his arms around himself, that defensive posture he had on his first day of school. “What does Annie have to do with anything?”

“I feel bad for you. You had this beautiful girlfriend in your old town, and now you’re slumming it with me. I’d be depressed if I were you, too.”

“I don’t get why you’re acting like this.”

“Do you remember on Monday when you said
the so-called pretty girls are the ugly ones
? Well, you obviously don’t believe that if you dated a girl like Annie.”

“Yeah, Annie was pretty, but that’s not the only reason why I liked her.”

“Oh! You guys were soul mates, then?”

“Shut up, Sarah. She was nice, okay? Which is more than I can say for how you’ve been treating me lately. I’m not going to get suspended because you’ve got an ax to grind. I never wanted to go to the dance in the first place. I hate dances.”

“
I
hate dances,” Sarah says back, her voice rising.

“So why the fuck are we going?” It isn’t a scream, but it definitely is the loudest Milo has ever spoken to her. His voice is stretched thin, frayed. He drops his head back as far as it will go. “I think this whole thing is a stupid idea.”

“I don’t care what you think.”

“I know. That’s sort of how we operate. You’re the one who gets to call all the shots, have all the opinions. But I’m telling you anyway. This. Is. Stupid.”

“You think I’m having fun, Milo?” She picks up some strands of her oily hair and lets them fall. They are heavy with grease. “You think this feels good?”

“Not really! Especially if your stank is any indication.”

Sarah takes a step back. Her legs feel unsteady. In a way, she knows she’s been testing him. Making sure, before she let herself completely fall for him. She realizes this now, as he fails. Fails miserably.

Sarah quickly puffs back up. “Screw you, Milo. You know what? Don’t go to the dance with me. See if I give a shit!”

Sarah’s not sure if Milo hears her. He’s already stormed off. Down the hall, around the corner. Gone.

If she wants to do this, she’ll need to not think about Milo, about Principal Colby, about anyone. She’ll just need to push through. And that is something Sarah is good at.