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.

16

EVE

“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.