“That’s true,” Liv agreed. Liv, number six, was the smartest of the Sophies. Her long box braids perfectly framed a heart-shaped face.

“Whatever, I’m heading in to homeroom.” Sophie flipped her hair to land behind her back. “Ignore this,” she commanded to the teary-eyed girls. Crying bothered Sophie. A lot.

But Sophie didn’t head to homeroom. As she neared the door to it, she dashed into the bathroom instead, running into the final stall. Some girls were hiding in there. She could hear nose blowing. Sophie wasn’t a hider like them. She just needed a moment alone. She lifted her feet onto the porcelain.

Eve Hoffman? Number one? The quiet girl, her face always in a book, who lurked around the theater kids? Sophie Kane, number two?

It didn’t make any sense!

Sophie’s mom always said, “Don’t ever let anyone think you’re less than.”

And she never did.

So how could she be number two? How had this happened?

What would people think? What would Brody Dixon think?

Whoever was in the stall next to her sounded like she was at the beginning of a panic attack. She could hear the hurried breath, and it reminded her of a mouse, and how their hearts beat hundreds of times a minute.

People were so weak.

Sophie, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest, stuffed her tears deep down inside. She placed them in the same spot she parked the image of her increasingly empty mailbox, which each month received fewer and fewer postcards from her dad, and the exhaustion she felt in the mornings, when it took everything in her to pull out a hair dryer and start the day.

No. Tears.

She whipped out her mirror. It had a crack in the upper corner that distorted the image of her perfectly plucked right eyebrow. She pulled out her magenta lipstick. It was down to its last little bit, and she silently cursed. She could feel the cold metal edges of the tube’s rim as she painted it onto her mouth. When she got home, she’d scrape out the last bits and put them in a little baggie, a trick her mom taught her. Then it would last a few more days.

Sophie smacked her lips together, put her wedges onto the floor, took a breath, and walked out.

She would find out who wrote this list. And she’d destroy them. She’d make them a joke. She’d get a new list written. She’d ensure she was number one. She’d never, ever let anyone see her as “less than.”

3

EVE

“They say,” Nessa gossiped to Eve over lunch as they huddled together at a corner table, “that Lara Alexander went home in tears.”

“She’s not on the list?” Eve asked. Seeing Nessa’s look, Eve explained, “I haven’t looked at the whole thing. I couldn’t. But that’s weird!”

Even Eve knew that Lara Alexander was remarkably well dressed, and Eve hardly noticed that stuff. Plus, her dad was the first African American president of the hospital. There had been all these announcements about it in the paper a couple of years back. Her mom wrote cookbooks. Famous ones. Her sister was the most popular girl in the high school. Lara seemed like someone who should be included in everything.