“Please get to the part where I’m supposed to understand.”

“Okay, okay, fine. Then, in the end of the poem, it says, How dreary to be somebody. How public, like a frog. To tell one’s name, the livelong June, to an admiring bog … Get it?”

Nessa giggled. “Huh? A bog? Nope. Don’t get it at all. Aw. I love my weird little bookworm.” She leaned in to Eve, and they folded into each other for a moment with the perfect ease and comfort of best friends since kindergarten.

But Eve broke out of their embrace.

“Don’t you understand? I was ‘Nobody,’ but I’m … ‘Somebody’ now! And that’s … well, a problem!”

Nessa just stared at her.

“My name will be called out all day to the bog? Like, the school is the bog? Get it…?”

Nessa began to say something, but rising voices from the popular table stopped her.

“Aw, come on, cheer up, you got silver!” Brody Dixon yelled over a half-dozen heads toward Sophie Kane.

“What did you say?” Sophie responded, her eyes furious slits.

“Man, what an Ice Queen…,” Nessa murmured to Eve.

“Silver medal!” Brody continued. “A place on the podium! So why the long face?”

“The face is the problem,” Caleb Rhines quipped from Brody’s side.

The boys cackled. Except for one, Eve noticed. He just sat there, eating his food. He looked up, and their eyes met, and she felt her face flush. He’d caught her in a full-on stare. Whoops.

“Who’s the one with the glasses again?” Eve turned to Nessa.

“Winston Byrd, I think? Wins all the science awards.” Nessa shook her head, still watching the popular table. “It’s so stupid. Because Sophie is so obviously pretty. Who cares, anyway?”

“Which part do you think is stupid? Sophie being upset about the list or Brody being a Malfoy about it?”

“Malfoy” was the word they’d been using for “jerk” ever since they’d read Harry Potter together in second grade.

“Both, obviously.”

Within a flash, as if nothing had been said, Brody picked up his tray and slid in by Sophie. He rustled her blond hair, and she smacked his arm in mock anger. Brody’s constant followers, Caleb, Tariq, and Aidan, each slid in between pairs of Sophies. Winston stayed where he was.

Popular kids were so confusing.

Hollers, sobs, and jeers bounced off the walls of the auditorium.

When Principal Yu finally quieted the entire eighth grade down, sniffles could still be heard.

“I’ve called you all here today to discuss an act of extreme disrespect. I will admit that I am truly saddened by this incident,” Principal Yu began, the school’s disappointed parent.

Eve and Nessa sat in the second-to-last row with all three-hundred-and-something kids. Eve rested her forehead on her hand to draw zero attention to herself. But despite this effort, Curtis Milford bent into the space between Eve’s and Nessa’s ears and whispered, “Who put you as number one, anyway? You wrote the list yourself, huh?”

Eve winced at the closeness of his voice.