An older boy passes the girls as they enter the cafeteria. “Hey! Dan the Man!” he says, and slaps Danielle on the back.
“Was he talking to you?” Hope asks.
Danielle is too startled to react. She tries to get a look at the boy’s face to see if maybe she knows him, but he disappears as quickly as he arrived. “Um … no clue.”
The girls continue over to the vending machine. The entire glass front is covered over by papers. Danielle assumes it’s an overzealous school club desperate for members until she pulls a sheet down and reads it.
Dan the Man?
Ugliest?
A cramp spreads inside her, contracting each and every muscle.
To be called ugly is one thing. Of course Danielle has heard the insult before. Is there a girl in the world who hasn’t? And while she certainly isn’t happy about it, ugly is something people say about each other, and say about themselves, without even thinking. The word is so generic, it’s almost meaningless.
Almost.
But the Dan the Man thing is different. That hurts, even though Danielle knows she isn’t a particularly girlie girl. Wearing dresses makes her feel weird, as if she’s in a costume, pretending to be someone else. She only puts makeup on for the weekends, and even then only a little bit of gloss and maybe mascara. She’s never had her ears pierced because she’s deathly afraid of needles.
But Danielle still has all the essential girl parts. Boobs. Long hair. A boyfriend.
Hope rips down a list of her own and sucks in a big breath, the way she usually does before plunging underwater. “Oh, no, Danielle … What is this thing?”
Danielle doesn’t answer. Instead, she stares at her reflection in the newly exposed square of vending machine glass. She hadn’t had time to shower this morning, so she just threw her hair up in a bun. A haze of short brown strands spike up around her hairline. It shouldn’t surprise her — bits of broken hair fill the inside of her swim cap after every practice — but it does. She tries to smooth them down with a suddenly clammy hand, but the strands pop right back up. She pulls off her elastic and shakes out her hair. It is dry and dull from chlorine and doesn’t move like normal hair should. It suddenly looks to Danielle like a bad wig.
Danielle turns away from her reflection. She sees that the lockers outside the cafeteria also have papers taped to them. She chokes out, “Hope, I think these lists are hanging all over school.”
Without further discussion, the two girls leave the cafeteria, split apart, and begin running, one on either side of the hallway. They tear down every copy of the list they pass.
Though Danielle is glad for something physical to do, it is also her second sprint of the morning without any breakfast. She searches deep down inside for the strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other, like a straw rooting around the bottom of a soda can. She makes it to the end of the hallway, and then runs smack into Andrew, who’s standing with a few other sophomore guys from the football team.
Including Chuck.
“Yo! It’s Dan!” Chuck calls out in a deeper-than-usual voice. “Dan the Man!”
The boys stare at her and laugh.
They’ve seen the list.
Which means that Andrew has seen it, too.
“Come on, Andrew,” another boy says, giving him a big shove in her direction. “Go give Dan a kiss!”
“Yeah! We support gay rights!” shouts Chuck.
Andrew laughs good-naturedly. But as he walks toward Danielle and away from his friends, his smile slips into a look of concern. He leads her into a stairwell. “Are you okay?” he asks, careful to keep his voice quiet.
“Not bad, considering the sex change operation I apparently had last night,” Danielle says, a desperate joke to break the tension. Neither of them laugh. She holds up the copies of the list she’s torn down. “What is this thing, Andrew?”
“It’s a stupid tradition. It happens every year at the start of homecoming week.”
She stares at him. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
Andrew runs his hands through his hair. It is still light from the summer, but his roots are growing in darker. “Because I never thought you’d be on it, Danielle.”
This makes her feel better, but not much. “Do you know who wrote it?” Danielle doesn’t have a ton of friends, but as far as she knows, she doesn’t have any enemies, either. For the life of her, she can’t think of one person who would hate her enough to do something this mean.
Andrew glances at the copies of the list in her hands and quickly shakes his head. “No, I don’t. And look, Danielle — you can’t go running around tearing these things down. These lists are everywhere. The whole school knows about it. There’s nothing you can do.”
Danielle remembers the boy who slapped her back in the cafeteria, the heat from his hand on her spine. She doesn’t want to do the wrong thing. She doesn’t want to embarrass herself any more than what is already happening. “I’m sorry,” she says, because that’s how she feels. For many reasons. “Tell me what to do.”
Andrew rubs her arm. “People will want to see you looking upset. They’ll want to see you react. Everyone still talks about this girl Jennifer Briggis and how she freaked when she got put on the list her freshman year. Trust me — doing the wrong thing now could ruin the rest of high school for you.”
Danielle’s chest gets tight. “This is crazy, Andrew. I mean, this is crazy.”
“It’s a big mind game. It’s like we tell the kids at camp: If you pretend like the teasing doesn’t bother you, it will eventually stop. So don’t give anyone the satisfaction of seeing you upset. You need to be stone cold.” He anchors his eyes on hers. “Game Face. Okay?”
She bites her lip and nods, fighting back tears. She knows Andrew can see them, but thankfully he pretends not to. Apparently, he has his Game Face on, too.
Danielle takes a second to compose herself and follows Andrew out of the stairwell, though a few steps behind.
Hope stands in the middle of the hallway looking around in a panic. She spots Danielle and rushes over. “Hurry up, Danielle. I grabbed every copy in this hall and in the science wing. Let’s go check near the gym.” She gives Danielle a huge hug and whispers, “Don’t worry. I swear on my life that we’re going to find out who did this and make sure they get what they deserve.”
“Forget it, Hope,” Danielle says. She drops the copies she’s holding into a trash can.
“What? What do you mean?” Hope turns around to glance at Andrew, who has rejoined his friends. “What did Andrew say?”
“Don’t worry. He said all the right things.” Which is how Danielle feels, without question.
“What the f?”
Though it’s posed as a question, the three words aren’t delivered like one, with the last syllable ticking up to a higher, uncertain pitch. And yet Candace Kincaid is clearly confused by the copy of the list taped to her locker door.
She