For as long as anyone can remember, the students of Mount Washington High have arrived at school on the last Monday in September to find a list naming the prettiest and the ugliest girl in each grade.
This year will be no different.
Roughly four hundred copies of the list currently hang in locations of varying conspicuousness. One is taped above the urinal in the first-floor boys’ bathroom, one covers the just-announced cast for the fall drama production of Pennies from Heaven, one is tucked between pamphlets for dating violence and depression in the nurse’s office. The list is affixed to locker doors, slipped inside classroom desks, stapled to bulletin boards.
The bottom right corner of each copy has been dimpled by an embossing stamp, leaving behind the scar of Mount Washington High rendered as a line drawing — before the indoor pool, the new gymnasium, and a wing of high-tech science labs were added. This stamp had certified every graduation diploma before it was stolen from the principal’s desk drawer decades ago. It is now a piece of mythic contraband used to discourage copycats or competitors.
No one knows for sure who authors the list each year, or how the responsibility is passed along, but secrecy has not impeded tradition. If anything, the guaranteed anonymity makes the judgments of the list appear more absolute, impartial, unbiased.
And so, with every new list, the labels that normally slice and dice the girls of Mount Washington High into a billion different distinctions — poseurs, populars, users, losers, social climbers, athletes, airheads, good girls, bad girls, girlie girls, guy’s girls, sluts, closet sluts, born-again virgins, prudes, over-achievers, slackers, stoners, outcasts, originals, geeks, and freaks, to name just a few — will melt away. The list is refreshing in that sense. It can reduce an entire female population down to three clear-cut groups.
Prettiest.
Ugliest.
And everyone else.
This morning, before the first homeroom bell, every girl at Mount Washington High will learn if her name is on the list or not.
The ones who aren’t will wonder what the experience, good or bad, might have been like.
The eight girls who are won’t have a choice.
Abby Warner strolls around the ginkgo tree, one hand drifting lazily over the thick calluses of bark. A breeze nips at her legs, bare between the hem of her corduroy skirt and her ballet flats. It is practically tights weather, but Abby will avoid wearing them for as long as she can stand the chill. Or until the last of her summer tan fades away. Whichever comes first.
The spot is known as Freshman Island. It is where the more popular ninth graders of Mount Washington assemble in the mornings and after school. During springtime, nearly everyone avoids Freshman Island because of the putrid smell of the pale orange ginkgo bulbs that thud swollen onto the ground, expelling a pungent gas. This is a fine arrangement, though, because by spring the freshmen will nearly be sophomores, and will avoid anything that might identify them as younger.
Abby’s parents dropped her and her older sister, Fern, off here what feels like hours ago, because Fern has some debate club thing. Or is it academic decathlon on Mondays? Abby yawns. She can’t remember which. Either way, these kinds of mornings suck, because Abby has to get up extra early to have time to shower, do her hair, and put together something cute to wear. She does it all without turning on the light, so as not to wake Fern, with whom she shares the largest bedroom in the Warner home. Meanwhile, Fern sleeps until the last possible minute because she has no morning routine to speak of, besides brushing her teeth and cycling through a rotation of jeans and boxy T-shirts.
This morning, Fern had proudly put on a new T-shirt that she’d bought online. It had an ornate crest printed on the chest, proclaiming allegiance to a rogue sect of warriors from The Blix Effect, a series of fantasy novels all of Fern’s friends are obsessed with. And in the car, Fern had asked Abby to give her two French braids, one on each side of her head, like the ones the female main character in The Blix Effect wears into battle.
Fern only ever wants Abby to give her two French braids, even though Abby can do a knot or an up-twist — hairstyles Abby feels are better, more sophisticated choices for her sixteen-year-old sister. But Abby never says no to Fern’s requests, even though she finds it weird that Fern wants to dress in what is essentially a costume, because the braids do make Fern look better, or at least like she cares a little bit about how she looks.
School buses and cars begin to appear. One by one, Abby is warmed by her friends’ hugs. They all spent the weekend sending pictures of potential dresses back and forth to one another for the homecoming dance on Saturday night. The dress Abby is completely in love with — a black satin halter with a thick white bow cinching the waist — is on hold in her size at a store in the mall. Her only hesitation is that none of her freshmen girlfriends seem to know how dressed up you’re supposed to get for high school dances that aren’t prom.
“Ooh! Lisa!” Abby says when her best friend, Lisa Honeycutt, comes walking over from the parking lot. “Did you show Bridget my homecoming dress? Does she think it’s too formal?”
Lisa throws one arm around Abby and pulls her in for a hug. “My sister said it’s perfect! Pretty and fun, but not in a trying-too-hard kind of way.”
Abby sighs with relief at having received Bridget’s approval. Abby and Lisa are the only two girls in their group of friends who have older sisters who also go to Mount Washington. Not that Abby’s Fern is any match for Lisa’s Bridget.
Abby had been invited to spend a week this past summer at Lisa’s vacation home at Whipple Beach. Thank god, otherwise her summer vacation would have consisted entirely of tagging along on Fern’s college visits.
During that week, Abby and Lisa snuck into Bridget’s bedroom to look around. They stuck their heads in Bridget’s closet. They found a few boys’ phone numbers hidden in Bridget’s sock drawer, and held her charm bracelet against their wrists. They tried on all of her makeup, which was perfectly arranged atop Bridget’s white wicker vanity. Abby had always dreamed of having a vanity, but there was no place for one.
Bridget mainly stayed by herself that week, texting her friends back home and reading a stack of books that she’d brought with her, and she only went to the beach with Abby and Lisa once for a couple of hours. But on the one rainy night, Bridget let them hang out with her in her bedroom. She curled their hair with her thick barrel iron and let them watch a corny old movie from the foot of her big fluffy bed. Abby and Lisa asked Bridget questions about what Mount Washington High was really like, and Bridget gave them lots of helpful, frank advice, like to be cautious when hooking up with older guys, to gossip only with the friends you completely trust, and how to hide the smell of liquor on your breath from your parents.
Fern, meanwhile, offered nothing beyond recommendations of which math teachers at Mount