“I just thought it would be fun,” Claudia answers. “Unless you’re too busy with your man.”
“No, not too busy,” I answer, blushing, but just a little. It’s getting easier for me to talk about Seth with my friends. Since his public display of Sharpie affection on Valentine’s Day, we are definitely an item at East Rockport High. And the highs I’m getting from our relationship (making out, hanging out, making out, hanging out) are enough to dull the mix of anger and sadness I feel when I think about how Principal Wilson managed to stomp out Moxie in one threat-filled assembly.
So the first Friday in March finds Lucy, Sara, Meg, Kaitlyn, and me huddled in Claudia’s bedroom, listening to music and eating chocolatey, salty snacks while Lucy puts temporary tattoos on our hands and all of us discuss the latest gossip.
“You know, this is way fun,” Meg says, peering at her temporary tattoo of Wonder Woman. “It’s been forever since we did something like this.”
“It reminds me of that slumber party scene in the movie Grease,” says Kaitlyn. “Let’s do mud masks.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” Lucy mutters, and we all laugh. Claudia laughs the loudest. For a moment we are this perfect bubble of girl happiness and nothing can mess with it.
Until Sara stops scrolling through her phone and says, quite plainly, “Oh, shit. March Madness.”
March Madness. How could I forget?
“Let me see,” says Kaitlyn, scooting over to peer at Sara’s screen.
“What is March Madness?” Lucy asks, frowning. “You mean like the college basketball thing?”
“No, not like the college basketball thing,” Sara says with a sigh.
And so, sitting in a loose circle, we take turns filling Lucy in. March Madness at East Rockport is, in fact, inspired by the college basketball championship because it involves brackets and competition, but that’s the only similarity. It’s so gross that I half expect Lucy to break a window or scream in rage. But she just sits there as we tell her about this charming East Rockport High tradition.
Tradition implies something of value being repeated, I guess, but East Rockport High’s March Madness is empty of anything resembling values—not any decent ones, anyway. It’s a system of brackets with sixty-four junior and senior girls, about a quarter of the girls in each class. The rest aren’t included because they’re not deemed ballot-worthy. The brackets are created by the upperclassmen guys who rule the school—the jocks and the popular guys. The Mitchell Wilsons of our world. Over the course of a couple of weeks, they use some complicated system of voting and personal testimony to pit girls against each other as the brackets lead to one girl in the junior or senior class. The final girl is referred to—casually and frequently—as East Rockport’s Most Fuckable.
And the boys share everything online. Every bracket update and every girl’s name.
Lucy eyes Sara’s phone. I expect her to start raging as only Lucy can, but she just shrugs her shoulders.
“What can you expect from this place?” she says. “I need more Doritos.” She crawls away from Sara’s phone and digs her hand into a blue Tupperware bowl full of chips. There’s something about the defeated way she says it that makes me feel half like crying and half like raging myself.
“Claudia, look, you’re on it!” Sara gasps, using her fingers to enlarge the picture.
“What?” Claudia asks, but we all can see it’s true. Claudia’s made the first bracket. The only one of all of us who has. She blushes, and I wonder if she’s thinking about Mitchell in the hallway before Christmas break. I wonder how much that gross incident affected her placement.
“Remember when we were freshmen?” Meg asks. “We wanted to be on it. And we were jealous of the older girls who were.”
“Yeah,” says Claudia, like she’s trying to recall it.
“And now?” I ask, eyeing Claudia carefully.
Claudia just shrugs. “It’s gross. But I’m not going to lie. Now it’s like I’m tempted to check it. To see if I’m advancing or not.”
“That’s fucked up,” Lucy says from over by the Doritos. I tense up, but Claudia just looks at her and nods.
“Yeah, it is,” she says.
“We could make a pact,” I say. “That we’re not going to look at it again?”
Kaitlyn shakes her head. “That’s only going to work if we all agree to bury our phones in Claudia’s backyard and stay off the Internet for the next month. You can’t escape it.” I know Kaitlyn’s right, so I don’t respond. The only sound is Lucy chomping on her Doritos.
“Hey,” says Claudia, finally breaking the silence. “I think my mom has an old bottle of red wine hidden in the kitchen that she’s forgotten about. Everyone’s asleep. Do you want to see if we can find it?”
“Yes, please,” says Lucy. “Red wine goes well with fake cheese, or so I hear.”
In no time we are sipping wine out of flowered juice glasses and laughing at our red-stained lips and teeth, and everything’s okay again, but the truth is that the March Madness brackets never leave my mind, not really. The picture on Sara’s phone has burrowed its way into my brain, and the idea of the girls of East Rockport being measured and ranked and compared on nothing more than their asses and breasts and faces makes it difficult to fall asleep, even after all the other girls—including Lucy—are sleeping peacefully around me, their light snores punctuating the quiet.
*
Later that week as I’m walking toward school, shuffling formulas I need to know for an upcoming math quiz through my mind, I spot Kiera Daniels sitting on the stoop of the school’s side entrance, fooling around with her phone. It’s still pretty early, and there aren’t many other students around. The sky is overcast, and it’s chilly, too.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she answers, peering up at me. “What’s up?”
I shrug. “Not much. What about you?”
Kiera shakes her head. “Just looking at this March Madness thing.”
I exhale. “Yeah.”
“I’m on it,” Kiera says flatly, holding the phone out toward me as if I need proof.
I think maybe it’s okay for me to sit down next to her, so I do, the cold cement of the stoop seeping through my jeans.
“Should I say … congrats?” I ask, uncertain. But Kiera just scowls.
“It’s stupid,” she announces. “It’s totally fucked on multiple levels.”
“I know,” I say, glad to be able to talk about it. “But it’s just this … this thing that happens. And nobody questions it.”
Kiera doesn’t answer. Just bites her bottom lip and stares at her phone again before clicking it off and tossing it into her backpack.
“You know what’s so infuriating to me?” Kiera says. “My boyfriend actually thinks it’s cool I got picked. Like it makes him cooler, which is just gross. And what’s also gross is it’s always a white girl who wins, anyway. And all the girls who aren’t white get pissed about it and it’s like, wait, isn’t it screwed up that anyone wins this bullshit in the first place?”