“Lay. Everyone loves you. And if they don’t, screw them,” I said. Then I texted her Y.O.E.
It was a code we’d had since middle school that we’d say to each other all the time. You Over Everyone. It was the answer to almost every question we could come up with to test our loyalty to one another.
Who would you want next to you in a jail cell?
Who would you want to take down zombies with during the apocalypse?
Who would you save in a fire?
You over everyone.
She grinned, grabbed my hand, and said, “Though she be b-b-b-but little, my b-b-bestie is fierce,” stealing a phrase from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I’ve always wanted to embody. I grinned and pretended to dust off my shoulder.
And then the elevator doors opened.
* * *
—
Valeria’s apartment was packed. There were a ton of kids I recognized right away from our school, but there were lots of people we didn’t know pressed against the walls and bouncing to music in her kitchen. It was clear right away that most of them were rising juniors and seniors, and that we were some of the youngest people there. I got a panicky feeling in the pit of my stomach almost immediately. Sensing it, Layla looped her arm through mine and pulled me farther inside.
The girls in chorus were sitting on couches around a coffee table in the living room—prime real estate at a party like this one. But before I could point them out to Layla, a song we both loved started to play. We started singing out loud from our quiet corner of the party, like we were back in Layla’s bedroom, worries about the party and impressing the chorus girls nearly forgotten. We were laughing and shouting right in each other’s faces when a tall white girl who I’d never seen before walked up to us. I stopped, but Layla’s eyes were closed so she was still belting out lyrics at the top of her lungs in her clear, effortlessly pretty voice.
“You need to join chorus!” the girl sort of shouted when Layla paused for a breath. Layla’s eyes popped open and she looked at me, and then at the girl, clearly a little embarrassed.
“What?” she asked.
The girl had long red hair that was pinned back on one side, revealing an earlobe pierced by two tiny gold hoops. There was another hoop through her right nostril. Her eyes were the green of hard pears, her cheeks the mottled pink of soft peaches. She had just a dusting of freckles (while I had a little over a million), and she was wearing a short denim dress that I instantly wanted.
“You really think I’m g-g-g-good enough?” Layla asked.
The girl smiled wide, showing her braces. “Are you kidding? Your voice is kind of unbelievable.” She seemed completely unfazed by Layla’s stutter, which made me love her for a second. She didn’t even blink.
Layla looked over at me again, and I smiled and nodded, because I’d been telling her the same thing for forever. I pushed my glasses further up my nose.
“I’m Layla Hassan,” Layla said to the girl. “And, this is C-C-Cl-Cleo B-B-Baker.” Layla normally hated saying my name because it’s so difficult for her (she was always more fluent with soft sounds than the hard ones).
I grinned. “Hey,” I said quietly.
“I’m Sloane Sorenson,” the girl said. “Valeria’s cousin. I just moved in here, with her, my aunt, and uncle. I’m gonna be starting at Chisholm in the fall.”
“That’s awesome!” Layla replied a little too enthusiastically. Her mouth hung open for a second before she was able to continue. “And you’re g-gonna b-b-be in chorus?”
“That’s the plan,” Sloane replied. “You know Valeria and everyone else, right?”
“I kinda know Valeria, b-b-but nobody else,” Layla said, and before I could react, Sloane was pulling her away.
I stood there awkwardly for a second, wanting to follow but feeling a bit like I wasn’t invited. Then Layla looked back at me. Come on, she mouthed. I grinned and followed her.
THE CHORUS GIRLS
In the living room, the chorus girls were laughing.
Sloane introduced Layla to everyone, and then Layla introduced me. Sloane sat in the center and pulled Layla down beside her.
Valeria smiled at me, but the other girls just kept talking. I stood there for a second until Layla said, “You-y-you mind scooting over for C-Cleo?” They did, a bit begrudgingly, and I squeezed in. But my hips aren’t small, so it wasn’t the most comfortable seating arrangement. And I was right on the edge, barely a part of them at all.
Though the chorus was much larger than these five girls, I learned over the next twenty minutes that they were the most popular. They were the five you wanted to impress if you were going to successfully infiltrate the theater kids clique, and they were the queens of the Shirley Chisholm Charter Girls Chorus.
Dark-haired twins, Cadence and Melody York, were sitting dead center telling a story about some new boy they’d just met. “He’s gorgeous,” one was saying. “He just moved here from Atlanta,” said the other. They were pale and petite and pretty, sopranos who never did solos, only duets, and the biggest gossips in school. They knew everything and they told everyone, and the only thing they cared about more than the latest rumors was music.
Sage Robertson had skin the color of gingerbread and long, relaxed hair. She was a mezzo-soprano, though she bragged that she could go lower. “I have range,” she assured us (though I had no clue what mezzo-soprano meant), and then she started talking about a concert she’d seen by a band I’d never heard of. Layla knew them, though. Sage was poised and measured in everything she said, maybe seeming more so as she sat next to the twins, who bounced and squealed and tossed their hair when they talked about anything. I could imagine her in Paris smoking a cigarette, or at a gallery talking about art with college students. I felt like a little kid as I sat next to her.
Valeria was a contralto (didn’t know what that was either), and had the prettiest voice, according to them all. A cloud of auburn curls surrounded her light brown face: based on the pictures all over the apartment, a perfect blend of features from her white dad and Puerto Rican mom. There was nothing about her personality that screamed Queen Bee, but she’d gotten into a prestigious summer program at Juilliard, so the girls just kind of made her the one everyone else listened to. That was, until her cousin Sloane arrived.
When Sloane started to talk, everyone listened even though she was the new girl in town. And Sloane talked to Layla like she was the most interesting person at the party.
“You’re cool,” she said to Layla, after Layla told them about getting one of her sister’s college friends to pretend to be Valeria’s mom so she could come to this party. Sloane said it with a small smile, like she was pleasantly surprised.