The bus ride north had been the usual keyed-up affair, the popular kids swapping ring tones and text-messaging on their cells, despite sitting just a few feet away from each other. Text messages were meaner than whispers, impossible to overhear or second-guess. Eve’s ears burned as she listened to the near-silent conversations behind her-tap, tap, tap, tap, burst of raucous laughter, tap, tap, tap, tap, more laughter. She assumed they were making fun of her, but what could she do about it?

Once at the museum, however, she had been approached by Beverly Wilson, whose sole claim to fame was being best friends with Thalia Cooper, the absolutely top girl in their class-the prettiest, the most popular, a girl who disdained cheerleading because she rode competitively and didn’t have time to go to practices, although the JV coach had made a special point of pleading with her to reconsider.

“Thalia says you know something about horses,” Beverly had said as they waited in line to walk through the supersize version of the human heart.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, my mom boards some, for some city people who like to ride. My dad doesn’t have much use for them, though.”

“Thalia likes people who like horses.”

Eve started to say, I didn’t say I liked them-she thought horses disgusting, given that she spent much of her time cleaning up after them-but she stopped herself. Just the possibility of Thalia’s positive attention was dizzying. If Thalia wanted a friend who liked horses, Eve could be that girl.

“Do you want to sit with us?” Beverly asked. “On the bus, on the way back?”

“Sure,” she said, hoping she was hitting the right casual note.

Beverly left her then and rejoined the group of girls orbiting around Thalia, but that made sense to Eve. Things should not go too quickly. She had been invited to ride with them at the back of the bus, an almost-two-hour trip. It would be too much to expect that they would allow her to walk with them through the museum or unwrap her lumpy homemade sandwich next to their purchased burgers and salads. She ate alone, not minding, the promise of the return trip bright in her mind.

After a quick but dutiful inspection of the Liberty Bell and Benjamin Franklin’s penny-speckled grave, they boarded the bus at six o’clock. Once they were on the highway, Beverly crooked a finger at Eve, summoning her to the seats two-thirds toward the rear of the bus. By custom, the final rows were reserved for the jocks, soccer and football players who hung over the seat backs, sweet-talking the girls, trying to get their attention. Eve was quiet, but she tried to make it an interesting kind of quiet, laughing at what seemed like the right moments, smiling and nodding otherwise. Sometimes Beverly would ask her sharply, “What’s so funny?” Eve just shrugged and rolled her eyes heavenward, which made the other girls laugh, seemingly with her.

They were in the final thirty minutes of the trip, the sun down and the bus dark inside, when Beverly explained what she called the initiation. “We’ve all done it,” she said, gesturing to Graham Booth, the least attractive of the jocks, a boy who liked to say he was descended from John Wilkes Booth, just to get attention. He particularly liked making this boast around the school’s few African-American students, adding, “So my sympathies for the Confederacy aren’t racist, just respect for family.” It was clever, a vicious way of suggesting things that could never be said directly under Glendale High School ’s speech codes, and Graham seemed proud of himself for figuring that out. He was a large boy with messy hair and a grin that showed too much gum. But he was good at football, and that was enough, for a boy.

Eve bit her lip after Beverly detailed the initiation. “I’ve never done that.”

“No one had. That’s why we made it our initiation. Graham’s big-big as a horse.”

“Does it have to be Graham?” Kenny Raskin, the runty younger brother of Seth Raskin, was next to Graham, and Eve thought he would be preferable. Smaller, certainly. Besides, Kenny was as nice as Graham was mean.

“Yes. It’s always Graham.”

Eve walked to the final row, where Graham now sat alone, Kenny having slipped into the aisle to help block the view of the backseat. She wasn’t afraid, not really, especially when she saw Graham wasn’t as big as the horses, nowhere near. And it was over so fast, thank God. For some reason she thought it might be like squeezing a bit of milk from a cow or a goat. But it wasn’t anything like that.

She took her seat among the girls, waiting to be congratulated, welcomed. The bus was suddenly so quiet, all the usual buzz gone. Perhaps people had fallen asleep.

Finally Beverly said, “That’s a lot of calories, you know.”

“Oh, but Eve doesn’t have to worry about what she eats,” Thalia said. “You can eat anything, can’t you, Eve?”

Everyone laughed, and Eve joined them, thinking it was a funny line. It was only the next day, when she tried to sit with them in the cafeteria and Beverly said all the seats were taken, that she knew she had been tricked. She just didn’t know why.

The strange thing was, the story didn’t spread, not in the way that Thalia and Beverly had clearly intended. The sophomores knew, and then the rest of the students, but the story failed to jump the firewall to the faculty. Eve stalked through the halls for a week, fierce and proud, staring balefully at boys who attempted to taunt her. “It wasn’t a big deal,” she said, not understanding the double meaning of her words until she saw Graham blush brick red and punch the boys who dared to laugh. From then on she said the line deliberately to anyone who dared to approach her. “It wasn’t a big deal at all.”

After a week of this, Val Morrisey stopped by Eve’s locker at day’s end.

“Hey,” she said. She was a big girl, broad-shouldered, unremarkable-looking except for her eyes, a light, clear green.

“Hey,” said Eve, steeling herself for some new form of taunt she hadn’t imagined. Val had a legendary mouth, as quick and lethal as Perri Kahn’s. Unlike Perri, she used it only for her own amusement, refusing to join the debate or drama clubs.

“Some of us were going to get some coolers at Caribou Coffee. You want to come?”

“I take the bus home,” Eve said. “I live pretty far out.”

“This guy I know, Tom, he has a car. He could drop you home, after.” Val saw Eve hesitate. “He’s my friend, and he’d take you home if I told him to, and if he tried anything-not that he would with me in the car-I’d knee him in the balls. Okay?”

“I’d have to call my mom. I mean, I don’t have to ask for permission or anything. She’ll just need to know that I’m coming home in someone’s car.”

“Here,” Val said, proffering her cell.

It was that easy. Val liked Eve because she hadn’t broken down in the face of the diva girls who had been intent on humiliating her. And whomever Val liked, Lila liked and the other skeezers accepted. Val and Lila even knew why Eve had attracted the divas’ wrath. “You’re cute,” Val said, and Lila nodded a little reluctantly. “They hated that boys were looking at you.” Eve finally had the new start she had wanted. The divas’ only recourse was to go to Ms. Cunningham and tell the whole story, pretending it was because they were so very, very concerned about Eve.

Ms. Cunningham had summoned Eve’s parents to school, which was what the divas had wanted all along. Again-why? That was the part that Eve still didn’t get. Not even Val understood this strategy. Did they want her parents to come to school in hopes that their very queerness would destroy what she had with Val and Lila? Eve remembered a goat that had been born blind, the way the other goats had cowered in the pen, afraid of it, when it was the weakest and most helpless of all. Was she the blind goat of Glendale High School? No, she was just a girl who had been dumb enough to yearn openly for what she wasn’t supposed to have. That was the lesson Beverly and Thalia had been intent on teaching her. Know your place, redneck.