The Underdogs by Sara Hammel Page B

tune I couldn’t place. But just as Annabel was about to enter the locker room, Evie touched my shoulder and froze. We weren’t the only ones tracking her.
    Patrick was perched on the back of the main lobby’s big sofa, which happened to be directly across from the entrance to the women’s locker room. Annabel swanned into the locker room, and Evie and I pretended to walk on by Patrick, eventually settling about ten feet away from him at one of the tables in front of the TV.
    The expression on Patrick’s face as he watched Annabel disappear into the locker room was indescribable, but I will try: picture love, plus anger, plus longing, plus sadness, plus … a dash of hatred. In that order. Annabel hadn’t acknowledged him when she passed by, so we couldn’t be sure she’d even seen him. That was the thing with Annabel. She didn’t show her cards or let on what was really happening with her. You just caught glimpses of who she might be, of who you thought she was, of how she was willing to portray herself on a given day. In any case, I didn’t think Patrick would’ve noticed Evie and me if we’d started juggling kittens with a clown chorus singing behind us. This was another one of those times Evie’s social invisibility worked in our favor.
    She whispered to me, “We should follow her in there.”
    I thought about that, but before we could make a move, Annabel stormed out.
    We were shocked. We’d never seen Annabel storm anywhere. “How the—” she seethed at Patrick. “ How did you do this? How did you get into my locker?” She was spitting mad. She shook something at him: a piece of notepaper folded perfectly down the middle. “You’re sick, you know that?”
    Patrick looked at her with ice in his eyes, a closemouthed, self-satisfied smile on his face. I’d never seen him like this; I’d never seen anything sinister from him.
    â€œThis kind of stuff is why—” Annabel shook her head, and again refrained from finishing the thought. “You’ll never be the man he is, and you know what? You can say what you want, write what you want, think what you want. I guess I can’t stop you.” She crumpled the paper in her hand and jabbed her index finger at him. “But the next time you touch anything of mine, I’ll call the police. You got that?”

 
    Before
    I couldn’t sit in that storage room with Evie for another day. Sure, I’d still hang out with her as I always had, but I couldn’t stay cooped up in that room all day long like she’d started doing. Nothing I did was helping get her out of there, so one day I just hit the wall; I had to skedaddle. It was so hard, leaving her behind. It went against everything I stand for. My protective instinct is fierce for Evie; it had been that way since we’d met.
    July was around the corner, and it was going to be a scorcher today. I walked with Evie toward Court 5 and back to her hideaway after Lucky dropped her off at the club’s front door, and sat with her while she got situated with a can of Cran-Apple from the vending machine and her latest tome, the one about the scary doomsday clock. She was slogging through dark novels when it seemed to me she’d be a lot happier reading Summer Cool: The Book , obsessing about boys, and splashing in the pool like the other girls her age I’d seen around the club.
    But I knew it was hard for her. Things were getting worse. Tad and his cohort had been working really hard this summer to find new fat-related insults. She’d tried out a few comebacks on me, such as I won’t always be fat, but you’ll always be a moron , and I won’t be fat forever, but you’ll forever be stuck with that ugly face .
    They sounded pretty good to me, but it wasn’t the same when it came time to make a stand, mostly because Tad never confronted her by himself. It was always in