The Boyfriend App (12 page)

“This is balls-out!” Lindsay was saying when a knock sounded.

My door flung open. “Sweetie?” My mother’s dark frame was silhouetted against the hallway’s bright light. “Are you okay? Did you have a dream?”

I said good-bye to Lindsay, promising I’d do even more Twitter PR stuff, and turned to my mom. It
did
feel like a dream. “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m maybe more than okay.” I patted the space next to me. The ergonomic chair was big enough for us to squeeze next to each other. It was how my dad and I used to sit.

“I want to show you something,” I said.

My mom sat next to me as I logged onto my Public entry. I took a breath, and clicked.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

chapter twelve

“
W
e both know you got what it takes, girl! Oh-oh-oh!”

It was Monday morning and I hadn’t slept since Lindsay’s three-a.m. phone call. Neither had Lindsay. She was wired on Starbucks and singing along with Danny Beaton on the radio while banging her hand on the steering wheel.

“Do you want me to recite my Top Ten Things I Love About Nigit Gurung list backward?” she asked, curving into Harrison’s parking lot. Her eyeliner curled into what she called a Sophia Loren cat eye. I was about to protest when I spotted a crowd of students waiting on the lawn in front of school. A half dozen sat on the granite ledge of the
Eros Sleeping
statue. The rest stood in a cluster staring at their buyPhones. Blake, Joanna, and Jolene were trying to push through the students, who were too absorbed in their screens to jump out of Blake’s path as usual.

“What the—?” I said under my breath. My heart sped up as Lindsay and I climbed from the Acura and started across the lot. My mind played movies of kids waiting by the flagpole to watch a fight—if Blake had spread the news about a confrontation, maybe a bunch of kids were waiting to watch?

“Audrey!”

I didn’t recognize the redhead calling my name from the outskirts of the crowd.

“That’s her,” a Goth girl with a rose tattoo on her neck said to her friend. Goth Girl wore a black lace veil that trailed to the floor, like a wedding-funeral mix.

“Go, Audrey!” cried Francis Noonan, my freshman-year softball pick.

If I was about to weather another Blake fight, at least a few kids seemed to be on my side.

Carrie Sommers stepped from the crowd in her cheerleading uniform and hollered, “You might be good at basketball, you might be good at track, but when it comes to building apps you might as well step back!” She raised her maroon-and-yellow pom-poms and shook them maniacally.

With the exception of Blake, Joanna, and Jolene, everyone broke into applause. I heard my name echoed and the clatter of gossip.
Holy. Crap.
My nerves spiked as we crossed the pavement. I couldn’t help it—I started to slow my steps, afraid of the crowd.

“Keep going, Audrey,”
Lindsay said through the bright white smile she’d plastered on her face. She linked her arm through mine.
“And stand up straight.”

The crowd swarmed us and swallowed me. I scanned for Aidan, but I didn’t see him. An Asian girl with blunt-cut bangs patted me on the shoulder. A guy named Marcus I knew from AP Chem said, “Genius app, Audrey.”

A tall, gangly basketball player raised her hand to high-five me. I stood on my tiptoes to connect our palms. “Congrats on the top ten,” she said. Her teammate stood next to her with a forehead full of butterfly Band-Aids covering Frankensteinesque stitches. “You gonna win us all Beasts?” Stitches asked, staring at me like I was going to be in trouble if I didn’t.

A girl with red-rimmed glasses I knew from a tutoring session on particle physics tapped my arm. “So how long will it take us to get matched?” she asked, adjusting her plastic headband.

I glanced over the dozens of eyeballs fixed on me. Had all of them downloaded the Boyfriend App? “Um, well,” I started. “It can be different for everyone. The app will match you to the best guy for you based on the current applicants within a five-mile radius. But you have to be within one hundred yards of your match for the alert to go off on your phone. So that you can, like, go to him and tell him.”

Public speaking wasn’t exactly my forte. And Blake was only a few feet away with glassy black locks hanging over her shoulders like Cher, freaking me out. Joanna stood to Blake’s left, her lips pulled back to expose dull, white, rectangular teeth that curved at the bottoms, like an upside-down row of tombstones. I swore Jolene’s mole was twitching.

“So do you know Danny Beaton personally or something?” asked Carrie Sommers, her pom-poms fluttering in the wind.

Lindsay jumped in before I could say anything. “I’m working on PR for the Boyfriend App,” she said, raising her hand as if to silence everybody. “So if anyone has any further questions, you all know where to find me. Public Party. Twitter.
FashionBecomesMe
. If you haven’t already, please sign up for my RSS feed for updates.” Lindsay pulled me from the crowd and onto the sidewalk leading to school. “We have to keep them wanting more,” she hissed.

I glanced over my shoulder to see everyone watching us walk away. None of them had looked at me like that in years.

DING DING DONG DING.

My shoulders tensed as the Boyfriend App’s alert rang out. A squeal sounded over the crowd’s murmurs. “I’ve been matched!” It was Goth Girl. The metal spikes on her dog collar caught the sunlight. She held her phone high in the air and girls clamored around her to see the flashing graphic. She was nearly knocked to the pavement when the stitched-up basketball player grabbed her phone. “Ty Bennet?” Stitches said, studying the screen. Goth Girl yanked her phone back. She glanced over the heads of the crowd. “Who’s
Ty Bennet
?”

A sophomore wearing a tan bomber jacket with US Navy wings pinned to the shoulder strode across the parking lot. His blond crew cut and aviator sunglasses made him look like he’d just stepped away from fighter-pilot training camp. “I’m Ty Bennet,” he said in a silky-smooth, talk-show-host voice. He lowered his sunglasses and took in the crowd. Goth Girl glanced between Ty and her phone, where my programming meant an arrow was pointing in Ty’s direction, and his approximate distance was flashing across the screen.
Five yards. Four yards. Three yards.

I couldn’t help but notice Blake, staring wide-eyed between Ty and Goth Girl, just as enraptured as the rest of Harrison.

Wrinkles creased the caked-on white powder on Goth Girl’s forehead. “We’ve been matched,” she said, holding up her phone.

I had to give it to this girl. She didn’t seem to care about the potential of public rejection. Maybe she got all that fear out of her system when she started wearing black lipstick in eighth grade. It had to be freeing, not giving a crap what anyone thought.

“Seriously?” Ty asked, a blond eyebrow cocking dubiously. He studied Goth Girl’s phone and for a second I was sure he was going to laugh. But then he took in the crowd’s stare and puffed his chest. “Awesome,” he said.

Lindsay saw her opening. “And the Boyfriend App finds love again,” she announced. She shook her head wistfully like nothing warmed her more than two kids in love. “Audrey and I will be participating in a Q-and-A session on Twitter this afternoon at three.”

I was about to mention I already had a session at three—with Mrs. Condor. But I figured reminding everyone about my mandatory school social worker visits wasn’t on Lindsay’s PR agenda. I’d have to beg Mrs. Condor to reschedule.

“Remember,” Lindsay went on, “the more you convince your friends to download, the bigger our pool of potential love matches.”

“So go get ’em, Harrison!” Carrie Sommers cheered. The bell rang, and like some sort of Pavlov’s dog situation, Carrie Sommers did a split jump. “Go! Fight! Win!”

I’d never been so fired up by team spirit. Was this really happening? Was I going to win this thing?

Cafeteria today? Mindy texted a few hours later.

I was ready and Mindy knew it.

The lunchroom smelled like new tires mixed with spaghetti. And it was louder than usual—maybe because I was trying to pay attention to conversations instead of ignore them. Echoes of
did you download Audrey’s app?
mixed with
have you been matched?
and
can you believe she was matched with
him
?
Everyone was staring in my direction like I’d just gotten a boob job.

“Hey, sport,” said Nina Carlyle as I passed. Her friend Anna said, “She’s an Olympic hopeful. She calls
everyone
sport,” and laughed, like the three of us were in on some great joke. A table of six girls wearing homemade T-shirts with Danny Beaton’s face on them that read
INDIANAPOLIS OR BUST!
looked up from their phones with a fawning chorus of, “Hi, Audrey!” “Hey!” “What’s up, Audrey?”

Even when I got tongue-tied, Lindsay made me promise I’d at least smile and wave. “Together. At the same time. Do we need to practice?” she’d asked.

Marcus from AP Chem sat with a handsome sophomore named Tim who played the saxophone. Tim winked at me. “Killer app,” he said, linking his arm through Marcus’s. I smiled. (And waved.)

Aidan sat alone at our lunch table. I flashed back to yesterday in the secret spot behind my apartment, like I’d done so many times since he’d gotten in his car and pulled away. I felt feverish just thinking about being alone with him, the way he’d leaned in close, his lips against my cheek. A faint smell of woodsy cologne lingered in my memory of what had happened. Things had been sort of weird in lab that morning, but I couldn’t tell if it was because he’d meant to really kiss me before I messed it up and now he didn’t like me anymore, or if it was because Nigit was sitting between us and being snotty about my app. And once all three of us had gotten into our normal trog-programming routine, Aidan had warmed back up. So I still wasn’t sure what to make of everything. And I couldn’t ask Lindsay’s or Mindy’s opinion, because what if it was nothing and I blew my cover?

But what if it was
something
? What if it wasn’t all in my imagination?

Aidan broke into a grin when he saw me walking toward our table. He held up his buyPhone with Public’s home page flashing. “You’re number four on the Top Ten list, Auds,” he said as I sat across from him. “This is
unreal
.” He held up his hand and I high-fived him. His fingers slipped through mine and held them for a second that felt like an eternity.

I couldn’t contain my smile. And I couldn’t stop imagining what it could be like to go to a private university and walk out of it with no debt. Maybe somewhere covered in ivy? It was impossible not to get my hopes up when everything was shifting. And I’d downloaded the app that morning, so I couldn’t fight the nervousness I felt when I thought about who I’d be matched with. What if it was Aidan? I’d imagined it a hundred times since I’d downloaded: the alert ringing out and
AIDAN BAILEY
flashing across the screen. I’d show him my phone, and then what would he do? What would
we
do?

“I’m sitting with my boyfriend today, ladies,” Lindsay singsonged as she passed her group of friends, holding Nigit’s hand up like a shiny trophy. Lindsay’s friend Diana, who wore weird headpieces and liked to be called Princess Di, called, “We love you, Linds!”

Lindsay’s friends all smiled like we lived in some weird utopia where girls didn’t get pissed when they got ditched for a guy. Then they resumed staring hopefully at their buyPhones. I’d never seen more phones displayed across the cafeteria. Hot-pink and purple cases mingled with black, navy, and metallic ones.

Lindsay squeezed my shoulder before she and Nigit sat. Mindy joined us, unloading a Thai wrap that smelled like lemons and peanuts. Nigit crossed his ankle over his knee, looking relaxed in his skinny black pants and sateen dinner jacket as he talked to Aidan about the China and Japan localizations for PhilanthrApp. He pulled his white glove from his fingertips and rested it next to his latte. Any other day he would’ve gotten made fun of. Any other day people would’ve pointed and sneered. Any other day he would’ve endured
trog, nerd, loser
.

Not today.

“Check out the Vampire Girl and Aviation Boy Hotness,” Lindsay said, scooching her chair closer to Nigit. She nodded toward a table where Ty Bennet smoothed a hand over Goth Girl’s black lace veil.

Zack Marks, the deer killer, sauntered by wearing a bright orange vest and Army-green pants. I would’ve thought he’d just murdered something, except he had a plastic Public shopping bag (and one from Piercing Pagoda—weird), which meant he’d been to U.P. Mall. He waved his new buyPhone at me and I waved back.

My mom emerged from the tiny room next to the cash register where she took care of stuff like who qualified for reduced lunch prices. She raised a hand and I waved to her, too. (My arm was getting tired, like Miss America’s must.)

Blake was noticeably absent. Her cronies glared at me from their position a few tables away, except for Xander, who avoided my glance altogether. He had one earbud in, half-listening to his buyPlayer while Blake’s friends took turns talking and glowering in my direction.

DING DING DONG DING
.

Conversation quieted across the cafeteria and heads turned toward the sound of the BFA.

It was coming from Carrie Sommers’s underwear.

Carrie’s round brown eyes blinked. She rummaged beneath her cheerleading skirt into the hand-stitched pocket of her bloomers, where she stored her phone. She stared at the screen and did a little tap dance—
shuffle, tap, tap, shuffle, shuffle
. Her head whipped in the direction of our table and her chestnut-colored ponytail followed, her perfect curls tumbling over her shoulder like a shampoo commercial. “Aidan Bailey!” she cried.