The Boyfriend App (4 page)

A lump burned my throat and I tried to swallow it like gum.

Whenever I used to cry, Blake would sing the theme song from the
Friends
reruns we watched together at the top of her lungs until I stopped crying and started laughing.

The way I missed her sometimes was so pointless.

I crossed the living room to my bedroom. Our apartment has a kitchen in one corner of our living room and two bedrooms right off another, so you can’t really make a dramatic exit by stomping off somewhere. I shut my door too hard to make a point, and then collapsed onto my bed.

The kitten falling off a shelf on my
HANG IN THERE
poster stared at me. So did Thom Yorke from Radiohead, looking slightly cooler than the kitten.

Two hundred thousand dollars . . .

A dark spike of hair fell in front of my eyes, and I tried to finger-comb it back into place.

No computer. No computer. No computer.
(Thom Yorke nudging me:
Okay computer
.)

I could brainstorm. Just my brain and me. Storming up ideas.

College. College. College
. Ivy League. Other smart kids. Communal bathrooms. Shower shoes. Shower caddies. With shampoo from Bath and Body Works that smelled like raspberries.

I was really fixed on the shared bathroom thing, for some reason.

Bathrooms. Showers. Bathrooms. Toilets. An app that found a clean public bathroom within a quarter-mile radius of your location? No. Logistics too impossible . . . I’d have to create a system for judging the cleanliness factor of every public bathroom in the United States. Plus, bathrooms are gross. I didn’t want to be known as the Public Bathroom App Girl.

I inspected the chips in my black-and-silver nail polish.
It’s a statement,
I’d told my mom when she commented on the alternating polish colors.
A statement of what, exactly?
she’d asked.

Maybe a nail-polish app that told you what color to wear depending on your outfit? No, stupid. An app that taught you how to use SAT words in sentences? Probably already existed. An app that predicted the future? Might be kinda hard.

Here’s the thing about apps. It’s easy to come up with a simple app (like, say, SmellyPet, the app that reminds you to give your dog a bath every three weeks, which I just came up with in three seconds). But it’s hard—
really
hard—to do a good one. Not that the programming is such a problem, or the code, but the original idea. The simple, sweet original idea . . .

I rolled over and stared at the current love of my life: Hector, my custom-rig desktop I built myself. Hector was like the best kind of boyfriend: smart, trustworthy, and always there when I needed him. I watched his green light blink and listened to the purr of his fans as though he were trying to signal he felt the same way about me.

I kicked off my Vans. Not being allowed to troll around Public Party made me want to more than ever. Some virtual Xander Knight stalking might be the only thing that could take away the sting of today—his lacrosse pics are
that
legendary.

Sometimes I looked at Xander’s pictures and remembered how it was when he watched me crawl across the basement floor before Blake stopped me. How he glanced down at the bottle, and then up at me. How a tiny smile crooked his lips when our eyes met.

PING!
went my buyPhone. I sat up straighter when I saw the text was from Aidan. My mom never said anything about texting.

Aidan: hey whats up

Me: nothn

Aidan: u going 2 win the contest? 200k?

Me: yeah right

Aidan: today when you weren’t in lab Bates said Nigit and me should work 2gether. so we started our app.

That stung a little. I didn’t know what to write back.

Aidan: I should of texted u tho to see if u wanted to work with us. But hey the good news is now u don’t have to split the money when u win like we do. ha

Aidan and Nigit were amazing programmers. They were sure to come up with something good.

Me: I get it.

And I did. But I still wished they’d thought of asking me.

Aidan: hey auds

Aidan was the only person who called me
Auds
. I liked it. I liked practically everything he did. But I couldn’t let on that I liked him
like that
.

I have three real friends. If I messed things up, I’d have zero. I remembered what it was like after my falling-out with Blake, before Mindy, Aidan, and Nigit adopted me. There was no one who I could look at who would look back at me.

I didn’t want to go there again.

There were one hundred thirty-nine days left. I needed to play it safe. So I obsessed over Xander, who I could never have.

Aidan: did you see info Bates cut and pasted onto MOOG bout how to build an app?

Me: not allowed to use my computer tonight

Aidan:???

Me: long story

Aidan: hey auds you ok?

I imagined his dark blue eyes holding mine, and the shiver I felt when he looked at me—like the day only
really
started when we saw each other.

Me: yup. c u tmorw

When Aidan first transferred to Harrison freshman year, all the girls freaked out and tried to make him their boyfriend. But Aidan was so shy he clammed up every time someone approached him, and pretty soon, all the girls gave up. But then last year for a few weeks, Aidan dated some girl at a private school in the next town over. She was beautiful and funny, and she wore pink tank tops and long, flowy skirts. I was nothing like her.

Anyway. I knew he was talking about what happened with Blake today, but I didn’t want to get into it. And I didn’t feel like texting anymore. I felt like having someone real here with me in my room, telling me that I actually might have a chance to win the contest. Telling me my ideas were genius. Telling me I was pretty even if my hair never did the right thing.

What I wanted was a boyfriend.

Aidan texted again. now that I know ur into homecoming . . . dance fundraiser tmrw. u bakin cookies?

Not unless I could build an app that would find me a homecoming date. Now
that
would be worth four years at MIT. AppDate, maybe. Or GuyApp. AppLove?

Aidan: or u secretly inventing the greatest app ever?

And then I had it. I knew what the simple, sweet idea was. I knew what my MIT-winning app would be. Everyone in the world would want it. It would make my mom and me millionaires. I’d be on talk shows with Mark Zuckerberg. I’d have the universe in the palm of my hand.

Everything that went wrong would be right again.

Introducing: the Boyfriend App.

Get the app. Get the guy. It would work—even for me. It had to.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

chapter four

L
indsay Fanning honked four times—four more times than my mom and my aunt Linda told her she was supposed to—just as I pushed through the door and spilled into the parking lot. Lindsay was technically my cousin, but she was way more like my sister.

The sky pegged water pellets at the windshield of her 1995 Acura Legend. I swung open the car door and tried to close my umbrella, but it wouldn’t budge. Rain soaked my hair. I finally got the thing to shut, and climbed inside. I could smell my strawberry shampoo as I sank onto the leather seats.

Lindsay’s platinum-blond bob was pin-straight and rain-resistant, thanks to some chemical treatment that had been banned by the FDA. “You look like a drowned skater boy,” she said, adjusting the neon-yellow rope that framed a lucite cameo at her throat. “Though the whole androgynous thing is pretty on trend right now.” Lindsay wants to be the
Deputy Fashion Director at a Major Fashion Magazine by Age Thirty or Die Trying
, as she puts it on the home page of her blog, Fashion Becomes Me.

Lindsay’s eight-year-old sister, Claire, waved a leather crop from the backseat. She pointed to the black velvet riding helmet dwarfing her head. “Look what Lindsay and me found on eBay,” she said.

Claire refused to go to third grade in anything other than equestrian-style clothes. She practiced riding her bike around the neighborhood, pretending it was a horse and whipping the back wheel with her crop.

“You look great,” I told her. Then I handed her an article I’d printed out about the horse who played Mr. Ed on TV.

Lindsay cranked up the windshield wipers and sped through the road behind our apartment complex. She had the AC blasting because she suffers from what she terms
hot flashes caused by an overactive metabolism
. The hair on my arms shot up like a forest of icicles.

“I heard about yesterday,” Lindsay said in a hushed voice. She’d missed the Dumpster incident because she was chairing the Homecoming planning committee (theme: Paris Fashion Week, Lindsay’s suggestion) and they met during lunch. “And I IM’d you like a million times last night to see if you were okay.”

“I wasn’t allowed to use my computer,” I said.

Lindsay nodded sagely. “My mom took away
Vogue
last week when I went over my spending limit on buyJams, so I know how you feel.” She leaned too close to the steering wheel, like she used to when our dads took us to drive bumper cars. “I can’t stop myself from downloading music once I start,” she said. “Do you think there’s some kind of twelve-step program for that?”

I looked at her and saw she was totally serious.

Lindsay clapped her leopard-print flat on the accelerator and fishtailed onto Route 31. Route 31 led from our apartment complex by the highway past the University of Notre Dame, past crappy hotels like Ho Jo and Motel 6, past the deliciousness of American Pancake House, to Harrison High School.

My cousin wasn’t winning any awards for her driving. And I was already nauseous when I thought about surviving school today. The only thing making it better was obsessing over how I was going to take the Boyfriend App from fantasy to reality. Since I wasn’t allowed to use my computer last night, I’d found one of my dad’s leather journals and brainstormed the old-fashioned way, sketching out the design architecture of the application with a pencil and eraser in pseudocode. Pseudocode just means nailing down the functionality in broad terms. Like say:
When the user hits X button, Y will happen
. Later I would go back and write the code in an editing program in a much more specific way that my computer would understand.

I yanked the journal from my backpack. Lindsay swerved around college kids who were wearing Notre Dame gear jogging along the side of the road, blissfully unaware of what a bad idea it was to run in the rain near Lindsay’s car-weapon. Notre Dame college girls always looked golden and bouncy and happy. Whenever I saw them, I tried to pick out which students studied in the engineering program, or did research at the department for nanoscience and tech. I tried to pick out which college girls I was like.

The first half of the journal was filled with my dad’s pseudocode for scripts to automatically restart computer systems should they be stopped. It was the kind of thing that had entered the market recently, but my dad was already working on a functional prototype years prior. He was way ahead of the curve.

I wondered if he’d ever gotten his courage up enough to show Blake’s dad.

I flipped through his code to my dog-eared page. My notes were scraggly and crooked. When we built apps, Ms. Bates taught us to beware of building while ideas were too nebulous, while limits were undefined. You had to set up parameters of what you wanted to create.

1) An app that finds the perfect boyfriend

If I want to win the contest, I need a universal app that can work for anyone and everyone—even me.

2) Perfect Boyfriend = Perfect Match

People will need to download the Boyfriend App (the BFA) and register by completing a highly detailed questionnaire. In order for the BFA to work, a registry with superpersonal information is a must. The BFA needs to know everything about you. If you’re claustrophobic and scared of big dogs, the BFA can’t match you with a boyfriend who loves packed movie theaters and has a Rottweiler with a spiky collar named Kill Boy.

3) This is NOT a dating app.

The BFA takes any preconceived notions about digital matchmaking and injects them with steroids to create a virtual Boyfriend Finder. An alert sounds on your cell phone when your Top Love Match is within 100 yards. Say you’re walking by the theater and the alert rings out: It turns out your perfect boyfriend—the guy who is totally made for you—is on stage running lines for King Lear. There’s no more missed opportunities, no more mistakes, no more chance happenings thrown away because you weren’t paying attention.

WHO NEEDS FATE WHEN YOU HAVE THE BOYFRIEND APP?

I jerked forward as Lindsay slammed to a stop twenty feet in front of a red light. “Someone needs to teach Blake and the Martin sisters a lesson,” she said.

Claire took a break from drawing horse heads in the steam on her window. “You can say that again.”

Lindsay said it again, but Claire didn’t laugh. Neither did I.

I snapped the journal shut and slunk farther down against the leather. Lindsay didn’t know the feeling of being not liked, and I was grateful for that. I don’t know what I’d do if anyone was mean to her. Everyone’s loved Lindsay since she entered the world via cesarean section, nine days before I did. She had a group of friends, but she usually just hung out with anyone she found interesting in the moment. (Though she avoided Blake & Co. out of loyalty to me.) To top off Lindsay’s lovability, in the summer between our sophomore and junior year, she did the coolest thing anyone at Harrison has ever done, which was to spend three months in New York City at FIT on a grant awarded by Kate Spade. She came back all worldly and everything, and everyone noticed. Between FIT and her fashion blog, she was sort of untouchable.