The Boyfriend App (5 page)

And just like Xander with his probable lacrosse scholarship to Stanford, and Blake with her guaranteed acceptance to Notre Dame (now that her father had donated millions for a workout facility to be called the Blake Andrea), Lindsay was practically guaranteed a spot at FIT next fall. So she had zero idea what it was like to have to go to college somewhere you weren’t excited about. Which meant she often said things like,
Where are you applying, Audrey?
Or, simply,
Where’re you gonna go next fall?
Which just made me feel worse. If I ended up at Holy Cross Community College to avoid debt, I wouldn’t really be
going
anywhere. It was embarrassing.

Lindsay’s crystal doorknocker earrings slapped the side of her face as she turned to look in my lap. “That journal’s kind of retro Audrey McCarthy circa fourth grade,” she said. She slammed on the gas while her head was still turned. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

She rested a hand on mine. I wanted her to put it back on the wheel.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re lying.”

“Maybe. But I don’t want to get into it right now.”

Lindsay attempted to angle the car into the elementary school’s parking lot still holding my hand. She gave up when we rolled over a soda can on the lawn, and then made tire marks on the grass as she gunned back on the road. We pulled up to the school’s front entrance, but Claire wouldn’t leave the car until Joelle Martin was out of sight. (Joelle was the third Martin sister, and in Claire’s third-grade class. In addition to being bullies, the three Martin sisters all have Jo names. How not cute is that?)

Joelle and her Hello Kitty book bag finally disappeared behind a bus, and Claire got out. She shut the door and waved a shaky good-bye with her crop.

“I wish Joelle Martin would get lice,” I said through an overly wide smile, waving encouragingly at Claire through the windshield.

“I wish Joelle Martin would get rabies,” Lindsay said, waving and smiling, too.

On our way to Harrison, we passed Lindsay’s mom power-walking beneath a golf umbrella. My aunt Linda’s main concern in life was traffic, which was why she walked a mile every day to her job as a receptionist at South Bend Dental. She wouldn’t take a ride—even when it was raining. Lindsay shook her head and said, “Oh, Linda,” as we passed. Linda gave us a thumbs-up.

At Harrison, Lindsay shot me sideways glances as we inched through the parking lot. The downpour washed the grime from Xander Knight’s artfully decrepit motorcycle. Lindsay was about to pull into an open spot when she realized Blake’s white Jeep Grand Cherokee occupied the space to the right. It was an unspoken rule at Harrison that you didn’t park on Blake’s left because she didn’t like having to squeeze between cars or have restricted room to open her door.

Lindsay’s wipers swiped the glass, barely able to fend off the rain. She jerked the wheel and pulled next to the sand-colored Prius I knew was Nigit’s by the bumper sticker that read:
NO, I WILL NOT FIX YOUR COMPUTER
. I wondered if he and Aidan had spent the night brainstorming app ideas.

Lindsay turned off the car. “Balenciaga’s new handbag is so gorgeous I want to take it behind school and have sex with it,” she said, rummaging through a metallic makeup bag. “Is that wrong?” She fished out a magenta-colored gloss and ran the wand over her lips. “I’m spotlighting the collection on
FBM
today.”

Lindsay has more than forty thousand uniques (a.k.a.: readers) on her blog,
Fashion Becomes Me
, and tweets to another twenty thousand.
FBM
got sponsored with an AOL ad this summer and that’s how she bought her used Acura for eleven hundred bucks. Nearly every girl at school reads
FBM
—even Blake, though she’d never admit it to Lindsay. (I know, because Lindsay once charmed me into getting Blake’s IP address, which I did by emailing her a web page that logged her IP as soon as she connected. Then I matched her IP to comments left on Lindsay’s blog nearly every day. Like:
OMG Lindsay luv ur blog! Totes buying Vena Cava LBD for Homecoming!

If you’re wondering:
Yes
, it
is
tempting to hack into Blake’s computer and mess with her life. Except I’d be breaking my dad’s rule: Never use what you know to hurt people.

Still, I’d fantasized about what I could do to make her stop coming after me. Like setting up a backdoor on her system and installing a keylogger for unfettered access to everything she ever typed—including passwords for pictures, documents, emails, bank accounts,
everything
—and then emailing secret romantic Blake/Woody pictures to Xander. Or, I dunno, connecting via said backdoor and launching a Denial of Service attack on the FBI. (That meant I could get Blake’s computer to launch its own attack by flooding the FBI’s server with connections. Which meant they’d show up on her doorstep and haul her away.)

I wished I could be meaner. Because there were so many more options.

Lindsay and I got out of the car and squished together under my umbrella. Rain soaked the bottom half of our legs as Lindsay went on about how drop-crotch pants can be flattering if you pair them with the right heel. I nodded along and reminded myself it was already Thursday—all I needed to do was get through today and tomorrow and maybe everything would be forgotten by next week. I ignored the little voice that whispered
Yeah, right,
as we made our way into Harrison.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

chapter five

I
swung open the door to the computer lab. It wasn’t even eight a.m. and the air was already five degrees warmer than the rest of school. Plus, there’s something about the way black T-shirts and black socks produce BO in epic proportions—that, plus some trogs don’t shower, like the rest of the planet—and our tiny, airless space was less than 400 square feet.

My gaze landed on Aidan hunched over his notebook. His lashes were so long they appeared to brush his high cheekbones as he jotted notes. His hair was dark and wavy, like Lake Michigan at night, and his broad shoulders angled to a slim waist. One hunter-green Converse was balanced on the opposite knee. He tapped the rubber sole with his mechanical pencil. I looked away before someone could catch me staring.

White paint flaked on our four windowless walls. The bulletin boards that framed the room overflowed with computer-related newspaper clippings—the most recent about Infinitum CEO Jane Callaghan’s relaunch of the InfiniPhone Universe due out next month. (Infinitum was Public’s biggest competition. The crowd of Infinitum users was smaller, but more devout.) And then there was the latest Public campaign:
The buyPhone 17.5: a Sexier SmartPhone: Just Because You’re Smart Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Be Sexy
.

No one even looked up as I took a seat at computer #15 in the back left corner of the lab. The trogs didn’t care about what happened yesterday, maybe because they were so steeped in building scholarship-winning code that my social faux pas was already old news, or maybe because they’d done way worse themselves. Like when Joel Norris dropped his tuba onto the big toe of head cheerleader and first violinist Carrie Sommers one week before the Circle of Stars National Cheerleading Competition in Indianapolis. The Harrison High pyramid was never quite the same. Neither was Joel’s social status. Harrison was unforgiving like that, especially if you messed with a popular girl.

Someone had written MOBILE APPLICATION DAY on the board in yellow chalk, and drawn a stick figure holding a cell phone with a thought bubble that read: TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND BIG ONES. I was about to take out my journal when I saw Mindy’s mane of caramel hair obscure the pane of plastic on the computer lab’s door.

Her dark eyes caught mine. She shoved a piece of paper with block letters scrawled in green marker onto the plastic partition: U OK 2DAY?

Maybe it’s only me, but whenever anyone asks if I’m okay, I just feel upset again. I gave her the okay sign and faked a smile. She considered me through the plastic for another moment before disappearing down the hall.

Three thin rows of wood with five computers each lined the lab. Aidan and Nigit sat directly in front of me. Aidan turned as I took my journal from my backpack. He was a few inches over six feet, and even while we were both sitting I had to look up to meet his navy eyes.

“You want some help, Auds?” he asked. His deep voice was quiet, like it was just for me to hear.

Aidan had grown up in a tiny town in Maine, which made sense, because something about him reminded me of a fisherman. Not just the well-worn cable knit sweaters, perfectly broken-in Levis, or the permanently mussed hair that made him look like he’d just climbed off a fishing boat: It was a quality I couldn’t put my finger on, like patience, or fortitude or something. He was both kind and tough. Most people don’t have that combination.

Aidan, his mom, and his little sister moved to South Bend during the winter of freshman year, so he never knew me as Popular Audrey. He never knew me as a girl with a dad. He never knew me as anyone other than a hoodie-wearing freak who carried a rabbit’s foot and who other guys stayed away from. Somehow him not knowing what I’d lost took the pressure off.

“I think I’m okay,” I started. “I actually brainstormed last night and I—”

“Aidan, we need to
focus
,” Nigit said, adjusting his glasses. “Sorry, Audrey,” he said under his breath.

Aidan gave me a long look before turning back to his computer. A text alert pinged my buyPhone.

Aidan: talk later

Ms. Bates looked up. Her dove-white hair was cut just beneath her jaw. She always wore red lipstick, and she always looked like an old-fashioned movie star. Bates was in her sixties, but you could tell she was drop-dead in her day. She was by far the most glamorous teacher at Harrison—even Lindsay said so—and she was definitely the smartest. We trogs got her all to ourselves.

“No phones, Audrey,” Ms. Bates said. “Only code.”

Bates went to grad school at MIT alongside Robert Dawkins, Public CEO Alec Pierce, and Infinitum CEO Jane Callaghan. It was weird to think of them all being grad students together. She never told us stories about them—no matter how hard we pressed. Only Google talked, telling me a Hannah Marie Bates worked with Jane Callaghan in New York City in the seventies before Jane Callaghan was
Jane Callaghan
and Infinitum was
Infinitum
. Sometime in the early eighties, Bates returned to her hometown and started teaching technology.

“Sorry, Ms. Bates,” I mumbled. I swiped a layer of vanilla-flavored gloss onto my lips and logged on to Public Party, where an ad popped up:
Danny Beaton Wants you to Party Your Face Off with the Newest Public buyPhone!

Confetti sprinkled across the screen.
Hello, Audrey McCarthy. Ready to start the party? Enter Your Password.

I logged in and clicked on my home page. I’d made my wallpaper dark gray and swirly, kind of emo, like in a Victorian house. It used to be pink, but now my Party Guest Connections had dwindled, so I figured my page should match my social standing.

An icon popped up.
Lindsay Fanning sent you flowers
. I clicked on it and a virtual bouquet bloomed above a note that read
Chin up, Cuz
. The flowers faded like a mirage, and that’s when I saw it. Front and center on my wallpaper.

BLAKE ANDREA DAWKINS:
Now your little Dumpster toy is just like you: TRASH!

A bunch of Harrison kids “loved” it. I scanned the list of loves—the Martin sisters, Annborg Alsvik, Carrie Sommers the cheerleading violinist, another girl I tutored last year for the SATs. I took the slightest bit of comfort that Xander wasn’t on the love list. Sweat warmed my palms as I deleted the post.

The murmurs and keyboard-clicks around me softened. I heard my dad’s voice.

You know who you are, Audrey. Nobody can make you feel bad unless you let them.

Just because we didn’t have a lot of money didn’t mean we were trash. I knew who we were, even if no one else did.

I logged off and took a breath. Nobody—not even Blake—was getting in the way of my Big Idea.

I SSH’d into my home computer. (It’s an encrypted connection, so school can’t see what I’m doing. Call me paranoid, but I didn’t want to leave a trace of my app in the lab.)

The blank screen gave me the familiar feeling of hope—like I could create something from scratch with meaning.

A problem is solved one step at a time.

It was what my dad used to say whenever we worked on homework or computer code.

So what’s the first step, sweetheart?

The survey. It was the key to creating the match-up algorithms.

Variables, arrays, loops, and sanity checks splashed through my mind. Something electric shot through the air as my fingertips touched down and started to create.

SURVEY PART I.

What do girls really want in a guy, anyway?

I tapped my finger on the mouse.

Kindness.

Honesty.

Hotness.

Nice to your parents but not too nice.

Smart.

Faithful.

Probably good at sports. (But if he’s a drummer, then okay if he’s not good at sports.)

Good dresser.

I wasn’t really sure what made one guy a good dresser and another guy a sucky one. Maybe I could build the survey like a multiple-choice question test.

How does your ideal boyfriend dress?