The Boyfriend App (7 page)

Boyfriend Alert
BRAD PITT, 24 YARDS SOUTHEAST.

I created a flashing arrow graphic that worked like a compass to guide the girl in the direction of her perfect match. The boys had to wait for their match to be revealed to them. Which happened only if the girl chose to reveal the evidence on her phone that they’d been matched.

And
boyfriend
was really just a word. I made the app to work for girls wanting girlfriends, girls wanting boyfriends, boys wanting boyfriends, and boys wanting girlfriends.

Each night, I took a break from coding around ten to download new music from buyJams. Downloading music on buyJams was like being in a trance. There were so many Radiohead songs waiting for me to purchase. And then all icons popped up:
If You Like Radiohead, Public Suggests . . .

I usually snapped out of it somewhere around midnight, and went back to building, debugging, and chugging soda.

On Wednesday, I sat next to Aidan in lab. I was closer to him than my usual seat one row back, and his nearness was making me dizzy. His eyes widened just a little when he saw me sitting there. His glance passed over the bare skin of my collarbone and I suddenly felt naked.

Sunday confession, here I come.

I cleared my throat. “I need your help with something,” I said.

Aidan turned his chair so he was facing me. He leaned back against his seat and crossed his arms over his broad chest. There was trouble in his smile and my pulse went erratic. Each second put me more on edge.

“Whatever you need,” he finally said. Then he reached forward and yanked my chair closer. Our knees were touching and my head felt full of cotton.

I swallowed.

“So for my app,” I started, trying not to focus on how close we were, how it felt to have him touching me. “I need guys to download it and take the survey and be potential boyfriends for the girl I get to test it out.”

“Are you the girl?” he asked evenly.

“What? No,
no
. Of course not.” I let out a nervous laugh.

“Too bad,” he said. Was he making fun of me?

I was staring at him, trying to decipher what he meant, when Nigit and Joel Norris sat down. Aidan convinced them to download the BFA, too, and then Bates came in and started a discussion on cross-site scripting.

That night, I texted Mindy and explained the gist of the app.

Sounds so cool, she texted back.

So . . . I texted. Any chance you would try it for me? Be the first girl user?

She radio-silenced me for a few minutes. Then she texted: I want to help you. But I’d be too chicken to ask out the guy I got matched with. I’m sorry, Audrey! Lemme know if I can do something else!

I was already worried the app wasn’t going to work. Now I was freaking out. I needed someone I trusted to test it.

The next afternoon, I was still drinking Mountain Dew and jittering about the app when Lindsay pushed open the door to Farrah’s Finds. “Chin up, Audrey. Shoulders back,” she said as a bell celebrated our arrival with a muted
ding
. “Your posture sucks.”

Farrah’s Finds was a vintage store located in a strip mall on Edison sandwiched between Her Story (my mom’s favorite romance bookstore) and a World of Video (which smelled like cigarettes and strawberry air freshener).

Lindsay sighed as we slipped through a curtain of purple plastic beads. “Heaven,” she said.

If this was heaven, I was going to take up sinning. Rows of musty-looking furs, stretched-out vintage T-shirts, and high-waisted jeans that would make even me look fat lined the walls. Glassy-eyed mannequins were posed around the store wearing 1960s fashions with dingy handbags slung over their shoulders. I envied the fact that they couldn’t smell the mothballs.

Farrah herself sat behind the register swathed in a paisley scarf and a snug silk blouse. “Lindsay!” she trilled. She bounced a little and her droopy water-balloon boobs got a second wind. “How’s my favorite fashionista?” Farrah had a fake accent, the kind that makes you think of rich people drinking tea and playing cricket. I was pretty sure she told Lindsay fake stories, too.

Farrah
blah blah blah
ed about wearing white after Labor Day and some other equally boring stuff, and then excused herself to retrieve a shipment of estate jewelry she called
exquisite
.

Lindsay turned to me. She tapped a hot-pink fingernail on the glass counter. “Did I ever tell you Farrah met editrix Diana Vreeland on a catamaran in Monaco and inspired Diana’s stacked-bangle look?”

There were so many words in that sentence I didn’t understand. “Diana who?”

“Diana
Vreeland
,” Lindsay said, like I’d asked who George Washington was. “Only the twentieth century’s greatest arbiter of style and elegance.”

“Listen, Lindsay,” I started, running my fingers over a golf-ball-sized cocktail ring displayed on a plastic hand. “I need to ask you something.”

Lindsay unfolded spectacles the size of Oreos and put them on. “I can barely see Loulou de la Falaise in these,” she said, squinting at her phone’s screen. Loulou de la Falaise was what she called her buyPhone.

I’d rehearsed my speech in my head all afternoon during classes. “You know that app contest Principal Dawkins announced?” I started.

Lindsay nodded. Her green eyes shrank behind the prescription lenses.

Nerves shot through me but I forced myself to go on. “I have this idea called the Boyfriend App.”

Lindsay’s fingers froze on the buckle of a Kelly green snakeskin wallet. She glanced at me with an expression I couldn’t read, partly because her eyes looked so weird in the spectacles.

I clammed up as she cocked a well-shaped eyebrow.

“That’s a really catchy title, Audrey,” she said, running her hand over a rhinestone tiara.

“Oh. Um, thanks,” I said, emboldened. “So I built it, and I just need someone to try it out. There’s this survey you’d have to take, and a bunch of guys I know already downloaded it onto their phones.” I left out the part that the only guys I knew well enough to convince to do it were the six computer-lab guys. “You’ll download the app to Loulou de la Falaise, and once you take the survey, the Boyfriend App sends you an alert when your top love match is within one hundred yards, and—”

“I haven’t had a boyfriend since Jonas,” Lindsay interrupted, referring to the college guy she met at FIT who made dresses out of pizza boxes. “Do you really think I’m ready to move on? To find happiness again?” Her eyes got all glazed. “Do you think I’m ready to resubmerge myself in the waters of love?”

Considering she hadn’t talked about Jonas in, like, a year, the answer was probably yes. But I put my hand over hers solemnly anyway. “I think it’s time,” I said gently, like we were in a Lifetime movie.

Lindsay’s lashes started blinking rapid-fire like they always did when she got excited. I knew I had her.

My cousin put the sparkling tiara on her head. “I’ll do it,” she said.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

chapter seven

C
ontestant Number 13079: Audrey McCarthy. Harrison High School. South Bend, Indiana. THE BOYFRIEND APP. Available for Download. Users: 7. Click Here for More Information.

“How exciting, Audrey!” Ms. Bates said the next afternoon in the computer lab. Her tall, thin frame was wrapped in a knee-length cashmere cardigan. She’d pinned her smooth white hair into a tortoiseshell clip.

It was Friday at the start of lunch period, and the lab was packed with Harrison students wanting Ms. Bates’s help building their apps. Students I had no idea cared about programming filled the seats and the regulars waited outside the door, acting pissed. Joel Norris peered through the glass, looking like he was going to drop his tuba. Again.

“You’re the first Harrison student to submit,” Ms. Bates said, smiling.

I sucked in a breath. I hoped I hadn’t rushed anything.

“The Boyfriend App,”
Bates read aloud.

I felt more nervous by the second. Ms. Bates knew
everything
. It was one of the first times I hadn’t asked for her advice on a computer project. “It finds boyfriends,” I blurted.

Bates pursed her crimson lips. She looked unsure, so I tried to explain it more like the computer nerd she knew me as instead of a teenager with a boy-crazy streak. “The app user fills out a survey,” I said. “And the Boyfriend App sorts the results of anyone in a five-mile radius who’s also completed the survey. It sends the user an alert when her top love match is within a hundred yards, so she can approach her possible love target if she wants to.”

Bates gave me another smile. But this one was smaller. “It’s sort of like a dating website?” she asked slowly, like I’d just described the Boring App.

“I—I think people will like it,” I said. But now I was freaking out again. Bates had cut my giant innovative idea down to its knees.

“I think perhaps you should dig deeper, Audrey,” Bates said, eyes narrowing. “You’re capable of much more, and if you just—”

PING!

I’d never been so relieved to get a text from Mindy.

Let’s eat in the Books. K?

Mindy was referring to the library. I mumbled good-bye to Ms. Bates and promised I’d try harder. I loved Bates, but she was totally out of touch. She’d never even gotten married. She probably forgot how important it was to have a boyfriend.

I made my way to the library and silently thanked Mindy a hundred times for not having to be the one to suggest eating as far away from the cafeteria as possible this week. I was hurrying past the girls’ bathroom when I heard crying noises. Not like I’m trying to win a Teen Compassion award, but I really think—as a rule—you should stop for crying. I pushed through swinging doors into the bathroom.

Blake stood hunched over the sink. Her hair was like a black curtain covering her face and arms. The silver charm bracelet she got for her sixteenth birthday dangled on her slim wrist. Her head jerked up, and her dark eyes went wide when she saw me standing there. She took a quick step back. She looked panicked, like an animal who’d been cornered. She shoved something into her purse. It was about the size of a pack of Bubblicious, but I couldn’t see what it was.

Maybe I should’ve run out of the bathroom right then, but I stupidly couldn’t help myself when it came to her.

I swallowed. “Are you okay?”

Mascara smeared beneath Blake’s thick lower lashes. She didn’t say anything for a few beats. She just stared at me. When she finally said, “You don’t get to care anymore. Remember?” her voice was practically soft, like even though she was trying to say something mean, she couldn’t make her tone match.

It still stung. “Whatever.” I turned to go but she grabbed my arm. Her brown eyes looked crazed. I couldn’t decipher if she was about to tell me what was wrong, or punch me.

“Audrey,” she said, her voice catching. Her grip tightened. She was freaking me out.

“You’re right,” I said as her nails dug into my skin. “I don’t care anymore.” It was a lie, but she let go of my arm and backed away like she believed me.

I couldn’t get away from her fast enough. I shoved through the door and hurried down the hall. I could still feel the cold grip of her hand on my arm. What was
wrong
with her?

In the library, I followed the scent of peanut butter to a circular table sandwiched between rows of leather-bound books. Aidan and Nigit sat next to each other with their heads bent over Nigit’s
World of Warcraft
notebook. Mindy wore a honey-brown sweater that matched her hair and dipped her knife into a jar labeled
PEANUT BUTTER. EXTRA CHUNKY!
Her eyes crinkled when she saw me. I smiled back and tried to forget about Blake.

Aidan’s hair was sticking out on the side like he’d slept on it funny, which made me think of him in bed. And then I thought of us rolling around in his bed, with him in the tissue-thin vintage Metallica T-shirt he wore last summer that made me crazy.

I was giving myself a fever just imagining it. I tried to think of something neutral as I made my way toward my friends.

Puppies running in a field.

Nigit drummed his knuckles on the wooden table where students had carved dates as far back as 3/25/86 and wrote things like C.S.+T.H.= LUV 4 EVA. I wondered if C.S. and T.H. were still together, planning their retirement. Or maybe one of them was in jail.

I dropped my paper bag onto the table and sat between Nigit and Mindy.

Aidan glanced up at me and smiled. He put on a navy-blue baseball hat that matched his eyes.

Nigit slapped a hand over his notebook page and gave me a dirty look.

“Chill, dude,” Aidan said. Dark curls stuck out like wings beneath the hat. The collar of his gray knit fisherman’s sweater nearly touched the curls. “I told her about the app,” he said, pinching a mechanical pencil between two fingers. Then he smiled at me. I couldn’t breathe until he broke our stare and returned his gaze to the notebook.

“PhilanthrApp,” Nigit announced, straightening. If he had feathers, they would’ve fluffed.

I fidgeted with the zipper on my green hoodie. Mindy said it made my eyes look like emeralds, so I was trying to wear it more often. “Sounds awesome,” I said.

The hair on Nigit’s skinny brown arms grew from the pinky side toward the thumb—the opposite of everyone else’s—but it didn’t seem to bother him. “It’s unbeatable,” he said, a grin quirking his lips. “Not that it isn’t also altruistic of you to find people boyfriends,” he added.

I ignored him.

My phone pinged with a text from Mindy. Looking at Xander makes me suspect Leonardo DiCaprio had sex with a girl angel eighteen years ago and they made him

I was about to text something back about Xander’s hotness when Lindsay’s voice echoed across the library:
“What the freak?”
A rhythmic
DING DING DONG DING
punctuated her words. I turned to see her platinum-blond bob shimmering beneath the library’s fluorescent lighting as she stared at her buyPhone. Her black jeans were slashed down the sides like a bear had mauled her. “Audrey? Can I talk to you for a sec?” she asked in a sky-high-pitched voice. She yanked me behind the cover of a bookshelf where our eighty-year-old librarian’s aide, Glenda, pushed a waist-high cart.