The Boyfriend App (8 page)

Glenda was legally deaf, so no one ever got in trouble for talking in the library. “Good morning!” she yelled, even though it was the afternoon.

Lindsay shoved her phone in my direction. “This
has
to be a mistake.” Her screen flashed with the Boyfriend App’s graphics: the swirly blue border framing the words
Boyfriend Alert!
in romantic cursive script. The blinking green arrow pointed in the direction of our lunch table. Beneath the arrow flashed:
NIGIT GURUNG: SEVEN YARDS NORTHWEST.

“It worked,”
I breathed.

“It’s obviously malfunctioning,” Lindsay said, shifting her weight from one motorcycle boot to the other. Her wide green eyes mirrored mine. “Nigit? Me?”

“Lindsay, please,” I whispered. I couldn’t lose her—not now. “The app matched you. Maybe it sees something we don’t.”

Lindsay glanced through a space in the bookshelf at my friends. Nigit arched forward. The puffy-paint Link from
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA
crinkled on his T-shirt as he gesticulated about a quest he’d recently started in
WOW
. Even Aidan’s eyes were glazed.

Lindsay pursed her fuchsia-colored lips. “You owe me.” She spun on her heel and bolted toward our table. “Is this seat taken?” she asked, pointing to the one next to Nigit.

Nigit stared through his Coke-bottle glasses. I worried he’d forgotten how to carry on a colloquial conversation.

“It’s open,” I squeaked.

Lindsay shot me a death look.

I sat next to Aidan and took out my stainless steel canteen. “Eco-friendly,” I remarked, fumbling to make conversation.

“Hi, Lindsay,” Aidan said to the back of his hands. I always forgot how shy he could be in front of other people. Which made me even more grateful for the way he’d stood up to Jolene in the hall.

Nigit stared at Lindsay’s forehead like she was a Cyclops from one of his video games come to life. Were my friends and I this glaringly antisocial all the time?

Without speaking, Mindy managed to be the most welcoming. She smiled as Lindsay sat, and proffered a ginger candy.

“I loved the short story you wrote for English,” Lindsay said to Mindy, unwrapping the candy. Mindy was a killer writer. “Was Anna’s bouquet a metaphor for her lady parts?”

“Um, Lindsay,” I started.

Mindy’s face reddened as she mouthed
No
.

“Is that Ganesh?” Nigit asked, his voice accusing. He shoved his head into Lindsay’s personal space and examined a gold charm on her necklace.

Lindsay nodded. Nigit let out a cackling laugh. “And you know who Ganesh is?” he asked. “Or, lemme guess, is your necklace just a faux-spiritual fashion thing?”

Lindsay glared.

“Speaking of fashion,” I said. “I’m sure you all know my cousin Lindsay has a fashion blog with more than forty thousand readers.” But I’d lost my audience, and no one seemed to care. Nigit and Lindsay locked eyes like they were in a staring contest to decide who hated the other one more.

“Duh,”
Lindsay said. She went to flick her hair over her shoulder and missed. (She only recently had it chopped into a bob, and sometimes she forgot it wasn’t long anymore.) She recovered quickly, fishing inside her ostrich-embossed purse and retrieving a granola bar. She took another glance at Nigit, who obviously didn’t believe her. “You mean Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles?” she quipped. “Sometimes called Ganapati, Vinayaka, or Pillaiyar?
Yeah
. I think I know who he is.”

Nigit’s dark eyes widened. “How do you know about Ganesh?”

Lindsay patted Nigit’s hand like he was a small child. “The worship of Ganesh isn’t restricted to India and Hindis, Nigit. I’m a Buddhist. As Ganesh is the Patron of Letters, I often invoke his name at the start of my blogging sessions.”

I swallowed a bite of baked potato and wondered what my very Catholic aunt Linda thought about her daughter’s eastern spiritual leanings.

Aidan’s eyebrows arched into mini lightening bolts. Nigit stared at Lindsay like she was the Public prize money. He reached into his backpack and retrieved a figurine the size of a thumbnail. It was the same Ganesh-elephant thing Lindsay had around her neck. He sat it on the table between them. I thought about displaying my rabbit’s foot, but I thought it might kill the mood.

“May I?” Lindsay asked.

Mindy held her peanut-butter sandwich in midair and glanced between Nigit and Lindsay.

Nigit nodded. Lindsay gently picked up the tiny green statue. “Jade?” she asked as she examined it.

“Jade,” Nigit confirmed. “It was a gift from my mom for Ramadan. I keep it on my puja table when I’m not here.”

You know when you look at somebody—
really
look at them—and no matter how long you’ve known them, what you see surprises you? Something about the way Lindsay stared at Nigit made me want to see what she did. I peered through Nigit’s thick glasses to see dark, intelligent eyes. His brown skin was clear and smooth, and his lips faded from dark pink on the outside to the pale pink of rose petals.

“I wish I had a puja table,” Lindsay said softly. “But my parents would freak. They already think my mala beads are weird.”

Aidan caught my glance as Lindsay and Nigit went on about their meditation practices. I gave him a small shrug and tried to look nonchalant, but I was breathless. The pool of guys with the app was so small I knew it was a fluke—but I still couldn’t help but freak out a little that the Boyfriend App was
working
.

“Last night while I was meditating I couldn’t get Prada’s extra-mini miniskirt out of my head,” Lindsay was saying as she cracked open the top to her Dr Pepper.

Nigit nodded sagely. “My family went to India last year and got Sanskrit mantras during a ceremony.” His index finger touched the shiny jade trunk of Ganesh. “Those help during meditation when your mind wanders.” He gripped the base of his statue, and glanced away. “I could teach you some,” he finally blurted.

“Really?” Lindsay said, her voice fluttery.

Nigit nodded. He grabbed Mindy’s bright red apple and took a massive bite, like that was somehow normal dining behavior.

Mindy and Aidan exchanged a glance.

“There’s a religious shop downtown,” Lindsay said, adjusting the hot-pink sleeve of her sweater. “No one knows about it. No one at Harrison, anyway. They have all kinds of statues and crystals. Wanna go?”

Nigit’s pale pink lips opened and closed like a goldfish.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

“Think of a limit as the value that a function approaches as the input or index approaches a value,” I told Rachel Levey that afternoon.

I tutor on Fridays after school. Don’t go getting the idea that I’m one of those Key Club or student government kiss-ups who live for volunteer work, because I’m not. This isn’t going on my college application. But my dad was big on
using what you’re blessed with to help others
, and it’s not like I can offer makeup-application tips or social-etiquette lessons.

Freshman year, I set up a corner table in the cafeteria after school with a sign that said
AUDREY MCCARTHY, ROGUE TUTORER
in red Sharpie. Kids came.

Before my dad died, Blake would sometimes come, too, and do her homework next to me if she didn’t feel like going home. Three years later, tutoring reminds me what it was like to be the old me. It was the one place where everybody still showed up to hang out.

I’d angled my table next to the water fountain in front of a Public poster that read
PUBLIC WANTS
you
TO GO TO COLLEGE
. The poster showed a blond girl with ripped jeans and bare feet sitting in front of a run-down house. A thought bubble over her head read:
No student debt?
And then Danny Beaton (who, apparently, could read thought bubbles) was superimposed onto the picture, saying, “That’s right! Just build the most innovative mobile application the world has ever seen!”

When I finished teaching Rachel Levey about limits, she started telling me about her mom cheating on her dad. I’m not good at that many things, but I’m
really
good at secret-keeping. You learn a lot about other kids from tutoring, especially if they come once a week, like therapy. I kept secrets like how Charlotte Davis had panic attacks; how Xander’s teammate Barron Feldman had medical-grade IBS—which was becoming less of a secret due to his frequent bathroom emergencies; how Zack Marks hunted deer like a psycho killer but also took ballet lessons two towns over; and how Jolene Martin’s mind mixed up the order of the letters in a word. (Not that she came for tutoring anymore since my falling-out with Blake.)

I told Rachel I was sorry to hear that. She shrugged. Then she switched gears and asked, “With whom are you going to Homecoming?” Rachel’s grammar was better than her math. I was about to say I wasn’t planning on going, when I saw him.

Xander.

His khaki-colored corduroys hung loose at his hips. He took his earbuds out, then stuffed his buyPlayer in his pocket.

What was he doing? Was he looking at me?

A janitor named Rosie pushed a yellow bucket along the cafeteria’s floor. Gray water sloshed over the sides and onto the linoleum. Rachel Levey was asking me something, but I couldn’t focus. “Audrey,” she finally said, loud enough to pull me from cognitive paralysis. “Are you all right?”

I cleared my throat. “Low blood sugar. See you next week.”

Rachel did a double take when she passed Xander, but he didn’t seem to register her. Because it was official.

Xander Knight was staring at me.

I was too nervous to stare back, so I focused on his tan, muscular forearms. When he stepped closer I saw the hair on those was blond and spiky, too. His hazel eyes were the color of almonds covered in gold dust. They sparkled even more than in his Public Party pics, even more than I remembered in Joanna’s basement.

I slipped my rabbit’s foot into my bag from its spot by my canteen. I didn’t need to remind Xander of the Dumpster Incident.

Our Hot Gym Coach Mr. Marley strode through my line of sight whistling the Harrison Victory March. The high-pitched melody zinged across the cafeteria as Xander Knight did the unthinkable. He spoke. To me.

“I need help with something,” he said.

It was the first thing he’d said to me since that night at Joanna’s when we stood together on the porch, minutes before the game of spin the bottle.
I like your sweater,
he’d said back then. And it made me happier than I’d ever been, even if the sweater was Blake’s. And then he’d taken a step closer. He’d put his hand on the porch railing, close to mine. Closer. Closer. Until our fingertips were touching.

But then Jolene Martin had burst onto the porch and called us inside for the game. Xander pointed to a dark cloud swollen with rain.
A storm is coming,
he’d said. And then the storm came. And those were the last words he said to me.

Until now.

“Can I sit?” he asked, gesturing to the empty chair beside me. He didn’t wait for an answer. He sat and arranged his notebooks in a mini tower. The vending machines where Nigit got his lattes buzzed like a hive of bees. A pungent whiff of Xander’s cologne made me feel woozy, but it’d been so long since I’d been close enough to sniff him that I kept doing it. He was a spicy mix of sweat and man-cologne: like if you combined how Brad Pitt would smell in
Babel
and
Meet Joe Black
. I tried to get my breathing under control as he unloaded a chemistry textbook. His bicep flexed as he opened the book and I tried not to watch.

“I don’t understand ionic bonds,” he said, his voice gruff. He wouldn’t look at me. He just stared at the textbook.

Please, God, let my voice work
.

“Well,” I started. One word went okay. Now I needed to string together a few at a time. “Ionic bonds are formed between two chemicals with oppositely charged ions.”
Success
. “So, like, take table salt.”

“Sodium and chloride,” Xander said.

“Exactly. Sodium and chloride are all the way at opposite sides of the periodic table. But opposites attract.” I couldn’t help myself. It had to be said. “In chemistry. And sometimes in real life.”

One hundred thirty-two more days. Why not?

Xander looked up. I got lost in those almond-colored eyes. Shades of green came to life now that the sun was streaming into the cafeteria. A little like almonds covered in mold, but not in a bad way.

I dropped my glance back to the periodic table. “An ionic bond is considered a bond where the ionic character is greater than the covalent character.”

“I get it,” Xander said quickly.

He did?

Xander ran a hand through his buzzed blond hair. “Audrey, listen. About the other day, with Blake. I should have—” But right then his lacrosse cocaptain, Woody Ames, rounded the corner drenched in sweat. He slammed another guy with his lacrosse stick, making me glad to be a girl. “Like I said, I think I got it,” Xander said suddenly. “The opposites attract thing.” He stuffed his textbook into a black EMS backpack. I didn’t want him to leave. I wanted to know what he was going to say.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

chapter eight

“I
f this date goes well, you’re going to need it,” Lindsay said an hour later when she took
@TheBoyfriendApp
live on Twitter. We were in my bedroom, eating Twizzlers. “And are you ever going to take down that kitten poster?”

We’d already dissected Xander’s weird half sentence, which Lindsay couldn’t interpret either. Mindy and Lindsay thought Xander was hotter than hot. Still, I never told them what happened freshman year with him. I didn’t know how to put it into words. Nothing had even
happened
. It just felt like it had—to me, at least.

Besides, not telling them meant we were all on the same Xander-level. Easier to obsess over him that way. Easier to distract Mindy and Lindsay from my other feelings, which was crucial to my survival.