The Pretty App

To Brian, Luke, and William,
the best family a girl could ever ask for

“I
’m Blake Dawkins,” I said into the camera. “And I’ll be your host today on
The Ex Factor
. Today’s first guest is Xander Knight. Mr. Knight, please take a seat right here on this swing set.”

Xander gave me a look over the top of the phone. “It’s harder to film you when you make me move around,” he whispered. A cold breeze had mussed his dark blond hair, and his vintage Chicago T-shirt was frayed at the collar. He wasn’t exactly thrilled to be out here on the playground with me, but everything about Xander felt familiar and safe, and I was grateful to be spending the morning of my eighteenth birthday with him.

“Just sit,” I said. “Please?”

The weight of his jock-boy frame made the swing set squeak like it did when we used to make out on the thing at the end of junior high. We’ve been broken up for months now,
ever since my ex–best friend Audrey created the Boyfriend App and wreaked havoc on our entire school, including Xander and me. Not that there weren’t a lot of other factors in our breakup—mainly that we’d fallen out of love—but something about that app set everything in motion.

Still. Being out here with Xander behind the school made me smile thinking back to those first days when we got together, when things felt new and full of goodness.

“Now, Xander,” I said, using my best
I’m the host and I control the conversation
voice, “can you tell me what it was like to be dumped by the prettiest girl in your senior class? No, wait, by the prettiest girl in your high school? Possibly in the entire state of Indiana?”

“You know that’s not really how it happened,” Xander said, watching me through the phone’s screen. “You didn’t exactly dump me.”

“Go along with it for the show,” I said through a clenched smile. I just needed to get some footage to make sure I was getting better at this. I’d been practicing for as long as I could remember, but I was going to college in the fall, and if I wanted to audition for some TV stuff on campus, I needed to be perfect.

“It was terrible,” Xander said, rolling his hazel eyes. “I cried for days.”

That was more like it. “Did you try to get her back?” I asked him in my most sympathetic voice. Then I tilted my chin so the camera would catch my best angles. (The world is a visual place. It’s crucial to remember that.) “Or did you just give up on the magic you had together?”

I was waiting for Xander to answer my
bring it home with a tough question
journalism tactic when a shrill bell sounded.

“Gotta go,” Xander said, stuffing the phone into the pocket of his corduroys. “I’ll email you the video later, okay?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer, and he didn’t look back as he raced across the JV lacrosse field toward school. He’d been doing this all week—it was like he couldn’t wait to get to the cafeteria. Xander and I both had first period free, followed by midmorning break. Usually we walked into school together, but this week he’d been sprinting away from me as soon as the bell rang. I couldn’t figure out what had gotten into him, but something was definitely up, and he wasn’t telling me.

I glanced at my watch. Nine more minutes until Public was scheduled to announce their next big app.
The best app yet!
the ads all promised, followed by their new tagline, of course:
From the most innovative tech company on Planet Earth. Now, everything’s Public.

Public did a big marketing push like this once every few months, and it was all anyone was talking about online.

I stuffed my props into my mustard-colored satchel: a microphone for when I practiced live reporting, tissues to hand to my pretend guests when they got emotional, and cue cards so I’d be good at reading a teleprompter someday (I’m not exactly the world’s fastest reader, so I have to work on it). I checked my reflection in a compact mirror to make sure my makeup was still perfect—it was, thank God—and headed toward the brown-brick, horseshoe-shaped building that was Harrison High School. Normally
I’d try to strut my stuff a little—in case anyone was watching through the cafeteria’s windows—but the lawn was too muddy, and I was scared to ruin the shoes my father got me. (The ones that made my mother say, “Remember when I still had my beauty and you used to buy me lovely things?” And she was only half-kidding.)

My dad liked to buy me presents that would make me look better. Prettier for the pictures we had to pose for now that he was running for office. He was so proud of how I looked. He never bought me books like
Hot Words for the SAT.
And even though I didn’t miss pretending to care about what
garrulous
meant, I sort of wished he hadn’t given up so easily.

The wind tossed my hair as I neared the side entrance to the cafeteria. A Milky Way wrapper skittered across the grass, coming to rest against the green shrubs that lined the exterior of Harrison. The shrubs had been carved into unrecognizable animal shapes by Save-the-Environment Club members. A bear? Muskrat? Someone had put a condom on a branch near one of the animals’ would-be privates.

I took a breath, lifted my chin, and shoved open the door to the cafeteria.

It smelled like bagels.

Theresa “T. Rex” Rexford was talk-shouting in her low voice. “I’ll flush myself down a toilet if she gets into Brown and I don’t.” Sara Oaks was trying to join the group listening to Theresa. Sara was the kind of girl who was always apologizing for everything, and always bursting into tears if someone even looked at her the wrong way. It made me
want to keep my distance, but my two best friends, Joanna and Jolene Martin, wouldn’t stop picking on her. Maybe other kids felt the way I did, because even though Sara was pretty, no one talked to her, and at least in our high school, being pretty usually guaranteed you a few friends.

A bunch of Harrison kids were checking their phones and making small talk, but no one said anything to me. I scanned the cafeteria for Joanna and Jolene, feeling more nervous by the second when I didn’t see them. There were so many kids bumping into one another, so many bodies touching, making me feel anxious. It’d been like this for me with crowds—even small ones—ever since I was five and my dad lost me at the Indiana State Fair.

A cluster formed around Audrey’s cousin Lindsay Fanning. Lindsay wore a black puffer vest over an off-white sweater that almost matched her platinum bob. She always looked like a girl from a magazine—not a model, but an editor or someone important leaving a fashion show.

“My sources say the unveiling is happening in New York City,” Lindsay was saying to the group. Her green eyes matched Audrey’s, and they glinted like she knew something no one else did.

“Happy birthday, Blake!” Joanna called from the sea of faces. Her honey-blond hair was pulled into a bun, with wisps strategically falling loose to frame her sky-high cheekbones.

Everyone looked up. Once their eyes were on me, I knew they would stay there, so I pushed back my shoulders and accepted my role. My lips were slightly pursed, and I
narrowed my gaze just the littlest bit, the way models do.

Hundreds of eyeballs traveled up and down my figure. They all wanted things from me, whether they realized it or not. And not just other teenagers. Adults, too.

Teachers.

My friends’ fathers.

Random strangers.

Beauty made people hungry. It made them want to take something without asking, and I felt like I had to give them what they needed because they’d steal it anyway. And I wanted to feel in control. So I told myself I was
letting
them stare at me. I was letting the girls imagine what it would be like to look like me. To be me. To wake up in my body and toss long, toned legs over the side of the bed. To pull a satin robe over a tight stomach and full breasts. To stare into the mirror and see a heart-shaped face with high cheekbones, flawless skin, and dark, dramatic eyes. I let them imagine what it was like to run polished nails through shiny, jet-black hair. To take off the robe and let it fall.

And while the girls were imagining what it would be like to wake up as me, the guys were imagining what it was like to wake up on top of me. That’s a lot of people imagining stuff about me at once, and it made me feel see-through. Naked. Vulnerable. It’s one thing to feel the eyes of a guy you like, but the wrong person’s eyes on you can make you feel all sorts of bad. It was like that for me a lot, and I’m not saying I don’t like being pretty, or that being pretty is hard, because that would be annoying and not true. Plus, it’s kind of the only good thing about me. I’m
just saying some things about it can be a mixed bag.

“I feel a little
nauseous
,” I whispered to Joanna as she sidled next to me with two hulking Starbucks cups. She must not have heard my code word for
claustrophobic
, because she handed me a cup that smelled like mocha and dragged me into the fray.

My crowd-anxiety ratcheted up the deeper we pushed into the mass of students. The drama kids. The small-but-ever-present Goth contingent. Usually Xander was hanging with his lax buddies. Where
was
he?

“Happy birthday, Blake,” Chantal Richardson chirped, and it made me happy even if she’d only said it because being class president meant you were supposed to say happy birthday to the people who elected you, even the mean girls.

Students moved en masse from the tables into the lunch line, elbowing one another for space, most of them talking about the new Public app. A siren sounded from far away. Someone laughed. Strains of Death Cab for Cutie filtered from a laptop. And somehow it still felt too quiet.

I turned and saw Xander standing beneath a ripped poster with stick figures giving each other the Heimlich maneuver. “He
wouldn’t
,” I muttered under my breath.

Xander’s back was to me, but I’d recognize his body language anywhere—he was doing the repetitive head nod, the one where he acted like a bobblehead doll. It was his way of showing he was super-interested in what a girl was saying. It was what he used to do when we first met, and then later, when I was telling him a long, over-dramatic
story when he really just wanted to make out. It was what he did when he liked someone.

He was talking to Mindy Morales.

Mindy was pretty, even if her wavy brown hair made her look like an unkempt lion. Gentleness emanated off her like a halo, like she could sense the exact type of compassion someone needed at a particular moment and give it to them. I don’t know how she did it.

Worst of all, she was Audrey’s new best friend.

Xander wasn’t my boyfriend anymore, but we’d been together for three whole years, and it was my eighteenth birthday. He should’ve been sitting at my table so we could spend midmorning together. Excited to see me even if no one else was. Not talking with the enemy.

I bit my lower lip. I know it sounds weird that I didn’t want to lose someone I’d already broken up with, someone I wasn’t in love with anymore. But Xander, Audrey, and my older, pretty-much-estranged sister, Nic, were the only ones who knew what my family life was like, or the secrets I kept. I was scared of what it would feel like to have all three of them gone.

Joanna was pressed against my side, and I tried to concentrate on what she was saying, but then I saw Audrey. Dark pixie haircut, that emerald hoodie she wore way too often, skinny jeans that accentuated her cute figure. She was making her way toward us, looking for her friends. I tried to turn away, but I bumped into Joanna. Audrey was always the bigger person, and I knew she’d wish me happy birthday—I knew it. It made me hurt all over before it even happened.

“Happy birthday, Blake,” she murmured. Her clear green eyes were bright, and her long, dark lashes didn’t blink.

Like one stupid birthday wish could change the way she’d abandoned me when I needed her the most.

I turned my back. Everyone except Joanna moved away from me like my pain was contagious as I hurried toward the lunch line.

When Audrey’s dad died in an accident at my dad’s company the fall of our freshman year, I stood by her side. I did everything for her. She could barely remember which textbooks she was supposed to bring home each day after school, or which seniors we were supposed to avoid due to the unspoken Harrison social code, like the time she asked Bree Landers for directions to the girls’ bathroom in the D wing. (Now Bree Landers works the concierge at Howard Johnson’s. But back then it was like asking Gwyneth Paltrow for directions to the bathroom at the Oscars.)

I was the one picking up Audrey’s pieces, and I was glad to do it; she was my best friend—she always had been. But then my father said this awful thing about her dad’s accident and it blew up into a huge fight between us. It was like my family represented everything bad that had happened to her family. She defriended me on Public Party and pretty much stopped speaking to me for months.

It was a punch to the stomach. I lost Nic, then Audrey. The only one left was Xander, but a boyfriend isn’t the same thing as a sister or a best friend. Joanna and Jolene were fine as far as friends go, but they could never be the kind of friend Audrey was. Sometimes it felt like no one could.