The Boyfriend App (2 page)

Nigit was the first to move. He took a swallow of his latte and made a loud gulping noise that ricocheted across the table and somehow spurred Blake into action.

“Hello, Aubrey,” she said. I rolled my eyes. Acting like she forgot my name was Blake’s numero-uno favorite game.

“Audrey,” I corrected her.

Blake smirked, and her beauty mark popped like a punctuation mark. She pointed at my rabbit’s foot, nestled in its permanent position on the right-hand corner of my lunch tray.

I’ve carried my rabbit’s foot for exactly three years to the day. Since October 12, freshman year. When it happened.

“So what’s
that
, Aubrey?” she asked in a singsong voice that curled across the table. Her shimmery gold fingernail matched the
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
logo key chain attached to the rabbit’s navy fur.

She knew what it was. Of all people, Blake
knew
.

I looked up at her and thought about all of our secrets. I thought about how she lost her virginity to Xander Knight’s cocaptain, Woody Ames; how she lied and promised Xander he was her first; how she worried her only real feelings were for our Hot Gym Coach, Mr. Marley; and how she could cry only when cartoon characters got hurt, but not real people.

And then I thought about what she knew about
me
. How the only reason she started dating Xander in the first place was because I had a massive crush on him. How I never even told her. How she just
knew
from the moment I spun a bottle and my breath caught when it landed on him. How I crawled on my hands and knees across the Martin sisters’ basement floor like I was begging. How I was about to kiss him when she elbowed between us and told everyone Xander was off-limits, that he was hers.

I was frozen, so I just answered, “My lucky rabbit’s foot?” My words made a horrible question-mark sound at the end, like we were on a game show and she was asking me the hundred-thousand-dollar question.

“And is it working?” Blake asked slowly, like she was talking to a kindergartner. The cafeteria had quieted and her voice echoed over the tables. “Are you . . .
lucky
?”

There was only one right answer—the one she wanted:
No. I’m not lucky. I’m maybe even
un
lucky
—but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Admitting it meant admitting the person I had loved most was wrong.

“Leave her alone,” Aidan growled. He turned to me. “Ignore her, Audrey.”

But I couldn’t. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. “Maybe I
am
lucky,” I said instead.

Nigit took that moment to burp, loudly.

“Classy, Nigit,” Blake said, pronouncing
Nigit
so it rhymed with
digit
. Nigit’s Indian, so obviously his name is pronounced
Nih-jeet
, which Blake of all people knows because their dads were roommates at Notre Dame back in the day.

Blake’s glare returned to me. “How about I get this for you?” she asked, her dark eyes flashing. She yanked my lunch tray from the table and held it high above her head like a cocktail waitress.

Mindy mouthed
No
. And then a hush fell over the lunchroom. There was only the faint hum of the vibrating vending machine.

Blake spun around and took off with my tray.

“No,
wait
.” I shoved my chair from the table. “Blake, stop,” I said, panicking as I stumbled after her. I saw the rabbit’s navy fur puff over the lip of the tray. The Dumpster was five feet high. There was no way I could get my rabbit’s foot from the lunch-food slop if she tossed it in there.
“Please,”
I tried again, but Blake was power-walking now, every muscle in her legs glistening beneath her airbrushed tan.

“Audrey!” Aidan must have come after me.

A hundred pairs of blinking eyes bore into me as my skull-and-crossbones Vans squeaked across the floor. Sweat trailed down my spine like a finger.

Blake stood in front of the Dumpster with her arm at a ninety-degree angle. Annborg was trying to get it all on video, but she tripped and dropped her phone. My tray seesawed on Blake’s palm. She smiled at me as she threw the contents into the Dumpster.

I lunged.

My fingers caught the gold buckle of her snakeskin belt as I tackled her and we crashed into the side of the Dumpster. We dropped to the floor and Blake let out a shriek. She rolled onto her back, and somehow I ended up on top of her, inches from her face. Her nostrils flared and her lips curled into a snarl. It was the first time I’d ever seen her look ugly.

Students clattered around us in a half moon. Aidan was still calling my name from somewhere in the mix of bodies that swarmed us. Heat rose to my cheeks and tears started, blurring my vision and making me see double. I blinked to see two Joanna Martins elbowing through the crowd (and trust me, one was enough). Joanna knelt beside me and put a warm hand on the side of my face.

“Audrey?” My mother’s voice cried out my name as she tried to push through the students. I could just make out the plastic hairnet she wore bobbing up and down between the faces that stared at me.

No, Mom, this is the last thing I need right now
.

Joanna’s fingers dug into the side of my cheek.
“Loser trog,”
Blake snarled, moments before Joanna knocked my head into the Dumpster and I passed out.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

chapter two

T
his is South Bend, Indiana. Standing out is not the point.

Everything that got messed up is traceable to the day my dad died in an accident at Blake’s dad’s megamillion-dollar empire, R. Dawkins Tech.

October 12, freshman year. The day everything changed because of a mistake.

But that’s how it goes. One glitch in the matrix and I could kiss life as I knew it good-bye.

In math or code, these sorts of anomalies don’t happen. Formula + Predictable Outcome = Safe. That’s why I spend my days in the computer lab and my Friday nights testing how hard it is to hack into various South Bend institutions’ secure websites. Answer: not very.

And things were going so well.

In the summer before freshman year, when we were all fake-smoking cigarettes and freezing one another’s bras at the Martin sisters’ sleepover parties, I was a vision of popularity. It wasn’t just my impeccable spin-the-bottle aim landing me seven minutes in heaven with hotties like soccer star Briggs Lick (perfect last name for your first French kiss, right?). It was the fact that those boys
wanted
to kiss me.

Because so what if big boobs didn’t grace my 115-pound frame, and so what if all my clothes were borrowed from Blake. I had looks. I had attitude. I had smarts.

I was fearless.

But then high school started, and my dad died, and I basically lost it. And even though Blake never took it out on me, angling for social position among kids three years older brought out the worst in her, like high school itself had made her cruel. It started with small stuff, like calling luge-obsessed Nina Carlyle the Fat Slob on a Sled. But it kept escalating, like when she buried Joel Norris’s inhaler in the courtyard, or started stealing stuff from the cafeteria while my mom’s back was turned. Worse, she’d look at me and smile like I was in on all of it. And I’d just stand there too numb to say anything.

I was barely hanging on back then. I was trying so hard to be okay without my dad, but I wasn’t. And then, one day, Blake pushed a girl with scoliosis into a gym locker and soaked her back brace in the sink.

I was only fourteen. But when your dad dies, you get what sad
really
feels like. So when Scoliosis Girl stood there crying with her curvy spine and no back brace, I snapped. I used my blow-dryer on the back brace and picked the girl first for my softball team. And that afternoon, I changed my Best Friend Status to Single on the Public Party Network.

Nobody defriended Blake Dawkins, not even on Public Party. She was crying in her bedroom when her father barged in. She told him what happened, and he capitalized on our fight and said I’d told him she was “sexually active,” and then grounded the living daylights out of her. (He’d probably found the diary she kept on her laptop and didn’t want to admit he’d snooped. Because I’d never told
anyone
.)

But Blake believed him.

This is a Catholic town. Most girls aren’t having sex in ninth grade. And the ones who are certainly don’t want their fathers finding out.

Blake never forgave me.

And, look. After I lost my dad and then Blake, I got kind of weird, too. Take the root of today’s Dumpster Debacle: that navy-blue-dyed rabbit’s foot with little white toenails hanging from a gold Notre Dame logo key chain. I was way too old to be attached to a stuffed animal—especially the foot of one—but my dad gave it to me before school on the day he died, and said, “Audrey, this will bring you luck.” He was superstitious like that, which was fun when I was younger, but old by the time I was fourteen. Instead of thanking him, I rolled my eyes.

After his accident, I couldn’t help but think that if he’d just held on to it, he would’ve been okay. Which meant I couldn’t let the rabbit’s foot go. Like, ever. Three years later, I get all kinds of freaked out if it’s not right next to me or on my person.

Since nothing exciting ever really happens at Harrison High School (besides the odd senior girl sneaking into a Notre Dame football tailgate and making out with a college guy) everyone knew about my dad’s accident at R. Dawkins Tech. They knew about my weird rabbit’s foot, and why I carried it. And even though this was senior year when we’re all supposed to be perfect, my quirks still paled in comparison to scandals like Annborg having solo sex in the costume closet. Or Barron Feldman having diarrhea in the colon section of the
Bodies
exhibit. Or Kevin Jacobsen smoking a joint during the SAT break.

You might even say my dingy rabbit’s foot was old news.

Until the Dumpster Incident. Thanks, Blake.

My dad’s boss, Robert Dawkins, and his wife, Priscilla, gave my ex–best friend a head start by naming her Blake, the figurative equivalent of stamping her birth certificate:
I’m a Huge Deal
. Blake Andrea Dawkins is the girl who saunters through Harrison’s halls with a glossy, pink-lipped smirk on her heart-shaped face, having a way better time than everyone else, sort of like high school is an exclusive party and she’s the only one invited. Don’t deign to approach her unsolicited, because she’ll give you a heavy-lidded blank stare that reminds you of the worst news of your life: You’re not her.

Everybody said first semester senior year would suck, and so far everybody was right. But there were only one hundred thirty-nine more days until I could escape Harrison High School. One hundred thirty-nine days until I could break free from the place where I’d fallen from grace and get away from the group of people who’d witnessed my loss. One hundred thirty-nine days until I could start over as someone new.

College was where I dreamed all the good stuff could happen. Because even if my mom and I couldn’t afford a college that matched my test scores (at least, not without accumulating a quarter-million dollars in debt) I still wouldn’t have to be
here
. Harrison High School would only be a place from my past. Nothing more.

By the time I woke up in the nurse’s office, the story had spread through Harrison like wildfire. Blake Dawkins and Joanna Martin told everyone I’d gone crazy and attacked Blake after she’d kindly offered to throw away my lunch. Who was going to cross Blake and Joanna?

My mother scheduled a meeting with the principal to detail the version of events she saw, but I begged her to cancel. She reluctantly did.

She reassured me on our walk from the school nurse to the school social worker that she found the rabbit’s foot. I guess she pushed a table against the Dumpster, and then used her banana clip to get it, like in that arcade game where you try to pick up a stuffed animal with the metal hook. It was currently being soaked in Palmolive. “Well, I worried they wouldn’t have the same model at the Notre Dame bookstore anymore,” she said.

We hadn’t been back to the Notre Dame bookstore since my dad died. The three of us used to go on weekends and try on T-shirts and Windbreakers, and then we’d browse my dad’s favorite books about football legends. Sometimes we’d buy stuff, but usually we’d just look.

I clutched an ice pack against the side of my skull and said, “Thanks, Mom.” And in my head I thanked her for not mentioning the real reason she saved the rabbit’s foot.

We stopped in front of a dirt-colored wooden door with G103 written in black marker on masking tape.

“I guess this is it,” my mother said. A small red line trailed over the side of her face where her hairnet had been on too tight, but her shiny brown curls still looked pretty good. I wanted to tell her so, but it was hard to talk to my mom at school.

“Audrey?” she said. I pulled my ice pack from my skull, sure we were about to have a moment. But then she said, “No computer tonight. And no internet. Except for homework.”

My mom has never understood why it isn’t okay to take away my computer. My dad was the one who taught me all sorts of coding techniques and encryption algorithms, the one who taught me how to script in Python and introduced me to
Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit
(the unofficial Hacker Bible). And when my mom used to come into my room and tell us to
get outside and enjoy the fresh air
, my dad and I would smile at each other, our own way of saying,
This is so much better than riding bikes.

When I was little, my dad saw I had the hacking itch, just like him. It’s something that starts in my toes and spreads to my fingertips—an all-consuming desire to see how something works, to reverse-engineer the inner mechanisms of software. My dad knew exactly what to do about the itch. He started me in Linux when I was eleven—an open-source software system popular among the geek set—which meant I could navigate the operating system used by the majority of servers in the world before I got my period. We moved from learning how to pilot the OS to creating simple scripts, and then onto actual programs. He didn’t just teach me how to do it—he taught me
why
. We studied hacker philosophy like
The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
My dad believed software should be open and shouldn’t have restrictive licensing—
Free
as in speech, not as in beer
, he used to say. We were practically religious in following the open-source philosophy because it produced the most stable software that anyone could have access to. It meant you could take code already in place, patch it for problems, and make it better.