The Ashley Project (6 page)

Ever since Lili had brought home a “warning” from the headmistress's office after the SOA sticker caper, Nancy had gotten it into her head that the Ashleys were nothing but trouble, and the late notice didn't help any.

“You really have to learn to be your own person,” her mother said firmly. “Get out of her shadow.”

Lili tried not to show her annoyance, since it would land her in more hot water. But how exactly did you become your own person when you shared the same name with the two most popular girls in your class?

A. A. LIVED IN A
penthouse apartment on top of the Fairmont Hotel in the middle of Nob Hill (also known in more resentful quarters as “Snob Hill”). She had lived there all her life. Her mother had fled New York and repaired to a two-bedroom suite when she was getting a divorce from her second ex-husband, a British rock star, and had never checked out. Instead she had upgraded, taking over the entire floor with money from the settlement. Upon arriving in San Francisco, she quickly met and married A. A.'s dad, the former mayor of the city, but divorced him a few years ago. Her mother still traveled constantly, and A. A. was never quite sure where she was or if she would be there when she got home.

The only constant in her life was her older half brother Zed Starlight, whose father was the ex-rocker her mother had left upon finding out he had not one but four love children with assorted groupies all over the globe. Zed had changed his name to Ned Alioto after A. A.'s dad pretty much adopted him when he married their mom. Ned never saw his real dad except on VH1 nostalgia shows, and he told A. A. he was tired of being the kid with the funny name.

Ned was hanging out in the suite's plush living room with a couple of his friends from school when she got home. They were nice enough boys, although completely obsessed with video games. Ned and his posse were on all the important sports teams at Gregory Hall, but A. A. never heard them talk about anything except what games they owned, what games they planned to buy, what games had secret shortcut codes that allowed you to get to the final levels, and whether it was time to order pizza.

Two of the guys were battling it out onscreen, brandishing Wii sticks like automatic weapons while the rest watched intently.

“Get him! Over there! Turn the corner and—”

“I'm—aaah . . .!”

“Take that!” Slaps and tapped fists all around as an alien's head exploded in a burst of green goo.

“Can I have next game?” A. A. asked, squinting at the screen and sitting on the nearest empty chaise. Might as well join in the fun.

“Sure,” one of the boys agreed, tossing one of the four controllers her way. A. A. lined up her shots and racked up a huge score in seconds. “You suck, Fitzpatrick,” she taunted, tossing the joystick back into the pile.

“Suck this, Alioto,” responded the boy who'd lost to her, flipping her off with a grin.

A. A. pulled a face. Boys were such doofuses. Sometimes she wondered what girls ever saw in them. From what she could see from her brother and his friends, all they wanted to do was play video games until their brains turned to mush.

Of course, laxjock wasn't like that at all. He was a real gentleman. Yesterday he even removed a virus on her profile page that was turning all her icons upside down—without her asking. Although it was beginning to bother her that he never texted her back after her goofy
I LOVE U
dare.

“Wanna order dinner?” she asked, nudging Ned with her foot and picking up a phone so they could order from the hotel's room service menu.

“Huh?” said Ned, never taking his eyes off the eighty-inch projector screen that dominated the room. Like A. A., Ned was tall and slim, but with a mess of curly blond hair inherited from his English dad.

“Forget it.” A. A. shrugged. She knew better than to bother him when Call of Duty: Ghosts was on. “I'm not hungry, anyway. I'm still full from that tea.”

“Uh-huh.” Her brother nodded, cramming a hand into an enormous tub of popcorn on the couch and scattering kernels everywhere.

A. A. walked into her room. It was the smallest one in the suite—probably the former maid's closet—but she liked its coziness. Her mother had recently redecorated again, and instead of her princess bed with the canopies, she had a loft platform bed with a fluffy rug. She kind of missed the tufted headboard where she used to line up all her stuffed animals. Her mother's decorator had banished her collection into an opaque white lacquered trunk.

She threw her bag down on the bed, and only when she had closed the door firmly behind her did she check her phone for messages.

Sure, she had acted like texting laxjock that she loved him didn't mean anything, but she had to admit,
she was worried. What if he thought she was serious? But then again, what if he thought she wasn't?

She fired up her computer and checked to see if he was online. Nope. He hadn't been online since that morning. Should she leave him a new comment? She mulled her options while her screen pinged with IMs from girls from class—everyone wanting to know more about Lauren's porky plastic surgery—when there was a sharp knock on the door.

“It's open,” A. A. called.

A boy walked into the room. It was the same boy who'd suffered a good-natured defeat at her hands a few minutes earlier. He was dark-haired and handsome, with clear blue eyes and deep dimpled cheeks. Robert Austin Fitzpatrick the Third, or Tri, was hands down the cutest boy in the seventh grade at Gregory Hall. Alas, he was also the shortest boy in the seventh grade at Gregory Hall. He barely came up to A. A.'s chin. But then, so did most boys her age.

Tri's family owned the Fairmont Hotel, and the two of them had known each other since they were small enough to hide in the grandfather clocks in the grand ballroom. Growing up, they had learned to ride bikes up and down the hall corridors. His older brother was
a friend of Ned's, and the two were familiar combatants during killfests.

“We're getting a pizza, do you want some?” he asked, taking a seat on the ornate bench in front of her bed. “Wow. Zebra stripes,” he said, admiring the rug.

“I know. I can't stop her,” A. A. said, sighing. Her mother's whirlwind interior design projects were a common annoyance. One year Jeanine had hired a feng shui master to realign the furniture, and he'd placed mammoth vases near all the doorways so that she banged her knee on one every time she left the room. “What kind of pizza?”

“Dunno. What kind do you want?” he asked. “Ned said you had the menu.”

“Yeah, I think it's around here somewhere,” said A. A., motioning to her messy desk.

“How was the tea?” he asked. Tri's older sisters were all Miss Gamble's girls and he was familiar with the school's social calendar.

“Okay.” A. A. told him about the upchuck-inducing fountain and he laughed, but not in a mean way. Tri liked a good prank.

Her phone buzzed with a text message, vibrating against the wooden surface of her rolltop desk, and she
grabbed it before it could fall off the edge. “Could you excuse me?” she asked, glancing down at her phone.

“Oh,” Tri said, looking a little confused. “You want me to—okay. Sure.”

“No—I—you can stay,” she said, tapping her phone screen to see who had texted her. Her heart beat. She had wanted to read the message in private, but it was just Tri. They were like brother and sister. But she felt shy talking about her feelings for laxjock with him. Conversation with Tri always revolved around the discrepancies between the first and second Star Wars trilogies, whether there was life on other planets (Tri pro and A. A. con), and things you could explode in a microwave (marshmallows, bars of soap, CDs, but not the family cat).

She hit the message icon.

WANNA LIVE TWEET THE VOICE W ME AND LI?

It was just Ashley. A. A. exhaled, deflated. She tapped a quick message telling Ashley she was busy and they could tweet later.

“Waiting to hear from someone?” asked Tri, still poking around her desk and rummaging through her books and papers looking for the pizzeria menu.

“Huh? No.” A. A. shook her head. “Don't touch
that!” she said suddenly, slapping his hand away from her pink journal. She looked at the clock. It had been three hours since she'd sent laxjock her sappy text. Ugh. She had to do something. She scrolled down the list till she found his number and began tapping out a new text.

“Mushroom and sausage okay?” he asked, holding up the red and white menu.

A. A. nodded, without looking up.
I WZ ONLY KDING!
she wrote, and pressed the send button just as Tri got up to leave, closing the door behind him. She put down her phone and sighed. Maybe he thought she was being too forward. Maybe he never wanted to hear from her again.

But a few minutes later her phone buzzed back to life again.

She yelped when she saw the screen.

It was from him!

BUT I
U 2 XOXOXOX

She pressed the phone close to her chest and smiled a small, secret smile. He was definitely amazing!

“WHAT IS
SHE
DOING HERE?”
Ashley hissed, glaring at Lauren, who had taken a seat at the round table. “This meeting is for committee members only,” she said as she removed her new H&M jacket.

It was a copy of a much more expensive Stella McCartney jacket, but she hoped no one would notice. The other day her mother had flipped when she saw the latest bills from Saks and had taken away Ashley's courtesy card, lecturing her that twelve-year-olds did not need to carry two-thousand-dollar handbags, blah blah blah, rampant materialism, blah blah blah, excessive consumption, blah blah and blah. This from a woman who spent a fortune on her skin-care regimen alone. She
said that Ashley was abusing her signing privileges and told her she was lucky she wasn't taking away the handbag itself. With only her allowance to spend, Ashley was forced to downgrade labels. But she refused to downgrade her trendsetting Ashley Spencer style. People looked to her for their fashion cues. Hello.

“Relax, Ash. It's an after-school activity, anyone can sign up, remember?” A. A. said mildly as she stretched her legs on the seat in front of her and yawned widely without covering her mouth.

Ashley frowned. A. A. could be such a tomboy sometimes. It wasn't good for the Ashleys' enviable reputations if A. A. would persist in slouching down and acting like a boy. But it wasn't so much A. A.'s posture that was bothering her as what A. A. had said.

Technically, A. A. was right:
Technically
, anyone could sign up for any of the myriad after-school activities offered at Miss Gamble's, although Ashley couldn't imagine who'd want to waste their time at such boring activities as chorus, which was populated by off-key aspiring
Voice
wannabes, or theater, where you had to battle the budding drama queens who couldn't talk without “emoting” or walk without “expressing.”

Even worse, who wanted to hang with the nerdy
worker bees who ran yearbook and
The Gambler
(the school newspaper: three pages stapled together and released once a semester)? Then there was the lowest of the low—School Spirit, which was populated by doughy-faced girls who organized weekly bake sales and created handmade posters for pep rallies and field hockey games, and Fashion Club, which was started by two weirdos who wore bizarre outfits on free-dress days. The Ashleys would never be caught dead in something as trite as Fashion Club.

No. There was only one after-school activity worth signing up for, and everyone knew it. And that was Social Club, the club that ran the most important activity of all: the monthly mixers with the boys from Gregory Hall.

School had been in session for almost two weeks, and even Ashley was tired of making piggy noises whenever she saw Lauren. She had to give the girl credit. Even when someone drew a pig on her locker, Lauren never even looked upset. She walked the hallways with her nose in the air and looked straight ahead, never giving any sign that the teasing bothered her.

Still, the girl should know better than to crash a Social Club meeting. Everyone knew it was staffed by Ashleys and their SOAs only.

Ashley rapped on the podium and called the meeting to order. “Okay. So you all know what we have to do. Plan the best boy-girl dance
ever
.” She wrote “Best Dance Ever” with four exclamation points on the whiteboard behind her.

“Yeah, and how are we going to do that if the dance starts at four p.m.?” asked Emma Rodgers, the way-too-opinionated leader of the popular eighth graders, who were all seated on the window ledges at the far side of the room. The eighth graders were too busy plotting how to crash high school parties to care about the mixer.

School policy dictated that all mixers and dances be held on school grounds from four to six in the afternoon. Every year the seventh and eighth graders campaigned for a later time—six to eight, seven to nine—and every year they were shot down.