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I guess we’re done. She still hadn’t gotten to deliver her fun, carefree line of the day. She’d gotten so light-headed being around him, she’d forgotten it anyhow.
Four
“What’s that?”
Sebastian and Ash were spending the afternoon at Ash’s house, each in their usual position around the kitchen table. Today, they were doing the work they hadn’t finished in class. Both of them were rocking out to the music coming from the garage.
Josh Montague’s band was playing a new song Josh had written the night before, he on drums, his former coworker on lead guitar, vocals and bass by their next-door neighbor. The only thing missing was Ash’s role, keyboardist. She’d promised to join practice once she was done with her homework.
“What?” Ash looked up from the diagram of the moat she was surreptitiously adding to the front of the school. She knew as soon as Sebastian saw it, he wouldn’t let her have any more suggestions in the project. “Be influenced by medieval times—don’t be literal!” he’d already chided.
“That outfit.” Sebastian was looking at Laila’s lehenga, which was still hanging on the coatrack. “Is that yours?”
“Oh. That. You haven’t heard?” Ash filled him in on Laila’s master plan of Ash wearing the lehenga to the prom. Sebastian always knew the latest happenings in the Montague household through his mother, sometimes before Ash had a chance to tell him.
Laila and Sebastian’s mother, Constance, had been close friends since the Montagues had moved in across the street in the multicultural First Hill neighborhood. Constance had a babysitting business that she ran out of her home, and had watched both Ash and Sonali till they were old enough to stay home alone. Sebastian and Ash had grown up in each other’s homes. Seb had no siblings and loved the constant chaos in the Montague household.
Sebastian shrugged. “I think it’s nice of your mother to offer. You don’t have too many other options.”
“Can you not be my mom’s fanboy for five seconds, please?” Ash was getting annoyed with Sebastian’s taking Laila’s side. He was supposed to be her best friend and support her despite his obvious and loyal admiration for Laila.
“I’m just saying.”
“Just agree with me. That’s your job as a best friend. And besides...” Ash was distracted by what she was seeing out of the kitchen window.
Sonali was cutting through the neighbor’s yard, climbing over bushes and under hedges. Was she practicing to join the marines or something? Why wasn’t she walking from the bus stop to home via the normal route of the sidewalk like all the other kids?
Ash rose from the table and went over to the window to see if there was someone on the side of the house she was avoiding.
No one.
Ash would bet anything this had something to do with whatever had caused the bird’s nest in Sona’s hair.
“I just don’t think fighting with your mom over something as silly as a dress is worth it,” Sebastian was saying. “Especially not since you’re just trying to impress Armstrong. Do you really want to end up as the star of one of his podcasts that badly?”
Ash resented that remark.
“I’m not just trying to impress Armstrong.”
“Then why were you not obsessed with going until he asked you?” Sebastian didn’t look up from his sketch. “And you weren’t stalking some expensive dress, either.”
“Well, no one else asked me! He asked. I said ‘yes.’ What’s wrong with that?” Ash clearly remembered texting Sebastian when Armstrong had finally asked her. He hadn’t been as overjoyed as she’d expected.
“You never gave anyone the chance! It was always, ‘I hope Armstrong asks me to the prom... Why hasn’t he asked me yet... I hope he asks me out in his blog. Or like on Twitter. Twitter’s so cool.’” He mimicked a voice that sounded nothing like her and more like Cartman from South Park.
“First, I do not sound like that.”
Seb smirked.
“Second, it’s not like there was a line of guys waiting to ask me.”
“What if someone else had asked you? Someone nice. Would you have been this obsessed?”
“Like?” Ash raised an eyebrow. This was going to be good.
“Like...someone else. Say, Dave.”
“Who the hell’s Dave?”
“My friend Dave! The only Dave we know.”
Ash furrowed her brow. “That guy you play Monster Race Cars with or whatever? Dave was going to ask me?”
Sebastian did an eye-roll. “Portal is not Monster Race Cars. He’s one of my partners in app development—we don’t just sit around playing games all day.”
“Who’s doing app development? Hi, Seb.” Ash’s father came into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of milk during the band’s break. Sonali snuck in behind him and before Ash could say anything, sprinted up the stairs. That girl was acting weirder than usual, and her hair was still a mess. Ash made up her mind to figure out what was going on.
“Hey, Mr. M. I am. With two of my buddies for our AP Computer Science class. We already have BlueDog Studios interested in buying our first app!”
“Their IPO was amazing last year. That’s huge, Seb. What’s the concept?” Josh Montague sat down at the table and passed a glass of iced tea each to Ash and Sebastian.
“Thank you. Our app insta-catagorizes all the pictures you take with your cell phone. Like, Ash has taken 15,000 pictures of that dress.” Sebastian pointed at the sketch she’d drawn in class. “Our app tags them all something like ‘Orange_Dress’...”
“You mean ‘The Dreamsicle,’” Ash interrupted.
Sebastian gave her an eye roll. “...so that she can search for that tag and find all of them in her Camera Roll rather than having to scroll through the year’s worth of pictures she has on it.”
“Now I remember us talking about this.” Josh looked impressed. “Every company’s asking for great apps and app development experience. I just submitted a multilayered tic-tac-toe game to the Windows Phone store. Sonali did the graphics for me.”
“That’s what our teacher said, too—app development is the best moneymaking strategy these days. With what BlueDog is willing to pay for the app, we’ll be able to pay our first-year tuition at Michigan.”
“You’re a good kid, Seb.” Josh smiled at him as though he wished Seb were actually his son.
Sebastian blushed.
“We have a lot of work to do. Maybe I can borrow Sona for the graphics, because none of us are that good at it.”
Josh laughed. “She’d love that.”
Ash felt a flare of jealousy. Her sister got a little goofy around Sebastian. She didn’t like that one bit. Seb was her friend. Oddly, Sona hadn’t come in to say hello today. She never missed out on a chance to talk to Sebastian and give him a dosage of the random factoids she’d learned that day.
“You guys have a name for your app?”
Sebastian grinned. “Still fighting over it, but Dave wants to call it Han Solo and the Chewbaccas.”
“This is the guy you wanted me to go to the prom with?” Ash glanced at Sebastian. She was officially Seb’s only non-weird friend.
“I assume my spawn has shared her dress woes with you?” Ash’s dad slid his milk glass from one hand to the other.
“Oh, I was there to witness the showdown,” Seb said, “in the Rebel store.”
Ash’s dad shook his head. “Try living with it.”
“I’m not deaf you know, you guys.”
“Let’s ask your dad what he thinks about my dress drafting theory.” Seb stood up.
Ash sighed. Great, more people needed to hear that her best friend was certifiably crazy.
“Mr. M, you’re into fashion.”
Josh looked doubtful. “I like watching stuff get made on Runway. I’m not really into fashion.”
“Okay, but don’t you think fashion is like architecture? I mean, look at this.” Seb circled the lehenga and started plucking at the skirt. “We’re doing a project where we are redrafting the front of the high school to look kind of medieval with as few changes as possible. We can easily do the same to this lehenga. The beading on this thing is nice—the shape is what’s weird. If we redraw it as a flat sketch and change the outline of it, then figure out how it would look in 3-D, wouldn’t that be pretty much how architecture is done?”
Ash watched her father, waiting for him to burst into laughter. He was an engineer. He was apparently a Project Runway addict. He would totally agree building things and dresses were two totally different things.
“Hand me those.” Seb gestured toward a box of paper clips on the kitchen counter when no one answered.
Ash watched Seb tuck the hem of the lehenga up, flipping it out like a bell and securing it in place with a paper clip. “If we put some wire in here, we could make it stay like this.”
Ash had to admit that the skirt looked infinitely better with the modifications Sebastian had made.
“We could do the same for the other side. And the top, we could change it, you know, make it like a thin strap thing or something. Draw a new sketch to get the lines right. Make it shorter like this.” Sebastian clipped the pieces as he talked. “And suddenly...”
Suddenly, the lehenga was different.
“...and it’s a whole new thing. With just a few tweaks.”
Ash’s mind spun. Something was coming together.
“And it’s so unusual because of the original beadwork and construction, but now it’s really modern and kind of cool. I haven’t seen anything like it.”
Unusual. Not mainstream.
“I see what you’re saying,” Josh agreed. “But do you really think making folds with paper clips is like sewing?”
Ash stopped listening.
Ash squinted at the lehenga. The color wasn’t bad—the beautiful Tiffany blue looked good on her. The changes Sebastian had made were definitely an improvement to the boxy shape it had before. There was still a lot more that needed to be done. Could it be possible? Could she be looking at her prom dress?
“Seb. I think you might be a genius,” Ash said slowly.
Josh was smirking. He knew exactly what she was thinking.
Sebastian didn’t.
“Wait, why? I don’t like that look you’ve got going on.”
“Remember how much you love me?”
Josh rose from the table, half smile still on his face. “I’m leaving before I get roped into something that’s going to get me disowned by your mother.”
Five
“Hi.” Jessica Moriarty dropped into Armstrong’s seat in Brit lit.
Ash glanced up from her reading. “Yes?” She was hoping to have a chance to chat with Armstrong before class started—lately it felt like the only time they talked was online via Twitter or his blog comments. She certainly didn’t want drama-queen Jessica hanging around eavesdropping on their conversation.
“What are you doing?” Jessica wanted to know.
Ash tried not to roll her eyes. “Reading, Jess. For our assignment today. Have you finished it?”
“Nope.” Jessica continued to stare at her.
Ash tried to read another few lines of The Tempest and failed.
“Okay. What is it?” Ash closed her book. The staring was getting creepy.
“So...Sebastian Diaz.”
“Ah.” This was normal. A lot of girls liked Sebastian and most were afraid to talk to him. At least one or two girls asked Ash about him every week: whether he was single, liked them, et cetera. As if Ash were his keeper or something.
“Has he said anything about the prom?”
“Yep, he’s said a lot about it.” Ash was enjoying this now. Jess had never been particularly nice to her before. Ash was still annoyed at the “vintage” comment she’d made in the dressing room when Ash had been trying on the orange gown.
Jessica’s eyes widened. “OhMyGod, are you guys going together? Did you dump Armstrong?”
“No!” Ash looked around, hoping no one had heard. This was how rumors got started. “I’m going with Armstrong.”
“So...Sebastian doesn’t have a date yet?”
Ash sighed heavily, as if divulging a huge secret, and lowered her voice. “He’s still available.”
Jess smiled as though she’d just heard that her grandmother’s pecan pie was now available in the vending machines. She was from the South and was constantly lamenting the lack of good Southern food in Seattle.
“Do you think he’d go with me?”
“Um...” Ash pretended to think about it. Honestly, she had no idea if Sebastian even knew who Jessica was. That was probably for the best. Jessica wasn’t the sharpest stick in the forest, and Sebastian tended to only hang out with the AP crowd. He’d only had one girlfriend during high school, the one girl in Computer Club who’d moved away their junior year.
“You’ll have to ask him and see,” Ash finally said.
Jessica’s face fell. “Can you find out if he likes me?”
“I’ll let you know.” Ash picked up her book again when she saw Armstrong enter the room, exactly a second before the bell rang. “Go sit down before you get detention. Sebastian hates girls who get detention. His mother would disapprove.”
Jessica hurried to her seat and was replaced by Armstrong a few seconds later.
