“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