The Ashley Project by Melissa de La Cruz

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.
    â€œIt’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 wasa friend of Ned’s, and the two were familiar combatants during killfests.
    â€œWe’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.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œDunno. What kind do you want?” he asked. “Ned said you had the menu.”
    â€œYeah, I think it’s around here somewhere,” said A. A., motioning to her messy desk.
    â€œHow 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.
    â€œOkay.” 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 shegrabbed it before it could fall off the edge. “Could you excuse me?” she asked, glancing down at her phone.
    â€œOh,” Tri said, looking a little confused. “You want me to—okay. Sure.”
    â€œNo—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