The Ashley Project by Melissa de La Cruz Page B

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.
    â€œYeah, 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.
    Ashley reddened. “There’s nothing we can do about that. I already asked.”
    â€œYou know this means we have to change in the locker rooms,” Montgomery Cunningham grumbled.
    â€œWe should just wear our uniforms,” joked A. A. Ashley frowned. A. A. would probably do just that if she weren’t an Ashley. She didn’t seem to care what she wore, since everything ended up looking good on her.One time Ashley and Lili had noticed A. A. wearing odd-looking shorts to gym class, and they turned out to be her brother’s boxer shorts. They were beyond horrified, but A. A. had merely shrugged.
    â€œDances are for losers,” Eva Tobin, another eighth grader, declared.
    â€œShut up! The dance is going to be fun!” Ashley said, trying to restore order as the committee meeting began to degenerate into gossiping cliques. Sure, they could complain and moan forever about how an afternoon dance was strictly kid stuff. But they had to face facts. They went to an all-girls school. They had to take what they could get. Even if the dance was at a mega-lame hour, it still meant they could hang out with capital-B Boys.
    Ashley put her hands on her hips and cleared her throat. “Okay. So what’s our theme?”
    â€œWhat about the sixties?” chirped Melody Myers, who could always be counted on to contribute, since she was a perennial hand-raiser. “I just saw Grease , and it was so cute. We could all wear poodle skirts and bobby socks—whatever those are.”
    â€œCute! But isn’t that the fifties?” A. A. asked, looking up from her phone.
    â€œFifties, sixties, what’s the difference?” Melody asked.
    â€œWhat about a Hawaiian theme?” Melody’s friend Olivia DeBartolo suggested. “That could be cute, right? We could all dress in cute beachy clothes.”
    â€œPass,” Ashley said, crinkling her nose. “Do you guys really want to wear grass skirts and coconut boobs?”
    â€œWe could do an eighties theme,” Lili suggested, sitting up straight in her chair. “Play a lot of Madonna, Prince, Billy Joel. Leggings are in now, and my mom said they were huge in the eighties, too. We could wear headbands and fingerless gloves and leg warmers! Ooh, leg warmers!”
    â€œEh,” Ashley sniffed. She looked around the room to gauge interest level. A. A. was madly texting on her phone as usual, the eighth graders were completely ignoring her, and she knew the rest of the club would be happy to just let her decide.
    â€œAnd we could rent, like, Pac-Man video games and Donkey Kong for the guys,” said Lili, getting more and more enthusiastic.
    â€œSure, so they can totally ignore us