Social Order (11 page)

SOCIAL PRESENCE: 8

Spotted flirting with not one but two boys at the bash! But maybe that's too much of a good thing?

SMILE: 7

Practically a little Miss Sunshine these days.

SMARTS: 9

Word has it she was behind our invitation. Nice move!

CUMULATIVE SCORE: 34

THE FRIENDSHIP CEREMONY WAS GENIUS—EVEN
if Ashley had to say so herself. She'd come up with it on the spot in that producers' meeting and now, just a week later, it was a reality. Not just that: It was reality television. How cool was that?

In front of the cameras in Miss Charm's class, groups of nervous girls stood up to make their presentations. Ashley wasn't surprised they were nervous. She'd be nervous as well if the Ashleys had made such pathetic banners.

Just as she predicted, everyone went for the most obvious thing. Sheridan Riley had stuck a row of false eyelashes onto her group's banner to represent her (too short) bangs. Melody Myers and Olivia DeBartolo had
stuck Liv and Maddie paper dolls onto their banner to show how similar and inseparable they were. Gag. Some people had actually used
colored pens
to make their banners. Hello! Were they poor? Or just lazy? Ashley couldn't believe the lack of initiative.

Even the songs everyone else chose were totally predictable. The first group sang “You've Got a Friend,” which was some kind of hippie song that Ashley's father sometimes played on his guitar. It was super sappy, and not helped by the fact that two of the four girls were crying while they were singing. The second group was even more lame, singing the old Beatles song “A Little Help from My Friends.” Daria Hart actually looked like Ringo. Ashley had to pinch herself so she wouldn't explode in hysterics.

But she had to admit that Daria's group—the three mousiest girls in the class—hadn't done a bad job with their banner. They'd used the cover from the Beatles album
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
, because that was where their song was from, and they'd had their three plain-Jane faces photoshopped in. At least they'd made an effort. Miss Charm was oohing and aahing over it, but she hadn't seen the Ashleys' banner yet.

Melody and Olivia's group presented a
Girls
–type play. In their speech, they talked about one another as
though they were all characters from the show. “You're so like Hannah,” Melody said to Doro Hansen. The problem was that even though there were four of them, no one wanted to be Shoshanna, the stupid one, so there were two Marnies instead.

The Ashleys—and Lauren—were up last, just as the producer had requested. Their 3-D banner looked amazing. Even Lili, who'd turned into an attention hogger and whiny baby ever since the cameras showed up, had let Ashley use her superior designs, realizing that Ashley actually knew what she was talking about.

Lili had been acting a little weird all day. She'd left the party last Saturday red-eyed, without telling anyone what happened. Ashley heard something had happened with the Reed Prep Froggy (because he was taking French, geddit) and vowed to get to the bottom of that, and she hoped whatever it was wouldn't affect Lili's participation in the program.

Everyone in the room gasped when they unfurled the heavy, ivory-colored canvas, Lauren holding one end and A. A. holding the other. Ashley was represented, as planned, by a giant diamanté tiara sewn onto the canvas. To shut Lili up, they'd mocked up a BlackBerry, just as she requested, getting an oversize replica made from
hand-stitched black leather. For A. A. they cut a soccer ball in half and glued one side to the banner. Ashley had never been serious about the kissing thing—she was just saying all that for the camera to create a sensation.

The trouble with A. A.: She was gorgeous. With her sharp cheekbones and long legs, she looked like a model. Plus she had a naturally sweet personality, and Ashley couldn't have A. A. coming across on TV like the angelic, beautiful one. The public had a right to know she could be a bit of a ho.

A. A. had forgiven Ashley for her jibes, as Ashley knew she would. Well, she'd let the matter drop, which was almost the same thing. With Lili being so pouty and difficult all of a sudden, and Tri still acting like a pretend boyfriend, still not brave enough to kiss her, Ashley didn't need any more stress on her hands.

The hardest person to represent on the banner was Lauren, for obvious reasons. They didn't really know her, and it was hard to tell what her personality was, exactly. She did well at school and her parents were insanely rich. So what? Everyone who was anyone at Miss Gamble's was rich. Finally they decided on a mock-up menu from the Ivy, the restaurant they'd gone to in L.A., to represent how she knew a lot of cool places. Ashley got
the calligrapher her mother used for black-tie events to reproduce the menu exactly by hand.

Across the center of the banner, the words “The Ashleys” had been hand-embroidered by one of her maids, who came from Guatemala. And each of them had a speech to make (learned by heart, of course, and rehearsed ad infinitum) about one of the other group members. Lili did Lauren, as she was the only one who wanted to. Lauren did Ashley, and she had lots of nice things to say. It was so obvious that Lauren was behind the blog. She seemed to hero-worship Ashley.
But then,
Ashley thought,
who didn't?
A. A. did Lili, and she did a decent job of praising Lili's loyalty, and Ashley finished off with a heartfelt speech about A. A. This was a celebration of friendship, after all. And looking around at her group, Ashley felt a wellspring of sincere affection for them. They made her look so good.

Their song was the pièce de résistance, as Lili insisted on calling it. They decided to take a completely different approach from all the other groups and
not
choose a song with the word “friends” in it. So they finally decided on “Halo” by Beyoncé. “You're my saving grace” seemed like the perfect way to describe how they felt about one another. Plus, it totally showcased
Ashley's sweet singing voice. She was so glad she'd insisted on everyone singing a capella. If musical accompaniment were allowed, Lili would have brought in her violin and stolen the limelight.

After class ended, and the producers were packing up and everyone was gushing over one another's banners and performances, Jasper—the British one, who was cuter than Matt, Ashley decided, mainly because of his accent—gave Ashley a cheeky grin.

“You may just have this sewn up,” he said, clapping her on the shoulder. “If you keep this up, you'll be the one everyone votes for. And by the way, thanks for the tip the other night.”

“My pleasure.” Ashley smiled.

“What did Jasper say to you?” asked Lili keenly.

“Nothing important.” Ashley shrugged. She didn't want to give Lili any more incentive to stage another secret taping.

Subterfuge was the only way to win. No one had ever won a game show by being nice.

LAUREN HAD A DATE. HER
first date! two first dates, actually. On the same day, and in pretty much the same place. How did this happen?

First off, Christian called to ask if she wanted to go hang out in Golden Gate Park one day after school. He sounded kind of nervous and almost apologetic about it: He was working on an urban geography project for school and needed to do some research at the Japanese Tea Garden. At the party, Lauren had said that the park was one of her favorite places in the city. Would she like to come along?

Of course she would! Lauren used to go to Golden Gate Park all the time when she was a little girl,
because her parents didn't have much money and the park was free. Her father had been a graduate teaching assistant for most of her childhood, working on his PhD and scraping by on an academic stipend, while her mother had a part-time job at a not-for-profit organization that paid her almost nothing to answer the phone and type letters. Their favorite place to spend time on Sunday afternoons was the Japanese Tea Garden. Of course, she hadn't mentioned all that stuff about being poor to Christian. He was a Gregory Hall boy, and not a scholarship student. She didn't want him to know that she used to live in a walk-up in the Mission.

Over the weekend, Alex had called as well. His mother was hosting some big, boring cocktail reception—“the usual socialite shindig,” he told her on the phone, “comb-overs and canapés”—at the de Young museum in the park. The museum closed at five, but the reception didn't begin until six. Did Lauren want to hang out there for an hour?

With all the crowds gone, they could have their own private tour of the place. He remembered her saying at the party how much she liked the park and the museum.
Oh God,
Lauren thought,
I must have gone around saying
the same things to everyone! I really need to work on my conversation skills.

Of course, the night of Alex's museum event had to be Wednesday, the one afternoon Christian could meet her in the Japanese Tea Garden. Lauren took a deep breath and agreed to do both. What had she done? Was she hanging out with the Ashleys so much that she was turning into one of them?

Going out with two boys at the same time was just the sort of duplicitous, selfish thing an Ashley would do. But Lauren couldn't help it! She liked both of them—what was wrong with that? It wasn't like they were exclusive or anything. She was just having fun.

Besides, an Ashley would most definitely
not
go to the Japanese Tea Garden. The other day, when she was having lunch with the Ashleys, Lili had dissed the fortune cookie that they were giving out on International Day, saying that they were actually an American invention. Just like sweet and sour pork and General Tso's chicken. Then Lauren piped up and told them how, a hundred years ago, fortune cookies were invented by the Japanese gardener who looked after the Tea Garden in the park.

She'd thought the girls were interested, so she had
kept talking—about how someone in L.A. claimed to have invented them, and how the Court of Historical Review had finally decided that they originated in San Francisco—until Ashley finally held up a hand to stop her and said it was the most boring story she'd ever heard.

Luckily, Christian didn't seem to find it boring. She told him all about it as they crossed one of the stepping-stone paths and circled a beautiful, serene lily pond. He was still in his Gregory Hall uniform, his shirt hanging out and his dark blond hair so messy it looked like he'd done somersaults down a hill to get here.

Lauren had raced home after school to change, telling Dex to drive as fast as possible. He ignored her, of course, and drove at his usual speed, laughing at her for trying to cram too many dates into one afternoon. She decided on jeans and a casual T-shirt with a funny slogan, “Don't Waste My Daytime Minutes,” that she hoped would appeal to Christian's sense of humor.

Somehow she felt less pressure hanging out with a boy like Christian than with the Ashleys. Or with any of the girls at Miss Gamble's, actually. He didn't even seem to care what she was wearing, aside from cracking up at her T-shirt. He just smiled at her a lot and tried to
make her laugh by pretending to almost fall off one of the stepping-stones.

Lauren especially loved the steep, curving moon bridge, which was more like a ladder than a bridge you walked over. She used to love clambering up it when she was a little girl, using her hands to pull herself up to the top.

“It's modeled on an ancient Chinese canal crossing,” Lauren explained to Christian, and he very seriously wrote that down in his notebook. She'd been worried he'd think she was too geeky, but he didn't seem to mind.

“Race you to the top?” he suggested, nodding toward the bridge, and she started running right away—without a head start, she'd never beat him!

They were having such a good time that when she pulled out her phone to check the time, Lauren was startled. With a pang, she realized it was almost five and time to meet Alex. She was reluctant to leave him.

“I've got to meet my mom now,” she said. She hated having to lie to Christian, but it seemed kind of rude to tell him she was off on a date with another boy. “For this reception thing at the museum I told you about—I'm really sorry I have to go.”

She
was
sorry. Hanging out with Christian was a lot of fun. She really liked him a lot.

“That's okay,” he said. “Hey, you wanna go see that new disaster movie next week? The one with the robots taking over the world or something?”

“Don't the robots always take over the world?” asked Lauren.

“But of course! Me, I'm scared of my iPod, aren't you?” Christian laughed.

“Oh, completely, and I'm not too sure about this cell phone either.” She grinned. “It's either going to give me cancer or take control of my brain.”

“I'll text you,” he promised.

She had another date with Christian! Whee. But first she had to get through date number two.

Christian gave her a quick hug, and when he was gone, Lauren ran all the way to the de Young museum, pounding through the elegant sculpture garden and arriving at the main entrance of the distinctive, copper-covered building pretty much out of breath. She hoped Alex wouldn't notice too much.

In a nearby restroom, she changed into outfit number two: a short, strapless, satin Rhys Dwfen dress with sky-high Alexandra Neel slingbacks.

Alex was waiting for her outside. Dark-haired, smoldering Alex, whose face broke into a giant smile when he saw her. The butterflies in her stomach returned.

“Sorry I'm late,” she wheezed, desperately trying to straighten her dress collar and flatten her flyaway hair as they walked through the first courtyard.

Inside the sweeping central court of the museum, with its high ceilings, pale stone floor, and giant black-and-white photographic mural, caterers were setting up food stations and bars. A tall, dark-haired woman in a silk Lanvin dress, her hair in a chic bun, was talking to waiters in tuxedoes.