When Sebastian still didn’t respond to her threat of not going to the prom, Ash grabbed her pencil and within minutes had replicated the dress on the corner of their sheet of paper.
God, it was beautiful. She darkened the lines of the cutouts on the bodice. She didn’t care what her mother said, the bodice was beautiful and it had looked great on her.
“How goes it?” Mr. Watkins’s voice caused Ash to drop her pencil and let out a small scream. “Sorry, Ash, didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Uh...” Ash tried to cover up her dress sketch with her arm. The drafting teacher was very young and pretty cute, and generally gave interesting assignments, but he was also very detention-happy. If anyone was caught texting, tweeting, on Facebook, taking selfies, thinking about taking selfies or generally doing anything else but the assignment, he immediately gave them weekend detention, which meant cleaning the garage for auto shop, which he also taught. She did not want detention.
“What’s this?” He turned the paper around to see what Ash had been working on.
“Oh. That.” Sebastian cut in before Ash could make up a lame excuse. “Ash and I were having a discussion. An argument, let’s say.”
Mr. Watkins’s eyebrows rose. “About some ugly dress?”
“It’s not ugly!” Ash’s mouth dropped open. “You guys are mean!”
Sebastian grinned. “I was attempting to prove to my lab partner here that there are so many similarities between classic drafting professions such as architecture and...fashion.”
“There are not.” Ash rolled her eyes, not playing along, as she assumed Seb would want her to.
“Actually...” Mr. Watkins tilted his head. “I’d like to hear what Sebastian has to say on this one.”
Ash looked to Sebastian. “Let’s hear the crazy.”
“Drawing flat sketches. Visualizing them in 3-D. Being able to put pieces together that fit and stay that way over a course of time. It’s architecture,” Seb insisted. “Look at the dress Ash is wearing for example.”
Both of them looked. Ash self-consciously smoothed down the puffy skirt of the navy cap-sleeve dress with tiny white bicycles printed all over it.
“The flat sketch of the sleeves—” Sebastian pulled the sleeve away from Ash’s arm “—would look something like this.” He quickly sketched a triangle. “But when it was modeled in 3-D, it would look more like this.” He made the triangle into a pyramid. “And the three pieces of fabric to make the sleeve would have to be sewed to make the pyramid. Fashion is an engineering problem.”
“Mr. Diaz, I’m impressed by your knowledge of both fashion and architecture.”
“Thank you.”
“Carry on, you two. But please save your debates for when you’re done with the assignment.” He walked away.
Ash breathed a sigh. No scrubbing oil off the floor of the garage this weekend!
“Thanks for the save. Though the excuse was such BS. I can’t believe he fell for that.” Ash picked up her pencil again and started to actually work on the watchtower of their castle entranceway.
“It wasn’t a save.” Seb was being serious. “Your dad has Project Runway on 24/7 in your house, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Ash gave him a so-what look. Her dad had become oddly obsessed with any show where people gave up everything to pursue their life’s dreams. She was pretty convinced he’d run off and audition for The Apprentice one of these days.
“I’ve been absorbing that show while I’m at your place. So much of it sounds like the stuff we learn in here.”
Sebastian had been building a website for his family’s church and had been working on it mostly out of Ash’s house so he could get Josh’s input on design. Apparently he’d been learning a thing or two, however wrong, about fashion, as well.
Ash leaned over and gave Sebastian a side-hug. “You’re cute when you’re wrong. But thanks anyway.”
“I’m not wrong!” Sebastian looked insulted.
“I love having a guy as a best friend, but seriously Seb. Fashion...definitely not the same as some boring old building!”
* * *
“Hey.” Ash tried to sound casual as she slipped into a seat behind Armstrong Jones in their Brit-lit class. Every time she got near him, she lost her nerve to say the fun, carefree line she’d come up with the night before. Every. Time.
“Cute dress. I like it with the Vans.”
She’d worried that checkered Vans with a printed dress was too much, but apparently not. Before Ash could thank him, he was off on a tirade. “Don’t you hate the reading list? God, it’s so mainstream. Do we really all need to read Emma or Wuthering Heights? Why can’t we find something a little more obscure... Something actually original? Like The Doctor’s Wife. Or East Lynne. Or at least some Kipling everyone hasn’t read a hundred times over. God.”
“I know!” Ash nodded along. She had no idea what he was talking about. She loved all the Jane Austen readings they’d done, but didn’t want to look overly mainstream.
Armstrong was unflappably awesome. She just loved the way he knew everything about literature. And even though she had no idea what he was talking about half the time, it had played to her advantage.
Ash had watched Armstrong from afar for years—commenting on the pieces he wrote for the school blog, sitting in the first row when he had the role of Jean Valjean in the previous year’s Les Misérables, admiring the fact that he made being a scholarship kid look cool. He relished being a thrift-store junkie and the fact that his parents were frequently unemployed.
Ash had found out Armstrong was taking Brit lit that semester and had immediately registered for the class. She had made sure to grab the seat behind him on the first day, knowing the teacher considered those seats permanent.
She had also gladly accepted Armstrong’s help when he’d offered to proofread her second paper on Jane Austen when the first one she’d written hadn’t gone over so well. Laila had had a fit when she’d seen Ash come home with a B. “An English paper? A ‘B’? You’re half British for heaven’s sake, you should be teaching the class!”
Ash had gotten an A on her second paper and despite this, had asked Armstrong to help proofread her third, as well. He didn’t have too many changes to suggest, but she’d effervescently attributed the A-plus, the highest grade in the class, to his help. He’d asked her to the prom shortly after.
“Want to go thrifting this weekend?” Armstrong asked without looking up from his phone, where his fingers worked furiously to live-tweet whatever was on his mind.
Ash burst into a smile. “Absolutely!” She cursed herself for sounding so pathetically pleased.
“I could use a suit for the prom. Maybe. I don’t know.”
Ash’s smile slowly faded. Here she was totally freaking out about what to wear and he hadn’t even thought about it?
“So...the prom after-party. What are you thinking?” Ash asked casually, hoping he would ask her what she wanted to do. The senior class was planning an all-night “lock-in” at the school with dance contests, food, music and movies. Her parents had already agreed to let her go given that it was chaperoned and didn’t cost anything extra. Ash was almost more excited about that than the prom.
“After-parties are so...I don’t know, cliché. Don’t you think? I mean the prom is such a cliché alone, right?” Armstrong turned back to face her. “I love that about you—you hate clichés.”
“Hate them,” Ash agreed, though she didn’t understand what was so cliché about the after-party. This was the first year the school was having it.
“I’m sure every other girl is probably fixating on her dress right now. Trying to find something ‘different’ while getting the exact same thing as her six best friends. I love that you’re not even stressed,” Armstrong continued.
Ash was relieved she hadn’t sent
him the dress freak-out text she had almost hit Send on the night before.
“Why don’t we go to Belltown after the prom and get into an open mic? You got a fake?”
Ash blinked, not realizing what he meant for a second. A fake ID? No, she didn’t have one. Where was she going to get one?
Great, one more thing to worry about. She had no dress. She had no fake ID.
“Sure, I have one. I mean, who doesn’t, right?” Ash smiled weakly. She’d just only gotten her real ID a few months ago.
“You’d be surprised. I gotta finish this blog. Text me later?” With that, and without waiting for a response, Armstrong turned around.
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.
“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.
Prom Ever After Page 3