Unfriended (3 page)

Aligned: M
²
, La Lisa, Schuyler, Rue, Jimmy+Liz, Lord Rothschild, Justin

Location: Putnam Beach. Putnam, CT.

I stretched my arms in front of me, past the point where my towel ended and the hot sand began. I was at Putnam Beach, lying on my stomach on my favorite striped beach towel, enjoying the feeling of the warm sun on my back. I turned my head to the side and closed my eyes, smelling the beach air, taking in the silence and calm and—

“Mad?” A voice to my right interrupted my reverie. A voice that belonged to my friend Schuyler Watson. “Could you pass me my sunblock?” she asked. Without opening my eyes, I patted around me until I felt her bottle of SPF 75 and heaved it in the general direction of the towel next to me.

“Ow!” I heard her yelp. A moment later, she added, “Thanks, Mad!”

“You’re welks,” I said. A groan came from the
towel to my left, and I had a feeling that my abbreviation hadn’t been appreciated, but who cared? I let out a long breath and felt myself smile. It was summer. It was a Friday. I was with all my best friends, and we had nothing to do today or tonight except hang out with each other. Finally, at long last, vacation had arrived.

It felt like it had been a long time coming. Frankly, ever since this past April, it seemed like everything in my life had been in a constant state of upheaval. But now things were back to normal—in all the ways that mattered.

I opened my eyes and looked at the towel to my left. My once-BFF, now just FF, Ruth Miller, was sitting there, wearing a one-piece bathing suit and her prescription sunglasses, reading a thick science textbook, her phone resting next to her. She caught my eye and smiled at me. I smiled back before resting my chin on my arms and looking out at the water of Long Island Sound, feeling utterly at peace.

“
Sérieusement?”
I heard a French-accented voice to my right say. I pushed my sunglasses up on top of my head and turned to see Lisa Feldman, another FF, staring at Schuyler.

Lisa seemed determined, through force of will, to correct the mistake fate had made by allowing her to be born in New Jersey and not Paris. She used French whenever possible, despite the fact that none of the rest of us spoke or understood it. But to my surprise, I’d actually begun to pick some up. Last week, when I had seen
Jules et Jim
with my cinephile boyfriend, Nate Ellis, I’d only needed the subtitles about half the time.

Lisa’s dark curly hair was piled on top of her head, and she was wearing big Audrey Hepburn–style sunglasses and a tiny black bikini, the better to tan as much as possible. As soon as summer rolled around, Lisa began a tanning regimen that she took
très
seriously, and by the time school started in the fall, she was at least three shades darker than she had been that spring.

Schuyler was wearing a bikini as well—or so she claimed. It was impossible to tell, as she had covered it up with a T-shirt and shorts, and wore a huge floppy hat so oversized that she kept having to lift up the brim to see us. Her long red hair was pulled back in a braid, the better to prevent her from chewing on it, which she was wont to do when stressed. Right after her breakup with her boyfriend, Connor Atkins, the hair chewing had gotten completely out of hand, and Lisa finally resorted to threatening to make her watch the terrifying
Dateline
special again, about the woman with the twenty-pound ball of hair in her stomach. It was this threat alone that had scared Shy into braiding her hair.

“What?” Schuyler asked, looking at Lisa. She held up her bottle of sunscreen, which featured a picture of two very pale kids sitting under an umbrella, wearing hats like Schuyler’s.
Ain’t No Sunshine When It’s On
! the bottle proclaimed. “This?”

“
Oui
,” Lisa said, shaking her head. “You look
ridicule
.”

Schuyler just shrugged and began reapplying.
“Better than what happened last summer,” she said, and I nodded emphatically. Schuyler was very fair skinned, and without lots and lots of sunblock (as she’d discovered the hard way) her face ended up the same color as her hair.

“Guys like it when you have a little bit of a tan,” Lisa said knowledgeably. “
Trust
me.”

Schuyler turned to me and frowned, her version of an eye roll, but I just shook my head and smiled. Lisa had been like this—very in-the-know and constantly dispensing advice—ever since she’d slept with her boyfriend, Dave Gold, for the first time after the prom. (She had also started holding forth about how her relationship with Dave was
très
mature. But this was slightly undermined by the fact that Dave had recently developed an obsession with motorized toy cars.) I had been doing my best to just ignore it, but for Schuyler—the only one of us currently without a boyfriend—Lisa seemed to be a little harder to tune out.

“You actually do have to be sure you get a little sun every day,” Ruth said, looking up from her textbook. “Otherwise, you run the risk of Vitamin D deficiency.”

“See?” Lisa said, looking triumphant. “
Voilà
. Ruth agrees with me.”

“That’s not exactly what I heard her say,” I said as Ruth laughed and Schuyler joined in.

I took a second just to enjoy the moment. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed this was possible—the four of us, hanging out again, with no weirdness or lingering tension. In April, when my Friendverse
profile had been hacked and my world turned upside down, I’d done my best detective work to find the culprit. But when I’d discovered the truth, it had broken my heart—the hacker had been Ruth, my best friend of the last nine years. As she was pretty computer illiterate, she’d hired Frank “Dell” Dell to do the actual hacking. He had been expelled, and Ruth and I had settled into a polite acquaintanceship, but I’d had no hope that we’d ever get our best-friendship back. But that had all changed after the prom.

Lisa was opening her mouth, no doubt to defend herself, when all our phones beeped simultaneously. Ruth lifted hers up from her towel, Lisa grabbed hers from her purse, I dug in my Pilgrim Bank canvas beach bag for mine, and Schuyler picked up her iPhone (dubbed the ShyPhone by all of us) and stared at it quizzically. Schuyler was more often than not completely perplexed by her phone, and still occasionally baffled by things like how to unlock the screen.

My screen was flashing with a Constellation message directed to all four of us.

Mark Rothmann was a friend of mine from school and a fellow Thespian. He’d gotten to know the rest of my
friends over the course of planning a complicated—and not entirely aboveboard—operation during our prom. The eleven of us who’d been involved had all agreed to simply call this operation “Promgate.” Mark hadn’t really known any of my friends before that, but there are just some things in life that bond you. And using a spotty English accent while pretending to be an earl and steal back a priceless school heirloom was apparently one of them.

“
Je ne sais
why Mark keeps complaining,” Lisa said. “I would think that a job where you were alone all the time would be awesome. He could probably just stop showing up for work, and nobody would even notice.”

Mark was working at the very undesirable Second Concession Stand, which was at the far end of the beach and perpetually deserted. But that might have had something to do with the fact that Justin Williamson, my ex-boyfriend and one of the most popular guys at school, was working at the
First
Concession Stand. I looked at Mark’s location on the Constellation message and realized that one of us probably had to go and visit him now. That was the thing about Constellation—there was no pretending that you were somewhere else.

Constellation was a new feature that Friendverse had introduced a few weeks ago. It did what Status Q, Friendverse’s status update program, did: you used it to tell people what was on your mind throughout the day. But unlike Status Q, Constellation was focused on your location, which showed up automatically as part of your update. And even if you didn’t post a new
status, you could set your Constellation so that your location would be updated throughout the day. (Mine, for example, was set to update every fifteen minutes.) Constellation was also really helpful in finding people, because if you were in the same location as someone on your friend list, you’d get a message that you had “aligned” with them. In your feed, you could also see which of your friends had aligned, and who was hanging out with who. And if you went to one place often enough, you could win points and be declared a Royal of that location. Last week, I had been declared Princess of Stubbs Coffee, the coffee chain that provided me with my daily iced latte, a summer necessity. Getting Stubbs Princess was pretty much my proudest achievement of the summer so far.

But even though I would have liked
everyone
to know about my Stubbs royalty status, I’d increased the security of my online accounts a lot since the spring. The only people who could follow me on Constellation were people I was friends with. Not everyone had these security measures in place, and if you didn’t, anyone could see where you were and what you were doing. But after everything that had happened over the last few months, I’d come to realize that not everyone had your best interests at heart when it came to the information you posted.

“You’re right,” Ruth was saying to Lisa with a wistful sigh. “I’d like a job where nobody was keeping track of me. Mrs. Adamson docks my pay if I’m a minute late. Which is probably why the twins have started booby-trapping the driveway.”

I nodded, and we all sat in silence for a moment, reflecting on the state of our summer employment—such as it was.

I had hoped to get hired by the Putnam Players, the local community theater group. But the only positions they were filling were the ushers—
volunteer
ushers. So I’d settled for working at On A Blender, the smoothie shop on Putnam’s main street. It was fine, except that none of my coworkers seemed to want to actually do any work. In addition, I was worried that some of my fingers were in danger of becoming permanently frozen from scooping ridiculous amounts of ice.

Ruth was working as a mother’s helper, babysitting six-year-old twins. Apparently, the kids had seemed great in the interview. It was only when she’d started full-time that they’d revealed themselves to be demonic, scheming creatures. Because of this, and the fact that their names were Jane and Alec, we had taken to calling them the Volturi.

Lisa had scored the most impressive job of all—she was interning at the Putnam Hyatt, occasionally handling translations for any French-speaking guests and staying out of the way of the terrifying head concierge, Mr. Patrick.

Shy had been the first of us to secure a job, since she knew that otherwise she would have to spend the summer at home getting private tutoring alongside her stepsister, Peyton, who terrified her. Peyton was finishing her junior year (or “sixth form,” as she referred to it) at home via private tutor, a necessity after
she’d been kicked out of her Swiss boarding school for reasons Schuyler still wasn’t clear on. So right after school let out, Schuyler had started working on the fuel dock of the Stanwich Yacht Club. But in the first three days, she’d fallen in the water twice and accidentally let a boat—or a ship, or whatever—drift out to sea, untethered. The vessel had eventually been recovered, but Schuyler had been moved to a less potentially damaging section of the yacht club, and was now working at the pool rental shop, signing out towels and water wings. She’d told us proudly that sunblock sales had increased ten percent since she’d started there.

Meanwhile, Nate had been hired for the summer to tutor Maxwell Avery, a seventh grader who had, impressively, flunked all of his classes this past year, including study hall. Maxwell’s parents, dazzled by Nate’s great grades and acceptance to Yale, had essentially put him on retainer, so that he could tutor Maxwell on call.

Occasionally, the situation was really frustrating, because it meant that Nate could be called away at a moment’s notice. But it also meant that he sometimes had whole days free, which made me
very
happy. Ever since school had let out, Nate and I had been spending as much time together as possible. But even so, it still seemed like it was never enough. I was utterly smitten with my boyfriend.

I scrolled through the Constellation updates on my phone until I came to Nate’s, and saw that he was still at the library. I touched the screen, zooming in on
his über-adorable profile picture, and felt myself smile involuntarily.

“How’s Nate?” Ruth asked, and I glanced over at her, dropping my phone onto my towel in surprise. She gave me a knowing look, and I felt my cheeks get hot, realizing that I had probably been gazing dreamily down at my screen.