The Ashley Project Read Free

slapped with a late notice on the first day of school. Three late notices and you had to face the Honor Board—which was kind of out of the question for her, since she was on the Honor Board.
    Ashley Li checked the time on the dangling golden lock of her tan leather Hermès Kelly watch, which she wore strapped around her wrist like a lariat. If they weren’t at Miss Gamble’s in fifteen minutes, Miss Moos, the dreaded school secretary with the creepy hair weave and onion-bagel breath, would soon be ringing their parents, inquiring in that quavery voiceof hers as to why their little girls weren’t in school that morning.
    She took a sip from her cardboard coffee cup. Chai soy decaf latte. It tasted like extra-hot crap, but she pretended to like it because Ashley Spencer loved it, and the point of being friends with Ashley Spencer—the whole point of being in the Ashleys—was that they all liked and did the same things. They had decided back in fourth grade that the Ashley thing was too confusing, so they would go by very cute nicknames instead. All except for Ashley Spencer, of course, who somehow retained the right to be called “Ashley.” Lili was a much chicer name than Ashley anyway, Lili decided.
    Where was the biatch? It drove her crazy how Ashley never seemed to notice the time.
    You’d think the girl would at least try to be on time for the first day of junior high. Lili sighed. She’d have to lie to her mom again to explain the disciplinary note.
    Whenever Lili messed up at school, she was sure to feel the wrath of (Nancy) Khan. Her mother, who had kept her maiden name and used to be the highest-paid female partner at Willbanks, Eliot, and Dumforth (and before that, editor at the Harvard Law Review ), wasnow a full-time SAHM: a stay-at-home mom—or in her case, a socialite-at-home mom, serving on all of the committees and volunteer boards at Miss Gamble’s. She didn’t accept anything less than perfection from her only daughter.
    She should just leave. Forget Ashley. Yeah, right. As if she could ever desert her best friend. That was the problem. Ashley could make anything better, more fun, and less completely mundane. She thought about the stickers from last year that Ashley had made for them to put on select lockers. The stickers read “The Ashleys: SOA” in script on silver foil. No one but the three of them knew what the letters stood for, and it drove the whole class crazy trying to guess. SOA stood for “Seal of Approval,” which should have been glaringly obvious, since only the cool girls in class got the sticker.
    Lili gripped her coffee cup tightly, took an agonized sip of the drink, and contemplated tossing it into the trash. They’d gotten into trouble for the stickers once the faculty got wind of the incident; the girls were chastised because their little prank promoted “clique culture,” which was supposedly against school policy. Uh-huh. Good luck with that.
    Ashley supposedly had a surprise for them, and Lili had no choice but to wait or be left out of the fun. Her other best friend, Ashley Alioto, had found something better to do than wait around for Ashley. A. A. had arrived right on time, just as Lili had, but she’d disappeared once they’d gotten their lattes. Maybe she had decided to ditch Ashley, but most likely she was just on the phone to that “boyfriend”—air quotes definitely intended—of hers again.
    Lili yawned and stretched on the wooden chair. She reached behind her to make sure her new Proenza shoulder bag was still hanging there. The bag was the same one that Ashley would be carrying and the same one that A. A. had carelessly plopped down on the seat across from hers. They had bought them together a few weeks ago. Lili had angled for the fire-engine red version, but Ashley had convinced her that beige was a more practical color for them. A. A., of course, had settled for the beige