Smiling and steering Danny away from the giant creature, which gave her newfound respect for turkey farmers, Maddie had explained that this was a wild animal and therefore unpredictable. Not a month earlier a wild turkey had chased a girl and her dog down a Cambridge street. Maddie had made Danny promise to never approach one.
“Sure,” he’d said.
The next day, she’d found him trying to feed a turkey popcorn.
She asked why he’d broken his promise.
“Because that wasn’t a wild turkey, it was George.”
Maddie thought Lucy had the same inability to distinguish Ryan Thompson from an ass.
And like those turkeys, Silicon Valley asses ran rampant thanks to a lack of natural predators.
“I’m not signing up for Pulse,” Maddie said, “and I’m not trekking to Sausalito to crash some Pulse loser fest.”
“Pulse-a-palooza,” Lucy corrected.
“Uh-huh. For 10s. What makes you think you can even get in?”
Lucy was checking her phone.
“Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“What makes you think you can get in?”
“Just something Ryan said the other day.”
“Seriously? Is this why you didn’t want an incubator boyfriend? He’s twice your age.”
“He’s not, and it’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?”
“He’s helping us.” Lucy held up her phone, open to the ValleyStart daily message:
ValleyStart: As we begin Week 3, next week’s beta test should be all you can see. For if you excel, it’s no secret we tell, that your Demo Day may just be child’s play!
“Things are moving fast,” Lucy said. “And Ryan’s giving us advice for Demo Day and—”
“That’s cheating!” Maddie said. “He’s not allowed to do that. I know you like to push the envelope, but I never thought you’d actually break the rules.” She stared past Lucy at the redwood tree in the center of the S on Lucy’s pennant—the school had a tree for a mascot, seriously? “Don’t you think Stanford frowns upon cheaters?”
The color drained from Lucy’s cheeks. “I didn’t trust you with that so you could throw it in my face.”
Maddie hadn’t meant to; it just came out. But if that was what it took to make Lucy see reason—
“Besides,” Lucy said, pushing her shoulders back and trying to grow taller. “I’m not cheating. A tip or two isn’t cheating. You’re just jealous that he’s giving them to me and not you.”
“Not in this lifetime,” Maddie sniped, immediately wishing she could take back the words that could have and did come out of her mother’s mouth. “Whatever. Do what you want, Lucy, but I’m not having any part of it.”
Maddie grabbed her bag, plucked her canvas sneakers from the pink basket, and left before Lucy could try to convince her to stay, to hear her out. But Maddie wasn’t Delia, easily convinced to straighten her hair or have a Demo Day prep session while on a three-mile run.
Shoving open the door to the dorms, Maddie stepped outside, where the warmth of the sun hit her face—again. Every damn day. She tossed her head back, glaring at the constant blue sky and cheery puffs of pure white clouds, wanting to scream.
Rain, one day. Just one day. One day where the sky swallowed all color, painting everything gunmetal gray with murky clouds that hung low enough to touch and humidity that clung to your arm hairs . . . and maybe then she wouldn’t feel the three thousand miles so much.
Aimlessly, Maddie passed by summer students lying on towels on the lawn in front of the student center, reading everything from War and Peace to the Gumberoo series. She trudged down the spoke leading to the ValleyStart headquarters but turned around when she heard two teams having a heated debate on Objective-C versus Swift. She kept going past the rounded gym and park at the far edge of campus. All the while, she had to keep unclenching her fists.
She hadn’t been this upset since her parents charged into the living room two years ago, shouting loud enough to wake Danny and scare away the only friend Maddie had dared to make since she was twelve. The girl was newly transferred and into art, and Maddie was lonely. But she’d have never tried, never invited her over, had her parents not sat in that same living room with her at the family meeting she’d called and promised they were going to do better, be better—better parents, better spouses, better people.
They’d lied. The yelling about infidelities started out marriage-related, transitioned into the agency, and back again, a loop Maddie didn’t care to figure out.
She’d walked her almost new friend out the back door and read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to Danny, all the while fighting the burn behind her eyes at the memory of her parents reading the book—her favorite at his age—to her.
Though she’d stopped drawing book covers years ago, that night she drew one for Danny, featuring the scene he loved most: the kids bathing in the fountain, scooping up coins.
Thoughts of Danny led her to the tech day camp and to Sadie.
“And she lives!” Sadie cried when Maddie walked in the door.
Some of the weight she’d been carrying immediately lifted. “Watch it, squirt, or I won’t open up my bag of designer tricks.”
“Speaking of . . .” Sadie eyed Maddie’s messenger bag. “Might want to think of being humane and leave that for the rats to nest in full-time. Carrying that will make you tumble from 10 as fast as Emma Santos.”
Maddie plunked her bag right in Sadie’s line of sight. “Emma Santos? From ValleyStart?”
“One and the same.”
“How do you know Emma?”
“I don’t. But I’ve been following her on Pulse.” Sadie made a face. “No thanks to you. Had to get the roster list myself.”
Maddie’s eyebrow lifted. “Did you hack into the system?”
“I could have, surely.” Sadie tossed her red hair. “But I just asked Ms. Kapoor. She said it’s on the website. Who would have thought to look there?”
“Who’d need to?” Maddie said.
“Anyone with a Pulse.” Sadie smirked. “If only they had an incubator for kids my age. It’s not right, I tell ya. Because, I mean, ValleyStart and Ryan Thompson and Pulse—it’s like all the best Gumberoo books combined.” Her smile faded and she spoke softly. “You know I almost met her?”
“Who?”
“Esmé Theot,” she said with awe that Maddie was glad to hear wasn’t reserved just for Pulse and Ryan Thompson. “My mom promised to take me to her signing in San Francisco a couple months back. We were gonna have dinner after—and not at one of those places with a lame kids’ menu.”
“What happened?”
“Avocados.”
“Avocados? I didn’t know you could get food poisoning from avocados.”
“No, not food poisoning. Runaway avocados. Some truck headed for Napa Valley got in an accident. No one was hurt, but the road was covered. Took so long to clean up that we missed the signing. Mom was really upset, saying she should’ve taken the whole day off, not just half. She took off the next day though, and we watched all the movies together with a big bowl of guacamole.”
Maddie could barely remember a time when her mom would have done that for her. She knew she’d never done it for Danny.
As Sadie settled back into the coding program, Maddie helped, getting lost in it, enjoying the break from Lucy and the incubator and all things Pulse. When the counselors announced it was time to start wrapping up, she was surprised at how much time had gone by.
Sadie grabbed her phone to text her brother about pickup and then dove back into Pulse.
Maddie groaned.
“Right?” Sadie said. “So you see?” She spun her phone around. “Emma’s down to a 4! She was a 10 a couple of days ago.”
“Okay.”
<
br /> “Don’t you get it? A 10 doesn’t fall to a 4 in a matter of days unless they’ve been, like, arrested or something—and not even then depending on what they were arrested for.”
“That’s disturbing.”
“I know, I mean, what could she have done?”
“That’s not what I meant—”
Sadie talked over Maddie. “She’s on hiatus everywhere—every social media account. Like ‘later, alligator.’ And look what she wrote on her Pulse profile: ‘Can there be a Pulse without a heart? Discuss.’ Weird, right? She was supposed to perform at Pulse-a-palooza, but if she’s not a 10 . . . Crush it or be crushed.”
Maddie stood and slung her bag over her shoulder. “Forget it, and while you’re at it, maybe forget Pulse too? Just for a bit?”
She laughed. “You’re funny. Standup, really, Maddie, totally gotta go for it.” An incoming text made Sadie sigh. “My brother’s gonna be ten more minutes.”
“I’ll wait with you,” Maddie said.
“Yeah?”
“Why not? I’ve got a thing for porcupines.”
“If that’s true . . .” Sadie dug something out of her knapsack and held it out to Maddie. “We’re doing a presentation thing, so if you want to see my porcupine dance and meet my mom and brother or anything, you can.”
Maddie accepted the flyer. “I’ll be there.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She reached for her sketchbook, flipping past the pages of potential Lit icons she’d been working on—a flickering candle for “romantic,” a coffin for “dead,” a sardine popping out of a can for “packed.” Paper was the medium she’d started drawing with, and she still tended to brainstorm that way. Though she’d often transition to her tablet, there was something about the feel of the light texture against her skin that released her creativity. She focused on Sadie. “Now, let’s sketch some mockups of moves for our spiky friend.”
* * *
* * *
When Maddie returned to the dorms, she saw Delia and Eric sitting on the edge of the fountain in the center of the quad. He looked upset, and Maddie wasn’t sure if she was intruding, but Delia waved her over.
“Did you hear?” she asked.
“Hear what?” Maddie said.
“Emma left the program.”
“She’s gone?” Maddie realized she hadn’t seen Emma since the talk on women in tech a couple of days ago.
Eric nodded. “She missed classes and our prep sessions the past two days. Said she was sick. And then, today, she texted from Stinson. Family emergency and she’s out.”
“Stinson? Is that a hospital?”
“Beach. North of San Fran. Summer home. Her dad’s a big Google guy.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Sure hope everything’s okay.”
“How bad could it be to spend the rest of your summer on a beach?” Maddie said.
Delia looked horrified. “We don’t know what’s wrong, which is awful for Emma.”
“Of course, I didn’t . . .” Maddie was frustrated at how poorly her East Coast sarcasm translated. “Awful, sure.”
“And now Eric’s team’s down to two,” Delia said. “That’s not fair. There should be a provision in the rules—”
“It’s okay, really,” Eric said. “She was always more into her guitar than the program anyway. I mean, I wish she didn’t have to go, but we’ll make it work.” His words were full of more confidence than his voice, but still he smiled, for Delia’s benefit, Maddie couldn’t help thinking.
Then Maddie remembered what Sadie said about Emma’s Pulse rating falling quickly. Because she left ValleyStart? Because she had a family emergency and took a social media break?
Pulse was exactly what Maddie thought it was. A complete and utter load of crap.
FIFTEEN
MVP • Minimum viable product: the most basic version of a product that functions just enough to prove that the concept works; often used in beta testing
THE GOOD NEWS WAS Delia had figured out what was breaking her code. The bad news was she was baffled by a half dozen more “snags,” as Lucy called them. Snags were for her fancy sweaters and tights, not code, but Lucy continued to brush them off as if Delia could wave a magic wand and make Lit ready for the upcoming beta test, which was now mentioned in every daily ValleyStart message. Like that morning’s:
ValleyStart: In the alphabet of Greek, it is the second letter. But for what you seek, it is the trendsetter. In less than a week, the beta will test your mettle!
Delia sighed. It wasn’t like she didn’t wish for that wand—she did, every day and every night as she lay awake, playing games on Delia’s Den, hoping for a eureka moment. She’d created nearly a dozen games over the years. The first, not-so-loosely based on The Shining, where the caretaker of an English manor battled ghosts and zombies, was the most straightforward but great for problem solving. From the Smudge Fudge Factory to the Sassy Cassie Studio, all the games she’d created were inspired by something in her life. The later, more complex ones featured people—women, specifically, female coders.
She’d almost given up being one, and she would have if it hadn’t been for her mom. Delia was in sixth grade when an “incident” she still didn’t know the details of occurred, and the principal found himself in need of a tutorial on the difference between “reply” and “reply all.” While explaining it to him in his office after school, a call came in from the mother of the twins—a boy and a girl—in her class. She had a flat tire and would be late. Delia said her dad, who was coming to pick her up, could drive them home.
The twins were waiting by the front entrance. As Delia headed down the hall, she heard them arguing about their separate birthday parties scheduled for the upcoming weekend.
“You take her,” the boy had said.
“No, you. It’s your turn. I took her last year,” the girl said.
“Dull Delia will ruin everything,” the boy said. “She’ll win all the points at the arcade with her stupid robot brain and everyone will be mad at me.”
The girl countered, “She’ll flinch every time the manicurist touches her toes, and besides, do you really want me to have to see her toes? Forget about the sundaes after.”
Delia’s shoulders rounded and her backpack, perched on one shoulder, fell to the ground. They heard. They turned. They saw her. She saw them. No one uttered a word.
And then her dad arrived, and they all drove home together. The only words spoken were by him. He told them of the new way he’d discovered to make a two-legged chair that would be so much lighter to move onstage and yet still could sustain the weight of three people.
At home, Delia sat on the floor in her dad’s workshop in the garage, smiling as he demonstrated the chair and put her, him, and Smudge in at once. And then she cried into her pillow until she fell asleep.
On Saturday morning, she feigned a stomachache and sequestered herself in her room, playing on her computer. But all the while the boy’s “stupid robot brain” looped through Delia’s mind. She shut her computer and unplugged the cords from the back.
Her mom found her in the closet, burying the monitor under the stuffed animals she no longer played with.
“Delia?” her mom had said. “I’m all for improvisation, but there’s not even an outlet in there.”
“I don’t need one,” she’d said. “I’m done with it. All of it.”
“If it no longer interests you, I’m all for finding something that does.” Her mom sat on the floor in front of the closet. “But first, I’d like to understand these.” She brushed her thumb across Delia’s face, drying her tears.
Delia couldn’t hold it in anymore and told her what the twins had said, but she didn’t stop there. She told her about the looks the boys gave her when she joined the mathlete team, the ones that turned into glares when they realized she knew more than they did; she tol
d her about the sleepovers Cassie was invited to that only turned into invitations for her when Cassie intervened. She told her that it didn’t really matter—that Cassie and her mom and dad and Smudge were enough.
Her mother listened, dried her own tears, and then pulled her daughter into an embrace. Delia curled into her, breathing in her lilac perfume, shielded by her light blonde hair, desperately trying to fit into the space of her mother’s lap, but she couldn’t. Not anymore. She pushed herself back, so tired of not fitting in.
“I wish I were like you and Dad,” Delia said. “Everyone loves you, the way you sing, how you make them feel. Numbers don’t make anyone feel anything.”
But numbers didn’t care if you “fit in” either, Delia had thought, and she’d begun to reconsider relegating her computer to the stuffed animal graveyard.
Her mom took both of Delia’s hands in hers. “I’m going to tell you something that my mother told me the day I insisted on wearing my Cinderella costume to school and came home in tears, searching for a pair of scissors. She said, ‘Some people are just plain mean, but it’s up to them to change, not you. Never stop being Cinderella, Claire.’”
Delia shrugged an understanding.
“I know.” Her mom gave a soft smile. “I thought it was corny too.”
“But did it help?”
“Some. Especially when I realized that if I were going to be someone for the rest of my life, it was going to be Princess Leia. Wore that costume until it shredded on its own. Hair buns and all.”
Delia laughed. “I hope there are pictures.”
“Sure are, I was a ham from birth.” She squeezed Delia’s hands. “And you, you were exactly this from birth. You started reprogramming the clocks after daylight savings time when you were four. I was so proud. I still am. But you need to be too.”
And that day, with Delia by her side, her mom researched Delia’s version of Princess Leia.
The end result was an expansion of the games on Delia’s Den, ones inspired by real-life women who made breakthroughs in computer science, like Ada Lovelace, whose writings from the 1840s led to her being credited as the first computer programmer.
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