“Anyway,” Maddie said. “The point is that we missed you.”
“Every day,” Zoe said.
Everyone was quiet for a few seconds. Until Emma looked at Zoe and whispered, “But our summer was pretty epic,” and she winked at her and said, “It seriously was.”
“Come on, don’t make her feel bad, you guys,” Maddie said. Then she turned to Allie. “Besides, I’m sure coding camp was just as epic.”
Allie heard the sarcastic emphasis on the last word, but she ignored it. Her summer may not have been filled with hotel pools and tournaments, but it had been its own kind of epic. Plus, the college’s cafeteria had one of those waffle makers, too.
“Actually, I had an amazing summer,” she said as she unwrapped her sandwich.
Zoe looked at the others, then took the lead and said what Allie figured they were all thinking. “Really?” she asked, drawing out the word. “Computer camp was ‘amazing’?”
“Yeah,” Allie said. “I mean, I missed you guys every day, but it was even more fun than I expected it to be.”
No one said anything, so Allie launched right in.
“We lived on campus, right in the dorms,” she began. “It felt like being away at college. And my roommate, Courtney, was super nice….All the other girls were, too.” She was talking fast, but she couldn’t help it.
“Oh, and I thought the computer lab would be dark and depressing, but it wasn’t at all! It had these massive floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, so everyone called it the Fishbowl. It was incredible. Superfast machines with giant monitors and a bunch of stations for big animation projects.”
Allie thought she might lose their attention completely when she started talking about the Fishbowl, but they still seemed to be listening.
“This is interesting and all,” Emma said, “but you’ve been texting us all summer about this thing you were building.” She waved her hand toward her chest in this well-let’s-see-it kind of way.
Allie scanned the quad to make sure Mr. Mohr wasn’t nearby, then reached into her back pocket for her phone. “I’ve been dying to show you—”
“No!” Maddie shrieked. She covered her mouth as her eyes grew wide, fixed on something in the distance.
“What?” Zoe asked.
“Hair,” Maddie whined from behind her hand as she stared at Chris Kemmerman and his friends, sitting three tables away. “It’s…it’s…gone.”
Toward the end of sixth grade, Chris Kemmerman seemed to be the only subject that kept Maddie’s attention for more than two minutes. Allie had been hoping the novelty had worn off over the summer. Apparently, it hadn’t.
“County was two weeks ago,” Zoe said matter-of-factly. But she could tell from their blank stares that they weren’t making the connection. “All the swimmers shave their heads before the final County meet. It cuts down on drag. Improves their race times.” She gestured toward the eighth-grade section on the opposite side of the courtyard. “My brother shaves his arms, his chest. Even his legs.”
“He does?” Emma asked, crinkling her nose. They all turned to look at Chris and his friends again, trying to get a better view of their legs.
“Actually,” Allie said, “I think he looks even cuter without hair. You can see his eyes now.”
“I agree,” Zoe said, resting one hand on Maddie’s back. “Besides, who needs hair when you have those shoulders? I mean, look at them.”
“I guess…” Maddie pouted. She let out a loud sigh and said, “But I loved his hair.”
Allie scooted her lunch to one side, sat on top of the table, and waved her phone in front of her. “Well, maybe he’ll be on your leaderboard.”
Maddie’s eyebrows pinched together. “What are you talking about?”
Cell phones were strictly prohibited during the school day, so Allie gestured for the three of them to come in closer. They clustered together, knees touching, and leaned in, blocking her phone from view.
She lowered her fingertip to the glass and tapped on the Click’d icon. Her app launched and the words Ready to click? appeared in narrow, loopy letters. She felt her chest swell with pride.
“You start by creating a profile with all the typical stuff. Here’s mine.” Allie tilted the screen toward her friends.
“When you open Click’d for the first time, it asks you about your favorite school subjects, what sports you play, what video games you like, what you look for in a friend…that kind of thing. Once it has all the basic data, it goes through fifty items and asks you to pick a favorite. It’s like those online quizzes you’re always taking, Emma.”
“I love those quizzes!”
“I know! I got the idea from you,” Allie said, and Emma grinned and tipped her head to one side. “When you’re done, it ranks how compatible you are with other people in the system. But here’s the fun part—it doesn’t show you who they are. You have to find them based on clues.”
“Like a scavenger hunt?” Zoe asked.
“Exactly,” Allie said.
“So wait,” Maddie said, straining over Emma’s shoulder to get a better view. “How does it know who’s most compatible?”
“It’s all about the questions.” Allie didn’t want to talk in jargon about fields and algorithms, so she answered as simply as she could. “I even made up a fake name and joined a few online dating sites so I could see how they worked. Click’d looks for things two people have in common. That’s it, really. The more you overlap, the higher your score. The higher the score, the higher your spot on the leaderboard.”
Allie went back to the main screen, tapped on the LEADERBOARD tab, and ran her fingertip slowly down the glass, scrolling through the list of photos. “This is how my fellow CodeGirls and I ranked,” she said proudly.
“What’s going on here?” Allie looked up in time to see Mr. Mohr standing right behind Emma, trying to see over her shoulder and into the circle. Allie pocketed her phone as quickly as she could.
“Nothing,” Zoe said. “Allie was telling us a joke.”
The girls scrambled into their seats and reached for their food.
“I didn’t see a phone, did I?”
Before Allie could answer, Maddie spun around and looked him right in the eye. “Did you have a nice summer, Mr. Mohr?” she asked sweetly.
Allie could tell he wasn’t buying the diversion tactic, but he must have been feeling generous. It was the first day of school, after all.
“It was very nice, thank you,” he replied. “My kids and I went to Washington, DC, and New York.”
“That sounds so fun!” Maddie said, smiling and nodding, but his face remained completely expressionless.
“It was. I highly recommend it.” He locked his hands behind his back. “Welcome back to Mercer,” he said, and then he walked away, scanning the quad, looking for his next stop.
Allie waited until he was over by the sixth-grade section, and then she pulled her phone out again. “Wanna try it?”
Zoe, Emma, and Maddie smiled at each other. “Um, yeah!” Zoe said, speaking on behalf of all three of them.
The night before, Allie created a new group called “Mercer Middle” so she could keep her school friends separate from the CodeGirls. She tapped on the pull-down menu and opened it. Allie was the only member, but she wouldn’t be for long.
She curled her body over her phone again and navigated to the LET’S CLICK button. It opened her contacts and she selected the boxes next to Zoe, Maddie, and Emma’s names. And then she looked at each of them in turn. “Ready?” she asked.
They all nodded.
Allie pressed INVITE.
“Let’s get out of here,” Maddie suggested, and that was all it took for the four of them to ditch what was left of their lunches in the closest trash can and hurry out of the quad, away from the crowds and Mr. Mohr’s watchful eyes.
They found a quiet spot on the walkway between the school garden and the science building and sat in a circle, cross-legged and bent over their phones. The thr
ee of them took the Click’d quiz while Allie squirmed, fidgeted, and leaned in closer, trying to see their screens.
Zoe let out and a laugh and said, “Okay, that’s funny.”
Maddie said, “Ha! No way!” as she selected an image.
When Emma kept chuckling under her breath, Allie couldn’t stand it anymore. “You guys are killing me!” she said, and scooted over behind Emma, resting her chin on her shoulder so she could see what question she was on.
“When you see the LET’S GO! button at the bottom of the screen, stop. Don’t press it until I tell you to,” Allie told the group.
“It wants permission to access my photos and my Instagram account,” Zoe said.
“Say yes. It pulls clues from your Instagram feed and stores the ClickPics in your photos file.”
“ClickPics?” Emma asked.
Allie grinned. “You’ll see.”
“Now it wants permission to access my contacts,” Maddie said.
“Choose yes again. That’s how you’ll invite new users,” Allie explained.
A minute later, Zoe yelled, “Done!”
“Me too,” Maddie said.
“Same!” Emma added.
Allie tapped her toes fast against the cement, feeling giddy as she checked the time.
“Perfect. We have fifteen minutes. Run. Get as far away from one another as possible and tap the button.” Allie circled her finger in the air. “And then start walking around campus, looking for each other. Oh, and watch your screen for clues. Blue means you’re close. Yellow means you’re getting warmer. Red means you’re hot. As soon as you find each other, tap your phones together.”
“And then what?” Emma asked.
“You’ll see,” Allie said again.
Emma, Zoe, and Maddie looked at one another, started cracking up, and then took off running in totally different directions, while Allie sat on the cement all alone, staring at the screen and trying to contain herself.
A minute or so later, Allie’s phone sounded with a single bloop and the screen lit up in bright blue.
She sprang to her feet and ran in the same direction Maddie had gone, stealing glances at her phone and watching for the color to change. The screen was still blue when she rounded the flagpole at the front of the school, but it turned yellow when she ran by the library.
Bloop-bloop.
She ran through the quad, down the steps, past the basketball courts, and turned the corner by the gym.
“Getting warmer,” Allie whispered as she glided past the boys’ locker room, heading for the staircase. “Who are you?” she asked the screen. “Where are you?”
Bloop-bloop-bloop.
Allie stopped cold and looked down at her phone to find a picture of Emma and Zoe with their arms around each other. It was tinted red and flashing, and as she walked toward the staircase, the red screen started flashing even faster.
She took the stairs two at a time, turned the corner, and found Emma sitting on the top step with her phone in the air, displaying an old photo of all four of them, taken at a soccer game.
Allie ran up the stairs as Emma jumped up and down, yelling, “This is so awesome!”
“Now tap,” Allie said, holding her phone out to Emma.
“What?” Emma asked.
“Tap your phone against mine.”
The second Emma touched the side of her phone to Allie’s, both phones vibrated, the red lights stopped flashing, and the photos disappeared. They sat down on the top step and stared at their screens. There was a single flash of white. And their leaderboards opened.
“Number three?” Emma crinkled her nose.
Before Allie could reply, Emma’s phone gave a celebratory woo-hoo sound and her camera automatically opened.
“Now we take a picture,” Allie said. They came in cheek-to-cheek, and Emma held her phone at arm’s length. “That’s a ClickPic. It goes out to everyone to show off the newest match!”
Bloop-bloop.
Allie’s and Emma’s phones sounded in tandem and started flashing yellow.
“Someone’s close!” Allie held her phone high in the air and Emma copied her.
Bloop-bloop-bloop.
The light on Allie’s phone changed to red. Emma’s did the same.
“It’s Zoe,” Emma said, twisting her phone so Allie could see.
“Mine’s Maddie!” Allie said.
They heard bloop-bloop-bloop from the bottom of the stairs, and a second later, the same sound came from the top. Allie’s phone showed a selfie of Maddie in her room, and Emma’s phone had a picture of Zoe and her brother at one of his swim meets over the summer.
“They’re coming from different directions!” Emma yelled. She barely had the words out before Maddie came racing down the stairs and Zoe came running up.
Emma couldn’t stop laughing. Allie was cracking up, too.
“Oh my God, this is so insanely fun,” Maddie said, touching her phone to Allie’s.
“I know, right?!” Zoe squealed as she and Emma made it official.
Then Allie turned to Zoe and Maddie reached out to Emma. They all held their breath as their leaderboards appeared.
“This is ah-maze-ing!” Zoe yelled.
Woo-hoo!
The sound came from all four phones simultaneously. “What’s that?” Maddie asked, laughing.
“Now we take a selfie together,” Allie said. “It will go out to the whole user community to show that we clicked.”
“By ‘user community’ you mean the four of us?” Zoe drew a circle in the air in front of them.
“Well, for now,” Allie said, laughing. “It’s just for us until after the competition on Saturday. Then maybe we can invite some more people.”
Maddie looked at her phone. “But without more friends, we can’t see the rest of the leaderboard,” Maddie said. “I just have question marks.” She turned the screen toward the other girls. “I can’t have question marks.”
“Exactly,” Zoe said. “We need more users.”
“Right? We need everyone in here!” Maddie said as she tapped a manicured fingernail against the glass.
“Like, the whole school,” Emma added.
Allie loved how excited they were to share it, but she couldn’t let them do that. Not yet. “Just wait till next week, after the competition is done. Then I’ll count on you to help me share it with everyone and teach people how to use it. You can be my street team!” Allie said. But that didn’t seem to be what her friends wanted to hear.
“I don’t know about that,” Maddie said, as she glanced around campus. Allie watched her, thinking that she knew that look on her best friend’s face far too well. Maddie was calculating. “You have more than nine hundred kids stuck inside a two-acre campus for eight hours each day. And it’s the first week of school, so about three hundred of them are sixth graders who hardly know anyone, along with who knows how many seventh and eighth graders who might want to start off the school year with some new friends.”
“What’s your point?” Allie asked.
“Isn’t your competition all about games for good?” Maddie said. “I would think a few stories about it doing good on your own middle school campus might be a nice touch, that’s all.”
Zoe hooked her thumb in Maddie’s direction. “She’s right, you know.”
Allie thought about it. She was dying to see what Click’d could do in the real world. She’d tested it in the lab to be sure it could handle hundreds, even thousands, of concurrent users, and it passed with flying colors. And she loved the idea of sprinkling her presentation with real-life success stories of newfound friendships. But there was too much at stake.
“I can’t risk it crashing, you guys…not with the Games for Good competition on the line.” Allie held up a finger. “Just wait one week. And then it’s all yours to share.”
Allie was beaming when she opened the door to the computer lab. She was still thinking about the way her friends squealed with excitement as they tapped their phon
es together and took their spots on one another’s leaderboards. They loved Click’d. She’d spent all summer hoping they would, and they did.
She couldn’t wait to get home after school and text her fellow CodeGirls to tell them all about her first real-life beta test. Courtney would be so excited for her. They all would be. She pictured herself on the couch with her dog, Bo, curled up by her side, her fingers buried in his soft fur while she tapped away on her phone’s keyboard.
The lab was filling up quickly, and Allie was happy to see that no one had taken the station she’d sat in last year. She was racing toward it when she heard Ms. Slade call her name. Allie turned to see her teacher waving her over. “Can you come here for a second?”
Nathan Frederickson was standing there, too. Allie felt her eyes narrowing as she walked toward him.
She and Nathan had gone to the same elementary school. They were both in the same computer class. Every year, they entered the same contests and competed against each other in the science fair, and Nathan beat Allie out every time. And every time, he couldn’t wait to rub her nose in it.
Allie could count her enemies on one hand. In fact, she could count them on one finger. And his name was Nathan Frederickson.
He was wearing loose, light-washed jeans, black slip-on Vans, and a white T-shirt with a big Poké Ball on it. He was taller than he was last year, but other than that, he looked pretty much the same, with freckles spread across his cheeks, and messy red hair.
“Hey,” Allie said.
“Hey,” Nathan mumbled back.
Ms. Slade must have been able to feel the tension because she laughed and said, “Well, now that we’ve got those pesky formalities out of the way!”
No smile from Nathan.
No smile from Allie.
“I wanted to congratulate both of you in person.” Ms. Slade looked at the two of them. “I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to show off my two Games for Good contestants.”
“What?” Allie asked. Ms. Slade hadn’t mentioned anything about mentoring Nathan, too. She couldn’t be serious. Allie looked over at Nathan and saw the color drain from his face.
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