Click'd

by Tamara Ireland Stone

  Penny looked down at her phone and laughed. “Do I even want to know the story here?” she asked.

  Allie felt a pang of sadness when she saw the screen. It was a picture of her and Courtney with their arms around each other, gummy worms dangling from their lips.

  “That’s my roommate from computer camp.” Allie remembered she’d spent the whole day trying to troubleshoot some issue she was having with Click’d, and she was determined to figure out the problem before she called it a night. Courtney had shown up in the Fishbowl with two Sprites from the vending machine and a huge bag of gummy worms. She sat down next to her and didn’t leave until Allie did.

  Penny held out her phone and Allie tapped hers against it. Then they looked at their leaderboards and watched their names settle into place.

  “Eight,” Penny said with a smile.

  “Ten,” Allie said, smiling back. As soon as the word left her mouth, her phone blooped again.

  It was like that all the way to school, and by the time the bus pulled into the roundabout and came to a stop, Allie’s leaderboard was full and there were one hundred seventy-six users.

  “This is kind of crazy, isn’t it?” she asked Zoe.

  “Yeah,” Zoe said. “Crazy fun!” She stepped into the aisle and threw her backpack over her shoulder.

  “I thought it might break, you know? I was afraid it would crash with all these people hitting the system at once, but it’s solid.” Allie jumped off the bottom step and landed on the sidewalk, but she felt like she was walking on air. “If it keeps up like this, I could have data on the whole school by Saturday. Do you know how good that would look to the judges? Zoe, I might actually have a chance at winning this thing!”

  Allie pictured herself standing on the Games for Good stage as the Spyglass CEO, Naomi Ryan, announced the winner. She imagined her parents in the front row, clapping and hugging each other, and Ms. Slade standing backstage next to the other mentors, beaming proudly. And then she pictured Nathan, standing next to her, looking shocked and defeated. She smiled to herself. She might have liked that image best.

  Zoe peeled off at her classroom and Allie kept going. When she turned the corner, she saw Maddie waiting at her locker wearing a big smile and her favorite light blue V-neck tee. Maddie called it her lucky shirt and firmly believed that every time she wore it, something good happened. Allie secretly thought she liked it because it made her eyes look even bluer than usual.

  “Lucky tee. What’s the occasion?” Allie asked.

  “Didn’t you get my text?” she asked, bouncing in place.

  Allie wondered how she could have missed it, but then she remembered the chaos she’d just left. “You should’ve seen the bus. It was madness.”

  “Look,” she said as she showed Allie her screen. Chris Kemmerman had joined Click’d.

  “You invited him?” Allie asked.

  Maddie nodded fast. “Emma dared me.”

  “I didn’t know you had his number.”

  “Zoe got it from her brother over the summer. They’ve been begging me to text him for months, but…I don’t know, I guess I’ve been waiting for the right time.” Allie balanced her backpack on her knee and started swapping out her books for her first three classes while Maddie kept talking. “He must have joined late last night. I checked right before I went to sleep and he wasn’t in the user list, but this morning, he was!”

  Maddie swayed her shoulders from side to side, and then added her hips. Allie started laughing. “What is that?”

  “My happy dance,” she said, but then she stopped suddenly. “Wait. What if he’s not on my leaderboard?”

  “What are the chances?” Allie asked.

  Maddie navigated over to her profile and checked the latest numbers. “With two hundred twenty-five users and ten spots on the leaderboard, that gives us a four point four percent chance at clicking.”

  Bloop-bloop-bloop.

  Maddie’s phone sounded and the screen lit up bright blue. “Ooh! New friend! Gotta go!” she yelled over her shoulder as she took off running, holding her phone high above her head.

  Allie took her lunch tray and made her way over to the old oak tree. She slid in between Zoe and Emma and tipped her chin toward Chris Kemmerman’s table. “Well? Where is he?” she asked.

  Maddie followed her gaze. “I don’t know. He’s taking forever.”

  “He’ll be here. He was in math third period,” Zoe said.

  All their phones buzzed and Maddie said, “Ooh, a new pic!”

  They all looked around for Mr. Mohr, and then Maddie checked her screen.

  “Yikes,” she said. She passed her phone around under the table so everyone could see the screen. Ella Samuels and Sadie Court were blurry in the shot, like they were trying not to stand too close to each other as they took the obligatory selfie. Neither one was smiling.

  “That’s the worst ClickPic ever!” Emma said, laughing under her breath. “Could they look more miserable?”

  Zoe pressed her hands into the table and leaned in close. “They were best friends last year, but I heard they haven’t said a single word to each other all summer.”

  “Well, I’m assuming they talked today,” Maddie said. “Check it out.” She lifted her phone again to show them Sadie’s leaderboard. Ella was in the number one spot. “And Sadie is Ella’s number two.”

  “See, that’s because they’re supposed to be friends. I know this because I’m the master quiz maker.” Allie shot them all a confident smile.

  “Yes, you are,” Zoe said.

  But then Maddie’s phone blooped in her hands and she jumped so high, it made everyone laugh. “Eep! You guys. Look.”

  She set her phone flat on the middle of the table, screen up and solid blue. No one said a word. They were all too busy waiting for the color to turn yellow.

  “Why isn’t it changing?” Emma asked after a full minute.

  Maddie took her eyes off the screen to scan the quad. “Because Chris stopped moving. Look, he’s talking to someone over by the water fountain.” She pointed to someone on the exact opposite side of the quad. He was standing next to a table full of people.

  “How can you tell that’s him?” Emma asked, squinting.

  “It’s him,” Maddie said.

  Allie judged the distance.

  She thought back to that day she and Courtney had gone out to the Fuller University football field to try to figure out the three distances she’d use for Click’d. She tried to picture the field in her mind. If she and her friends were in the end zone, Chris might be somewhere around the forty-yard line, which would make him a little more than one hundred feet away. He was still in Click’d’s blue zone, but just barely.

  “You guys…it’s him, right? It has to be him.”

  “It really could be anyone.” Zoe barely got the words out when Chris started walking toward their table again.

  Bloop-bloop.

  They looked down at Maddie’s phone. The screen had turned bright yellow.

  “Oh my God, it is him!”

  Chris must not have heard the first alert, but he heard the second one. He stopped, looked at his screen, smiled, and then turned slowly in place, giving the quad a solid three-sixty spin. Then he started walking again, a little more slowly, searching and listening as he went. Maddie’s eyes were glued to him. The rest of the girls were watching the scene like a tennis match, swapping from Chris to Maddie and back to Chris.

  When Maddie’s phone let out a triple bloop, they all jumped and their eyes darted down to the screen. It was a picture of Chris and someone who looked like his little sister. The picture flashed faster as Chris got closer.

  They all looked up when Chris stopped behind Zoe. “Hey.” He turned his phone so they could see the picture on his screen.

  Allie recognized it right away. The four of them were dressed in matching green shirts with matching green hats and matching green socks. “St. Patrick’s Day, I’m guessing.”

  “Nah, just a rando
m Thursday,” Zoe said sarcastically, and Maddie shot her a look.

  Chris smiled. “Well, it’s a nice pic and all, but it’s not very helpful.” Then he looked down and saw that the phone in the center of the table had his picture prominently displayed, tinted red and flashing fast. “One of you is going to have to tell me who that phone belongs to.”

  “We could. But it’s way more fun to keep you guessing,” Maddie said, wearing that confident, flirty smile of hers.

  “Here, have a seat,” Zoe said as she scooted over to make room for him between her and Maddie. Chris sat. And then he reached forward and set his phone on the table, right next to Maddie’s, with less than an inch of space between them.

  He glanced around the table. “We had English together last year, didn’t we?” he asked Emma, and she nodded. Then he looked at Zoe. “I know you. You’re Quinn’s little sister.”

  “Zoe,” she said.

  “Chris,” he said to the whole group. “Is that your phone?” he asked, and Zoe shook her head. Then he looked at Allie. She took her phone from her pocket and showed it to him. Emma held hers up before he had time to ask. “So, process of elimination says…you.” He glanced at Maddie.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  He reached out, gave his phone a little nudge, and it hit Maddie’s. The two phones glowed white and then flashed their leaderboards.

  He stood and looked down at the phones. “Looks like you’re my eight,” he said.

  “And you’re my nine,” Maddie said.

  “Good. You bumped Sean from that spot,” Chris said as he gestured toward his table. “That’s not going to go over well.”

  “Why not?”

  “He started off as my one this morning, but he’s been slipping off the board all day. I think it’s crushing his ego.” He shrugged. “That’s okay; he could use a little ego check anyway.”

  Allie stole a glance at Chris’s leaderboard. It was hard not to notice that it was filled almost entirely with girls.

  Woo-hoo, Chris’s and Maddie’s phones called out simultaneously.

  “Well, I guess we should make it official.” Chris reached for his phone, held it at arm’s length, and leaned in close to Maddie as he snapped a selfie. Seconds later, all their phones lit up with a picture of the two of them.

  He stuffed his phone in his pocket as he stood. “See you around, Maddie,” he said as he walked off, heading for his table.

  As soon as he was gone, Maddie’s smile slipped from her lips.

  Zoe noticed right away. She reached across the table and flicked Maddie’s forehead with her finger. “Stop it. Right now.”

  “Nine?” Maddie pouted.

  “How many users are there?” Zoe asked.

  Maddie looked at the screen. “Two hundred sixty-three,” she said.

  “Right, so do the math. Out of two hundred sixty-three people, he’s your number nine. What are the odds of that, Maddie?”

  “Three-point-three percent,” Maddie said plainly.

  “Three-point-three percent,” Zoe repeated. She pointed at Chris’s table. “And you finally talked to him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he knows your name.”

  “True.”

  “And two hundred sixty-three people just saw a picture of the two of you with your faces all smashed together!”

  “Now that’s an excellent point.” Maddie’s face lit up again. She grabbed her phone and took a screenshot of the leaderboard. Then she swiped right and the photo of Chris and his little sister lit up her screen. She took a screenshot of that, too.

  “He’s even cuter up close,” she said.

  “See?” Emma said. “It’s all good.”

  “It’s all good,” Maddie echoed. And then she stood and slapped her hands on the table. “Glad that’s done. Let’s get out of here. We have new friends to make.”

  The four of them walked around campus for the rest of lunch, and by the time the bell rang, Click’d had 312 users and Maddie’s, Zoe’s, Emma’s, and Allie’s leaderboards were changing every ten minutes or so.

  “We’re still number one,” Zoe said as she turned to Allie and gave her a high five.

  Emma stopped in her tracks. “What’s wrong?” Allie asked, but Emma didn’t answer right away. She was still staring at her phone.

  “You’ve all bumped way down,” she said. “You two are seven and eight, and Maddie’s my ten. I barely even know the rest of these people.”

  Maddie grabbed Emma’s shirtsleeve and gave it a little shake. “That’s part of the fun!”

  Emma squirmed away. “They can’t be my top friends over you guys! How is that even possible?”

  “It’s totally possible,” Maddie said. “With three hundred twelve people in the system, the odds of the three of us being each other’s top ten drops to three-point-one percent.”

  Allie looked at her out of the corner of her eye. She was good at math, but even she couldn’t imagine calculating that fast in her head. “You’re a freak of nature, you know that, right?”

  Maddie shrugged. “It’s a gift.”

  “Hello?” Emma waved her hands in front of them. “Doesn’t anyone care about this?”

  “Not really. It’s not like it means anything,” Zoe said.

  “Of course it does.” Emma crossed her arms. “How can you even say it doesn’t mean anything?”

  “It means we all answered a bunch of questions the same way, Em. That’s all. It doesn’t say anything about our friendship,” Allie explained.

  “Well, then maybe you shouldn’t have named it Click’d,” Emma said sharply. “Because then, you know, people might start to think it had something to do with figuring out who you click best with.”

  “Wait. Are you seriously upset about this?” Zoe asked.

  Emma thought about it for a few seconds, and then she crinkled her nose and said, “A little bit. Yeah.” She waved her finger around in front of the three of them. “And when we’ve all fallen off each other’s leaderboards, you’re going to feel the same way.”

  “I don’t think I will,” Zoe said.

  Emma let out a huff. “You’re just saying that because you and Allie are number one. But we’re not even a third of the way through the school yet, so if Maddie’s right, the odds of us being together will plummet every day.” She brought her hand down in front of her like an airplane falling from the sky.

  The three of them laughed, and that seemed to make Emma even more upset. She looked at her screen, as if her own words had just given her an idea.

  “Wait…what if I stop playing? Then my leaderboard won’t change.” She looked at them. “What if we all stopped playing? If we never tapped phones with anyone else, our leaderboards wouldn’t change, right, Allie?”

  Allie shrugged. “You’d still get alerts when you got within range, but you could turn those off in settings, I guess.”

  “Okay, but why on earth would you ever do that?” Zoe asked as she and Maddie exchanged a look.

  Emma wasn’t giving up. “You guys, we don’t have to do the scavenger hunt part. Let’s stop playing so we can lock in our leaderboards exactly the way they are right now.” She raised her eyebrows at Maddie. “That way, you and Chris won’t move.”

  “Hey, don’t bring Chris into this. The two of us are solid. We’re not moving, no matter how many users join.” Maddie smiled confidently.

  “Besides, we can’t do that,” Zoe said. “The more users Allie has by Saturday, the better her chances of winning the Games for Good contest. We have to help her get players, so they can get new players, and they can get players.”

  “Yeah, we’re Allie’s street team,” Maddie added, and then she turned to Allie and gave her a fist bump.

  Emma thought about it for a minute and then blew out a heavy breath. “Fine. I’ll keep it moving, but I’m doing this entirely for you, Allie. Because I have three best friends.” She pointed to each in turn. “And I don’t need to click with anyone else but you guys.” />
  “Hey, Allie,” some guy said as they passed in the hall between fourth and fifth.

  “Love your app!” another girl told her when she was gathering her books from her locker.

  As she was rounding the corner by the library, a guy passed her and then doubled back. “Wait! You’re Allie?” he asked. And when she nodded, he waved a few people over and they all gave her high fives.

  When she reached the computer lab, she opened the door and stepped inside, and everyone in the room started clapping. Allie curtsied dramatically and thanked them for sharing the app. “It wouldn’t have this many users if it weren’t for all of you,” she told them.

  She was walking toward her desk when Ms. Slade called her over. “Sounds like Click’d is a huge hit. Everyone’s talking about it,” she said. “How many users do you have?”

  Allie pulled out her phone, launched Click’d, and opened her profile page. “Three hundred thirty-two.” She felt so confident as she said it, but her expression changed when she saw the look on Ms. Slade’s face. “What?” Allie asked. “Isn’t that good?”

  “Of course. I’m glad people are having fun with it, it’s just…” Ms. Slade forced a smile. “It’s going around a lot faster than I expected.”

  “I know, right? I was worried about stability at first, but it’s working exactly the way it’s supposed to.” She took two steps closer. “My Games for Good demo is going to blow your mind. It’ll be so much better than the one you saw at CodeGirls.”

  “I loved your demo at CodeGirls,” Ms. Slade said plainly. “I told you then not to change a thing. Because you didn’t need to.”

  Allie thought back to Nathan’s Built demo. “Nah, it wasn’t good enough. I had twenty users and a few stories from camp, but now I have more than three hundred users. And you should see what’s going on out there.” She pointed at the door. “Kids are using it to make friends during the first week of school and it’s doing real, actual good!”

  “It was doing good before, Allie,” Ms. Slade said. But she must have been able to tell how excited Allie was, because her expression morphed into a genuine Ms. Slade–smile. “Why don’t you use your class time today to start collecting some of those stories?” she said as she pointed to the two computers in the back corner. “Nathan’s using Agnes, but you can use Ira.”