But even with my friends’ unanimous support, I still have no idea how to proceed with bringing Jade to justice.
“I know this sounds petulant,” Carly begins.
“It doesn’t, because none of us knows what that means,” Matt interrupts.
Carly ignores him. “I think it’s time Jade gets a taste of her own medicine.”
“Am I hearing you correctly?” I pretend to bang the wax out of my ears. “Are you saying we should hack Jade?”
“Not necessarily. I just think being on the receiving end of one of these pranks might be the best way for Jade to learn her lesson.” A sneaky smile creeps across Carly’s face. “And it WOULD be kind of fun.”
“There are a few things we could do, while still staying inside the law.” Umberto rubs his hands together like he’s been waiting for permission to unleash a sinister plan. “And now that we know what she’s up to, we can set a trap to catch her red-handed.”
“If we’re going to be hatching an evil scheme,” Matt says, “we DEFINITELY need some sugar.”
“It IS the best brain food,” I add. Matt and I share a nod. This situation is far from ideal but I’m happy to know so much time apart hasn’t done our friendship any damage.
Carly runs to the kitchen for more snacks. When she returns, the four of us settle down to come up with a great—and legal—way to get back at Jade.
SHOWTIME
It turns out that Sophie Hinton has been the one leaving notes in Matt’s locker, which bums out Umberto but makes Matt’s day.
“I can’t believe it,” Umberto complains. “My coding partner was after Matt this whole time. I guess it’s true what they say—girls will always take a sense of humor over brains.”
“The best part is now whenever I get her notes, I can read them in an English accent,” Matt says. “I can’t believe I have an international girlfriend.”
“She’s not your girlfriend!” Carly, Umberto, and I shout.
“Besides, we’ve got more important things to worry about,” I continue. “Like saving me from getting kicked out of school.”
“If we stick to our plan, we’ll be fine,” Umberto says. “Any questions?”
“I have one.” I scan the faces of my three friends. “Is anyone else scared?”
“We’d be crazy NOT to be scared,” Carly announces. “This is uncharted territory for all of us. I barely slept last night.”
Matt lets out an evil whisper. “It’s GO time.”
“We’re not in a heist movie,” Carly says. “Enough with the snarky dialogue—we’ve got work to do.”
“Which is just another line of snarky dialogue.” Good old Matt—he always has to have the last word.
“Stop bickering,” Umberto interrupts. “If we’re going to pull this off, we need to cooperate. Operation Save Derek is now in effect.” He races down the hall to implement Phase One of the plan.
As fun as pretending to be spies has been these past few days, I’m still not sure we’re doing the right thing. I lay in bed last night for hours debating whether or not to tell my parents everything. I know they’d want me to tell Demetri; they might even call him directly. Both of them would understand that Jade framed me, but when I pictured the looks of disappointment on their faces, I couldn’t bring myself to tell them. I’ve seen their expressions of dismay before, and even though I was involved with these pranks accidentally, it would all come down to the fact that I was trying to take a shortcut with my work—again. If I were a superhero, trying to get out of work would be my fatal flaw, the same way Supergirl avoids Kryptonite.
In the end, I decide to figure this out with my friends and leave spilling the beans to my parents as plan B. Besides, now isn’t the time to procrastinate. For once, it’s time to ACT.
D-DAY
My phone dings in my pocket; it’s Jade telling me to meet her after second period. I’ve been mentally preparing for this moment but seeing Jade’s text makes it real. A bolt of fear shoots up my spine.
Jade called last night to review all the details of her master plan. As soon as we hung up, I group-texted Matt, Umberto, and Carly to update them and make sure our counterattack would still be effective.
The bell rings after world history. I take a deep breath and make my way to the door. Act natural.
“Derek?”
Ms. McCoddle’s voice nearly makes me jump out of my skin. “Can you do me a favor and deliver this projector to the kindergarten room? Ms. Tatreaux asked to borrow it and I know her classroom is on your way.” Ms. McCoddle smiles and nudges the projector cart toward me.
What do I do? I’m supposed to meet Jade outside the main office right now—there’s no way I can do both.
“Sorry, Ms. McCoddle,” my mouth starts speaking before I have my excuse lined up. “But I—”
“I’ll do it,” Carly says from the doorway. “I love visiting the kindergartners.”
Quick thinking, Carly. What would I do without you?
Once we make it to the hallway, I tell Carly I owe her one. She shakes her head and tells me to find Jade.
My hacker lab partner doesn’t waste time on pleasantries when I find her outside the main office. “So the program I—we—wrote disables the security camera in Demetri’s office at ten o’clock,” she begins. “The master file with all the grades can only be accessed through Demetri’s computer, so as soon as I gain access, you download the file onto this thumb drive.”
She hands me a flash drive the same shade of blue as my skateboard. What I’d give to be shredding down a half pipe right now instead of getting ready to break into the principal’s office.
An alarm goes off on her phone, letting us know it’s ten o’clock.
“I wrote the program to activate then because the administrators have a meeting with the assistant superintendent about the bus thing,” Jade explains.
I have no idea how Jade knows so much about the comings and goings of the school; I can barely keep track of my own schedule, never mind anyone else’s.
We both pretend to be opening lockers when Demetri walks by with Assistant Superintendent Menendez and the rest of the office staff.
“Somebody will stay behind to answer phones,” I whisper.
Jade shakes her head. “It’s a mandatory meeting. The calls will go straight to voice mail.” She slips into the office, holding the door so I won’t chicken out. She points to the red light on the security camera in the corner of Demetri’s office, which is usually green. “No one will even know we were here.”
She makes a beeline to Demetri’s desk. When she gets to his computer, her fingers race across the keyboard. I try to distract myself from how nervous I am by looking at the photos next to Demetri’s computer.
“I didn’t know Principal Demetri was a sailor.” I pick up the framed picture of our principal waving aboard a skiff with a small, floppy-eared wiener dog in his arms. Jade tells me to stop touching things.
I carefully set the photo down and shove my hands in my pockets. I immediately clench the flash drive. Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose I actually help her steal the grades of every student that goes here? Does our plan actually MAKE me a criminal? Then I spot something that makes my entire body collapse with relief. I tap Jade on the shoulder.
“What?” she snaps.
The light on the security camera is now a bright, steady green.
“What’s going on here?” Principal Demetri suddenly appears in the doorway. His arms are crossed and I can tell he’s having a difficult time remaining calm. Behind him are Umberto, Matt, and Carly.
“There’s no way my program had a mistake,” Jade says. “I checked it a hundred times.”
“You wrote a program that turned off the camera at ten,” I answer. “But I wrote a program that turned it back on at ten-oh-five—with a little help from Umberto.”
“Principal Demetri didn’t believe us when we told him one of his own students was responsible for these hacks,” Umberto tells her, “but the
n we told him he’d be able to catch you in the act.”
He hands me my new trusty laptop to really rub it in Jade’s face:
// settings for camera
HashMap
settings = {active: true};
// log in to camera, update
settings
public void update_
camera(settings, user){
if(user.auth == true){
for(int i = 0; i
< settings.length(); i++){
camera.
settings[i] = settings[i];
}
}
}
update_camera(settings, Jade);
Jade stays cool as a cucumber as my friends and I reveal we’ve been one step ahead of her. I wasn’t expecting Jade to burst into tears or anything, but she should at least be ANNOYED that we foiled her plan.
I think she’s finally about to react when she turns to me and holds out the steadiest palm I’ve ever seen.
“Derek, may I please have my flash drive back?”
She stares at me, not blinking, until I hand it over.
“Jade, you’re in a lot of trouble. We’re calling your parents.” Principal Demetri leads us into the hall, not letting Jade out of his sight. He looks at all of us and his eyes land on me. “Good job getting to the bottom of this. I won’t forget that you had the school’s best interests at heart.” He nods for us to head to class, then closes his office door.
“We should totally get some free passes out of this,” Matt says as we head down the hall. “Today is worth three or four major screwups for sure.”
“That girl is fearless,” Umberto said. “She didn’t even break a sweat.”
Matt shakes his head. “She’s got to be half robot or something. No wonder she’s so good at computers.”
“A digital mastermind,” Carly says. “Who WE outsmarted.”
I stop dead in my tracks. “Did I just go from a victim who got framed to the guy who saved the school?”
Carly bats her eyes and clutches her chest. “My hero.”
Even though she’s kidding, right now I feel like one.
I wrote a computer program that saved the school!
YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?
It’s a good thing I wasn’t expecting a parade to celebrate my victory because hardly anyone found out how I rescued our school from a giant hack. Demetri wanted to keep the whole Jade affair hush-hush, so there weren’t a lot of congratulations coming my way. I did end up filling in my parents—with the expected results.
“Why didn’t you tell us WHILE this was going on?” Mom asks. “We’re always here for you—you know that!”
“I wonder if the police will get involved,” Dad says. “Maybe even the feds.”
“Nothing would make me happier than if they throw the book at Jade,” I add. “In fact, I’d like to be the one to throw it.”
It takes me a while to convince them that everything is fine, mostly by steering the conversation to my new skills. I take my laptop from my bag and open it to the desktop.
The screen now has a sprinkling of applications.
Mom’s hand flies to her mouth in shock.
“Look at all these apps.” Dad scans the screen. “Even a homework scheduler.”
“For all her flaws, Jade DID create some pretty cool programs,” I add.
Mom opens each of the folders one by one, praising Jade’s—and my—work. I know what she’s going to say before she even opens her mouth, so I beat her to the punch.
“I’m not giving up on coding because of the Jade mess,” I tell my parents. “A lot of what Ms. Felix said makes sense—I want to be able to contribute to the digital world, not just stare at it from the sidelines.”
“Well, that was worth the price of the computer right there.” Dad smiles.
To celebrate, Mom makes my favorite treat—she slices a pint of vanilla ice cream with an electric knife and stuffs the cutout circles between two warm chocolate chip cookies. A homemade ice cream sandwich that’s a gooey, delicious mess.
Outside the cafeteria the next day, I stop dead in my tracks when I spot Jade.
“What are YOU doing here?” I ask. “I thought you got expelled!”
“Remember when I told you my dad was a computer consultant?”
“Uhm … yeah.”
“Well, his specialty is cybersecurity. Companies hire him to see if he can find a breach in their systems.”
“Thanks for sharing, Jade, but I don’t really care about your father’s job right now.”
She shakes her head with an expression that tells me she’s waiting for me to catch up. “My father was hired by the L.A. Unified School district.”
“So he must be furious that his own daughter was trying to change people’s grades!”
She stares at me like I’m a dolt, and I’m beginning to feel like one.
Jade’s arms flail wildly in the air. “Hel-lo! I was helping my dad discover where the breaches were in the system!”
WAIT, WHAT?
“I was looking for holes in the school’s firewall,” she continues. “And I did a pretty good job, don’t you think? The district’s servers were ripe for the picking. Look how many times I got in.”
Is she scamming me again? There’s no way she was working FOR the school this whole time.
“Not even Principal Demetri knew the city hired my father,” she continues. “At my last school, I hacked into the sprinkler system and set the cafeteria sprinklers to go off during lunch. It was totally Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.”
“As fun as a soggy food fight sounds, you were still causing trouble and costing the school money.”
Jade crinkles her nose. “My dad IS furious with me. I’m supposed to just tell him if I find any breaches, not act on them. Between setting off the sprinklers at my last school and rerouting the buses here, I’m grounded for the rest of the year.”
“Welcome to my world.”
“Demetri put me on probation and gave me fifty hours of community service. I’m not a bad person—but I find it tempting to cause trouble when no one’s looking. I guess I’m having a hard time keeping myself in check.”
“If you’re looking for advice in making good choices, you’re talking to the wrong guy,” I say. “It’s a struggle every day, ten times a day.”
“I was really tempted to send McCoddle emails from your account asking for tutoring help on the weekends,” Jade says.
“Am I supposed to thank you for not making my life more miserable than you already did?”
“The good news is you’re not a tourist anymore,” she continues. “You can be someone who contributes to the Internet, not just takes from it.”
“Says the girl who’s always glued to her phone,” I chide.
Jade shrugs. “Getting sucked into a rabbit hole versus making conscious choices is a battle for all of us.”
“The Internet in a nutshell,” I agree.
She pulls her phone out of her pocket and heads down the hall as her thoughts surround me. When it comes to the Internet, will I be part of the problem? Or part of the solution?
A PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
The next day, Carly stops me outside of school and tells me she has a surprise to cheer me up after the recent uproar.
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” I tell her. “I’m just glad all this is over.”
“You were there for me when I really needed it,” she says. “Now it’s my turn to take care of YOU.”
Knowing what she’s probably got in store, I tell her I don’t have time to go to Calabasas and hang out with the ninja horses this week.
“Then I guess the ninja horses will have to come to you.” Carly opens the front door of the school as if she’s a woman highlighting prizes on an old TV game show.
Inside, Nancy and Pete are holding the miniature ninjas—plus Maggie—in the center of a large circle of students.
“This time there’s no dr
ama to diminish the superpower of miniature horses!” Carly says. As soon as Maggie sees Carly, Maggie trots over for a nuzzle.
“Just two mammals getting mushy over each other.” Matt comes up behind me and sticks his finger down his throat as if he’s about to puke.
“Don’t worry—I doubt Sophie will get jealous.” Carly steps aside and motions for Matt to come closer. “Come on—Maggie loves it when you pet her neck.”
Matt rolls his eyes but Carly doesn’t budge, and after a moment he tentatively reaches out his hand to pet Maggie. He pulls his hand back quickly when Maggie turns her head.
“You’re AFRAID!” I say. “That’s why you’ve been making fun of us this whole time!”
“I’m not scared of this little pony!” Matt says. “My bike is bigger than her!”
As if Maggie can understand what he’s saying, she swings around quickly to face Matt, who jumps back five feet.
“You ARE afraid!” Carly laughs as she reins in Maggie.
Matt’s cheeks turn as red as a Santa Monica sunset. I fake-punch him in the arm and tell him it’s okay to be frightened of a horse the size of a Chihuahua. He’s about to punch me for real when Umberto wheels himself between us.
“Matt, knock it off or I’ll tell Sophie not to send you any more love notes,” Umberto says.
Matt composes himself immediately, more afraid of losing his admirer than of a horse.
My Life as a Coder Page 8
