But none of that really answered her mom’s question about why it was suddenly so important. That was something else entirely.
“What if I get picked for Hackathon?” Allie asked. “Then I won’t be going to CodeGirls Camp with Courtney this summer. If she comes to Game On, at least I can tell her in person that I applied.”
Allie thought about the application, complete and just waiting to be submitted. It was a long shot; Spyglass was only taking forty kids—ten middle schoolers and thirty high school students—and the company was selecting them from all over the state.
The chances of her going were slim to none. Her chances were even worse since she hadn’t developed anything since Click’d. And her chances were worser than worse since the Spyglass CEO, Naomi Ryan, was personally involved in the internship selection process, and she only knew Allie one way: the kid who bombed at the Games for Good competition four months earlier.
“Look,” her mom said, snapping Allie back to reality. “We know how much you and Courtney miss each other. And we’d love to have her come visit—we really would—but let’s do it in a month or so. You save your money, let her save her portion, and buy a ticket in advance. Then I bet round-trip will cost closer to two hundred bucks.”
“Maybe even one-fifty,” her dad added.
“That’s nothing.”
“You two can totally save that.”
They nodded at each other. Then looked back at Allie again.
“We’ll make you a deal,” her mom said. “You two pay for her plane ticket and we’ll cover everything while she’s here. Museums, Alcatraz, the works. We’ll take her anywhere she wants to go. All you have to do is cover the flight.”
“And it will be warmer,” her dad added with an encouraging lilt in his voice. “No one wants to visit San Francisco in January anyway!”
Allie was just about to tell them how Courtney was dying to escape the sun and the desert heat, when her mom reached over and patted her dad’s hand. And Allie didn’t say a word, because it wouldn’t have mattered.
That hand-patting thing was a show of solidarity.
It was their silent way of saying they agreed with each other.
And it meant one important thing: This conversation was over.
Allie pushed her plate away. “May I be excused?”
Her mom raised an eyebrow, first at the half-eaten pizza, and then at Allie. “Don’t be mad at us.”
She wasn’t mad. She was disappointed. And she was having a hard time hiding it.
As she was leaving the kitchen, she heard her mom’s voice behind her. “If you want Courtney to visit so badly, figure out a way to get her here.”
They couldn’t see her roll her eyes as she left with Bo right on her heels, like he always was.
Inside her room, she flopped down on her bed and FaceTimed Courtney. When she answered, the look on her face said it all.
“No?” Allie guessed.
“Yep. You?”
“Same.” Allie sucked in a breath. “My mom said you’re welcome to come, but we have to figure out a way to get you here ourselves. So, I don’t know, maybe you’ll sprout wings in your sleep tonight.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’ll happen. Hey, and if not, maybe I’ll stumble on a secret teleportation device or something. There’s this suspicious-looking shack behind the cafeteria that I’ve been meaning to check out. Could be a portal.”
“Who knows? It’s possible.”
“As possible as me sprouting wings in my sleep.”
Then Allie’s phone chirped. She read the screen.
Maddie
Did you finish math?
I’m stumped on #12
“I’ve gotta go,” Allie said to Courtney. “Maddie has a homework question.”
“Okay. Tell her I said hi,” Courtney said.
“I will. And I’ll ask her if she has any ideas for us.”
But Maddie didn’t. And after they started a group chat to discuss it, neither did Emma or Zoe. Her best friends promised to think about it, but it seemed impossible, and by the time Allie crawled into bed that night, she felt frustrated beyond belief.
Allie was about to drift off to sleep, when her phone buzzed. She groaned as she rolled to one side, reached for it on the nightstand, and peeled one eye open.
Courtney
We didn’t finish good day/bad day!
Allie blinked fast, trying to force herself to wake up. She had to reply. She couldn’t break their streak.
Courtney
I got to level 26 in Destination Earth My room is only 80 degrees right now Thinking of visiting you made me SO happy
You live too far away Summer is too far away I can’t wait to be your roommate again!
Allie felt a pang of guilt, but she pushed it down. The hackathon wasn’t going to happen anyway. Chances were, she’d be spending the summer with Courtney. What was the point of telling her about the application?
She had already recapped her good day, so she went straight to her bad day list:
Allie
Being far away from your best friend sucks I’m all out of gummy worms I’m not going to Game On without you!
Allie wanted that last one to be true. But she was totally out of ideas.
Allie rested her lunch tray against her hip and scanned the quad. She took a deep inhale. The rain had left everything feeling clean and new, but she was glad the sun was out again.
She walked toward her friends, all gathered around their table underneath the big oak tree. Maddie and Chris were sitting next to each other on one side, and Zoe and Emma were across from them. Zoe scooted over to make room next to her, and Allie squeezed in.
“Missed you on the bus this morning,” Zoe said as she popped a chip in her mouth. “Where were you?”
“My dad had a meeting downtown, so he dropped me off on the way.” Allie ripped into her sandwich wrapper. She’d started to take a bite, when she realized Zoe was staring at her.
“What?” Allie asked.
Zoe leaned in closer. “I don’t think I was the only one who missed you.”
Marcus? she mouthed, feeling the blood rush to her chest and her cheeks and the tips of her ears.
Zoe nodded.
“Why? Did he say something?”
“Not exactly,” Zoe whispered. “But when you didn’t get on the bus at your stop, he kept turning around and looking in my direction, like he was trying to figure out where you were. Apparently, that boy can’t start his day without your daily, Hey-six, hey-three routine.” Zoe said it using a high-pitched voice for Allie and a lower one for Marcus.
“We do not sound like that.”
“Oh, you totally do.”
Just when Allie thought they might go back and forth like that for the entire lunch period, Emma leaned forward to get their attention. “Did you show Allie the video from the soccer game yesterday?”
Zoe immediately seemed to forget the Marcus thing. “You have to see this. I was going to show you on the bus. It is hil-ar-i-ous!” Zoe looked to be sure Mr. Mohr wasn’t walking around with his orange bucket, confiscating devices, then she pulled her phone from her back pocket. “Remember that kick I took in the ribs? Check it out. Emma’s mom caught the whole thing on video.”
The rest of the group crowded around, and Zoe pressed PLAY.
On the screen, a girl wearing a #22 Raptors jersey kicked the ball loose from Emma and took off, dribbling it straight for their goal. Zoe crouched down low, ready to block it.
Raptor #22 took a few steps, planted her left foot, and swung her right leg back, preparing to kick it with everything she had. But then Zoe lurched forward, throwing her whole body on top of the ball, and #22’s foot landed right in her ribs instead.
Everyone around the table winced.
“No, wait,” Zoe said, holding up her finger. “You’ve gotta hear it, too. The best part is the noise I make. I swear, it’s not even human!”
Emma pressed PLAY again. Everyone tried to move
closer to the phone, but it was impossible to hear with all the noise in the quad.
“Hold on.” Zoe reached into her backpack and pulled out a pair of blue-and-gray earbuds, shaking them out to untangle the cord. She handed one side to Maddie and the other to Allie.
“When did you get these?” Maddie asked. “I thought you were saving for those wireless Beats?”
“I was,” Zoe said. “But these were on sale after Christmas, so I caved. I can’t stand that cord, though.”
“Return them,” Emma said.
“Tried. Can’t. Sale items are final.” She pressed PLAY. “Okay, listen.”
Maddie and Allie watched and listened. This time, they could hear the dive. The kick. And the low, guttural, inhuman-sounding groan that came out of Zoe’s mouth.
“Yikes,” Maddie said.
“Brutal,” Allie added.
Zoe shook her head. “Eh. Goalie life. You know what they say: ‘No grass stains, no glory. No bruises, no story.’ ”
For the next ten minutes, they chatted about their latest Netflix obsession and speculated about how long the newest celebrity couple would last. And then Allie finished her sandwich, downed her water, and tossed her unopened bag of chips to Emma.
“Want these?” she asked.
“Duh,” Emma answered, ripping the bag open.
“I’ve got to run.” Allie gathered up her trash. “We’re getting a new assignment in Advanced Computer Science today, and I want to get a head start.”
She glanced over at the basketball courts. Nathan Frederickson was there, sitting at his usual table on the blacktop with his friends, Cory and Mark. He still spent some lunches in the computer lab, but Allie couldn’t remember the last time she had to drag him out of there and into the sunlight. As she was watching, he stood, reached for a basketball, and passed it to Cory.
Good, Allie thought. She wanted to get to the lab first.
For weeks, Ms. Slade had been hinting about this assignment. She promised it would be the biggest challenge yet, but totally unique and lots of fun. Allie couldn’t wait. She was always excited about new projects. And she was always excited about a new opportunity to beat Nathan.
“What are you building this time?” Zoe asked. “Is it a game?”
“Or an app?” Emma asked.
“What’s the theme?” Maddie asked.
“Do we get to play?” Chris asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m about to find out!” Allie threw her wrappers in the closest trash can and took off for the lab, waving over her shoulder as she called, “See you later!”
Allie speed-walked into the lab and fell into her seat. She had started the school year in the first row of her CS class, right in front of Ms. Slade’s desk, but she’d moved to the back of the room and took the empty seat next to Nathan when the two of them were working together on their entries for the Games for Good youth coding competition. She could have moved back to her original computer station, but she decided she liked it in the back, so that’s where she stayed.
She fired up her computer and logged in to the server to check on Click’d, like she always did at the beginning of class. A few clicks later, she was looking at the stats.
Everything looked good. She quickly deleted a few obviously fake accounts and checked over the crash reports and error logs, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
Click’d didn’t require too much of her attention anymore. It had been going strong for nearly four months. She now had just a little more than two thousand users across the country, and it was starting to grow to new schools in new areas.
Right as the bell rang, Nathan collapsed into the seat next to her.
“Hey, Gator,” he said as he fired up his computer and logged in. She gave him a chance to check on his stats before she asked for an update on Built.
He angled the monitor so she could see what he was seeing. “A little better. I added a few new items to the general store and sped everything up a bit, so houses get built a little faster. Minor stuff. We’ll see if it makes the numbers start climbing again.”
Nathan had been a finalist in Games for Good, just like Allie had been, only his game didn’t self-destruct two days before the show, so he got to be on stage, demo to hundreds of important people, and get the attention of the Spyglass Games executive team. For a while, he’d been a little bit famous. His name and his picture were all over the news, he was featured in a bunch of stories about kid coders, and he even got to be on the local TV news station.
But over the last month or so, his user base had been declining, and Nathan couldn’t explain why. Neither could anyone at Spyglass Games. They’d told him to tweak a few things here and there and see if it made a difference, but so far it hadn’t.
“Maybe Naomi Ryan will have some new ideas for you during your meet-and-greet?”
Nathan started to say something else, but then he looked around at the room, now almost filled with students, and seemed to change his mind.
The lab door flew open and Ms. Slade breezed in with a bright “Good afternoon, everyone!” Her hair was piled into a bun at the top of her head with a yellow pencil holding it in place. She was wearing jeans, a bright orange sweater, and dark green earrings. Allie squinted, trying to get a look at them, but she couldn’t tell what they were from that distance.
That was one thing she missed about sitting at the front of the class. Ms. Slade had a huge collection of earrings she’d made on the computer lab’s 3-D printer—power tools, keyboard keys, music notes—and she always matched them with the current project theme.
She walked back to her desk and picked up a red bucket. She lifted it in the air, reached inside, and removed a blue Lego block. “Okay, who’s ready for the next big assignment?”
Ms. Slade scooped up a handful of Legos and dropped them on Xander Pierce’s desk. They sounded like the rain that had been hitting Allie’s window all night.
“Build something,” she told him.
Xander stared at the pile. “Like what?”
“It doesn’t matter. Anything. Just build it as quickly as you can.” She began walking around the room, desk to desk, dropping handfuls of Legos in front of each person.
Once she got her pile, Allie began snapping hers together. She wasn’t even sure what she was building, but after a few minutes, she realized it looked a little bit like an airplane, so she went with it.
By the time Ms. Slade returned to the front of the room, Xander had finished building a house. Next to him, Jessica Morse had built something that looked like a car. Ms. Slade picked up their creations and held each one in the air.
“You’ve built lots of things in this class. And now, you’re going to take them apart and put them back together again.” Ms. Slade broke off the top half of Xander’s house. And then she separated the bottom part of Jessica’s car. While everyone watched, she reassembled them. “See. Now you’ve got something completely new,” she said, proudly displaying her new creation.
“What is it?” Xander asked.
Ms. Slade studied it. “I have absolutely no idea. But now it’s not a car or a house, is it? It’s something else entirely.”
Ms. Slade handed it to Jessica. And then she walked to the whiteboard, picked up the green marker, and in big, swirly letters she wrote:
REUSE!
“It applies to environmental waste and code waste, too.”
Ms. Slade stepped into the aisle and tapped her fingers against her dangly earrings. Allie grinned when she realized they were two green-and-white recycling symbols.
“The fastest way to build a brand-new app is to reuse the code you’ve already written. So, this time, you’re being graded on speed. You have the rest of this week to build and test your app, and next week to release it to a real user base. It can be the entire school or a small group—that’s up to you—but real people have to begin using it by Monday, one week from today. You’ll have four days to gather data, and on Friday, you’ll each present your app a
nd tell us what you learned.”
Allie could hear the huffs and sighs and “no ways” echoing off the walls of the lab.
“It’s easier than you think!” Ms. Slade said. “Just look at all the games you’ve made in the past. Go back through your repositories. Look at everything you’ve ever written and ask yourselves how to you can turn it into something totally new. Share like you used to do with real Legos when you were little kids.” She picked up the bizarre looking Lego thing she’d built. “You’re at slightly different levels in this class, and some of the projects you’ve built might be more advanced than others, but you all have something you can share.”
Ms. Slade gestured toward Allie. “Allie has code that knows how to pull pictures from Instagram; maybe someone here could use that.” She walked to the other side of the room. “Maggie, you have code that translates voice to text. And, Tyler, you have code to make custom emojis.” She crossed the room again. “Nathan has code for creating a whole virtual city, and Francis has code for creating an interactive choose-your-own-adventure book. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. There’s no limit to the things you could build together!”
Ms. Slade scanned the room with eager eyes, as if she were expecting a little more excitement.
“And for those of you applying to Hackathon, this is exactly the kind of thing the admissions committee will be looking for: proof that you can write quickly, share code, and work as a team.” Allie thought about how close she’d come to hitting that SUBMIT button on the application the night before, and her heart started beating faster.
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