Swap'd

by Tamara Ireland Stone

  Marcus’s expression changed. He no longer looked mad. Now he looked embarrassed. And maybe even a little . . . hurt. He grabbed the cash, stood, and jammed it into his pocket. “So much for being anonymous.” Before Allie could say anything else, he stood and walked to the door. He didn’t turn around.

  Ms. Slade put a checkmark next to his name. Allie felt small. She couldn’t imagine this getting any worse. Until she heard Ms. Slade say, “Have a seat, Ms. Gilbert.”

  Kelsey Gilbert slipped into the seat across from her, and Allie froze. Suddenly, she was face-to-face with the other mistake she’d made. The one she’d tried to forget all about.

  Allie listened to Ms. Slade list off the things Kelsey had purchased over the last three days. A necklace. An iPhone case. A bag of candy. She explained that she needed to return them to the owner.

  Allie watched her, wondering if Kelsey realized that she was Princess Peach. She was the game’s creator. The only one with access to the system. And also the one who sold the tutoring sessions and made sure Kelsey didn’t win them.

  She wanted to tell her, and she knew she should tell her, but Allie couldn’t bring herself to say the words. When Ms. Slade finally excused her, Allie started breathing normally again.

  “Let’s take a little break. I’m going to get a coffee. How about some popcorn?” Ms. Slade asked. When Allie shook her head, Ms. Slade scooted her chair closer. “You know, I’ve found that warm, buttery popcorn is a good start to fixing just about anything.”

  Allie ran her fingernail through a deep groove in the desk and didn’t look up. “Not this.”

  “Yes, even this,” Ms. Slade said, resting her hand on Allie’s shoulder. “Look, I know you feel horrible. This whole thing seems enormous right now. But I promise you, it won’t feel like this forever. People will forget all about it. They’ll move on. And you . . . well, you’ll take what you need from this whole experience, and you’ll move on, too. It’s okay.”

  Allie took the deepest breath, like she was inhaling all the words Ms. Slade had just said and storing them deep in her soul. It was exactly what she needed to hear. Especially those last ones. She could handle everyone else’s reaction, as long as she knew her favorite teacher believed it was all going to be okay.

  Allie nodded at Ms. Slade, already feeling better. “Thanks. And I’ll take some popcorn, too.”

  Allie managed to avoid everyone for the rest of the day. She stayed in the lab during lunch, meeting with buyers and sellers, returning cash, and figuring out how to return the things they’d purchased. During advanced CS class, Ms. Slade made her take a break and go to the library. That was fine with Allie. That way, she didn’t have to see Nathan.

  At the end of the day, she walked toward the bus, but she stopped at the flagpole. She couldn’t seem to take the steps to the door. She was relieved when Zoe stepped off the bus a few minutes later and walked toward her.

  “Do you want me to walk home with you?”

  Allie glanced up at the sky and then shook her head. “It’s about to start raining again.”

  Zoe raised an eyebrow. “So then . . . maybe we should get on the bus.” She didn’t wait for Allie to answer, she just threaded her arm through hers and started leading her in that direction.

  At the top of the steps, Allie glanced at Marcus. He kept his gaze fixed on something outside the window and didn’t look at her.

  When she got to her seat, Allie flopped down in her spot next to Zoe and pulled out her phone.

  “What are you doing?” Zoe asked.

  “Courtney’s auction is over by now. Arizona is an hour ahead of us.”

  “She doesn’t know you had to give all the money back?”

  Allie shook her head.

  On screen, Courtney’s version of Swap’d launched. Allie expected to see a list of all the items that had sold and her updated leaderboard, but instead, there was a message on the screen:

  TODAY’S AUCTION HAS BEEN CANCELED.

  “Call her,” Zoe said. “Now.”

  After the way the two of them left things the day before, Allie wasn’t sure Courtney would even take her call, but she FaceTimed her anyway. She ducked down low, behind the seat in front of her, shielding herself from the noise of the bus. It rang three times before Courtney finally picked up.

  “Hi,” Courtney said.

  The background was unfamiliar. Courtney wasn’t in her computer lab at school, and she wasn’t in her bedroom. But Allie didn’t say anything about it.

  “Hi,” she replied.

  Zoe gave Allie’s arm a supportive squeeze.

  “You didn’t do it,” Allie finally said.

  “I tried. At five minutes before the start time, I just . . . couldn’t.”

  Allie had so much to tell her, but she didn’t know where to start. The day still felt like a series of blurred memories—like it had all happened to someone else, not to her.

  “I’m sorry I got so mad yesterday,” Courtney finally said.

  “It’s okay,” Allie said. “I’m sorry I didn’t sell the DS last week. You were right. If I’d sold it, none of this would have happened.”

  Although she still would have had to tell Ms. Slade. She still would have had to return all the money.

  “Look, it’s all going to be okay. We’re going to buy that plane ticket tonight after all. You’ll never guess where I am right now!”

  “Where?”

  “My next-door neighbor asked if I wanted to babysit.” Courtney turned the phone toward a little girl with a tiara on her head, sitting at a small table, surrounded by stuffed animals. “This is Parker. She’s five and she’s the cutest thing! We’re having a tea party. I’ve been calling her Princess Peach, in your honor.”

  Zoe leaned in closer and said, “Hi, Parker.” They both waved at the screen.

  “Her mom’s paying me forty bucks! It’s a legit job. In two hours, I’ll have the rest of the money to buy my ticket and get to Game On!” Courtney gave the phone screen a fist bump. “You were right. It all worked out.”

  Courtney was still waiting for Allie to tap her fist to the screen.

  “What’s wrong?” Courtney asked. “Did the price go up again? I didn’t think to check!”

  “That’s not it.” Allie hung her head, wishing she didn’t have to say the words that were just sitting there, waiting to leave her mouth. “I had to give it all back. Everything. The stuff is gone. The cash is gone.”

  Courtney’s face fell. “I should have held my auction today.”

  “We’d still be short.”

  “We’d still have something!”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. You did the right thing, Courtney.”

  “Yeah? Well, it doesn’t feel like the right thing. None of this feels right! We worked so hard.”

  Allie knew what she meant. Every time she had that thought, her chest felt uncomfortably tight.

  Courtney sat there for the longest time, not saying anything. It was excruciating. Allie hated hearing her so upset, but the silence was even worse.

  The little girl in the background held her cup in the air. “Our tea is getting cold.”

  “I’d better go,” Courtney said.

  “Okay.” Allie hated everything about this. She didn’t want Courtney to be mad at her anymore. She didn’t want anyone to be mad at her anymore. “But we’ll talk tonight, right? We’ll do good day/bad day?”

  “Yeah.”

  She hung up. She and Zoe were silent until the bus pulled to her stop. “See you,” she whispered.

  Marcus didn’t look at her as she left the bus, and as she walked the half block to her house, she tried not to think about that. She tried not to think about what happened with Courtney, or what happened with Ms. Slade, or what happened with Kelsey.

  She rounded the corner, stepped onto her lawn, and looked up to find a dog running straight for her. It took her a second to recognize him, but as soon as she did, she dropped her backpack on the grass, crouched down low, and
threw out her arms.

  “Archie!” He came at her so fast, he knocked her backward.

  She sat up, laughing as he covered her cheeks with dog kisses.

  “Sorry,” Nathan said, trying to pull him away from her, but Allie nuzzled in closer. After the day she’d had, this was, without question, the high point.

  “It’s okay.” She scratched Archie’s back and peered up at Nathan. “What are you doing here?”

  “Can I talk to you?”

  She was still mad at him for what he’d said in the lab the day before, but when she saw the look on his face, that anger started melting away. She’d never wanted to fight with him in the first place.

  Nathan reached out his hand. Allie took it and let him pull to her feet.

  “Always,” she said.

  Allie grabbed her backpack, and the two of them walked toward the house with Archie leading the way. As she searched for her keys, Bo barked and scratched at the other side of the door. As soon as she got it open, Bo and Archie raced straight for each other and started wrestling in the entryway. Allie and Nathan stepped over them on their way to the kitchen.

  Allie poured two glasses of milk and grabbed a half-empty package of Oreos from the cabinet. She hopped up on the counter and Nathan joined her.

  “What are you doing here?” Allie asked as she dunked her cookie into the milk and took a bite.

  “Well, I didn’t realize this until just now, but clearly, I’m here to show you the proper way to eat an Oreo.” Nathan twisted his cookie apart, dunked one half into the milk, took a bite, and then dunked it again, finishing it off.

  Allie rolled her eyes. “Dude. Everyone knows you only separate the cookie side from the frosted side when you have no milk. When you do have milk, you have to dunk the whole thing in and eat it together, because then you get the whole cookie-frosting-milk combo.” She demonstrated her technique, and then took a bite, closed her eyes, and smiled as she chewed.

  “That ruins the frosting. You, Allie Navarro, are a frosting ruiner.”

  “A what?”

  “You heard me.”

  He grabbed another cookie, twisted it apart, and licked the frosting.

  “You are so weird.”

  “I know. So are you.”

  “True.” Allie grabbed another Oreo, dunked it her way, and took a bite. “Why are you really here?”

  “Well . . .” Nathan wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You know how you keep asking me what I’m building for the reuse project?”

  “And you keep saying it’s a surprise.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’m not building anything.”

  Allie stopped mid-dunk, looking up at him.

  “Surprise!” He threw his arms in the air and pasted on a big grin.

  Allie still hadn’t moved. “What do you mean you’re not building anything?”

  “I mean, I’m not building anything. Because I can’t. I haven’t made anything new since I finished Built.”

  Allie thought back to all the months that had passed since Games for Good. He finished Built in September. It was almost the end of January. “We’ve had at least three development projects since then. What have you been working on?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. I keep making up some Built-related emergency I have to deal with. I’ve actually taken pieces of my own game apart and put them back together again so I wouldn’t be lying to Slade when she asked what I was working on. She gave me full credit, since technically, I was coding, but now I think she’s onto me. She told me I wasn’t getting out of this assignment, no matter what. That if I didn’t turn something new in, she’d be forced to give me an F.”

  “So what have you been doing for the last two weeks?”

  “Hanging out with my friends. Doing homework. Binge-watching Netflix. Playing Fortnite. Finding stuff to sell on Swap’d. You know, the usual.”

  The pieces were all clicking into place. Allie couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed sooner. All week, he’d been on the blacktop with his friends during lunch. She hadn’t had to force him out of the computer lab once. He was even late to CS class a few times. She remembered thinking he looked so confident, so cocky, that he must have been way ahead of her, and building something extraordinary. As it turned out, it was the exact opposite.

  “Is that why you’ve been playing basketball at lunch all week? Because you’ve been avoiding coding?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I tried to. Last Thursday in the lab . . .” he trailed off. Allie thought back to that day. She remembered he’d started to ask her something, but then Zoe texted her, and she got all caught up in her tutoring auction item. He told her to forget about it. She had.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Nathan continued. “For a couple of months after Games for Good, I was on top of the world. My Built user base was skyrocketing. My game was trending. Reporters were calling me every day, my picture was in the paper, and I got to go to all these meetings at Spyglass with real-life game developers. All of them were so excited about what I’d done. And then there were the sponsors, sending me free stuff all the time, practically begging me for a billboard in the game. It felt like it was the beginning of something big. And then”—he snapped his fingers—“like that, it was over. The users started dropping off, and the meeting invitations stopped coming, and the packages stopped magically arriving. It wasn’t the beginning at all. It was just temporary. And now it’s over.”

  At least he’d had his moment. She would have liked to have known what that was like, even if it was temporary.

  “All I could think about was that I had to do something great. Something new and better, something that would get people’s attention again. I can’t even begin to tell you how many hours I spent in my room, late into the night, just staring in my monitor, with my fingers on the keyboard, unable to code a single line. And the more days that went by like that, the more I started to panic, and the more my mind started messing with me. What if I never come up with anything else?” Nathan slid off the counter and started pacing the kitchen floor. “What if I just had one decent idea, Allie, and that was it?”

  “That’s not going to happen. Something will come to you.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “It will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know you!” Allie couldn’t hold back any longer. She slid off the counter and stood right in front of him. “Look, I’ve spent my whole life trying to beat you, and you’re always a step ahead of me. You always have the better idea for the better user base or the better implementation—”

  “That’s not true,” he said, cutting her off. “You’re always the one I’m trying to beat.”

  “And you always do! I always come in second to you. I have since third grade.”

  Nathan’s face fell. “You know I hate that, right? It’s not fair. You always have better ideas. That dog-walking app?”

  “Came in second to your weather app.”

  “And that puzzle game—”

  “Came in second to your hoverboard game. And my soccer skills game came in second to your Quidditch-skills game.”

  “Okay, but Click’d—”

  “Came in tenth!” Allie’s voice cracked. “I failed so badly, I wasn’t even allowed to be onstage with you!”

  He looked right into her eyes. “You should have been up there. If you had been, you would have won. And you would have handled this whole thing so much better than I have. You wouldn’t have coder’s block because you were famous for, like, ten minutes and then you weren’t.”

  “I might have!” Allie said.

  “Well, here’s your chance. Go to Game On, do that meet-and-greet with Naomi Ryan, show her Swap’d, and land a spot in the hackathon program. You deserve it. And you won’t have to worry about me competing against you. I’m not even applying.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with me, does it?” She br
ought her hands to her hips. “Because if there’s any part of you, even a tiny part of you, that’s staying out of this because you think that will help me get in . . .”

  Nathan reeled back. “Of course not! This has nothing to do with you, Allie.” Nathan combed his fingers through his hair. “I have nothing to show Naomi Ryan. I have nothing to show Ms. Slade on Friday. I have nothing! No app. No game. No users. Nothing to present. And now it’s too late.”

  “No, it’s not. You have, like, thirty hours. Courtney and I built Swap’d in about thirteen. You just need an idea.”

  “Ooh, got it!” He reached in his pocket and pretended to pull something out, but when he opened his hand, it was empty. “Oh, wait. Never mind.”

  Allie rolled her eyes. “What’s your biggest problem with Built? Why are you losing users?”

  “I don’t know . . . I think it’s just too complicated. It takes a while to learn. It scares new people away.”

  Allie paced the kitchen floor, walking back and forth between the sink and the fridge. He was right. It was complex in some ways, but it was also so cute, with its tiny houses, and the little builders in their overalls, and that store that sold all the building supplies. Those miniature billboards with the sponsorship signs were brilliant.

  “Maybe you need something simpler, you know? A way to introduce people to the game in a friendly way.”

  “Like what?”

  Allie paced some more. She paced and thought and paced and thought. She wondered how that town could scare anyone away. It was adorable, with its tree-lined sidewalks, and the town square, and all those cute little roads.

  Roads.

  Allie stopped and turned to Nathan. “I’ve got it. Follow me.”

  She took off, heading for the stairs. She took them two at a time, with Nathan and Bo and Archie trailing after her, all trying to keep up. When she got to her room she flung the door open, went straight to her desk, and opened the top drawer.

  She unzipped the white case, removed the DS, opened it up, and flicked the power button. As she handed it to Nathan, the Mario Kart theme song filled the room.

  He smiled. “I haven’t heard that song in years.” And then he looked at the screen. “This is why your name is Princess Peach.”