Click'd Series, Book 1

by Tamara Ireland Stone

  Nathan ignored her and kept talking. “I think I’m going to install this thing you made after all.”

  “It’s not a ‘thing.’” Allie still didn’t look at him.

  Nathan reached for his phone. “Fine, your game,” he said, putting sarcastic emphasis on the last word. “Click’d.”

  Allie ignored him.

  “I’m kind of curious about that leaderboard thing, you know?” When she didn’t respond, he tapped his fingers on the desk, filling the silence. Then he pointed to Allie’s phone. “What’s yours like? Any big surprises?”

  She sighed. “Install it and find out. You can see everyone’s clicks.” She turned to look at him and pointed at her monitor. “Look, I’ve got a ton of work to do here.”

  “Sure. Got it.” Nathan poked around on his phone and mumbled to himself. Or maybe he was talking to Allie, she couldn’t tell. “That invitation you sent is somewhere in here…Oh, wait. Yep. There it is.”

  Allie sighed again. Louder this time. She could hear him tapping on his screen.

  “It’s installing,” he said.

  “Awesome,” she replied. Allie tried to ignore him, but she couldn’t help stealing a glance out of the corner of her eye when Nathan leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up on his desk.

  “Man, you’re asking for a lot of profile data here,” he said as he typed. “What are you going to do with all this information?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You could sell it. I bet a big company would pay a lot of money for this kind of stuff. We’re a hot target market, you know?”

  “I’m not going to sell the data.”

  The room got quiet again and she went back to her code. But the silence didn’t last long.

  “Ooh…photo.” Nathan reached out with his arm and smiled at the camera, but when he noticed Allie had turned to look at him, he changed course. “Actually,” he said as he handed her his phone, “will you do the honors?”

  Allie took his phone without thinking about it, and Nathan leaned back in his chair with his hands folded behind his head, staring off into the distance.

  “Seriously?” she asked. “I’m really busy here. Can’t you just take a selfie?”

  “Selfies never turn out.”

  “Sure they do. You just don’t know how to take them.”

  “Please?” He smiled at her as he pointed to his phone in her hand. “It’ll just take a second. Then I’ll leave you alone.”

  He returned to his pose and Allie blew out a breath. She held up his phone, clicked the button, and handed it back to him without looking at the picture.

  “Nice,” he said, nodding approvingly. “Okay, profile done. Time for the big quiz!”

  Allie rolled her eyes and then looked at the clock that hung over the door. She only had another ten minutes before her mom arrived. She told herself to focus, but she couldn’t help it—her eyes kept wandering over to Nathan.

  At first, his eyebrows were pinched, like he was in deep concentration, but then his face started to relax. Every so often, a smile would tug at his mouth, and when that happened, Allie involuntarily leaned toward him, dying to know what question he was answering.

  Suddenly, he started laughing hard.

  “What?” Allie reluctantly asked.

  “Boy bands? Seriously?” He was still trying to catch his breath as he twisted the phone toward her.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Wow. Okay. Hmm. Well, this one is definitely a tough question.” He drummed his hands on the table. “Pick a favorite. Come on, that’s just crazy talk. How am I supposed to pick a single favorite boy band singer?”

  Allie rolled her eyes. She wondered if Ms. Slade had any headphones she could borrow.

  “You know, I’m going with Zayn.”

  “You do that.”

  “I don’t really know why, I guess he seems like the most interesting one. And you know, I like that he left One Direction to go out on his own.” Nathan kept talking, but Allie ignored him. “Or maybe it’s just because his name is so much cooler than mine. Zayyyyn…” he said, drawing it out. “That’s fun to say. Zayyyyn…How come I got a boring name like Nathan and he got a name like Zayyyyn? Maybe I should go by Naaaate?”

  Allie grabbed the sides of her monitor with both hands and pretended to smack her forehead against the screen.

  “Nah. You’re right. I can tell by the look on your face. That doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?”

  Allie sat up and pointed at her screen again. “I am trying to concentrate, Nate.” She didn’t draw it out the way he had.

  “Sure. Right. Sorry.”

  Allie looked back at her monitor and tried not to look over at him again, but he was making that pretty impossible.

  “Last question!” Nathan said in a singsong voice. “No! You’re making me pick a favorite doughnut? Sprinkles, maple bar, glazed, or chocolate iced. Allie!” He slapped the back of his hand to his forehead as he looked up at her. “This test is impossible. You know that, right?”

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “Not at all. Look at me. I’m stumped. Totally and completely stumped.” His finger hovered dramatically over his screen, as if he had a serious choice to make and feared picking the wrong one.

  “You’re mocking me.”

  He smiled at her. “I’m messing with you, not mocking you. There’s a difference. Here we go.” He made a big show of pressing the LET’S GO! button.

  And as soon as he did, Allie’s phone said bloop-bloop-bloop and the screen lit up, flashing fast with a red-tinted photo of Nathan and someone she assumed must be his mom. Nathan’s phone echoed with the same sound.

  “Well, isn’t this interesting!” Nathan said as his face broke into a huge grin. Allie craned her neck, trying to see his screen, but Nathan twisted away and curled his body over it, hiding it from her view.

  She hoped it was something from Instagram.

  She couldn’t handle the idea of it being anything else.

  Because then she’d have to tell him why she was sitting next to him in the lab.

  Nathan rotated the phone in her direction.

  “Nice pic,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Allie smiled, remembering the night she posed for it. “Courtney, my best friend at CodeGirls camp, took it when we were working late one night in the Fishbowl.”

  She sighed. She missed the Fishbowl. She missed the people in it even more.

  His eyebrows pinched together. “The Fishbowl?”

  “Yeah. That’s the name of the computer lab at Fuller University. It’s surrounded by these super-tall windows on three sides, so while you’re working, you kind of feel like you’re outside. There’s a small field where we all played soccer during breaks. And we’d sit in the shade under this big willow tree and eat our lunch.”

  Nathan smiled. “Sounds nice.”

  “Yeah.” Allie let out a long sigh. “It was.” She turned and looked at him. “It was quiet, too. People respected each other’s work time.”

  Nathan looked at her. And then he smiled. “I feel like you’re trying to tell me something, but…” He lifted his phone into the air. “Okay, so what do we do now?”

  “We tap our phones together to see where we landed on each other’s leaderboards.”

  Allie reached out toward him, but Nathan pulled back. “What if we don’t tap them together?” he asked. “What if we keep it a secret?”

  She lowered her arm. “Fine with me. I don’t need to know.” She dropped her phone on the opposite side of her desk, as far away from Nathan as possible, and went back to work. Nathan set his phone down, too. And then he pulled his headphones over his ears and his fingers started flying across the keys.

  Allie checked to be sure he wasn’t watching her, and then she looked back at her data. All she had to do was search for his name and she’d be able to see every single answer to every single question. In a matter of seconds, she could figure out exactly where he ranked. She scrolled u
p to the search field. She was just about to type in N when he said, “Okay, I take it back. I can’t stand it.” He reached for his phone.

  Allie wrapped her arms across her chest. “No. You didn’t want to find out, so we shouldn’t find out.”

  “Come on…look.” Nathan fake-pouted and turned his phone so she could see his leaderboard. “I don’t have a single friend.”

  “There’s a good reason for that.”

  “Please?”

  Allie hated the idea of giving in to him, but she also wanted him to use Click’d. She wanted him to know what he was up against on Saturday. It was an intimidation tactic, plain and simple.

  “Fine,” she said as she picked up her phone and tapped it against the side of his.

  And then they both stopped talking or moving or breathing, and watched their screens. They flashed white. And then their leaderboards appeared.

  “Did you answer the questions honestly?”

  “Of course I did. Why would I lie?”

  More than five hundred people in the system, and she had the most in common with Nathan Frederickson? That seemed impossible. Totally and completely impossible.

  “Interesting score for two people who hate each other,” Nathan said.

  Allie glared at him. “You don’t hate me. I hate you! I’ve hated you since…” She trailed off, remembering all the little things over the years, each adding up to her calling Nathan Fredrickson her archenemy. Her nemesis.

  Nathan looked at Allie.

  And Allie looked at Nathan.

  Now she had a new reason to get more users. The more there were, the faster he’d be bumped off her leaderboard.

  “I have to get back to work,” Allie said.

  Allie’s mom picked her up in front of the school. As she climbed into the car and slipped her seat belt over her shoulder, Bo poked his head in between the seats and started licking her face.

  “Bo!” She buried her face in his neck and inhaled his soft fur. “I missed you! How was your day? Did you miss me, too?”

  Allie was glad Bo was there. It helped her ignore the sound of her phone buzzing in her back pocket with new member alerts.

  “Why did you have to stay late?” her mom asked as she put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. “It’s only the second day of school.”

  If Allie had found and solved the problem in her code, she might have told her mom everything, but under the circumstances, she couldn’t stand the idea of bringing it up. “Just working in the computer lab, getting ready for Saturday.” Which was kind of true, but not completely.

  She was expecting her mom to press her for details, but instead she reached over and grabbed Allie’s hand. “You were so brilliant last weekend. I can’t wait to see you up on that stage, in front of all those people.” She shot her a smile. “We are so proud of you.” And then she returned both hands to the steering wheel and started talking about some drama at work. While Allie listened to her mom’s story—offering the occasional What? and No way! at the appropriate points—she stole a glance at her phone.

  Click’d was spitting out picture after picture, slideshow-style, of all the people who had clicked at school that day. They all looked happy. They were all having fun. None of them seemed worried about the clues they’d received on their phones. She wanted the thing with Zoe to be a fluke or a random error, but she knew that was impossible. And after hours in the lab, she didn’t have a clue how to fix it.

  What was she going to say to Zoe? What were they going to say to Emma?

  Her mom pulled up next to the fence that lined the field. “Maddie’s mom is giving you a ride home,” she said.

  Allie grabbed her soccer bag from the backseat, kissed Bo good-bye, and then stepped out of the car. “See you at home,” she told her mom as she closed the door.

  Most of her teammates were already huddled up in the corner of the field. She spotted Maddie and Emma standing with a big group, chatting as they stretched, but Zoe was sitting alone, a few feet away from everyone else, still lacing up her cleats.

  Allie dropped her bag on the ground and collapsed next to her, flat on her back. It was still warm and sunny, and she stared up at the sky, looking for animal-shaped clouds.

  “You’re not exactly reassuring me here, Al.”

  Allie closed her eyes and rocked her head from side to side. She could feel those tiny artificial pellets from the turf digging into her scalp, but she didn’t care. When she opened her eyes, Zoe was staring down at her. “Turns out, it’s harder than I expected.”

  “Speed it up, ladies!” Coach yelled as she pointed at the rest of the team, already starting laps around the field.

  Zoe blew out a breath, untied her cleat and started over, buying time so they could keep talking. She motioned with her hand and shot Allie this keep-going look.

  Allie sat up, unzipped her bag, and pulled out her own cleats, filling Zoe in as she started lacing them up.

  “I can’t find it,” Allie whispered.

  “What do you mean you can’t find it?”

  “I only had an hour. I’ll try again tonight. But…” Allie looked around to be sure no one else could hear her. “All the photo-related stuff is in this one area, smack in the middle. It might not be a simple tweak to a single line of code, like I thought. Everything’s interconnected.” Allie interlaced her fingers. “The photo access is part of a much longer string of commands—the way it feeds users the Instagram clues, stores the ClickPics, and sends them to the whole community—it’s all tied together.”

  Zoe still looked confused.

  “It’s like a three-layer cake,” Allie explained, stacking her hands one over the other. “And the photo-related stuff is the middle layer. I can’t just take it out without destroying the entire thing.”

  Allie stood and brought her foot to her hip, stretching out her leg. Zoe stood next to her and stepped her right foot forward into a lunge.

  “Even if I find the issue, I’m not sure I can risk it. Not until after the competition on Saturday.”

  “But that’s four days away.” Zoe stepped back and lunged on the other side.

  “Exactly. It’s only four days away. I went through the system and deleted anything that looked suspicious—all the screenshots, all the blurry photos, basically anything that looked like it wouldn’t have been posted—but I only found a few. It’s not consistently using the photos app as a source for the clues. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s pulling them from Instagram, exactly the way it’s supposed to.”

  “Okay, but what about the other one percent?” Zoe looked around to be sure no one could hear her. “If you ask me, you got lucky. What if there’s something, like, really personal?”

  “Then I’ll delete it from the queue before it goes out.”

  Zoe let out a laugh. “What are you going to do, spend the next four days glued to a chair, watching a computer screen, just in case Click’d pulls a random pic?”

  “I’m going to be glued to a chair until I can figure out how to fix it, anyway. I’ll be going straight to the lab at every lunch and right after school, and when I get home, I’ll go straight to my desk and comb through the code. I might as well look for sketchy photos while I’m at it. What other choice do I have?”

  “You could take it down,” Zoe said. “Not forever or anything…just until you find the issue and fix it.”

  Allie had already thought about that, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Not when Click’d had so much momentum. “I’ve got this. It’s going to take longer than I thought, but I can fix the code, and in the meantime, I’ll make sure it doesn’t share anything from anyone’s private photos again.”

  “Ladies!” Coach yelled as she pointed to the rest of the team, already on their next lap. “Are you planning to join us today?” The two of them took off running, keeping their distance from the others.

  They ran in silence for the next few minutes.

  “So do we tell Emma?” Zoe finally asked.


  Allie made a face. “She’ll be so upset.”

  “Right?”

  “Besides, it sounds like Wyatt was cool about the whole thing.”

  “Totally. He deleted it.”

  “So Emma’s secret is safe. What’s the point of upsetting her, you know?”

  Zoe shook out her hands. “I can’t even imagine telling her.”

  “Then maybe we don’t.”

  When Allie got home from soccer, Bo was waiting in the entryway just like he always was. Allie dropped her bag on the floor and sat down so he could jump into her lap and cover her face with kisses. “Come on,” she said to him. “Let’s get to work.”

  He followed her as she raced for the staircase and started up, taking them two at a time.

  “Where are you going?” her mom called from below. “What about dinner?”

  Allie stopped and gripped the banister. “Can I eat up in my room?”

  Her mom looked over at the kitchen table. Allie’s dad was already there, setting three plates on top of three place mats, and filling three glasses with milk. “Have a quick dinner with us. We want to hear about your day.”

  No, you don’t, Allie thought.

  She’d already been away from Click’d for two hours, and even though no one was likely to be close enough to trigger a photo clue that late in the day, she couldn’t stand not working on the fix.

  “I have a ton of homework.”

  Her mom thought about it, and then she finally pointed at the kitchen table, and said, “Fine. Grab your plate to go.”

  Allie went into the kitchen and took a big whiff. Everything smelled delicious, and she suddenly realized she’d barely eaten lunch and hadn’t had anything but microwave popcorn since. She kissed her dad on the cheek, and then scooped out a huge helping of chicken, rice, and steamed vegetables.

  “Bye,” she called back as she ran for the stairs. The scents teased her all the way into her room.

  Allie sat in her chair and Bo crawled underneath her desk and curled himself into a ball at her feet. Since she left the lab, 47 people had joined, leaving the count at 605. She shook her head in disbelief. At the rate she was going, she’d have 650 users by morning and maybe even 700 by the end of the next day!