Click'd

  Allie’s leaderboard was half-full before the bus even left the roundabout, and so was Zoe’s. The energy level inside was sky-high as everyone passed their phones around—just like they’d done earlier that week—laughing and joking as they tapped them together and admired their new leaderboards. Nobody appeared to care that the woo-hoo sound was gone or that the ClickPics feature had been disabled.

  “You did it,” Zoe said.

  Allie was beaming as she relaxed back into the seat.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the bloops. She smiled when she heard people yelling, “Yes!” and shouting out their ranking. People hugged and high-fived. And it all felt fun again.

  She looked around, thinking about how strange it was that thirty-two kids in three different grades, who were trapped on a bus for forty-five minutes, twice each day, usually rode in silence, barely speaking to each other, but now, they were all becoming friends—and it was all because of Click’d.

  It was the kind of story the judges would want to hear.

  Allie stood and started taking pictures, eager to try to capture the energy of the moment so she could weave it into her presentation as soon as she got home.

  But then she heard a voice from the back of the bus. “What happened?”

  “Uh-oh,” another voice said.

  Allie looked down at her phone. Click’d had crashed.

  “Launch it again!” Allie called out.

  She navigated over to the main screen and touched her fingertip to the icon. Click’d launched and her profile filled the screen. It stayed like that for a few seconds. She waited for a sound. Or a vibration. Anything.

  All the phones were silent again. No bloops. No flashing screens. No picture clues. No leaderboard.

  Allie tapped the icon again. Her profile opened. But when she opened the leaderboard tab, the whole thing crashed again.

  “No.” She stared at the screen. She shut down her phone and started it up again. She launched Click’d again. That time, it didn’t even open her profile before it crashed.

  Allie wanted to scream. Or cry. Or hit something hard. She pictured herself doing all three at the same time as soon as she got home.

  “It’s okay,” Zoe said reassuringly. “You can fix it. The leaderboards are full now and you’ve got thirty-two users.”

  But Allie couldn’t speak. When the bus stopped at her corner, she still hadn’t said a word. Before she stood up, Zoe took her face in her hands and squeezed her cheeks. “Look at me. You’re going to go inside, run your tests, or whatever it is you do, and figure it out, okay?”

  Allie tried to smile, but she couldn’t. Zoe was squeezing her face too hard.

  “Text me as soon as you fix it,” Zoe said, and she let her hands drop.

  Allie stood and walked down the aisle in a haze. As she passed Marcus, he said, “Hey, I’m sorry, Three.”

  Allie blew out a breath. “Me too, Six.”

  Allie’s mom tapped her fingernails against the table. “Please make your phone stop,” she said.

  Buzz.

  Buzz.

  Buzz.

  It had been like that ever since she left school that afternoon. One text after another, each one saying pretty much the same thing:

  Did you know Click’d isn’t working?!?

  I keep clicking the icon but nothing happens!

  Are you fixing it?

  When will it be up again???

  Allie pushed her chair away from the table and walked into the kitchen with Bo on her heels. She turned her phone off before she set it on the counter. She didn’t want to hear it or see it. She just wanted everyone to leave her alone.

  She returned to her chair and took a slice of pepperoni pizza from the box in the center of the table. Bo settled back into his usual spot right under her feet, and Allie dug her toes into his soft fur. She wished she could hide under the table, too. It seemed quiet down there.

  “You okay?” her dad asked.

  Allie shook her head.

  “You might feel better if you talk to us about it,” he added.

  “I don’t need to talk about it.” Allie took a big bite and washed it down with her milk. “But you know what I do need?” she asked sarcastically. “A working app. Do either of you happen to have one of those?”

  Her parents were silent.

  Maybe I don’t need a working app, Allie thought. Maybe I don’t deserve to be there after all.

  Click’d had been a total failure. It had caused fights all over the school, embarrassed people in ways she’d never be able to apologize for, and it almost ruined her friendship with Emma.

  She had no business being in the Games for Good competition. Clearly, Click’d wasn’t good.

  “Is there anything we can do to help?” her mom asked.

  Allie took another bite and chewed while she thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m going to spend the next few hours trying to figure out why it’s crashing, and…” She trailed off. She didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “Maybe you’re closer than you think?” Her dad tried to sound positive. “You fixed the big stuff, right? It was working on the bus. You just have some stability issues, that’s all.” He made it sound like it was so easy, but Allie knew it wasn’t.

  She stared at her food. She knew she needed to go back to her room, back to that desk, and back to those never-ending lines of code, but she was so tired of looking at them. She just wanted to sit in front of the TV, eating popcorn and watching a movie like the three of them did every Friday night.

  Popcorn. That reminded her of her week in the lab. She thought about Nathan and got angry all over again.

  “Do you have a plan B? Just in case?” Allie’s mom asked.

  “There’s no plan B,” Allie said. If she couldn’t keep Click’d from crashing, she would have to withdraw from the competition. “No working code, nothing to enter.”

  “Well, that’s only half-true,” her mom said. “You’re supposed to be demo-ing in the pavilion all day, too. You have to show up.”

  Ugh. Not the pavilion again, she thought.

  “No way. If I can’t fix Click’d, the Games for Good Pavilion will have to have one empty kiosk.” She pushed her pizza away. “I’m not going. Not a chance.” Just thinking about being on that exhibit floor without a fully functional, amazing-looking app made her feel nauseated.

  “Well, even if you can’t be in the competition, you still need to be in the pavilion.”

  Allie let out a sarcastic laugh. “What am I supposed to do, Mom? Stand there while people stare at a screenshot of a broken app? People are coming to the conference to see games. I can’t be there if I don’t have one to show them.”

  “But you have a game to talk about,” her dad suggested.

  “No one cares about that,” Allie said.

  The room fell silent. Nobody said anything for almost a full minute. Allie was about to go back to her room when her dad spoke up.

  “You know that demo you did at CodeGirls Camp last weekend?”

  Allie rolled her eyes. “Yeah.”

  “Do you know what part I loved most?”

  Allie pictured the voting app. She thought about the two people with the blue screens, who walked from opposite sides of the auditorium. She thought about the moment Courtney joined her onstage.

  “The part where I didn’t suck?” Allie asked.

  Her dad ignored her sarcastic tone. “The part I loved most was when you showed all those pictures of you and the rest of the girls in the lab, and told stories about how you became friends.”

  He leaned forward on the table and she found herself doing the same.

  “That’s when everybody in that auditorium got goose bumps. It wasn’t because of your app; it was because of the experience you had. You talked about being afraid in a room full of strangers, and you talked about all the CodeGirls getting to know things about one another they never would have learned without Click’d. That was the most powerful
part of your presentation—the stories you told.”

  Allie’s ears perked up. “Seriously? That was the best part?”

  Her dad looked at her mom, and her mom nodded along with him.

  Allie thought about that. She had pictures. And she had plenty of stories. She was planning to pull a bunch of ClickPics into her presentation, anyway. It wouldn’t take long to turn them into a slideshow.

  “It’s still plan B,” her mom said. “But it’s better than nothing.”

  She couldn’t stand the idea of giving up, and she wasn’t about to—not yet—but if she couldn’t fix it, at least she’d have something to show people when they came to the booth.

  And she knew Ms. Slade expected her to be there, with or without a working app.

  “I’d better get back to work,” she said with a sigh. She took another slice of pizza to go and trudged up the stairs with Bo right on her heels.

  Back in her room, she opened her code again and started from the beginning. She tweaked a few things and then tested it. And it failed. She tweaked and tested again, and it failed again. She pored over every detail, line after line, trying to figure out what was making it crash.

  “What am I missing?” she asked herself.

  And then she started from the top and scrolled down, studying every connection to every database table again.

  Just after midnight, she thought she found the problem in a line that was somehow calling the same table twice. She deleted one instance, and was about to run another test when she changed her mind. At that point, she figured the test didn’t even matter. No one else was awake anyway. It would either work or it wouldn’t.

  Last chance, she thought as she executed the program.

  And then she held her breath.

  She reached for her phone and tapped on the icon.

  Click’d launched exactly the way it was supposed to. And suddenly, she was staring at her profile.

  “It works,” she said. Bo stood when he heard her voice and started wagging his tail excitedly. She looked down at him, beaming. “It works.”

  It was actually working.

  She couldn’t believe it was actually working.

  She clicked on the leaderboard and braced herself, waiting for it to crash. But it didn’t.

  She clicked on Zoe’s profile picture. She clicked on Lauren’s. And then Penny’s. She was just about to click on Marcus’s when the screen went dark.

  “No…” she groaned as she collapsed back into her chair. She stared at her phone, and then back at the code, and then back at her phone again. There was no getting around it. Tears welled up in her eyes as she glanced at the time: 12:24 a.m.

  As the tears slipped down her cheeks, she typed a message to Ms. Slade:

  Allie

  Please pull my name from G4G

  Allie and her parents stood at the top of the escalator, looking down onto the show floor.

  “There it is,” her dad said. But Allie had already seen the Games for Good Pavilion. It was huge, and the fact that it was bright blue and white, smack in the middle of the show floor, and surrounded by dark-colored gaming booths, made it impossible to miss.

  She felt her mom’s arm on her back. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Allie said, even though it wasn’t true. She already wanted to cry, and she had no idea how she was going to get through the day without doing it.

  Her dad rested a supportive hand on her back. “I know this isn’t at all what you expected out of today, but we are so proud of you. You know that, right?”

  Allie shut her eyes and nodded quickly. And then she grabbed a chunk of her hair and twirled it around her finger. She stared down at the pavilion again, knowing that just inside, there was a small kiosk with her Click’d logo on it.

  “Go down there and tell everyone about your game,” her mom said. “Don’t think about what went wrong. Don’t think about the fact that you’re not in the competition. Just focus on everything that went right. Tell your stories.”

  Allie nodded. And don’t think about Nathan, she thought. Don’t even look at his kiosk. Don’t even think about what he did.

  “Remember: twelve hundred users in three days,” her dad said.

  “Twelve hundred and fourteen,” her mom said, correcting him.

  Allie forced a smile. “Including Taylor Swift.”

  “Exactly! See, now that’s a good story.” Her mom grabbed her shoulders with both hands and pivoted her toward the escalator. “Come on. Let’s go have some fun.”

  They followed the crowd into the exhibit hall and flashed their badges for the security guard. Inside, there were people everywhere, racing around, putting the final touches on their booth displays. They were testing microphones and loading their games on giant screens. Huge signs hovered in the air, advertising a bunch of games she had on her phone and more she’d never even heard of.

  As soon as Allie and her parents stepped onto the bright white carpet, a woman in ripped jeans, black Converse, and a bright blue T-shirt that read G4G Pavilion Coordinator came up and introduced herself. “Hi,” she said, extending her hand toward Allie. “I’m Jen.” She shook hands with her parents. “Follow me.”

  She led them over to a kiosk, and Allie’s breath hitched when she saw her sign. Click’d was in big block print above her logo. She looked at it and felt the corners of her mouth turn up. She still loved the pencil-thin swirls that formed two stick figures with their arms around each other.

  “You should have everything here: cables, connectors, keyboard, touchpad,” Jen said brightly as she pointed to each item on the narrow shelf. “But give a shout if there’s anything else you need, okay?” She checked her watch. “The show floor opens in forty minutes. You good?”

  Allie was wondering if Jen knew that she wouldn’t be up on the stage like the rest of the people in the pavilion. She was about to ask her when Jen stepped forward, closing the distance between them.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about your game.” Allie bit down on the inside of her cheek. “I’ve made special arrangements for you to sit next to your guests in the audience. Your badge will get you in a little early. Look for the seats in the front row with your names on them.”

  Allie dipped her chin to her chest and stared at the stark white carpet.

  Jen squeezed in closer. “It happens all the time, you know?”

  She looked up. “It does?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Almost every year, there’s someone in the pavilion who had to drop out of the formal competition. And it’s okay. Your app will still go up on our website whenever it’s ready, and you’ll get to tell a ton of people about it today. So try to have fun, okay? You’ve earned this spot.” She pointed up at the sign above their heads. “I can’t wait to play your game. It sounds amazing.”

  “It is.” Allie heard Ms. Slade’s voice from behind her, and she slowly turned around. She found her teacher standing there in a light blue suit with a crisp white shirt. She was wearing more makeup than she typically wore in class, and her hair was even curlier than usual. Allie thought she looked beautiful.

  “Hi,” Allie said as she tried to swallow down the giant lump in her throat.

  Ms. Slade reached out and took Allie’s hand in hers, gripping it hard. “Allie…I’m kind of at a loss for words today. I’m so sorry. But at the same time, I’m so proud of you.”

  “For what?” The words squeaked out of Allie’s mouth.

  “For…everything. For building your app. For working all week to fix it. For being here in the pavilion. I’ve never been so proud of one of my students.”

  Allie forced a smile. She tried to say thank you, but nothing came out.

  “Here,” Ms. Slade said. “These are for you.” She pressed a small box into Allie’s hands.

  Allie opened it, and inside, she found a pair of dangly Click’d logo earrings, just like the ones Ms. Slade had worn to the CodeGirls demo a week earlier. She looked up to thank her, and realized Ms. Slade was
wearing one in her left ear, too. And in her right, she wore one of the little houses from Built.

  “I’m going to go check on Nathan. Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

  Nathan.

  Allie watched her walk away until she reached Nathan’s kiosk. He was on the opposite side of the pavilion, and Allie realized for the first time that she had an unobstructed view. His sign looked perfect: two of his animated characters were leaning against either side of a colorful house with the word BUILT forming the roof.

  Nathan was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, tennis shoes, and a black throwback T-shirt with an Atari logo on the front. She could see his monitor and the small neighborhood street, complete with miniature cars and trees lining the sidewalks, and those little characters standing on tall ladders with their hammers in hand, pounding away on the side of a tiny house.

  Then he turned his head and caught Allie looking at him. He held up his hand, giving her a small wave, but she didn’t return it. Instead, she turned her back to him and kept setting up her slideshow.

  When the show floor opened at ten o’clock, the exhibit hall came to life as it filled with people. It got louder and louder as games from neighboring booths competed with one another for attention. There were games running on oversize screens designed to look like phones, and movie theater–size screens with huge groups of people gathered around them. Off to one side, Allie spotted a bunch of people standing in line to take turns jumping up in the air in front of a green screen while a photographer snapped a picture, converted them into animated characters, and placed them into a game setting.

  “Hi.” Allie looked down when she heard the voice, and saw a young girl standing next to her. She was watching the pictures on Allie’s screen.

  “What’s your game?” the little girl asked, pointing up at the sign.

  “It’s called Click’d. I created it to help people make new friends.”

  “That sounds fun,” the girl said.