Like she’d been telling people all day: She made a mistake at some point. She missed something. She broke Click’d.
When all the booth traffic finally slowed down, Allie took a big sip of water and then crouched down, reaching into her backpack and feeling around for her lip gloss. She peeked inside and saw her spiral-bound notebook, and pressed in between its pages, she saw the printout Nathan had given her in the lab on Thursday right before they’d left for the day. She gave it a tug and pulled it out.
She looked over her code, paying special attention to the commands Nathan had highlighted in blue, and especially to that last line, highlighted in green. That line “was what tied it all back to the leaderboard,” he had said. She stared at that line, like she’d stared at it the whole night and most of the day before.
Her booth was still quiet, so she went back to her monitor, moved her presentation into the background, and opened a browser window. She navigated over to the CodeGirls server, opened her code, and found the area she’d changed on Thursday night.
She held Nathan’s printout up to the monitor and compared them. She’d deleted the lines of code he’d told her to. And the line he’d highlighted in green matched up perfectly, too.
But then she noticed something strange. Not in Nathan’s printout, but in her code on the screen.
In his printout, there was a line after the one he’d told her how to rework. But when she looked at her code, it was missing.
She looked at the piece of paper again. And back at the screen. And then back at Nathan’s printout.
After the line of code she rewrote—the one that reworked the way the photos connected to the leaderboard—there was supposed to be another line.
Nathan had included it in his printed instructions. But it wasn’t in her code.
She thought back to Thursday night. It was almost midnight when she made the changes. She hadn’t meant to even touch that line of code, but maybe she’d accidentally deleted it. It was late. She was tired. It was possible.
Allie’s chest felt heavy.
She’d known in her gut it wasn’t Nathan’s fault, and now she had proof.
She thought about the look on his face when he first installed her app. She remembered the way he joked with her as he took her quiz, how he made her take his profile picture, and the way he smiled when Click’d put her in the top spot on his leaderboard. She thought about Nathan flipping his phone upside down, saying that one friend was enough for him. And she thought about the way she smiled when he called her Gator.
She retyped the missing line of code exactly the way it was on the printout, and when she was done, she compared the two again. It looked perfect. She held her breath and pressed SAVE. And then she refreshed the data and pressed the UPDATE button without even testing it.
She took out her phone and launched Click’d.
Her profile looked exactly the way it did on the bus the day before, right before it started crashing.
She clicked on the leaderboard and found that it was completely full with her top ten friends on Bus #14.
It was working again.
She couldn’t believe her eyes. She opened all the screens, trying to make it crash, but it refused to.
She knew she should probably leave it alone, but she couldn’t help herself. She navigated over to her user list. There were flag icons next to thirty-two names; the kids on Bus #14. But she could still see the original list of twelve hundred members, and scrolled down until she found Nathan’s information. She clicked on the icon to flag it and reactivate his record.
Bloop-bloop-bloop.
She looked down at her screen and saw an old picture of Nathan, standing between Cory and Mark. She recognized the gym of their elementary school. It was taken during the fifth-grade science fair.
Allie glanced over at Nathan’s kiosk. He was surrounded by a big group of people wearing black shirts with the Stardust Games logo on the back. He was talking with them, but she could tell he’d heard the sound, too, because he touched his back pocket and kept stealing glances over at her.
She waved.
After the Stardust executives shook Nathan’s hand and walked away, she watched him pull his phone from his pocket. He looked at his screen and smiled. And then he started walking toward her kiosk.
Allie tightened her grip on her phone and started walking toward him.
The picture on her screen was bright red and flashing fast when they met in the middle of the pavilion.
“Hi.” Allie smiled nervously.
Nathan smiled back. “Hey. You got it working, huh?”
“Yeah.” Allie’s heart was racing. Her hands felt clammy and her mouth was dry. She tipped her head toward her kiosk. “I just found your printout in my bag and…it looks like I accidentally deleted the line right after the one you told me to change.” Allie swallowed hard. “I feel so stupid.”
He shook his head. “Don’t. It was late at night. It was an easy mistake.”
“No, not about that,” she said. “About blaming you when you didn’t do anything wrong.”
It was quiet for a long time. Finally, Nathan said, “I never would have done that to you. You know that, right?”
She pulled in a deep breath. “I know. I’m so sorry.”
He looked at her like he was trying to figure out what to say next. “That was horrible,” he finally said.
“What was?”
“Seeing you in the audience today. You should have been up there with the rest of us.”
“It’s okay. You were great up there. And I’m happy for you. I really am.”
She held her phone out toward Nathan. He smiled as he tapped his against it. Their screens flashed bright white and their leaderboards appeared.
“Nice to see you back, Gator.”
Allie smiled. “You too, Nate.”
Then something over Nathan’s shoulder caught Allie’s attention. There was an even larger group of people in Stardust Games tees at his kiosk that time, and they seemed to be looking for him.
“What’s that all about?” she asked, pointing toward them.
Nathan turned around and followed her gaze. “Executives from Stardust. I guess they’re all excited about Built. They really liked my presentation.”
“That’s awesome.”
“Remember Rescued, that game for shelter animals from last year?” he asked. Allie remembered it well. She even had the game on her phone. “Well, it didn’t win, but Stardust funded it and it now it’s a top game on all the online app stores. They want to do the same thing for Built.”
“Seriously?”
“They said they’ll give me space in their labs and a few additional developers, and they’ll handle all the marketing. They think they can help get top corporate sponsors, and with the right backing, they say Built could really take off.”
Allie didn’t hear much enthusiasm in his voice. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“Well, that depends.” He shrugged. “They want to see what they called ‘proof-of-concept’ first. They said if I can get two thousand downloads by the end of the month, they’re in.”