Penny looked down at her phone and laughed. “Do I even want to know the story here?” she asked.
Allie felt a pang of sadness when she saw the screen. It was a picture of her and Courtney with their arms around each other, gummy worms dangling from their lips.
“That’s my roommate from computer camp.” Allie remembered she’d spent the whole day trying to troubleshoot some issue she was having with Click’d, and she was determined to figure out the problem before she called it a night. Courtney had shown up in the Fishbowl with two Sprites from the vending machine and a huge bag of gummy worms. She sat down next to her and didn’t leave until Allie did.
Penny held out her phone and Allie tapped hers against it. Then they looked at their leaderboards and watched their names settle into place.
“Eight,” Penny said with a smile.
“Ten,” Allie said, smiling back. As soon as the word left her mouth, her phone blooped again.
It was like that all the way to school, and by the time the bus pulled into the roundabout and came to a stop, Allie’s leaderboard was full and there were one hundred seventy-six users.
“This is kind of crazy, isn’t it?” she asked Zoe.
“Yeah,” Zoe said. “Crazy fun!” She stepped into the aisle and threw her backpack over her shoulder.
“I thought it might break, you know? I was afraid it would crash with all these people hitting the system at once, but it’s solid.” Allie jumped off the bottom step and landed on the sidewalk, but she felt like she was walking on air. “If it keeps up like this, I could have data on the whole school by Saturday. Do you know how good that would look to the judges? Zoe, I might actually have a chance at winning this thing!”
Allie pictured herself standing on the Games for Good stage as the Spyglass CEO, Naomi Ryan, announced the winner. She imagined her parents in the front row, clapping and hugging each other, and Ms. Slade standing backstage next to the other mentors, beaming proudly. And then she pictured Nathan, standing next to her, looking shocked and defeated. She smiled to herself. She might have liked that image best.
Zoe peeled off at her classroom and Allie kept going. When she turned the corner, she saw Maddie waiting at her locker wearing a big smile and her favorite light blue V-neck tee. Maddie called it her lucky shirt and firmly believed that every time she wore it, something good happened. Allie secretly thought she liked it because it made her eyes look even bluer than usual.
“Lucky tee. What’s the occasion?” Allie asked.
“Didn’t you get my text?” she asked, bouncing in place.
Allie wondered how she could have missed it, but then she remembered the chaos she’d just left. “You should’ve seen the bus. It was madness.”
“Look,” she said as she showed Allie her screen. Chris Kemmerman had joined Click’d.
“You invited him?” Allie asked.
Maddie nodded fast. “Emma dared me.”
“I didn’t know you had his number.”
“Zoe got it from her brother over the summer. They’ve been begging me to text him for months, but…I don’t know, I guess I’ve been waiting for the right time.” Allie balanced her backpack on her knee and started swapping out her books for her first three classes while Maddie kept talking. “He must have joined late last night. I checked right before I went to sleep and he wasn’t in the user list, but this morning, he was!”
Maddie swayed her shoulders from side to side, and then added her hips. Allie started laughing. “What is that?”
“My happy dance,” she said, but then she stopped suddenly. “Wait. What if he’s not on my leaderboard?”
“What are the chances?” Allie asked.
Maddie navigated over to her profile and checked the latest numbers. “With two hundred twenty-five users and ten spots on the leaderboard, that gives us a four point four percent chance at clicking.”
Bloop-bloop-bloop.
Maddie’s phone sounded and the screen lit up bright blue. “Ooh! New friend! Gotta go!” she yelled over her shoulder as she took off running, holding her phone high above her head.
Allie took her lunch tray and made her way over to the old oak tree. She slid in between Zoe and Emma and tipped her chin toward Chris Kemmerman’s table. “Well? Where is he?” she asked.
Maddie followed her gaze. “I don’t know. He’s taking forever.”
“He’ll be here. He was in math third period,” Zoe said.
All their phones buzzed and Maddie said, “Ooh, a new pic!”
They all looked around for Mr. Mohr, and then Maddie checked her screen.
“Yikes,” she said. She passed her phone around under the table so everyone could see the screen. Ella Samuels and Sadie Court were blurry in the shot, like they were trying not to stand too close to each other as they took the obligatory selfie. Neither one was smiling.
“That’s the worst ClickPic ever!” Emma said, laughing under her breath. “Could they look more miserable?”
Zoe pressed her hands into the table and leaned in close. “They were best friends last year, but I heard they haven’t said a single word to each other all summer.”
“Well, I’m assuming they talked today,” Maddie said. “Check it out.” She lifted her phone again to show them Sadie’s leaderboard. Ella was in the number one spot. “And Sadie is Ella’s number two.”
“See, that’s because they’re supposed to be friends. I know this because I’m the master quiz maker.” Allie shot them all a confident smile.
“Yes, you are,” Zoe said.
But then Maddie’s phone blooped in her hands and she jumped so high, it made everyone laugh. “Eep! You guys. Look.”
She set her phone flat on the middle of the table, screen up and solid blue. No one said a word. They were all too busy waiting for the color to turn yellow.
“Why isn’t it changing?” Emma asked after a full minute.
Maddie took her eyes off the screen to scan the quad. “Because Chris stopped moving. Look, he’s talking to someone over by the water fountain.” She pointed to someone on the exact opposite side of the quad. He was standing next to a table full of people.
“How can you tell that’s him?” Emma asked, squinting.
“It’s him,” Maddie said.
Allie judged the distance.
She thought back to that day she and Courtney had gone out to the Fuller University football field to try to figure out the three distances she’d use for Click’d. She tried to picture the field in her mind. If she and her friends were in the end zone, Chris might be somewhere around the forty-yard line, which would make him a little more than one hundred feet away. He was still in Click’d’s blue zone, but just barely.
“You guys…it’s him, right? It has to be him.”
“It really could be anyone.” Zoe barely got the words out when Chris started walking toward their table again.
Bloop-bloop.
They looked down at Maddie’s phone. The screen had turned bright yellow.