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!
She took bites of food while she scanned over all the data she’d gathered over the last thirty hours. And then she tapped on the photos tab and scanned the queue. A few people had clicked while she’d been at soccer practice, and she smiled when she looked over all the new ClickPics, wondering how they’d found each other. Did they hear bloops while they were at the mall? Did their phones call out to each other during football or track practice?
She went through each of the photo clues, one by one, but they looked like they’d been pulled from Instagram. It all seemed innocent enough.
“Maybe it magically fixed itself,” she told Bo as she buried her toes into his soft fur. And then she let out a heavy sigh, because she knew that was impossible.
Allie navigated back to the Fuller University site, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to click on the CodeGirls logo. She was dreading the plunge back into the sea of commands; she’d already swam through the source code four times that day. She turned around and looked at her bed, wishing she could crawl inside the sheets. Instead, she reached for her phone, launched Click’d, and opened her CodeGirls group.
Her profile page looked the same, except she had 20 friends instead of 688. She wished she’d created a teleportation device instead. If they could all just beam themselves into Allie’s bedroom, they’d have this problem solved in no time.
She opened Courtney’s profile and read through her stats, even though there were no surprises there.
Over the summer, the two of them started playing this game they’d made up called “good day/bad day.” At times, CodeGirls Camp could be an emotional roller coaster mixed with triumphant highs and intense lows. So, before they fell asleep at night, they’d each list the top three things that had gone right that day and the top three things that had gone wrong.
Allie opened the chat window and typed a message.
Allie
good day/bad day?
Courtney
YES!!!
Allie
you first
Courtney
happy to be home with my sister met a new girl at school—rly nice teacher called my game “addictive”
Courtney
now you
Allie
688 users and growing fast everyone loves it—phones everywhere have a good shot at winning G4G
Courtney
miss the fishbowl miss the codegirls miss you most
Allie wanted to tell her about the glitch in Click’d, but after that, she wasn’t sure how to do it. Instead she kept it simple.