Allie felt like someone had just punched her hard in the chest.
Emma had been holding back her tears, but they started slipping down her cheeks quickly and she wiped them away as fast as she could. She stood and reached for her backpack. “You know what would have made it a teeny, tiny bit better?” she asked. “If anyone—say, for example, one or two of my best friends—had warned me first. That would have been better. Then I would have been prepared with some snappy comeback or ready to totally deny it, but to be surprised like that…” Her voice caught and she sucked in a breath. “I wasn’t even wearing pants!”
Emma stormed off, wiping her face as she left. Allie tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but it wouldn’t budge.
None of them knew what to say, so they sat there for almost a full minute until Maddie broke the silence. “How could you guys do that to her?”
“It was an accident,” Allie said.
“We didn’t think she’d find out,” Zoe whispered.
“Please stop saying that. Do you have any idea how messed up that sounds?” Maddie asked.
“She was already upset about the leaderboard thing, remember? We didn’t want to make it worse,” Zoe added.
Maddie pressed her hands flat against the table and stood. “Just FYI, if I tell either one of you a secret and you tell anyone else, accidentally or otherwise, even if you don’t think I’ll ever find out, and even if you think you fixed it, I want to be the first to know.”
Maddie dumped her untouched lunch into the closest trash can and ran off after Emma.
“I’d better go talk to her,” Zoe said as she stood from the table. “You coming?”
Allie pictured the lab and the empty seat in front of her computer station. “I know I should, but I need to get back to work. People are already clicking.” She hooked her thumb toward two girls on the far end of the quad, sneaking their phones from behind their backs and tapping them together on the down-low.
Zoe waved her off. “Go. This is my fault anyway, not yours.” Allie started to jump in to disagree with her, but before she could say anything, Zoe turned on her heel and took off in the direction Emma and Maddie had gone.
Allie left the table, and as she walked by each group of friends, someone looked up and waved at her, or called out, “Hi, Allie.” She waved back. All these people suddenly knew who she was. If she weren’t feeling so horrible about what happened with Emma, she might have been a little more excited about it.
She opened the door to the computer lab and immediately saw Nathan in the back corner. Again. She groaned under her breath. She was hoping to have the lab to herself.
Allie crossed the room, collapsed into her chair, and pulled the keyboard toward her. She was typing in her password when Nathan leaned closer, right into her personal space.
“Allie Navarro, you’re the most famous person at Mercer Middle School,” he said, pretending to hold a microphone to his mouth. “What do you think about all this attention?”
Allie couldn’t look at him. It was all she could do to keep from screaming. Just twenty-four hours earlier, she’d sat in this seat and told Nathan her app was a hit. She bragged about how many users she had, and she couldn’t believe how perfectly everything was going. Everywhere she looked, people were playing her game or talking about it. Now, two of her best friends were furious with her, and Allie knew they were right to be. She should have told Emma.
“You don’t have any words for your adoring fans?” he asked, pushing his imaginary microphone under her mouth again as he cocked his head to one side.
She pushed his hand away.
“Hey…you okay?” he asked. He sounded genuinely concerned.
Allie shook her head. She wasn’t okay, but she didn’t feel like talking about what happened, and she certainly didn’t feel like talking about it with Nathan. Besides, she didn’t have time to chat; she had too much work to do.
“I…messed something up with one of my friends, that’s all.” Allie could hear her voice trembling. She sucked in a breath and changed the subject. “What are you doing in here, anyway?”
“Big lunch date,” Nathan said, and then he tapped his hand against the side of his monitor. “Agnes and I kind of have a thing going.”
“That’s not at all weird.” The back of her neck felt tight, so she took her fingers off the keys and brought them to her shoulders instead, pressing them deep into her skin. “What about Cory and Mark?”
Nathan shrugged. “I don’t really hang out with them anymore.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Why is that so surprising?”
“It’s just that back in elementary school you guys were like brothers.” Allie shot him a half smile. “Remember that one year, on the first day of school, when all three of you were in tears because you were in different classes?”
Nathan cleared his throat. “First off, that was third grade. And second, Cory and Mark were in the same class and I was in a different one.” He rested his hand on his chest. “I was the only one crying. But hey, thanks for bringing it up.” He shot her a half smile and added, “Good times.”
She smiled back at him before she went back to her screen. He returned to his, too, but she noticed he didn’t put his headphones back on.
“So what happened with you guys?” Allie asked as she deleted a blurry photo of someone’s dog.
Nathan kept his eyes on his screen, too. “I don’t really know. Cory and Mark started playing basketball during lunch and made a bunch of new friends, and…I guess I wasn’t good at that.”
“At playing basketball?”
“No, at making new friends.”
Allie felt her chest tighten, but she didn’t take her eyes off her monitor. She kept scanning the photo queue, but there wasn’t much to see. Word must have gotten around about Mr. Mohr’s orange bucket.
“Nothing happened, really; it just got awkward, that’s all. And I was working on my game during lunch anyway, so it didn’t really matter.”
Allie stopped what she was doing and looked at him. “Wait a second.” She pointed at the little animated characters walking around on his screen. “Are you saying you spent every lunch last year in this room, with Ms. Slade, working on your game?”
He laughed. “Well, when you say it that way you make me sound like a loser.”
“I didn’t mean…” Allie stammered. “I don’t think…”
“Whatever. I don’t care. I like my game. These little animated people make sense. Real people don’t always do that, you know?”
Allie put her elbows on the armrests and leaned closer to him. “I get it. I swear, I do. And that’s the whole point of my game, you know? It’s supposed to make it easier to make new friends.” She pointed at his phone. “I bet your new best friend is on your leaderboard right now. How many people have you clicked with since you installed it yesterday?”
He crossed his ankle over his leg and pulled on a frayed part of his jeans. Then he looked up at her from under his eyelashes and smiled. “Still just the one.”