“No way!” Emma said as she slapped her hand hard on the table. “Are you kidding me? San Diego was the best! Highlight of the summer. No question.”
“What are you talking about?” Maddie asked. “It was insanely hot…like a hundred and two degrees the entire time. We were melting on that ridiculous black turf. How could that have been your favorite?”
“One word,” Emma said. “Pool.” She looked right at Allie. “When we got back to the hotel after the first day, the whole team ran straight for the pool. We kicked off our cleats and jumped into the deep end holding hands, in our uniforms and everything!”
Allie felt a little twinge of jealousy. She’d been so caught up in her own world all summer, she hadn’t thought much about what was happening back home. She hadn’t missed a soccer tournament since third grade. It was so weird to think that her best friends had more than two months of memories that didn’t include her.
“Wait. You’re all skipping the most important part,” Zoe said.
“What?” Maddie asked.
Zoe threw her arms up in the air. “Waffles?”
Emma let out a sigh. “Oh, brother. Here we go again.”
“The breakfast buffet had one of those waffle makers that flips over and cooks two waffles at once.” Zoe pulled her hands away from the sides of her head, like it was exploding.
Allie laughed. “What is it with you and those waffle makers?”
“Crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. They’re magical. Like unicorns. Or…Pegasuses,” Zoe said.
“Pegasuses?” Emma wondered. “Or Pegasi?”
“I don’t know.” Zoe tossed a Cheeto at Emma’s head and she batted it away. It landed on the table, so she picked it up and chucked it back at Zoe, laughing.
“Anyway,” Maddie said. “The point is that we missed you.”
“Every day,” Zoe said.
Everyone was quiet for a few seconds. Until Emma looked at Zoe and whispered, “But our summer was pretty epic,” and she winked at her and said, “It seriously was.”
“Come on, don’t make her feel bad, you guys,” Maddie said. Then she turned to Allie. “Besides, I’m sure coding camp was just as epic.”
Allie heard the sarcastic emphasis on the last word, but she ignored it. Her summer may not have been filled with hotel pools and tournaments, but it had been its own kind of epic. Plus, the college’s cafeteria had one of those waffle makers, too.
“Actually, I had an amazing summer,” she said as she unwrapped her sandwich.
Zoe looked at the others, then took the lead and said what Allie figured they were all thinking. “Really?” she asked, drawing out the word. “Computer camp was ‘amazing’?”
“Yeah,” Allie said. “I mean, I missed you guys every day, but it was even more fun than I expected it to be.”
No one said anything, so Allie launched right in.
“We lived on campus, right in the dorms,” she began. “It felt like being away at college. And my roommate, Courtney, was super nice….All the other girls were, too.” She was talking fast, but she couldn’t help it.
“Oh, and I thought the computer lab would be dark and depressing, but it wasn’t at all! It had these massive floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, so everyone called it the Fishbowl. It was incredible. Superfast machines with giant monitors and a bunch of stations for big animation projects.”
Allie thought she might lose their attention completely when she started talking about the Fishbowl, but they still seemed to be listening.
“This is interesting and all,” Emma said, “but you’ve been texting us all summer about this thing you were building.” She waved her hand toward her chest in this well-let’s-see-it kind of way.
Allie scanned the quad to make sure Mr. Mohr wasn’t nearby, then reached into her back pocket for her phone. “I’ve been dying to show you—”
“No!” Maddie shrieked. She covered her mouth as her eyes grew wide, fixed on something in the distance.
“What?” Zoe asked.
“Hair,” Maddie whined from behind her hand as she stared at Chris Kemmerman and his friends, sitting three tables away. “It’s…it’s…gone.”
Toward the end of sixth grade, Chris Kemmerman seemed to be the only subject that kept Maddie’s attention for more than two minutes. Allie had been hoping the novelty had worn off over the summer. Apparently, it hadn’t.
“County was two weeks ago,” Zoe said matter-of-factly. But she could tell from their blank stares that they weren’t making the connection. “All the swimmers shave their heads before the final County meet. It cuts down on drag. Improves their race times.” She gestured toward the eighth-grade section on the opposite side of the courtyard. “My brother shaves his arms, his chest. Even his legs.”
“He does?” Emma asked, crinkling her nose. They all turned to look at Chris and his friends again, trying to get a better view of their legs.
“Actually,” Allie said, “I think he looks even cuter without hair. You can see his eyes now.”
“I agree,” Zoe said, resting one hand on Maddie’s back. “Besides, who needs hair when you have those shoulders? I mean, look at them.”
“I guess…” Maddie pouted. She let out a loud sigh and said, “But I loved his hair.”
Allie scooted her lunch to one side, sat on top of the table, and waved her phone in front of her. “Well, maybe he’ll be on your leaderboard.”
Maddie’s eyebrows pinched together. “What are you talking about?”
Cell phones were strictly prohibited during the school day, so Allie gestured for the three of them to come in closer. They clustered together, knees touching, and leaned in, blocking her phone from view.
She lowered her fingertip to the glass and tapped on the Click’d icon. Her app launched and the words Ready to click? appeared in narrow, loopy letters. She felt her chest swell with pride.
“You start by creating a profile with all the typical stuff. Here’s mine.” Allie tilted the screen toward her friends.
“When you open Click’d for the first time, it asks you about your favorite school subjects, what sports you play, what video games you like, what you look for in a friend…that kind of thing. Once it has all the basic data, it goes through fifty items and asks you to pick a favorite. It’s like those online quizzes you’re always taking, Emma.”
“I love those quizzes!”
“I know! I got the idea from you,” Allie said, and Emma grinned and tipped her head to one side. “When you’re done, it ranks how compatible you are with other people in the system. But here’s the fun part—it doesn’t show you who they are. You have to find them based on clues.”
“Like a scavenger hunt?” Zoe asked.
“Exactly,” Allie said.
“So wait,” Maddie said, straining over Emma’s shoulder to get a better view. “How does it know who’s most compatible?”