“Do you know what part I loved most?”
Allie pictured the voting app. She thought about the two people with the blue screens, who walked from opposite sides of the auditorium. She thought about the moment Courtney joined her onstage.
“The part where I didn’t suck?” Allie asked.
Her dad ignored her sarcastic tone. “The part I loved most was when you showed all those pictures of you and the rest of the girls in the lab, and told stories about how you became friends.”
He leaned forward on the table and she found herself doing the same.
“That’s when everybody in that auditorium got goose bumps. It wasn’t because of your app; it was because of the experience you had. You talked about being afraid in a room full of strangers, and you talked about all the CodeGirls getting to know things about one another they never would have learned without Click’d. That was the most powerful part of your presentation—the stories you told.”
Allie’s ears perked up. “Seriously? That was the best part?”
Her dad looked at her mom, and her mom nodded along with him.
Allie thought about that. She had pictures. And she had plenty of stories. She was planning to pull a bunch of ClickPics into her presentation, anyway. It wouldn’t take long to turn them into a slideshow.
“It’s still plan B,” her mom said. “But it’s better than nothing.”
She couldn’t stand the idea of giving up, and she wasn’t about to—not yet—but if she couldn’t fix it, at least she’d have something to show people when they came to the booth.
And she knew Ms. Slade expected her to be there, with or without a working app.
“I’d better get back to work,” she said with a sigh. She took another slice of pizza to go and trudged up the stairs with Bo right on her heels.
Back in her room, she opened her code again and started from the beginning. She tweaked a few things and then tested it. And it failed. She tweaked and tested again, and it failed again. She pored over every detail, line after line, trying to figure out what was making it crash.
“What am I missing?” she asked herself.
And then she started from the top and scrolled down, studying every connection to every database table again.
Just after midnight, she thought she found the problem in a line that was somehow calling the same table twice. She deleted one instance, and was about to run another test when she changed her mind. At that point, she figured the test didn’t even matter. No one else was awake anyway. It would either work or it wouldn’t.
Last chance, she thought as she executed the program.
And then she held her breath.
She reached for her phone and tapped on the icon.
Click’d launched exactly the way it was supposed to. And suddenly, she was staring at her profile.
“It works,” she said. Bo stood when he heard her voice and started wagging his tail excitedly. She looked down at him, beaming. “It works.”
It was actually working.
She couldn’t believe it was actually working.
She clicked on the leaderboard and braced herself, waiting for it to crash. But it didn’t.
She clicked on Zoe’s profile picture. She clicked on Lauren’s. And then Penny’s. She was just about to click on Marcus’s when the screen went dark.
“No…” she groaned as she collapsed back into her chair. She stared at her phone, and then back at the code, and then back at her phone again. There was no getting around it. Tears welled up in her eyes as she glanced at the time: 12:24 a.m.
As the tears slipped down her cheeks, she typed a message to Ms. Slade:
Allie
Please pull my name from G4G
Allie and her parents stood at the top of the escalator, looking down onto the show floor.
“There it is,” her dad said. But Allie had already seen the Games for Good Pavilion. It was huge, and the fact that it was bright blue and white, smack in the middle of the show floor, and surrounded by dark-colored gaming booths, made it impossible to miss.
She felt her mom’s arm on her back. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Allie said, even though it wasn’t true. She already wanted to cry, and she had no idea how she was going to get through the day without doing it.
Her dad rested a supportive hand on her back. “I know this isn’t at all what you expected out of today, but we are so proud of you. You know that, right?”
Allie shut her eyes and nodded quickly. And then she grabbed a chunk of her hair and twirled it around her finger. She stared down at the pavilion again, knowing that just inside, there was a small kiosk with her Click’d logo on it.
“Go down there and tell everyone about your game,” her mom said. “Don’t think about what went wrong. Don’t think about the fact that you’re not in the competition. Just focus on everything that went right. Tell your stories.”
Allie nodded. And don’t think about Nathan, she thought. Don’t even look at his kiosk. Don’t even think about what he did.
“Remember: twelve hundred users in three days,” her dad said.
“Twelve hundred and fourteen,” her mom said, correcting him.
Allie forced a smile. “Including Taylor Swift.”
“Exactly! See, now that’s a good story.” Her mom grabbed her shoulders with both hands and pivoted her toward the escalator. “Come on. Let’s go have some fun.”
They followed the crowd into the exhibit hall and flashed their badges for the security guard. Inside, there were people everywhere, racing around, putting the final touches on their booth displays. They were testing microphones and loading their games on giant screens. Huge signs hovered in the air, advertising a bunch of games she had on her phone and more she’d never even heard of.
As soon as Allie and her parents stepped onto the bright white carpet, a woman in ripped jeans, black Converse, and a bright blue T-shirt that read G4G Pavilion Coordinator came up and introduced herself. “Hi,” she said, extending her hand toward Allie. “I’m Jen.” She shook hands with her parents. “Follow me.”
She led them over to a kiosk, and Allie’s breath hitched when she saw her sign. Click’d was in big block print above her logo. She looked at it and felt the corners of her mouth turn up. She still loved the pencil-thin swirls that formed two stick figures with their arms around each other.
“You should have everything here: cables, connectors, keyboard, touchpad,” Jen said brightly as she pointed to each item on the narrow shelf. “But give a shout if there’s anything else you need, okay?” She checked her watch. “The show floor opens in forty minutes. You good?”
Allie was wondering if Jen knew that she wouldn’t be up on the stage like the rest of the people in the pavilion. She was about to ask her when Jen stepped forward, closing the distance between them.