Ellie Sandberg would love to reinvent herself. When she earns a spot at an elite boarding school for young inventors, it seems like the perfect opportunity: A summer away from home, away from her overprotective parents, and away from the hopeless cr...
I'm back in my old hiding place—the bench behind the hedge. Not that it will do much to conceal me if anyone wants to find me. Reese already found me lurking here once before, using the GPS tracking on my visor. It sits beside me on the bench at this very moment. The blue LED light flashes orange every few seconds, alerting me to the presence of unread messages.
I let out a sigh, ignoring the visor and tilting my face upward to bask in the mid-afternoon sunshine. I know who those messages are from. My exceedingly industrious "partner" has been texting me since early this morning. You'd think he'd take the hint after his first twenty messages went unanswered...
But no. The boy is nothing short of tenacious when it comes to text messages. Maddox has finally located his missing work ethic. All it took was a girl refusing to play his games.
"Because she'll do all the work and let me coast."
Oh really, Maddox? Will I?
I feel like throwing up. I can't get those words out of my head. No wonder I get the sense that Maddox is flirting with me. Not because he actually likes me. Of course not. Because he's using me. Am I really so easy to manipulate?
This is what I get for working with a team. I should quit. Go back to solo status. I need these people like I need a mattress full of bedbugs, creeping all over me in the dark.
That mental image makes me shudder. Gross, Ellie. But that doesn't change the fact that I need to eradicate this so-called partnership. Time to "debug" my life.
I don't know though... Part of me doesn't want to believe Maddox really meant it. Maybe Eleanor's the one he's player—and maybe he has his reasons. She's obviously not the easiest person to get along with. I suppose I should give Maddox a chance to explain himself before I do anything rash.
At least I didn't delete the program I wrote last night. That was my first instinct at the time. I scurried back into my room before he and Eleanor could catch me lurking in the hall, and I pulled up the program file that I'd spent all night crafting.
RIGHT CLICK DELETE
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I sat there for a long time with my finger hovering over the Enter key, but I couldn't do it. In the end, I wimped out and hit NO. That program was a thing of beauty. I couldn't bring myself to destroy it out of spite.
I settled for the next best thing instead. Why get rid of the whole program? Simply deleting a few strategic lines of code rendered it inoperable, unable to compile, and nearly impossible for anyone but me to debug.
Let Maddox try to coast on that.
Maybe that's why he keeps texting. The LED on my visor stops flashing and turns a solid orange. I side-eye it with a scowl, wondering what that means. Did all those unanswered messages drain down the battery?
