He swallowed his cream puff thoughtfully. “Well, I was listening to some really great mariachi music on the way over and it did a number on my battery.” Annika flushed. “So I needed to charge my cell. I hate when it goes below ninety percent.”

“You—you complete—” Annika’s anger was fire. “How am I supposed to … arrrhhh!”

Hudson chuckled, looking unfazed. “It looked like you only had about five percent left, so I guess you better talk fast.”

Balling her fists at her side so she wouldn’t do something that would land a felony on her record, Annika stormed to the front of the room and looked at her laptop. It was already at 4 percent—definitely not enough to get through a ten-minute presentation. Shit. Hudson was right; she’d have to talk fast and maybe even improvise the ending.

She tossed him another dirty look and flounced up to the podium with her dying computer. While the crowd sat stock-still and silent, watching her, Annika quickly looked around for a place to charge it on the makeshift stage. Of course, there wasn’t one.

Pasting a smile on her face, she placed her laptop on a small wooden stool, hooked it up to the AV wires, and lowered the mic from Hudson’s height to hers.

Well, she tried to, anyway. He’d tightened it extra hard—probably just to watch her struggle, red-faced, as she was doing right now—until finally, she snatched it off its stand entirely.

“Hi.” She sounded a little savage, and the high schoolers winced at the initial squeal of feedback, but she kept going. “So nice to see all of you! I’m Annika Dev, CEO of Make Up.” Hazarding a glance at her laptop, Annika saw it was now at 3 percent. “Okay, so without further ado, I’m going to get into the presentation. What I have here”—she gestured to the screen as she spoke, rapid-fire—“is a prototype called OLLI: the Original Love Language Interface. OLLI is a deep-learning network that we feel is really pretty innovative.” She caught June’s eye in the very back of the room. She kept miming for Annika to slow down, but of course, she couldn’t. “Umanyway,” Annika continued, seeing the 2% flashing on her screen, “thisisbasicallyawayforpeopleinrelation—”

A boy with red hair that almost exactly matched Ziggy’s raised his hand. “Excuse me?”

Annika tried not to groan in frustration. “Yes?”

“I can’t understand you.”