Chapters (45)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Pulse
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY–ONE
- TWENTY–TWO
- TWENTY–THREE
- TWENTY–FOUR
- TWENTY–FIVE
- TWENTY–SIX
- TWENTY–SEVEN
- TWENTY–EIGHT
- TWENTY–NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY–ONE
- THIRTY–TWO
- THIRTY–THREE
- THIRTY–FOUR
- THIRTY–FIVE
- THIRTY–SIX
- THIRTY–SEVEN
- THIRTY–EIGHT
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- RESOURCES
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Maddie’s heart wrenched at the line she was sure Sadie’s brother had delivered. “I’ll be there.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She turned and faced Maddie. “But I guess you do owe me for Ryan—”
“Don’t say it!”
“Don’t yell at me!”
“I’m not.”
“Tell that to my eardrums!”
“Just . . .” Maddie took a deep breath. “Enough, Sadie, just listen to me. Stay away from Ryan Thompson and stay off Pulse and will you please take your hands off your ears?”
Sadie made a face at Maddie and stormed off in one direction, and Maddie tossed her hands in the air and stormed off in the other.
She flung open the door to the student center and jerked her head back to the ridiculously puffy clouds in this eternally blue sky.
What am I even doing here?
TWENTY–FOUR
CODE SMELL • A surface issue that indicates a deeper problem in the code
“UH, LIA?”
Eric had started calling her that a week ago. No one called her that. She loved that no one called her that except for him.
The beta test had secured Delia’s confidence in Lit. But after what happened with Ryan, Lit needed to not just work, but to be flawless, to account for every possibility and every impossibility.
She much preferred the quiet of the library and the proximity to Eric to the chaos of all the teams scrambling to rework their code in the study hall in this last week before Demo Day. Though she found she couldn’t be too close to Eric and still concentrate. They’d taken to sitting across from each other, laptop to laptop, where she could hide her flush every time he called her Lia. Every single time.
“Marty texted me again,” Eric said.
“More PowerPoint trouble? Tell him to text Lucy. You’d think she invented it with the things she can do.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what?” Delia’s grin faded when she saw the concern on Eric’s face.
“First, we’ll figure it out, I promise, we’ll figure out what—”
“Eric? What is it? Just tell me.”
“I think it’s better that you see it.” He rotated his computer with one hand and reached for hers with the other. Goose bumps erupted on the surface of her skin, but what she saw on the screen meant they were increasingly no longer a result of Eric.
“How . . . how is this possible?” Delia said.
She released Eric’s hand and pulled the laptop closer. She read, running her finger along each line, determined to get to the end, to the punch line, to the joke this had to be. Had to be.
Eric pushed his chair back, circled the table, and sat beside her. “It’s yours? All of it?”