“What?” Delia said.

“The double X factor,” Maddie said.

Lucy and Delia didn’t respond.

“As in chromosomes?” Maddie said. “Girls. Chicks. You know, boobs.”

Delia swiveled her head. “Oh, well, it’s not that unexpected. And hey, at least there won’t be a long line for the bathroom.”

Maddie stared blankly, and Delia seemed to shrink. Maddie addressed Lucy. “We’re all together.”

“Yes!” Lucy said. “On this side of the room. How are we supposed to gauge Ry—the judges’ reactions from all the way over here?”

Maddie’s face twisted like the smell of french fry had finally hit her. “No, the teams. They assigned us—a coder, a designer, and a . . .” Her eyes floated to Lucy.

“Project manager,” Lucy said.

“Uh-huh. The teams should have nothing to do with gender. And yet look at this. Is there even a single coed group here?”

Lucy searched. “There’s one.” She set her tote on the white laminate table and pointed across the room to two guys and a girl with a heart-shaped face and smooth tawny-beige skin that made Lucy wonder if she’d remembered to pack her extra-strength pore cleanser. The girl rested something—a guitar case?—on the floor as she settled into a chair across from her teammates. Lucy squinted. “Hey, Delia, isn’t one of those guys the cutie you were trying to hook up with last night?”

Sriracha-red painted Delia’s cheeks. “I wasn’t . . . he’s like my coworker.” Her usually soft voice dropped even further as she looked at him. “We were just talking.”

“Tip for you, Delia: ‘just talking’ doesn’t walk you to your door,” Lucy said.

Maddie folded her tall frame into the seat. Her knees bumped the underside of the table as she extracted her monster laptop and her sketchbook out of her messenger bag. “They underestimate us.”

Lucy stood on tiptoes to evaluate the room and the handful of girls in it, which included Nishi Kapoor as the only female judge. Her slight “I hope so” slipped out. Delia’s head bobbed like she heard, but she sat down without saying anything.

What? An advantage is an advantage. The less someone expects of you, the more you can impress them.

Which got Lucy thinking back to the previous night’s discussion about the app that would be core to their incubator startup project. Something they were passionate about.

She eyed the sketchbook, open to the logos Maddie had been working on last night.

How they had settled on an Uber-style dog-grooming service still eluded her. It was the only idea they could all agree upon, the most vanilla of all the concepts they’d floated.

And that was the problem.

Lucy was about to give Delia and Maddie the same real-world lesson her mom had given her when she was ten about average not getting you listed in Forbes, when something swept across her lower back.

Not something. Someone.