Mack
Brave: having or displaying courage,
resolution or daring
Mack kept her head down as she walked into the cafeteria.
It felt like jumping into a shark tank.
Hello, eat me now.
She picked up her tray of food and walked to an empty table, trying to look as if being on her own was a choice and not a sentence.
She could see Kennedy watching her. Then she murmured something to the girl next to her and stood up.
Mack felt her stomach lurch.
When Kennedy sauntered across to her, she had to fight the impulse to stand up and run.
Instead she thought about Scott.
A friend is someone who cares about you.
“Hi, Kennedy.” She produced a smile that Kennedy didn’t return.
The other girl put her hands on the table and leaned in, her eyes hard. “How does it feel to be hanging out with the losers?”
The losers.
That was her name for the kids who were part of the Coding Club.
The club was run in the IT room, which was at the other end of the school.
The first time Mack had walked into the room she’d almost turned and walked right back out again.
There had been ten boys huddled around a laptop, arguing about something called Java. Mack had always thought it was an island in Indonesia, but it had turned out that Java was also a programming language.
She’d felt as if she’d parachuted into a foreign land without a phrase book and beat a hasty retreat to the door. She fully expected to see a sign saying Girls Keep Out that she’d missed on the way in, but there was nothing and before she could make it into the corridor, Sam had appeared in front of her.
She hadn’t even noticed him among the group until he stepped in front of her.
“Hi. Good to see you.” His smile was friendly and Mack had seen so few friendly smiles in the time since she’d started at the school, she decided she couldn’t afford to ignore this one.
“Hi.”
“You’re Mack. I’ve seen you around the boatyard with Scott.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say he’s my dad, and then she decided there was no point in inviting more abuse. For all she knew Sam might have reason not to like Scott.
“Yeah, he’s kind of a family friend.” She hoped her mom would forgive her for saying that. Truthfully she had no idea what Scott was really, but she was pleased he was around. After that time he’d taken her sailing, she’d taken to dropping round on her way home from school. Sometimes he let her help in the boatyard, so she’d left an old pair of jeans and a shirt there.
“He’s cool. He fixed my dad’s boat.” Sam scratched his head. “So what are you doing here?”
“I need to build a website. I thought I might try coding,” Mack said awkwardly. “This is the Coding Club, right?”
Sam stared at her.
“Hello?” Mack waved a hand in front of his face. “Coding Club? Tuesdays and Thursdays?”
“Sorry. We don’t get that many girls who want to code.”
“How many?”
“You’re the first. But that’s cool,” he said quickly. “Really great.”
It didn’t sound cool or great to Mack. She didn’t mind being in a minority, but did she really want to be the only one? “Maybe this isn’t going to work.”
“Hey, more girls should be able to code. Why not? It’s the future and there’s a huge gender gap in the tech world. It’s crazy. Coding is a basic life skill. I mean, you couldn’t imagine living in a world where you couldn’t read, could you?”
Mack flattened herself against the wall, slightly alarmed to be on the receiving end of such evangelical belief. “Well, I—”
“Exactly. Reading is something everyone should be able to do. It gives you access to opportunities. And so does coding. Technology is everywhere. Don’t you want to be part of it?”
She wanted to be part of something, that was for sure.
She had no friends at school and home was still pretty tense. Her mom was always sewing, or there was some new drama. Mack couldn’t handle her own drama, let alone extra. Sometimes she hovered in the kitchen for a few minutes, evading questions like how was your day? (answer: totally crap), but mostly she went straight to her room, where she sat on the bed and messed with her phone or stared out the window.
She missed the old days when she’d been able to talk to her mom about anything and everything.
She missed her old school and her friends.
She wanted to belong.
“I’ll think about it.”
“If you leave, you’ll think of a million reasons not to do it. And if you join, other girls might follow.”
Mack wondered whether she should break it to him that her influence wasn’t exactly impressive. Most days she ate her lonely sandwich by her lonely self in the cafeteria. The number of people lining up to spend time with her amounted to zero. If she was a role model then she knew nothing about it and she certainly didn’t see herself as a trailblazer.
This whole thing was a bad idea. Another bad choice among the millions she’d made lately.
She should have tried to teach herself to build a website by watching a video on YouTube.
“I don’t think this is for me.”
“One session,” Sam begged. “Stay for one session, and if you don’t love it I’ll never ask you again.”
“I have to build a website.”
“Not today.”
“Excuse me?”
“If I’ve only got one session to convert you, you’re not going to use it up on that.”
“But—”
“If you never want to come again I promise I’ll help you build your website anyway. It’s easy. Today we’re doing something way more exciting.”
Mack looked at the boys huddled round the laptop. “What?”
“Does that mean you’re staying?”
Was she?
At least Sam seemed genuine. He wasn’t trying to stuff beer into her hand or force his tongue down her throat.
“I guess.”
“Great. Come and see.” He half dragged her across the room before she could change her mind. “Guys, this is Mack. Give her some space.”
The boys shuffled awkwardly to one side and she found herself staring at a screen covered in incomprehensible letters and symbols.
She had no idea what this was about. She was going to look stupid and they were all going to laugh at her.
She was good at math, but this wasn’t math.
“Sit down.” Sam pulled out a chair. “I’m going to show you something.”
He tapped the keys and covered the screen in lines of incomprehensible code. Then he hit enter and a robot on the desk moved toward Mack.
She laughed. “Seriously? You made it do that?”
“I can program it to bring you the remote control. Or your phone. You name it.”
How about a new life? Can you program it to bring me one of those?
“That’s cool. So that’s what you do in here?”
“We do everything. Sometimes we’re working on an app, sometimes we build a new game. We’ve done some white hat hacking.”
“Hacking?”
“Hey, we’re the good guys. But today I’m going to teach you to program that robot to bring you something. After that we’ll talk about this website you want.”
That had been weeks ago.
Mack hadn’t missed a session of the Coding Club since.
She knew all their names now. There was Tyler whose younger sister was in her Aunt Jenna’s first-grade class, Max who thought he was terrible at English (Mack had agreed to help him in exchange for help getting the photos to rotate on her website) but could program anything. Curtis, Bradley, Sam—she knew them all.
Better than that, she considered them friends and she loved everything about the club.
Her enthusiasm had surprised even Sam. “I wasn’t sure you were going to come back after that first time.”
“I wasn’t sure either, but here I am.”
He grinned. “Not a lot of people know this, but computer programmers rule the world.”
She was starting to believe him.
She felt an excitement she never felt when she was starting an English essay.
She was going to change the world. Maybe she’d get a job with NASA. She was so excited by what she could do with computers that there was no way she was giving it up.
They were people, she thought. Not geeks or nerds.
People.
Unfortunately they rarely ventured into the cafeteria for lunch, which was why she was still eating alone.
Mack forced herself to meet Kennedy’s gaze.
Her palms were slippery and her heart was bashing hard against her ribs. “I don’t know any losers. Only a bunch of really smart guys.”
“You’re new here and you just lost your dad.” Kennedy spoke with exaggerated kindness. “So I’m going to help you out for your own good. Maybe you don’t realize it, but those kids you’re hanging out with are nerds. Geeks. They are not, and never will be, part of the cool crowd.”
“Got it.” Maybe she could program a robot to smack Kennedy across the head.
The other girl’s mouth tightened. “Do you know what it’s going to mean for you if you carry on hanging out with them?”
Mack looked at Kennedy and saw that her makeup was so thick it looked like plastic.
This close up she could see the bumps on the skin that the other girl was trying to conceal.
Everyone had insecurities, she thought.
She stood up so that she was eye to eye with her nemesis. She kept her hands on the table in case her shaking knees gave way. “It’s going to mean I have good, genuine friends.”
“Oh please—” Kennedy stared at her and gave a short laugh. “So basically you’re a nerd, too.”
“No.” Mack discovered that her knees weren’t shaking anymore. “I’m a girl who can code. And do you know what that makes me? It makes me smart, Kennedy.”