“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 fir
st 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.”