Ellie Sandberg would love to reinvent herself. When she earns a spot at an elite boarding school for young inventors, it seems like the perfect opportunity: A summer away from home, away from her overprotective parents, and away from the hopeless cr...
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E L L I E
I sit alone on a stone bench with my laptop perched on my knees, but my eyes keep darting everywhere except the screen. Footsteps crunch along the gravel path nearby. I pray they won't turn the corner around the tall hedge that conceals my presence.
I awoke this morning with a sense of renewed purpose. I didn't bother to draw my window shade last night, and I woke up before my alarm, roused by the early morning sun. It's a perfect, cloudless day. Amazing how the whole campus here at Winthrop takes on a different mood beneath a clear blue sky. Last night's events—falling in the pool and Maddox's visit afterward—they never happened. It's a new dawn, and I know how to spend my morning.
I open a clean document and type words at the top of the screen.
Ellie Sandberg Winthrop Acadamy Maker Program MAKER FAIR PROPOSAL
That's a start, anyway. I stare at the blank space beneath the heading, blowing out a tense breath. Maker Fair is in two weeks... and I don't have a clue what I'm making. My plan coming in here—the self-propelled self-navigating lawnmower—seems vaguely pathetic to me now.
The thing is, it's not even original. I got the whole idea from a post I read on TeenHack...
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I need to come up with something better. Dr. Carlyle said it himself last night: "We're expecting big things out of you this summer..." Big things. Not copycat things that anyone with a TeenHack account and a wifi connection could read about and duplicate.
I scrunch my mouth to the side and tap my finger nails against the bottom edge of my laptop keyboard. My goal when I applied to Winthrop was merely to get accepted to this program. That in itself seemed like a stretch. But now that I'm here, the goalposts have moved. If I'm going to stick it out for the month, then I want to do well. Make something good. Something amazing. Something undeniable. I need to make a project that will earn the respect of every single person who stood around and laughed at me last night. I want to leave this place with all of them calling me by my real name—Ellie Sandberg, not "Lowercase"—because I made the most talked-about thing to come out of this program since Emerson Kemp himself created InstaLove.
