pter 10 +15 Bonus The same teammates who used to hype Nicole up were now spewing insults , cussing her out . I can't believe this ! The competition deadline is an hour away , and Nicole's program crashes with a bug . Not only that , it wiped out everything we built . She straight -up ruined all our work ! ] { Damn it ! We spent a whole month grinding on this , and now it's all gone . We told her to fix the bug herself , but she didn't know what the hell she was doing . She kept typing mistakes into the code until the whole thing was completely dead ! ] [ Man , I swear she must've been plagiarizing other people's work all along . That's why she doesn't even know the basics . } [ Any genius coder out there ? Please help us ! I'm about to lose my mind ! ] The ranting on Instagram got louder by the second , and soon , random onlookers jumped into the mess . [ Did you all just find out ? Word was out a while ago that she only got into Arkenville University because both her parents are professors . They paid her way in . [ Her test scores were barely good enough for a community college , nowhere near Arkenville University's cutoff . But somehow she slipped in as a so - called gifted student . ] [ Wait , isn't that illegal ? And just because her parents are professors doesn't mean she gets to skip the rules ! ] [ And all that stuff about her being some kind of genius ? Total lies . My friend went to grade school with her . They said she was average at best , barely able to do basic math . ] Watching the comments pile up , more and more vicious with every refresh , my suspicions finally felt solid . So , this was the real Nicole . Without my ideas to steal , she couldn't even handle simple code . She was nothing more than a pretty face with nothing underneath . But then ... what was it that tied her to me in the first place ? While I was still turning it over in my head , the phone in my hand blasted with a shout . Mark hadn't hung up . His voice was sharp with panic . " Kelsey , did you hear me ? You have to help Nicole fix this . You're the only one who can do it ! " And then it clicked . The only link between me and Nicole ... was Mark . Once I saw that clearly , I knew he was playing some role behind the scenes . So I told him flat - out , " Sorry . Can't help you . " I was about to hang up when his tone shifted , the anger softening into fake sweetness . " Please . Just help Nicole this one time . I know you're jealous , but if you help her now , I promise I'll keep my distance from her in the future . Okay ? " The way he tried to sweet - talk me only made me more certain that he was hiding something . I let out a cold laugh . " Tell me . How can you be so sure I'm the only one who can save Nicole ? " 1/2