Chapter 6 · Second Chance, I Lost Him First

By the second semester of my freshman year, Secondhand Hub had over 8,000 users.

Students from other schools started asking if they could sign up, too.

Stella and I talked it over and decided to open it up to six universities in Riverstone first.

Server costs started to add up.

Between the domain, cloud hosting, and SMS verification, we were spending over 600 dollars a month.

I didn't have much saved up. I couldn't bring back the money I made in my previous life, and all I had now was the allowance my parents sent me.

Stella was in the same boat.

"Should we try to get some funding?" Stella asked.

"It's too early. The app hasn't really taken off yet," I replied.

"Then where's the money going to come from?"

"We'll earn it ourselves."

I spent two days picking up a few freelance gigs on the campus forum.

A data visualization page for a senior's capstone project earned me one thousand dollars. A registration web app for an off-campus training institute brought in fifteen hundred dollars. A web-scraping script written for another team in the lab netted six hundred dollars.

All in all, I made 3,100 dollars in one month.

When Stella learned it, her expression was complicated. "Sophie, seriously, when did you pick up all these skills? You're only a freshman."

I shrugged. "I'm a quick learner."

Stella said, "Come on, nobody's that good. Are you some undercover intern from a big tech company, going undercover as a freshman to see what college life is like?"

I couldn't help but laugh. "What do you think?"

Stella grinned. "Honestly, you're not normal. But I like it."

Life was so busy back then that I barely had time to think about anything else.

Classes by day, lab in the afternoon, coding or freelancing at night.

On weekends, Stella and I would work on the app together, and sometimes we'd grab seafood stew to unwind.

Life was full, clean, and simple.

There was no Jack, no Olivia, none of that messy past until one day in March.

I was coding in the library when Sunny called me. "Sophie, you need to check the campus forum right now."

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Someone accused you of plagiarism on the forum," she said.

I frowned and opened the forum.

The post title read: [Exposed: Freshman Sophie Rivers from the Computer Science Department, Secondhand Hub's Code Copied from a GitHub Open-Source Project.]

Below the post were two screenshots of code, one labeled Sophie's Secondhand Hub and the other GitHub open-source project.

Honestly, the code really did look almost the same.

Actually, that open-source project was written by me.

Back in 2018, I released a campus trading platform demo on GitHub under the username SophieDev.

That demo was basically the prototype for Secondhand Hub.

This time around, I rewrote the code from my previous life. Some of the frameworks and logic couldn't be changed. They were already the best solution.

But to everyone else, the code from 2014 looked the same as the open-source project from 2018—

Huh? The project from 2018? It was only 2015 right now.

That open-source project on GitHub hadn't been uploaded yet. It wouldn't exist until the future.

I took another look at the screenshots in the post.

I clicked on the GitHub link they'd labeled.

The page was not found.

Someone had doctored the screenshots.

Someone was obviously targeting me.

I scrolled down to the comments.

[So all that freshman hype was fake?]

[She copied some open-source code and still has the guts to brag?]

[No wonder she's so amazing. Just Ctrl+C, huh?]

Hundreds of comments were all calling me out.

I took a screenshot of the post and sent it to Stella.

She replied instantly: [Who would do something so shady? The GitHub link is fake.]

[Someone's trying to mess with me,] I said.

[Who?] Stella asked.

I thought for a moment.

In my previous life, I was some Gilianish major at a no-name college. I never had to deal with drama like this.

But this time around, I had actually got people coming after me.

My phone buzzed again.

It was an unfamiliar contact popped up, showing a Liabrenn location.

It wasn't a text; it was a WhatsApp message.

The profile photo was a girl in side view with long hair and flawless makeup.

It was Olivia.

It read: [Sophie, long time no see. Heard you made an app in Riverstone? That's pretty cool.]

I stared at that message for a few seconds.

In my previous life, Olivia went to a fashion college in Liabrenn after the SATs, in the same city as Jack. They were together for two years, and when they finally broke up, Olivia laughed it off when she told the truth.

This time around, she came looking for me way earlier.

Chapter 6

By the second semester of my freshman year, Secondhand Hub had over 8,000 users.

Students from other schools started asking if they could sign up, too.

Stella and I talked it over and decided to open it up to six universities in Riverstone first.

Server costs started to add up.

Between the domain, cloud hosting, and SMS verification, we were spending over 600 dollars a month.

I didn't have much saved up. I couldn't bring back the money I made in my previous life, and all I had now was the allowance my parents sent me.

Stella was in the same boat.

"Should we try to get some funding?" Stella asked.

"It's too early. The app hasn't really taken off yet," I replied.

"Then where's the money going to come from?"

"We'll earn it ourselves."

I spent two days picking up a few freelance gigs on the campus forum.

All in all, I made 3,100 dollars in one month.

When Stella learned it, her expression was complicated. "Sophie, seriously, when did you pick up all these skills? You're only a freshman."

I shrugged. "I'm a quick learner."

Stella said, "Come on, nobody's that good. Are you some undercover intern from a big tech company, going undercover as a freshman to see what college life is like?"

I couldn't help but laugh. "What do you think?"

Stella grinned. "Honestly, you're not normal. But I like it."

Life was so busy back then that I barely had time to think about anything else.

Classes by day, lab in the afternoon, coding or freelancing at night.

On weekends, Stella and I would work on the app together, and sometimes we'd grab seafood stew to unwind.

Life was full, clean, and simple.

There was no Jack, no Olivia, none of that messy past until one day in March.

I was coding in the library when Sunny called me. "Sophie, you need to check the campus forum right now."

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Someone accused you of plagiarism on the forum," she said.

I frowned and opened the forum.

The post title read: [Exposed: Freshman Sophie Rivers from the Computer Science Department, Secondhand Hub's Code Copied from a GitHub Open-Source Project.]

Below the post were two screenshots of code, one labeled Sophie's Secondhand Hub and the other GitHub open-source project.

Honestly, the code really did look almost the same.

Actually, that open-source project was written by me.

Back in 2018, I released a campus trading platform demo on GitHub under the username SophieDev.

That demo was basically the prototype for Secondhand Hub.

This time around, I rewrote the code from my previous life. Some of the frameworks and logic couldn't be changed. They were already the best solution.

But to everyone else, the code from 2014 looked the same as the open-source project from 2018—

Huh? The project from 2018? It was only 2015 right now.

That open-source project on GitHub hadn't been uploaded yet. It wouldn't exist until the future.

I took another look at the screenshots in the post.

I clicked on the GitHub link they'd labeled.

The page was not found.

Someone had doctored the screenshots.

Someone was obviously targeting me.

I scrolled down to the comments.

[So all that freshman hype was fake?]

[She copied some open-source code and still has the guts to brag?]

[No wonder she's so amazing. Just Ctrl+C, huh?]

Hundreds of comments were all calling me out.

I took a screenshot of the post and sent it to Stella.

She replied instantly: [Who would do something so shady? The GitHub link is fake.]

[Someone's trying to mess with me,] I said.

[Who?] Stella asked.

I thought for a moment.

In my previous life, I was some Gilianish major at a no-name college. I never had to deal with drama like this.

But this time around, I had actually got people coming after me.

My phone buzzed again.

It was an unfamiliar contact popped up, showing a Liabrenn location.

It wasn't a text; it was a WhatsApp message.

The profile photo was a girl in side view with long hair and flawless makeup.

It was Olivia.

It read: [Sophie, long time no see. Heard you made an app in Riverstone? That's pretty cool.]

I stared at that message for a few seconds.

This time around, she came looking for me way earlier.