Welcome back to Friday Reads! This week’s excerpt comes from Screen Queens, an epic mashup of The Bold Type meets The Social Network when three girls participate in a startup incubator competition and uncover the truth about what it means to succeed in the male-dominated world of tech.

Today’s excerpt comes from chapter seven, when the girls first arrive at ValleyStart and begin to realize just how challenging the competition will be.

Step by step, Lucy breathed, calming herself by visualizing the end game. Which would start here, in the vast study hall-turned-hackathon headquarters. She paused under the arched entrance feeling very small.

Table upon table was filled with Gavin-esque seventeen-to-nineteen-year-olds in hoodies and those same plain white tees, all waiting to be emblazoned with a Facebook-Google-Apple-Uber-Lyft-Twitter-eBay-LinkedIn-Airbnb-Snapchat logo—or, better yet, their own.

The testosterone nearly choked her. Or maybe it was the stench of old French fries and Axe body spray.

“There,” Delia’s meek voice said. “Twenty-two. That’s us.”

Lucy searched the area surrounding their designated table. “Damn,” she muttered. The judges’ table—Ryan’s table—may as well be in Reno. She could barely see the top of his head, that sandy-brown “natural” tousle she was sure took an hour to achieve. (And was so worth it.)

“Does anyone notice what I’m noticing?” Maddie said, pushing her aviators back on her head. It was the first time she’d looked up from her phone all morning.

Finally. Lucy was relieved that at least one member of her team also realized what a complete disaster their placement was.

“What?” Delia said.

“The double X factor,” Maddie said.

Lucy and Delia didn’t respond.

“As in chromosomes?” Maddie said. “Girls. Chicks. You know, boobs.”

Delia swiveled her head. “Oh, well, it’s not that unexpected. And hey, at least there won’t be a long line for the bathroom.”

Maddie stared blankly, and Delia seemed to shrink. Maddie addressed Lucy. “We’re all together.”

“Yes!” Lucy said. “On this side of the room. How are we supposed to gauge Ry—the judges’ reactions from all the way over here?”

Maddie’s face twisted like the smell of French fry had finally hit her. “No, the teams. They assigned us—a coder, a designer, and a . . .” Her eyes floated to Lucy.

“Project manager,” Lucy said.

“Uh-huh. The teams should have nothing to do with gender. And yet look at this. Is there even a single co-ed group here?”

Lucy searched. “There’s one.” She set her tote on the white laminate table and pointed across the room to two guys and a girl with a heart-shaped face and smooth tawny-beige skin that made Lucy wonder if she’d remembered to pack her extra-strength pore cleanser. The girl rested something—a guitar case?—on the floor as she settled into a chair across from her teammates. Lucy squinted. “Hey, Delia, isn’t one of those guys the cutie you were trying to hook up with last night?”

Sriracha-red painted Delia’s cheeks. “I wasn’t . . . he’s like my coworker.” Her usually soft voice dropped even further as she looked at him. “We were just talking.”

“Tip for you, Delia: ‘just talking’ doesn’t walk you to your door,” Lucy said.

Maddie folded her tall frame into the seat. Her knees bumped the underside of the table as she extracted her monster laptop and her sketchbook out of her messenger bag. “They underestimate us.”

Lucy stood on tiptoes to evaluate the room and the handful of girls in it, which included Nishi Kapoor as the only female judge. Her slight “I hope so” slipped out. Delia’s head bobbed like she heard, but she sat down without saying anything.

What? An advantage is an advantage. The less someone expects of you, the more you can impress them.

Which got Lucy thinking back to the previous night’s discussion about the app that would be core to their incubator startup project. Something they were passionate about.

She eyed the sketchbook, open to the logos Maddie had been working on last night.

How they had settled on an Uber-style dog-grooming service still eluded her. It was the only idea they could all agree upon, the most vanilla of all the concepts they’d floated.

And that was the problem.

Lucy was about to give Delia and Maddie the same real-world lesson her mom had given her when she was ten about average not getting you listed in Forbes, when something swept across her lower back.

Not something. Someone.

“Hey now, someone got their beauty sleep,” Ryan Thompson said. “Feeling as ready as you look, Lucy?”

“More.” Lucy smiled, quashing her body’s reflexive flinch as his hand pressed into her in greeting, a stray fingertip accidentally gliding across the exposed skin between the bottom of her knotted tee and the top of her skinny jeans.

“That’s what I like to hear. Because I’m counting on you.” He lowered his voice. “These things are usually so boring, they leave me totally cached out. Just once I’d like a little wow.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Lucy said, determined to build on the rapport that had begun the day before. “Wow is our team name.”

“Is that so?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Trademark pending.”

Ryan Thompson chuckled. Strategize, stylize, and socialize. So far, so good.

“Did you see that?” Lucy said after he’d gone.

“Uh-huh,” Maddie said.

Delia averted her eyes.

“Ryan Thompson thinks we can wow him.” Lucy fell into her seat. “We have to wow him.”

She watched her teammates disappear into their devices while the groups around them talked excitedly, huddling together behind a singular laptop or raiding the snack center’s free chips, sushi, and energy drinks. She chewed on her lip—the bad habit she’d been trying to break since the third grade. She caught herself and grabbed hold of her wrist instead. Around and around she spun the pink plastic wristband from the club her Pulse tee had gotten her into two nights ago. Uber-style dog grooming was not a wow. It was barely a “wuh.”

Finally, a bald man at the front of the room tapped a microphone. Lucy sat on her feet to see better. His zippered V-neck sweater marked him as a VC with a likely net worth greater than the output of a dozen small nations combined. He spoke into the mic, welcoming them all to day one of ValleyStart.

Lucy reached for her notebook and tuned out the instructions. She’d already memorized the five-week itinerary—from today’s frantic race to lay down the skeleton of their app to the mornings of classes and lectures to the afternoons of “free” time to be spent getting their idea functional and scalable. They’d be going through the stages every startup did to take its product to market, leading up to the pivotal beta test where a small sampling of users would try the app, and ending in Demo Day when they’d showcase their revolutionary creation and impress the judges enough to win the Pulse internships that would last the rest of the summer.

Impress the judges. Impress Ryan Thompson.

Lucy’s mind whirled faster than her wristband. Then Ryan took the mic. She released the bracelet and sat up straighter. As did everyone in the room.

“Welcome, welcome, welcome. And now, the p-i-i-i-tch.” Ryan drew out the word. “Ah, nothing rattles to the core like that simple five-letter word. Nerves. Fear. Humiliation.” Lucy was sure if she were closer, she’d have seen that same mischievous grin he wore in her dorm room. “But this is a no-pressure environment. And if you believe that, I’ve got a hip programming language called FORTRAN to sell you.” He laughed, though, Lucy noticed, with less gusto than he had with her. “Okay, okay, seriously, this is easy stuff. Just get on up here, outline your team’s project in sixty seconds or less, and you’re good to go.” He clapped his hands together. “Now let’s get started. Hmm, you know, we usually go in numerical order, but let’s just say that this morning . . . I’m feeling twenty-two.”

Lucy’s heart stopped. This was exactly what she wanted, and yet . . . was she actually going to do this? They’d brainstormed pet grooming half the night. She dropped her feet to the floor. But this was Pulse. She gently pushed back her chair, feeling all sixty pairs of competitor eyes on her.

This was Ryan Thompson.

She had to wow.

She quickly turned back to her table. “Do you trust me?”

“No,” Maddie said.

“Yes,” Delia said.

“Majority rules,” Lucy said, inventing their team precept on the spot.

She brushed her dark hair over her shoulder and weaved through the tables to reach Ryan. Confidence was not something Lucy lacked. Today was no different. Still, after accepting the microphone, warm from Ryan’s hand, she stood close to him, figuring it couldn’t hurt to absorb some of his own three-comma-club, billion-dollar confidence by osmosis.

“Right,” she said. “So you’ve heard of Uber. Lyft. Waze. They get you places. We aim to get you to the right ones.” Lucy glanced at Maddie and Delia. They knew she was off message. But they had no idea just how far. Yet.

She cleared her throat. “Because nothing’s worse than showing up first at a party.” Now deliberately avoiding her teammates, Lucy surveyed the room and this lot whose last party probably had a bouncy house. “Or getting to a club that’s more fossilized than a tyrannosaurus bone. Or a show where the band’s dedicating the whole night to Barry Manilow covers.” Pulse. Ryan Thompson. And WOW. Lucy placed one hand on her hip and pressed her heels into the floor, lengthening her torso as much as she could. “Like Waze, our app will rely on crowdsourcing, letting our users give you a heads-up if that party’s a do or a don’t. If the bar’s full of hotties or hot messes. If the bouncer’s particularly ornery. If it’s an under-twenty-one night or a senior citizen early-bird dinner.” Confidence brimmed with each sentence she uttered. Now, as she drew to a close, she paused and looked up. Exposed wood beams crisscrossed the vaulted ceiling. She smirked as the line that would clinch it came to her. Then she turned so she could see Ryan. “Uber, Lyft, they pick you up. We hook you up.”

Ryan grinned as he took the microphone back from her. “And what are you called?”

He tilted the mic toward her, and she hesitated, distracted by a glimpse of Nishi looking a bit surprised. Lucy blinked and refocused on Ryan. Looking directly at him, she said, “Lit.”

The way his lips stretched wider, Lucy knew she’d done it. She’d wowed Ryan Thompson. Adrenaline powered her feet back to her table. They may as well give her the noncompete now. The internship was hers. No one could deny what she’d just done.

Except, maybe, her teammates.

Missed last week’s FridayReads? Check out this excerpt of The Grief Keeper!