Spin the Golden Light Bulb

by Jackie Yeager

  THE STAIRWELL

  Ten containers are stacked up near the shed door. Nine are filled with metal and wood parts and one is filled with our costumes and paperwork. I can hardly breathe looking at all the broken pieces shoved in there like that. It’s like parts of me are shoved in there too.

  Gregor has left to have the containers moved to our bedchamber. Seraphina pulls us into a huddle. “Alright, my Crimson Kids. I know your chances don’t look very promising right now, but we have no time to look backward. Rehearsal Judging is in seven days. I believe you can salvage your solution somehow. Remember what we’ve said all summer: Be curious, be creative, be collaborative, be colorful, and be courageous. That’s you—the Crimson Five. Only now you must stay cool too. Go back to your bedchamber and fix this thing. I know you can.”

  Mare claps her hands. “Okay, Seraphina. I got this. Let’s go see how much glue and duct tape we have. We’ll need a lot to reconstruct.”

  “Can we ask Swissa for some too?” asks Jillian. “Or is that against the rules?”

  “No, that’s fine” says Seraphina. “The rules say you can’t go back to Piedmont Pantry. As long as you don’t steal anything, you can get your materials from wherever you like.”

  Mare nods. “We’re on it!”

  “Wait,” says Jax. “Is it okay if I go back to my bedchamber while you guys do that? I have an idea to work on.”

  “Can I go with you?” Ander asks.

  “Sure. I need your help anyway.”

  “Then it looks like you have a plan,” says Seraphina. “I’ll have boxed lunches sent up to your chambers. If you need anything else, let me know.”

  “Will you meet us for dinner?” I ask.

  “Of course. I’ll want to hear how you’re doing.” She holds out her fist and we touch knuckles, our wristbands shining under the shed light bulb. This seems to motivate the rest of my team, but it doesn’t make me feel any better at all.

  The girls and I run around to the front of Piedmont Chamber. The Ohio team is gathered under an awning and they turn to look as we run by. Their whole team is made up of girls, wearing yellow shirts and matching headbands. I wonder what it would be like to be on a team of all girls. Probably not as much fun as having Ander around. I smile to myself for a second until I remember—I’m still mad at him.

  When we reach our bedchamber, the containers are waiting by the work table. We open them and take inventory of our supplies. We have a jug of super glue, leftover paint, and seven rolls of duct tape. I guess that’s a start.

  Jillian turns on the music. “What should we do first?”

  “Let’s each take a container and put together whatever pieces we can,” says Mare.

  I open one up and dig through it. Most of the pieces are the ones I painted myself, so sad and crumbled. I do my best to match them up with random scraps, gluing small pieces at a time. The glue welds my fingers together though. I look for a place to lay the pieces and realize that I need a large cloth or something. I check the cupboard under the windowsill and find Mabel curled up in a ball. I pull her out and open up the pocket of her dress to turn her on. Her eyelids blink open and she stretches.

  “Hi, Mabel,” I say.

  She blinks.

  “Will you do a job for me?”

  She blinks again.

  “Can you find Swissa and ask her if we can have an old bed sheet?”

  She blinks a third time. I check inside her control panel to be sure she has recorded the question. She has, so I open the door. She scurries out and down the hall. A little while later, Swissa knocks. Mare opens the door and Mabel rolls in too. She pops open her dress pocket and inside is a pink bed sheet folded into a small square.

  “Thanks, Mabel. Good girl.”

  She blinks and wheels herself back into the cupboard, but I leave the door open so she’s not lonely this time.

  “Hi, Swissa,” I say. “Thanks for the sheet. I need some place to lay these pieces while they dry.”

  She sets three boxes onto our table. “Anything for the team.”

  “Are those our lunches?” asks Jillian.

  “Yup, Seraphina said you’d be working through lunch.”

  “Yeah, that’s because most of our solution got destroyed last night,” I say.

  “Oh my gosh! That’s awful.” She looks at all the pieces on the ground before she heads out the door. “I’m sorry,” she says like she might actually mean it.

  Jillian and Mare take their lunches over to the floor near our bed, but the thought of eating anything when our project is in pieces makes my stomach ache. Our glued pieces look nothing like they’re supposed to and the drawings look like a dinosaur drew them. My brain tangles up so bad my head hurts. “I’m going.”

  “Where?” asks Mare.

  “I don’t know, but the gallery pieces look terrible!”

  “I think they look cool in a weird sort of way,” says Jillian.

  “But that’s not how they’re supposed to look!” I run out the door past purple shirts from Iowa and gray from Illinois. I run and run and don’t stop until I get to the end of the hall and down the giant stair case. I land at the bottom and practically smash into Jax.

  “Wait, where are you going?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Our project is awful!”

  “But we have an idea,” Ander calls. “We were just coming up to show you.”

  “You can show Mare and Jillian.” I break away and find a side exit door. But I don’t want to exit. I want to hide. I crawl under the staircase and start to cry. My body shakes as I think about all of our hard work. Gone. My chance to get to PIPS. Gone. All because of one mean girl and Ander’s stupid mouth. We’ll never get to the finals now. We’ll all be sent home. We’ll all get programmed. Everything will go back to the way it was. My best friend will be best friends with someone else. The kids at school will call me by my number, and Ander and I won’t even talk. I thought we were friends, but how can I ever forgive him? It’s his fault my dream won’t come true. There’s no way we can fix our solution now.

  I reach into my pocket for a tissue. Instead, I pull out a slip of paper. It’s the message I got the first night here—a faded, wrinkled string of words:

  Don’t be afraid of change. Have the courage to believe in what you can achieve.

  Change? Change what? Our whole solution? It’s too late now. I don’t even know where to start. Why can’t Grandma Kitty be here? She’d know what to do.

  The exit door opens so I slide into the corner. I can’t let anyone see me crying. I peer through the steps at a pair of white boots. I quick turn back around.

  Swissa peeks under the stairs. “What are you doing in there?”

  I don’t look up. “Nothing.”

  “Really? It looks like you’re hiding.”

  “Please go away.”

  She crawls in next to me and I squish myself against the wall. Why can’t she just leave me alone?

  “Do I have to? This looks like a great hiding spot.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I wish I had found this place earlier in the summer.”

  I look at her out of the corner of my eye. She’s a lot prettier when she’s not scowling. “Why would you need a hiding place?”

  “Me? Lots of reasons. To get away from the drill sergeant in the laundry room who teaches us how to fold towels perfectly, or the bottle robot—”

  “What’s the bottle robot?”

  “It’s the machine that fills the shampoo bottles for all the bathrooms in the building. One of us has to watch it to be sure it doesn’t malfunction. The team from Nebraska invented it one year. The Piedmont Committee wants to be sure we can use it.”

  “So what do you have to do?”

  “When you’re on bottle duty you can’t look away for a second. A laser monitors your eyes
. It reports you if you do.”

  “How long do you have to watch it?”

  “Thirty minutes every day.”

  I picture myself forcing my eyes to stare at a shampoo filling robot for thirty minutes in a row. “That’s almost as bad as getting programmed.”

  “It’s worse. I liked getting programmed.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, I was programmed for Art Forms. That’s what I’m good at, not watching bottles.”

  “Then why are you here, working as a chambermaid?”

  “It’s a summer job. I go to a high school for performing arts in New York City during the school year.”

  I hadn’t pictured Swissa doing anything other than wheeling her cart into our room and snapping sarcastic comments at us. “Wow. Do you sing?”

  “Yes! And I dance and act too. I love it there. I wish I could have stayed all summer.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Well, anyone who competes at the National Finals can come back to work here for a summer while they’re in high school. I didn’t want to, but my parents made me.”

  “How come?”

  “They wanted me to give back to the Piedmont Organization. But I was afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “I was upset when my team didn’t make it to the Global Championships and I had to leave. It took me a long time to stop being sad. I was convinced that PIPS was the school for me.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t make it.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not sorry anymore. Not long after I was programmed for Art Forms, I realized how much I love performing. I also realized PIPS wasn’t the school for me. The School of Performing Arts is where I belong.”

  “But why didn’t you want to work here?”

  “I thought if I came back I would wish I went to PIPS again.”

  “Did you?”

  “At first I did. I saw all of you girls so excited to be here. There’s great energy in this place. Everyone is filled with such great ideas.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I was miserable at the beginning of the summer, but then I realized that my school is full of great energy and great ideas too. We just use our ideas in a different way.”

  “So you’re not miserable anymore?”

  She laughs. “No, not really, except when I have to watch bottles. Besides, summer’s almost over and soon I can go back to my own school with all my new friends.”

  “I’m glad you’re not sad. Your school sounds fun.”

  “It is. So . . . why are you hiding?”

  “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “Oh?”

  “My team won’t even make it to the Finals.”

  “Is that because your stuff got wrecked?”

  “Yes, and without our rotating object, our play won’t make any sense.”

  “Why don’t you make a new object?”

  “Our other one was really good though.”

  “Your other one is gone.”

  That feels like a punch in the stomach. “Yeah, but I don’t know where to start.”

  “Don’t you have teammates?”

  I huff. “Yes.”

  “You have another week don’t you?”

  “But what if we can’t think of something else as good?”

  “So you’re afraid to try?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “It sounds like you are.”

  I bite my pinky nail. “What if we can’t think up something good enough to earn one-hundred and fifty points? All the other teams and judges and parents will think we stink.”

  “So you’d rather tell the judges that your object got destroyed so you had to withdraw from the competition. You’ll never get to the finals that way.”

  I cross my arms. “I guess I am afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “What if we work hard all week to come up with another amazing solution and we don’t get enough points anyway? All the hard work will be for nothing.”

  “So you’re afraid of hard work?”

  “No! But we did work hard and look what happened.”

  “Yeah, but what’s the worst that can happen if you work hard again and come up with a new solution? You won’t make it into the National Finals and you’ll be sent home for programming like I was.”

  “But you like artistic stuff. I’ll probably get programmed for math, and I don’t even like it. I’ll have to go to the School of Math for high school. I have all these ideas swirling around in my head all the time. I want to be someplace where I can use them.”

  “If you have so many ideas swirling in your head, why aren’t you with your team right now, creating a new solution?”

  I look down at the message in my hand.

  “Kia, I wasn’t meant to go to PIPS, but if you are then I bet you can pull something amazing together.”

  I bite on my thumb nail.

  “You know I’m right.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I don’t want to give up. I want our team to have a chance. “Okay. I’ll go back.”

  “Good, and I will too. At least my bottle shift is over for today.”

  “Thanks, Swissa.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We crawl out of the stairwell, and I run down the hall to the giant staircase. I better hurry. We have so much work to do if we’re ever going to get to the finals.

  GHOST-LIKE

  I crack open the door to my bedchamber. My teammates are huddled around our work table. None of them hear me come in so I stand in the doorway for a second, wondering what they‘re working on.

  “Hey,” I finally say.

  Jillian looks up. “Where were you?”

  I suddenly feel like an idiot for leaving. “I went for a walk.”

  “Oh.” She turns back around. No one else seems to care that I was gone or that I was upset.

  I walk over to the table and peek over Mare’s shoulder. “What are you guys doing?”

  “We’re trying to think up a new object that can go along with our play,” says Mare. “We can’t get the Ghost Gallery to look like it was. Jillian and I have been trying for an hour.”

  The random pieces, scattered on the floor, make my head hurt again. “I’m sorry I ran out before. I was frustrated.”

  “Like we’re not?” Jillian demands, shuffling papers on the table.

  Now I feel worse. “I should have stayed to figure it out with you.”

  “We’re teammates, right?” says Mare. “We need to stick together.”

  “I know.”

  She looks over at the boys. “Right guys?”

  Jax looks up. “Yeah.”

  “I promise I won’t run away again.”

  Mare pulls me over to the computer. “Ander and Jax have an idea.”

  “We’re trying to design a new Ghost Gallery—a digital version of what we already built,” says Jax.

  I’m not sure what to think about a digital object. But I try to be positive because I don’t have a better idea yet. “So you think we should use a computer object instead of the box object?”

  “Yeah,” says Jillian. “We could design our image that way this time.”

  “Hmm.” I kneel down at the table and try to picture what they’re talking about.

  “We could still use our costumes and script,” says Mare.

  “Yes, that’s the idea,” says Jax, scratching his head.

  We spend the next hour trying to design something worth one-hundred and fifty points. Jax doesn’t leave the computer, but eventually Mare lays down on the floor while Jillian spins in the sparkles. “Is it dinner time yet?” she asks.

  “The dining hall opened ten minutes ago,” says Mare. “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not
hungry,” I say. “I’m going to keep working.”

  “I’ll stay too then,” says Ander.

  “Okay,” says Mare. “We’ll bring you dessert.”

  Jax, Jillian, and Mare leave, and I sit down at the table across from Ander.

  “I don’t blame you for what happened, you know.”

  He looks me straight in the eye. “Yes, you do.”

  I struggle to keep my nails out of my mouth. “No, not anymore. I did at first, but it’s Witch Girl’s fault. She was sure we were going to have a better solution than hers so she convinced her teammates to help her wreck ours.”

  “We don’t know they did it.”

  “Who else would have done it?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d rather know for sure before we blame them.”

  “Okay, Mr. Detective, let’s find proof then. We’ll spy on them like they spied on us. Or let’s go confront them. I’ll bet they’ll squirm when they know we’re on to them.”

  “Do you even hear yourself?”

  “What?”

  “First you blame me for telling them we’re doing a play, and then you blame her team for wrecking our object—”

  “So?”

  “You’ve wasted all this time trying to blame someone and running off when you could have been working with us.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I get that you’re mad. I want to blame the person who smashed it too. All our hard work was destroyed, just like that, but that’s not what’s bugging me. Even if the Michigan team did do it and got the idea because I have a big mouth, you shouldn’t have been such a jerk to me. I didn’t do it on purpose. I said I was sorry and you didn’t say anything to me.”

  I mangle my ring nail. “I know. I was upset.”

  He leans back in his chair. “Well, I was upset too, and you made me feel worse.”

  “You’re right. I’m a jerk.”

  “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends!”

  “Friends don’t ditch each other when one of them makes a mistake. They stick by each other. No matter what.”

  “I didn’t mean to ditch you.”

  “Well, you did.”