Vera gave a little moan of annoyance.
“Nolan?” Nixie called over to him. “What’s Vera doing wrong?”
Vera never asked anyone for help; Lucy could tell Vera hated to be a bother. Nixie was always the one who did the asking for her. Nixie was so good at pestering people, it was amazing she hadn’t yet managed to pester her parents into getting her a dog, even if she didn’t have a sibling to pester with her.
But Nolan was busy rescuing someone else in another group. He was practically an assistant teacher for the camp, helping almost as many kids as Preston and Pippa did.
Vera answered the question for her: “Everything! I’m doing everything wrong!”
But Lucy knew that wasn’t the right answer. Nobody ever did everything wrong with their coding. Well, maybe except Boogie. There had to be one particular bit of the code that was incorrect. All you had to do was find it and fix it.
Lucy peered at Vera’s screen.
Vera had told the dog to start jumping when she clicked on a little green flag at the top of the screen, but then Vera had kept clicking the space bar over and over again. Clicking the space bar was another possible “event” for starting a program, but that wasn’t the way Vera had coded it.
“Try this,” Lucy said. She clicked on the green flag. Instantly Vera’s dog started bouncing.
“Yay!” Nixie, Vera, and Boogie said together.
“Lucy is a genius!” Nixie squealed. “Lucy is the most genius-y of all geniuses!”
Lucy felt herself blushing. What she had done was so simple! It didn’t take a genius—let alone the most genius-y of all geniuses—to notice one simple error and correct it.
But still. She had done it.
Not Nolan.
Not Elena.
Lucy.
She was the most genius-y of all geniuses in her coding group at coding camp today.
Maybe that should be an item on Lucy’s coding badge, if she ever made up the rules for one: solve a coding problem for someone else.
And she had already done it!
Nolan was back now. “What do you need help with?” he asked Vera.
“Lucy already fixed it!” Nixie reported.
Would Nolan look cross that he wasn’t the only code-fixer-person in their group now? Would he tell Lucy that coding was his thing, so it couldn’t be hers?
Instead, his face crinkled into a huge grin as he raised his hand to give her a high five.
Lucy’s face hurt from grinning as she high-fived him back.
* * *
—
By Friday they were supposed to be completing the code for animating the letters of their name, or at least their initials. Not that Pippa and Preston ever gave deadlines or nagged anybody to hurry up and finish any coding task. They kept saying that play was the best way to learn coding. They thought play was the best way to learn anything.
Vera’s letters still weren’t cooperating. V, E, and R were doing what they were supposed to, but her A bounced so high it disappeared off the top of the screen.
“Nolan? Lucy?” Nixie said. “Can you guys make Vera’s A behave?”
Nolan started to get up from his seat to stand behind Vera’s computer.
Then he sat back down again.
“I just need to fix this one thing in my own code,” he said. But Lucy had a feeling Nolan’s code was already working perfectly. Nolan’s own code always worked perfectly.
Should she go help Vera and be the most genius-y of all geniuses again? But something about the way Nolan had stopped himself from helping made Lucy want to see what would happen if no one came to rescue Vera.
Boogie looked over at Vera’s computer. As if Boogie could help anybody fix anything!
“I like the flowers you added to your letters,” he said. “They look like they’re growing out of them. Maybe I should add something onto Blobby.”
Even though everyone else had been busy with the name-animation challenge for the last three days, Boogie was content to make Blobby twitch occasionally or roll over once in a while. “Like ears!” Boogie said. “Maybe Blobby would listen better if I gave him some ears! That would help, I know it—”
Vera cut Boogie off with a wail. “I just touched something that made my A come back again, and then you started talking, talking, talking, about Blobby, Blobby, Blobby, and I got distracted, and I hit the wrong key somehow, and now my A is gone again!”
Lucy had never heard Vera sound angry before. Even when Boogie had almost whacked her in the face during the real-life dance choreography, she had barely given him a scowl.
“Just because you don’t care about doing anything right doesn’t mean I don’t care. My A with the yellow daisies on it, the one I had to draw three times to get it right, is gone! It’s gone, and I can’t get it back!”
She didn’t add, And it’s your fault! but Lucy knew that was what she was thinking.
Pippa called over to Vera. “Hold on, Preston or I will be there in a minute.” To the whole class, she said, “Everybody, listen: I’m hearing too many people freaking out right now. Just remember: If what you’re doing isn’t working, try something else. Remember, this is Computer Play Camp!”
“I’m sorry,” Boogie said, in a small, un-Boogie-like voice.
“Just look at it!” Vera cried, pointing to her screen. Lucy could see Vera’s A was still missing.
Obediently, Boogie looked where Vera was pointing. He stared at the screen as if staring could cause a vanished A to reappear.
“One time…” Boogie said, and trailed off. “One time I was messing around with Blobby—okay, I know you’re tired of hearing about Blobby—but Blobby disappeared, and then I touched this one thing, and he came back.”
As Lucy held her breath, Boogie leaned over and touched something on Vera’s computer for her.
There was A! Wreathed with daisies, and at the end of Vera’s name, exactly where it was supposed to be!
For a moment no one said anything.
Then Nixie said, “It’s fixed!”
In a choked voice, Vera said, “Boogie fixed it.”
“Boogie fixed it!” Nolan sounded as proud of Boogie as Boogie always was of Nolan.
“Well, Blobby helped,” Boogie said modestly.
Vera just stared at her screen. “But—but—but all you do is goof off!” she told Boogie. “I’m trying so hard, and you’re not trying at all, so how could you fix my dog?”
Boogie shrugged. “Luck?”
Lucy had an idea. She wasn’t sure she should say it. But so often in coding camp, she would have an idea and not say it, and then Nolan would say it, and it would solve everything.
“Maybe…” she said to Vera. “Maybe you’re trying too hard? And maybe Boogie isn’t trying hard enough?” She remembered what Pippa had just said. “I mean, if what you’re doing isn’t working, maybe you should try—”
“Something else,” Vera and Boogie said together.
Lucy continued. “Like maybe Vera should just try—”
“Playing?” Vera asked with a sigh. She made it sound as if playing was the hardest work anyone had ever had to do.
Fifteen minutes later, Vera had somehow managed to get her A to cooperate with V, E, and R.
“I just tried a bunch of things,” she said, “and then one of them worked!”
And in those fifteen minutes, Boogie had managed to make Blobby do a clumsy little bouncing dance.
“Look at Blobby!” Boogie shouted. “Did you ever see a blob dance like that? Look at him go!”
Lucy sat admiring her own animated name on the screen, L-U-C-Y, with each letter doing its own carefully choreographed motions, one after the other, in perfect sequence.
Maybe…could coding possibly be her thing, after all?
On Sunday afternoon, while Elena was off at Juniper’s house, Lucy lay on the couch, finally starting to
write down the requirements for a Let’s Have Fun Club coding badge. Maybe when Elena saw them written officially in the handbook, she’d get excited the way she had started to get excited about the dog-walking badge.
Lucy put the handbook down on the coffee table after she had a list of half a dozen items, and then set the timer for her computer hour. It was bliss to be able to use her computer time in perfect freedom. She wanted to try out some new ideas for animating her name. It would be cool to start with all the letters doing the same thing, and then have them change, one letter at a time. What if her L turned a somersault, and then her U jumped up and down, and her C jiggled like Jell-O, and her Y bounced right off the screen and then right back onto it again?
This would be the best animated name in the history of the world!
She giggled, thinking how much she sounded like Nixie now.
But when her name was done, it was amazing to watch the letters doing amazing things that she, Lucy Lopez, had told them to do.
She sensed someone behind her and whirled around to see Elena, clutching the Let’s Have Fun Club handbook as if she might hurl it at the computer screen.
“I thought you were at Juniper’s,” Lucy said, realizing too late how guilty it made her sound. But she didn’t have to feel guilty for using her own hour of computer time—she didn’t!
“Well, I’m not,” Elena said. “For your information, Juniper threw up. Twice. So Dad came to get me. For obvious reasons.”
With a shaking finger she pointed to the open page of the handbook.
“So you’re the one making up requirements for a coding badge, when you wanted to do coding only because I did it first? And now you’re the big know-it-all about coding? Number four: Animate the letters of your name in three different ways. We didn’t even do that activity in my camp. Number five: Help someone else with a coding problem. So now you’re the great coder guru, helping everyone else with their coding problems? What makes you think I’d even want to get another stupid fake badge from a stupid fake club—especially a stupid fake badge you’d get only because you copied me?”
Lucy felt her cheeks flushing, not with guilt, but with anger of her own to match Elena’s.
“Why shouldn’t we both get a coding badge? We both got the bracelet-making badge. We both got the reading badge. We both got the jigsaw-puzzle badge. We both got the hair badge. We’re both working together on the cookie-baking badge.”
“That’s right,” Elena snapped. “Why don’t you get a badge for doing every single thing I do? You already copy everything else about me. I picked out those running shoes with the light-up sparkles, and then you asked Mom for the very same ones.”
But half the girls in Lucy’s class had those light-up sparkle shoes!
“I did my third-grade life-cycle-of-an-animal report on porcupines, and then last month you did your life-cycle report on porcupines, too!”
How was Lucy supposed to remember what animal Elena had chosen for her animal report two years ago?
“And then you went to Mom behind my back to get her to sign you up for coding camp. You couldn’t let there be one thing that’s all mine, could you? Not one thing in the whole entire universe!”
Elena ended with a sound that was half gulp, half sob. And then Lucy couldn’t feel angry anymore.
Oh, why had she ever signed up for coding camp? Why hadn’t she let Elena have one thing in the universe that was all hers? She could still quit the camp. She would quit the camp tomorrow. All the fun she’d had with coding for the last three weeks wasn’t worth making her sister feel so miserable. She didn’t want coding to be her thing if it was going to make tears start running down Elena’s cheeks.
If only she had turned out to have a talent for basketball, like Nolan. If only she liked dogs as much as Nixie did. Although she might have liked dogs better if Bear hadn’t been so big and so…doggy. Maybe walking smaller, better-behaved dogs could be her one special thing.
Or maybe she’d never have one thing in the universe that was all hers, either.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered, with a half gulp, half sob of her own.
Through a veil of tears, she stumbled into the hall and ran upstairs. Alone in their room, she found her Let’s Have Fun Club sash, tucked carefully in a safe corner of her upper bureau drawer. It felt good to rip off all four badges. Then she started into the sash—tearing, tearing, tearing.
Tiny scraps of crepe paper rained down on the bedroom carpet like confetti.
* * *
—
Elena must have thrown away the scraps from Lucy’s torn-up sash because they were gone when Lucy came to bed that night, after a dinner where both girls hardly said a word. Lucy was glad to have the room to herself while Elena was still downstairs watching TV.
She lay in bed hugging her pillow, trying to forget how terrible it had been to hear Elena’s sobs and to see Elena’s tears.
If only, once Lucy quit coding camp, everything would go back to the way it used to be.
* * *
—
Lucy waited until the next morning to tell her parents she didn’t want to go to coding camp anymore. Even though her dad had seemed willing to let her quit on that first day, three weeks ago, she had a feeling they’d be upset if she quit now, with only one week left to go. Both her parents believed in sticking things out. They were both big on following through. And if they asked why she suddenly wanted to quit, and she told them the truth, they might be mad at Elena, and then Elena would be even madder and sadder than she was already.
But Lucy didn’t have to tell them the truth. She could just say she had finally figured out she wasn’t a coding person, the way Vera had calmly announced she wasn’t a dog person. Some people weren’t coding people, just like some people weren’t dog people—even if Nixie thought everyone in the world should be a dog person, even her own nonexistent sister.
“Dad?” she asked after breakfast, once Elena had left to brush her teeth. “I’ve been thinking, and…”
She could tell her father was too busy fixing lunches to be listening, so she let her sentence trail off.
Would Nixie still like dogs even if she had a sister who liked dogs first? It was hard to imagine Nixie switching to loving cats instead.
“And what, honey?” her dad asked. He had been listening, after all. “What have you been thinking?”
Lucy shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” her father gently pursued. “You girls were both so quiet at dinner last night. Is something wrong between you?”
Everything was wrong between them!
But Nixie truly seemed to think it was perfectly fine for two people in the same family to like the same thing. If Nixie had a sister who loved dogs, Nixie would love dogs, anyway. Nixie would never give up on loving what she loved.
“No,” Lucy said to her dad. “I wasn’t thinking anything.”
Except that maybe, just maybe, Nixie was right.
For the final week of camp, Pippa told them on Monday afternoon, they’d be learning how to take the first steps toward coding their own simple computer games.
The camp erupted into pandemonium. Two boys at the front of the room gave a good imitation of missiles blasting. Another boy fell off his chair onto the floor, clutching his chest as if he were dead.
Lucy saw Colleen catch Pippa’s eye and give a warning shake of her head.
“These will not be violent games,” Pippa hastened to add.
The missile-exploders and fake dead boy groaned in disappointment.
Lucy hadn’t played many computer games. Her parents liked old-fashioned board games or games played in what they called the great outdoors. But she couldn’t wait to learn how to code one.
Pippa explained that every game had to have an objective—a goal the players were trying to accomplish. Otherwise you’d never know whether you had won. Games had to have r
ules for what the players were allowed to do to reach the goal. Games were more challenging when players had to overcome obstacles along the way.
The first game they were learning to code was an easy one, where a little ball had to jump through a gap between two moving posts.
Lucy worked half-heartedly on coding the moving-ball game. It was hard to care about a little bouncing ball on the screen when your real-life sister wasn’t speaking to you, and you didn’t know how you were ever going to make things right between the two of you ever again.
“My ball wants to hit the posts,” Boogie said, but then he gave a sheepish grin. “But I bet he could get through them if he wanted to. And if I figured out how to help him.”
He stared at his screen, forehead furrowed.
“Come on, ball!” Boogie encouraged the screen. “Come on, Ballie! Come on, little Ballie-Wallie!”
Then Boogie gave a shout. “Ballie did it! I mean, I did it! Okay, Ballie, I’m going to change the game to make it harder for you. I’m going to make the gap between the posts smaller. Are you ready, Ballie?”
“Sure!” he made Ballie squeak.
Vera had been giving her own little squeaks of agitation as she tried to figure out how the game was supposed to operate.
“My ball wants to hit the posts, too,” she confessed to Boogie. “I don’t know how to fix the game so he can get through.”
“Your Ballie just needs to mess around for a while, to build up his confidence,” Boogie suggested. “Like this.” He leaned over Vera’s computer. The next thing Lucy knew, Vera was giggling. Her Ballie might still be crashing into the posts, but at least he was having fun. And it looked like Vera was having fun, too.
But Lucy wasn’t having fun. All she could think about was Elena’s words: You couldn’t let there be one thing that’s all mine, could you? Not one thing in the whole entire universe! Elena didn’t even seem like a sister right now, more like an alien who had showed up at the house from a faraway galaxy to share a bedroom with her. Talking to Elena—if she ever did talk to Elena again—would be like talking to those aliens from the first day of coding camp.
Lucy Lopez Page 5
