How would she talk to Elena if Elena was really an alien? She’d have to spell out everything super-clearly.
It’s all right for two sisters to like the same thing!
But maybe an alien wouldn’t know what a sister was.
Lucy remembered how Nixie had tried to explain pets to an alien. She had said a pet was a special kind of animal who loves you better than anyone in the world.
A sister, Lucy could say, is a special kind of human being who loves you better than anyone in the world.
It suddenly occurred to Lucy that no one, not even Nolan, had pointed out to Nixie that she’d also need to explain love to the alien.
How could you ever explain love to an alien? Or to a computer?
Or to a sister?
* * *
—
The next three camp days were devoted to making their own computer games. Friday, the last day of camp, would be the Coding Expo, where the campers could show off their dances, their animated names, their games—everything!
But it was as hard for Lucy to focus on making her own game as it had been to focus on Monday’s sample game. So on Tuesday she just watched what everyone else was making. Maybe she should have quit coding camp if she wasn’t going to be doing any coding anymore.
Nolan’s game, which he had started working on at home, was already so complex no one understood it when he explained it to them, not even Lucy. But from what she could hear, it had plenty of explosive sound effects.
“But no people, animals, or property are harmed in the playing of the game,” Nolan assured them.
Nixie’s game was exactly like the bouncing-ball game, only with a bouncing dog instead of a bouncing ball. Every time the dog bounced through the posts, you got a point. If you got ten points, your parents had to get you a dog. Nixie’s parents couldn’t come to the expo because of work, but she planned to play her game with them on the computer at home.
“They’re terrible at games,” Nixie gloated. “And I’m the one who made the game, so I’m bound to be good at it, so I’ll win, and I’ll get a dog! And I’ll get one you’ll love to walk, Lucy! And you too, Vera!”
To Lucy’s astonishment, Vera and Boogie decided to make their game together. Well, she would have been astonished a week ago, but she wasn’t astonished now. The game had Blobby in it, and Vera drew a face on him with a jolly expression just like Boogie’s. The objective of the game was for Blobby to wander around at random until he bumped into a big green dot, and then the dot turned into a flower.
“Do you get a point for every dot that turns into a flower?” Nolan asked.
Vera and Boogie both shook their heads.
“So what do you get?”
“You get pretty flowers,” Vera said.
“Vera’s drawing the flowers,” Boogie added. “So they’ll be very pretty flowers.”
And just like that, Lucy had an idea—a wonderful idea, an absolutely perfect idea—for her game.
If only Elena would come to the expo! And if only Elena would play Lucy’s game!
* * *
—
The Coding Expo was held in their classroom, but Colleen had gotten permission for it to spill out into the hallway, to have enough space for fifteen coders and their guests.
Lucy hadn’t mentioned the expo to Elena, and Elena hadn’t mentioned it to Lucy. They tried to act normal in front of their parents, but when it was just the two of them, they had barely talked about anything since their big fight on Sunday.
As Lucy sat with her open computer, at a desk in the hall near the library, she waited to see when her parents would come, and if Elena would be with them.
Would Elena criticize her choreographed dances? Get mad that Lucy knew how to animate letters when Elena hadn’t done that in her camp? Most important, would she refuse to play the game?
Next to Lucy, Boogie sat showing Colleen how he had coded the moves for one of Blobby’s dance routines. Vera, Nixie, and Nolan had their desks next in the row. Their families weren’t there yet, either.
“Wow!” Colleen said. “This is so cool!” She lowered her voice. “Believe it or not, I’m terrible at computers. But you’re a good teacher, Boogie. I think I could code a dance for my own Blobby now, if you helped me.”
Boogie beamed. Lucy felt herself beaming, too. Yay for Blobby, and yay for Boogie!
Then she looked up, and there was Elena.
“Mom and Dad are coming later,” Elena said stiffly. “They said I should come over to your expo now, without them, because they had to ‘finish up a couple of things’ first. And you know what that means.”
Nervous as she felt, Lucy stifled a giggle. Their parents were always finishing up a couple of things in their classrooms, and their couple of things always took forever.
Elena giggled, too, and suddenly both girls were laughing hysterically in their old hyena way. It was so good to laugh together again! It was the best thing in the world!
A moment later, the laughter ended abruptly, as if the laughing sound effect on a computer game had been shut off.
It was time for Lucy to ask the question that mattered to her most. “Do you want to play the game I made?”
Elena avoided Lucy’s eyes. “What’s it called?”
Lucy took a deep breath. “It’s called Sisters.”
Elena opened her mouth as if she was about to say something. But then she closed it as if she had changed her mind about saying anything.
Lucy handed her the set of instructions she had typed up and printed out.
The objective of this game is to gather a bunch of flowers to give your sister.
Elena still didn’t say anything, but Lucy could see her eyes glistening.
Like Vera and Boogie’s game, Lucy’s game involved flowers, but hers was more of a real game than theirs, because you had to figure out how to catch flowers that were floating through the air and put them into a vase. When you got ten flowers, a girl appeared on the screen, with long dark hair, like Elena. Lucy had been so glad when she found that figure in the program’s catalog of ready-made pictures you could put into the code. Even Vera couldn’t have drawn one as good.
“Go on, play it,” Lucy begged.
When Elena looked up from the end-of-game screen with its bunch of flowers for the girl who looked like her, she wiped her eyes with the side of her hand.
“I made something for you, too,” she said, sounding as shy as Lucy had.
From her backpack, she pulled out a brand-new Let’s Have Fun Club sash with four badges on it, exactly like the one Lucy had ripped into a hundred tiny pieces.
“I’m sorry I was mean,” Elena said. “I guess we can’t help liking so many of the same things. It sort of makes sense, because we’re—”
“Sisters,” Lucy finished the sentence for her.
“And I started making a new badge,” Elena continued. “Wait till you see this. You aren’t going to believe it.”
She reached into her backpack for the Let’s Have Fun Club handbook and gave it to Lucy.
Lucy flipped past the dog-walking badge and the coding badge, to a page that read:
SISTERS BADGE
1. Do the dishes for your sister some night even if it’s her turn, just to be nice.
2. Stick up for your sister if someone else is mean to her.
3. If you do anything mean yourself, tell your sister you’re sorry.
4. Help your sister get a badge.
5. Give your sister a great big hug.
“I love this badge,” Lucy whispered. “It’s my favorite badge of all.”
“And I just did number three on the list,” Elena crowed. “And I helped you with the hair badge, so that’s number four for me. And if you show me how to do the name-animation thing for the coding badge, then that’s number four for you, too.”
“Let’s cross off number five right
now,” Lucy said. “Both of us.”
And they did.
How to Get Started as a Coder
If you want to learn more about coding, all you need is a computer, access to the Internet, and a parent’s permission to use them both. Abundant free resources are available that will let you learn how to code all the projects Lucy and her friends accomplish in their after-school coding camp.
The best place to start is with the Hour of Code website: https://code.org/learn. There you will find an astonishing array of projects (many with helpful tutorials), identified by grade level. These include how to code a dance party, how to send a boat through a maze, how to animate the letters of your name, and how to design your own computer games.
A wealth of options is also available through MIT’s free-to-all Scratch coding program. Just go to their website at https://scratch.mit.edu/. Here you can not only create your own stories, games, and animations, but also share them with the entire online community of fellow Scratch creators.
Happy coding!
Acknowledgments
I can’t express enough thanks to the children’s-book superstars at Holiday House who helped make Lucy’s story as starry as could be. Margaret Ferguson is the editor every author dreams of, offering the perfect blend of encouragement and unfailingly insightful critique. Raina Putter and John Simko made sharp-eyed corrections I would have otherwise missed. Kerry Martin created a delightful design for the series.
Grace Zong is the most genius-y of all artistic geniuses! I hug myself with joy every time I look at her illustrations and mega-darling covers for all the After-School Superstars titles.
My superstar agent, Stephen Fraser, has cheered me on for book after book; his steadfast support means so much to me. Writer friends offered critique on crucial drafts: heartfelt thanks to the Writing Roosters (Tracy Abell, Vanessa Appleby, Jennifer Bertman, Laura Perdew, and Jennifer Sims), and to Leslie O’Kane. I am also beyond grateful to three elementary school teachers for reading the manuscript and providing feedback on the coding instruction—Amy Glendinning, Clarice Howe-Johnson, and Megan Watkins—as well as young coding guru Quinn Reynolds. Of course, any errors that remain are my responsibility alone.
Megan Watkins allowed me to sit in on her coding workshops at Stott Elementary in Arvarda, Colorado, and Stephanie Winiecki welcomed me to her after-school computer club at Boulder Country Day School. I learned so much from both of these stunningly talented teachers. Some of the coding activities for Lucy’s camp were inspired by the extremely helpful book Helping Kids with Coding for Dummies by Camille McCue and Sarah Guthal. I spent many hours on the Hour of Code website trying out programs myself. Here my computer programmer son, Gregory Wahl, was a great help to his technologically challenged mom.
Most of all, I’m grateful to my unfailingly patient and cheerful eleven-year-old coding tutor, Lorelei Held, who sat next to me for several afternoons showing me how to code a dance party and to draw and animate my own clumsy pictures. I can’t imagine how I could have written the book without her. Thank you, Lorelei!
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