How Lunchbox Jones Saved Me From Robots, Traitors, and Missy the Cruel

by Jennifer Brown

  One of the pieces fell. I picked it up and tucked it inside my top lip so that it stuck down like a tusk. I put the other piece on the other side of my lip to match it. I was a walrus. I spent about five minutes barking and clapping my hands like a seal, because I didn’t know what sound walruses made.

  So it turned out building a robot wasn’t all that bad. I held the pieces on top of my head like antennae and then reenacted the entire science lab scene from Alien Onslaught. I found some round pieces and squeezed my eyes around them and then pretended to be surprised by everything I saw. I found a couple of T-shaped pieces and held them at the sides of my neck and walked around Frankenstein-style.

  And just as I stuffed two long green pieces up my nostrils and started saying, “What? Is there something hanging out of my nose?” the maws pushed through my door.

  We all stared at one another for a moment. One of the green things fell out of my nose and landed with a clatter on the pile of parts. Also, a sunflower seed fell out of my hair. Then the maws sprang into action.

  “There’s my Lukey-Wukey,” Maw Shirley said, coming at me with her pinchy hands.

  “Bring those baby cheeks over here,” Maw Mazie said.

  I pulled the other green piece out of my nose and let it drop onto the pile. “Sorry, maws, not now,” I said. “I’m in the middle of something really important.”

  They exchanged disbelieving glances, so I started randomly rooting through the parts to make it more believable.

  “My stars, what is this?” Maw Shirley asked, toeing one of the pieces.

  “Looks very technical,” Maw Mazie said, bending with a grunt to pick up the book. She held it up and studied the cover. “Well, it’s about robots. Are you building a robot, Lukey?”

  “Sure am,” I said, snapping two pieces together with absolutely no idea what I was going to do with those pieces once I was done. “For school.”

  “Maybe we should help,” Maw Shirley said.

  “Oh, good idea! We’ll order pizza and forget about the gnocchi.”

  As much as I loved the idea of pizza over gnocchi, there was no way I was going to let the maws anywhere near my robot.

  “That’s okay,” I said, hurriedly. “I’m going to be working on this all night, probably.”

  The maws exchanged glances again.

  “What? Working on gnocchi night?” Maw Mazie said.

  “Your dad’s been peeling potatoes for hours,” Maw Shirley said.

  “Your grandfathers are dying to watch football with you.”

  I shrugged. “Sorry. It’s for school. I can’t do anything about it.”

  Now, you might have thought I’d have felt bad about lying to the maws. After all, they were so sweet, and missing a Friday night meal made by them was one of the worst things they could even think of. But I had no doubt in my mind that if I let the maws help make the robot, it would be an adorable baby robot with very pinchable cheeks and a bottom that would fit into the palms of their hands. And they would figure out a way to make the pieces pink.

  I told myself I would eat double portions on the next gnocchi night to make up for the lie.

  “There you are.” Mom stood in my doorway, pulling an earring off her ear. “Sorry I’m late. I’ve been looking all over for you two. I think we should have a nice, big salad to go with the gnocchi.”

  The maws jumped into action, shuffling out of my room, excitedly going on about lettuce and cauliflower and cucumbers and cheese, and completely forgetting about the robot. Mom winked at me over their heads, and then stuck her head into the room after they’d gone.

  “Looks like you’re really getting into this robotics stuff, huh?” she asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

  She stepped over the pile of robot parts and kissed my cheek. “You’re a very smart boy. I’m sure you’ll have it figured out in no time.” She pulled the earring off her other ear while she walked to the door. “I’ll bring you some gnocchi later,” she said over her shoulder.

  After Mom left, I decided it was time to really get down to business.

  I flipped through the first forty pages of the book, skimming over most of it, and then picked up the same two long pieces and fit them together. I picked up another piece—a flat, black one—and attached it to the side of one. I snapped three more pieces on, and something that rotated. I picked up the power brick and found a spot to stick the whole mess to. I snapped it on, held it up triumphantly, and . . .

  Yeah, I wasn’t going to be able to do this alone.

  I went into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and called Walter.

  “Hey, Luke, what’s up?”

  “Remember when you said it sounded like fun to build a robot?”

  “Yeah.”

  I fell back on Mom and Dad’s bed. “Does it sound like Friday night fun?”

  “Sure. But I can’t come over. My cousins are here.”

  “I’ll come there,” I said hurriedly. “What time?”

  After hanging up with Walter, I went back into the kitchen, expecting to see the maws sweating over cutting boards and pots of boiling water. Instead, the maws were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and gossiping about someone’s unfortunate hair fungus problem, and Dad was the one sweating over the pot of boiling water. Mom was sweating over a cutting board. I heard the paws arguing in the living room.

  “Aren’t they doing a wonderful job, Lukey-Wukey?” Maw Shirley said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Hey, um, Dad? I need a ride to Walter’s house.”

  Dad’s face was beet red. A sweat bead rolled down his nose and he blotted it with his sleeve. “What? Walter? When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now? No way.”

  “But I need to go,” I said. “It’s for school.”

  “I’m kind of busy here, Luke.” As if to punctuate his words, a lid fell off the stove and landed with a clang on the floor. The maws put their hands over their hearts and made startled noises. “Sorry,” Dad said.

  “Mom? Can you take me?” I asked, but the question quickly dried up in my throat as I saw her harried face over the mountain of lettuce she was chopping. “Never mind,” I mumbled.

  “You’re just going to have to tell Walter you can’t come,” Dad said.

  I thought about the robot parts on my bedroom floor. And the candy at Walter’s house. “But I have to go. Can’t the maws make dinner like always?”

  Dad dropped another lid and muttered under his breath, then wiped his forehead with his sleeve again. “Your grandmothers are taking a long-overdue break. I am making dinner to night, and you’re not going to Walter’s. There’s nobody to take you there. And that is final.”

  “I can take you.”

  Rob was standing in the kitchen doorway. I’d been so worried about getting Walter’s help with the robot, I’d completely forgotten that the World’s Worst Brother was in the house.

  “No, thanks,” I said, even though saying it broke my rule of never saying anything to Rob ever again for as long as I lived.

  “Well, then I guess you’re not going,” Dad said. “Because Rob is your only way there.”

  “I’ll wait until after dinner,” I said.

  “I’ll be on dish duty then,” Dad said. “What about you, Mandy?”

  “Clearing the table,” Mom said.

  “Guess it’s Rob or nothing,” Dad said. “Take your pick.”

  I sighed very, very deeply to let Dad know that I knew what he was doing. He was trying to force me to forgive Rob. He was trying to push us back together. Well, it wasn’t going to work.

  “Fine,” I said, then turned to Rob and very icily added, “When are we leaving?”

  “Give me five minutes, li’l bro,” he said, and jogged out of the room.

  I gave my dad my best Are You Happy? look, but he only smiled back like maybe he really was.

  I was already waiting in the back seat of Rob’s car before he got out there. I figured i
t would make things less awkward if we weren’t walking out to the car at the same time. Plus, I didn’t want him to get any ideas that we were friends now. He was my chauffeur. That was how I was going to think about it. I even changed his name, in my head, to Mr. Jeeves, because Mr. Jeeves seemed like a chauffeur-y kind of name.

  Soon Rob came out to the car and got in the driver’s side. He fumbled with his keys until he found the right one, and then turned around in his seat.

  “You can sit up here, you know,” he said.

  “No, thank you,” I said. That would be highly inappropriate, Mr. Jeeves, I added in my head.

  He sighed. “Luke. Just come sit up here.”

  I shook my head, staring straight ahead, as if I didn’t even see him. I started to feel that familiar clog in my throat—the one I always got before I was about to cry. Or throw up. Sometimes it was hard to tell if it was tears or barf that was going to pour out of my face until it was actually happening.

  I remembered three summers ago, when Rob and I built a fort in the woods behind our house. Nobody knew we were doing it—not even Mom and Dad. It was our secret. We’d drag scraps of wood and old pizza boxes and broken cinder blocks and anything else we could find out into the trees and would arrange them, day by day, into a house structure. Rob even borrowed some of Dad’s tools so we could hammer things together, and I borrowed an old bath rug from the hall closet so we could lie down inside our fort without getting bugs on our shirts. By the end of the summer, we had a two-room fort, with windows and everything, and we would play Fort Invaders, a made-up game where we pretended we were holding enemy troops at bay and saving our town. I was always the lookout, up in a tree, and would scramble down about every five minutes screaming, “They’re coming! They’re coming! Arm yourselves, men!”

  Sometimes we would just sit in the fort and talk. Rob would mostly talk about girls, who seemed to be a constant source of misery for him, and I would pretend that I understood his torment, even though I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why he would want anything to do with girls in the first place. And every now and then we would talk about Mom and Dad, and about how sometimes other people acted like it was weird that Dad stayed home with us and did all the chores while Mom went to a job every day, but how we didn’t understand why anyone worried about that, because it was the way it had always been in our house and it wasn’t any big deal. And sometimes we would just tell a whole lot of fart jokes.

  That summer was the best summer of my life. I wanted it to never end.

  It did. And so did the summer after that and the summer after that, and now there would be no more summers, because Rob was going to spend this summer in boot camp and then he would go away and by the time the marines let him come back home, he wouldn’t be coming to our home at all.

  It was like every summer was ending, and he thought it would somehow all be okay if I just sat in the front seat with him.

  “Come on, Luke. I’m not going to drive until you move up here.”

  I reached for the door handle. “Then I’ll walk,” I said, even though I had no idea how to get to Walter’s house because it was all the way on the other side of town.

  Rob grunted and twisted the key. The car roared to life. “Fine. Have your way.” He backed out of the driveway, and I accidentally let my eye catch his. “You can’t stay mad at me forever, you know.”

  I swallowed. The clog in my throat started to hurt, which meant soon I wouldn’t be able to talk without getting that embarrassing cry-wobble in my voice. “Watch me,” I said, satisfied that I still sounded kind of steely.

  He gazed at me a moment longer, and then reluctantly put the car into drive. “I’m sorry that I’ve disappointed you, but you have to know that my joining the marines isn’t about you,” he said to the windshield. “It’s just something that’s important to me. Remember all those games of Fort Invaders we used to play? Remember what I always used to say?”

  I did. Man, I can’t wait until I grow up, he used to say, sitting with his back propped against the outside wall of the fort, catching his breath. I’m going to be a real soldier then. It was something Rob had always wanted to do. I just had never thought he’d actually go and do it.

  “I had to grow up, li’l bro. You will, too,” he said.

  I didn’t answer. The clog wouldn’t let me.

  CHAPTER 9

  PROGRAM NAME: Helping Hand

  STEP ONE: Robot is pathetic

  STEP TWO: Robot visits nonpathetic robot friend who knows what a chassis is

  STEP THREE: Both robots dance samba

  For some reason, they were having a fiesta at Walter’s house. An actual fiesta, with yellow and orange flags hanging from the living room doorway, refried beans on the stove, and a piñata in the garage. Cousins were racing everywhere, one of them with a giant floppy sombrero on his head.

  “¡Hola!” Walter cried when he opened the door to let me in. Mariachi music tumbled out from behind him.

  “What’s—?”

  He grabbed my shoulder and tugged. “Come in, come in! The tamales will be ready in half an hour.” I stumbled inside and he took the bag full of robot parts from me. He peered inside. “Oh, yeah, we should have that mostly knocked out in half an hour. Then we can join the samba contest.”

  “Half an hour? Samba what?” I asked, trailing behind him.

  We skirted a few cousins, stole two sopapillas from a wandering aunt, and ended up in Walter’s bedroom. He shut the door behind us, muffling the music.

  “Okay, let’s get started,” he said. He dumped the plastic bag of parts onto the floor and sank down onto his knees next to them. “You have the book?”

  I pulled the book from my backpack and handed it to him. He opened it up and immediately began reading through it, nodding his head every so often as if it made total sense to him.

  “Uh, Walter?” I asked, unsure what to do with myself while he read.

  “Huh?” He didn’t look up.

  “Why are you having a fiesta?” I asked.

  He shrugged, still not looking up. “Because it’s Friday,” he said. “And we had the Oktoberfest last weekend.”

  “Oktoberfest?”

  He laid the book at his side and began sifting through the parts. “You know, Wiener schnitzel, spaetzle, that kind of thing.”

  “What the heck is a winger spatula?”

  He giggled and blew a curl out of his eye. “Not winger spatula. Wiener schnitzel. It’s a traditional German veal dish.”

  “Are you German?”

  He looked at me as if I’d just asked the most ridiculous question he’d ever heard. “Of course not,” he said, and that seemed to be the explanation for everything. Walter’s family was having a fiesta because they’d already had Oktoberfest, and they’d had Oktoberfest because of course they’re not German. Made perfect sense in Walterville.

  I rested my hands on my thighs and leaned forward, picking through the pieces. “So you think you can help with this?”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’ve built most of an MK4 Roadster kit car with my uncle. I think a little robot will be no problem.”

  “Should we get your uncle?”

  “Nah,” he said. “He’s making salsa right now. I think I’ve got this.”

  I watched as Walter expertly snapped pieces into place, the power brick becoming a car; the car becoming a truck; the truck becoming a . . . robot. He bounced in place as songs changed in the depths of the house. A couple of times he hummed along, as if he’d been listening to fiesta music all his life.

  “Walter?” I finally asked, when he looked like he was nearly done.

  “Yep?” He snapped a hook onto the back of the bot.

  “Does it need a chassis?”

  Again he stopped and gave me the incredulous look. “Why would it need a chassis?” he asked.

  I let out a breath. “I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out if a chassis is food. Are we eating a chassis to night?”

  He lau
ghed, a holding-his-belly, rocking-backward-so-I-could-see-his-tonsils kind of laugh. “You are so funny, Luke Abbott,” he said once he got a hold of himself. “For a second there I thought you were serious.”

  I had been serious. But Walter didn’t need to know that. I held my belly and rocked backward, too, forcing out a laugh to match his.

  He worked for a few more minutes and then held up the bot.

  “Ta-da!” he cheered.

  I gazed at the robot. It looked like an actual robot. It had four big rough-tread wheels, a hook sticking out from one end, and the two pieces I’d had jammed up my nostrils just hours before sticking out of the other end. Wires snaked around the side of it, and when Walter pushed a button on top, the pieces I’d had jammed up my nose slowly closed like a crab’s claw.

  He turned the bot over. “This right here is a color sensor,” he said. His finger trailed wires that snaked up the robot’s side. “It will sense color changes and will follow a trail of color. So you can program it to follow a line, and it won’t ever get off course. It also has a sensor on the front here.” He turned the bot around and showed me what looked like a little camera. “That senses when the bot is getting close to an object and will make it stop before it knocks into anything it shouldn’t. Somewhere you should have a gyroscope, but I don’t see it here.”

  He looked at me expectantly, and I shrugged. Maybe the gyroscope was the thing that had skittered out of my locker and across the hallway floor, landing behind the trash can and I was too afraid of what might be behind a middle school trash can to go after it.

  “Well, if you find the gyroscope, you can attach it, too. It will help your bot orient itself.” He assessed the robot fondly. “Basically what you have here is a very sweet piece of complex machinery. It can do anything from pick up objects to knock stuff down to turn circles in a victory dance. Not too shabby, huh?”

  I nodded, not because I’d understood anything he’d just said, but because he’d looked so triumphant while he’d said it.

  “Walter,” I said, “you really should be on the team. You’re good at building stuff. You want me to ask Mr. Terry about getting you on it? You can have my spot!” Which sounded really generous, but was actually just me trying to replace myself so I no longer had to be on the team.