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

by Jennifer Brown

  “Nah,” he said, getting up and brushing off the front of his jeans. He started dancing in place. “I’ve got cars to build. Did you know that the Mastretta MXT is Mexico’s premiere sports car? It’s got more than 240 horse power and can reach over 140 miles per hour.”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  “If that isn’t reason to have a fiesta, I don’t know what is!” he cried. He flung open his bedroom door, and music and laughter flooded in. Two cousins spilled by, giggling and flinging balloons at each other.

  “Ooh! Balloon fight!” Walter cried. He disappeared into the party.

  It definitely wasn’t any quieter than having the maws and paws around, but the tamales smelled delicious and the music was pretty great and there were cousins with balloons.

  I jumped into the balloon fight after him.

  CHAPTER 10

  PROGRAM NAME: Self-Destruction

  STEP ONE: Robot is minding his own business

  STEP TWO: Girl robots appear with sparkles and hair accessories

  STEP THREE: Now-sparkly robot hides in corner, hoping his battery will die

  I knew it wasn’t going to be good news when Missy the Cruel stood over the robot for a solid ten minutes without saying anything. I pushed the same button Walter had pushed at his house, and waited for the pincers to close. Instead, a loud buzz emitted from the power brick and the robot shivered and then did nothing. Clearly, the robot just didn’t like me.

  “That’s the ugliest robot I’ve ever seen,” Missy said. “I should have known you’d mess it up. Why did we let Loser Luke get his loser hands on it, anyway?” she asked the group at large. “We’ll never win anything now.”

  “I think it’s kind of cute,” Mikayla said. She pointed at the hook with her big toe. “We could put some rhinestones on the tail here.”

  “It’s not a tail,” I said. “It’s a hook.”

  “For—” one Jacob said.

  “What?” the other Jacob finished. I cringed. I hated it when they shared a two-word sentence. It really seemed unnecessary. And creepy.

  “For . . . hooking things,” I said.

  “Like . . . ?” Stuart prodded. He popped a sunflower seed into his mouth.

  “Like . . . things,” I said. “I don’t know. Things that need hooks to hook them. I’m sure something will need to be hooked.”

  “Well, that just seems really dumb,” Missy the Cruel said. “It figures that you can’t even tell us what the parts are for. I say we tear it apart and start over.” She reached for the robot.

  “No,” I said, lunging forward and grabbing it before she could get her miniature hands on it. Even though I hadn’t technically been the one to build it, I still felt kind of protective of the robot. It had sat on my dresser all weekend and stared at me with its two eye stalks. Or what ever those things were Walter had put on the top of it that looked like eye stalks. It kind of felt like a pet now.

  “Why should you get the only say?” Stuart said. He crunched a sunflower seed. “It’s not your robot. We’re a team. I’m with Missy. I say we should start over.”

  “Maybe we could just tie some yarn to its nose,” Mikayla suggested. “I can tie bows with my toes, did you know that?”

  “Everyone in the world knows that,” I said. “And it’s not a nose. It’s a gripper. And it doesn’t need bows.”

  “A gripper?” Missy said incredulously. “That doesn’t sound very technical.”

  “Well, it grips things, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  “I think you’re looking for the word ‘claw,’ ” Jacob said.

  “I don’t know,” the other Jacob said. “It’s not really very clawlike. It’s only got two pieces. A claw should have at least three, don’t you think?”

  “Good point, Jacob.”

  “Thank you, Jacob.”

  “They’re forceps,” Missy interjected. “If you were paying attention in vocab at all, instead of eating glue, you would know that.”

  “I don’t know, they look more like tongs to me,” Stuart said. He mimicked a tonging motion with his hands.

  “I can work salad tongs with my toes,” Mikayla said.

  “We know,” we all said in unison.

  All except one person, of course. The one person hanging out in the back of the room in his camouflage jacket not saying anything to anyone. Lunchbox Jones. I chanced a peek to see if he was still awake. He was, but he had his head down, his chin resting on his lunchbox. He was watching us silently.

  His eyes met mine. I looked away quickly.

  “Right,” Missy said matter-of-factly. “Time to say goodbye to Loser Luke’s lame design.” I had been so rattled by meeting Lunchbox’s gaze, I was too slow to react. Before I could even reach out, Missy had snatched up the robot and had begun taking off the parts that Walter had put on.

  “No,” I said, reaching for it. “Not the eye stalks! At least leave the eye stalks!”

  But Missy didn’t listen to me. Of course. Missy never listened to anyone but herself. Soon she was holding just the power brick. Mikayla was fashioning rhinestones that she seemed to produce out of nowhere onto some large, flat pieces. The Jacobs rolled a wheel back and forth between each other, every so often cheering over points gained in a secret game only they understood. And Stuart was using the color sensor cable to dislodge a sunflower shell out from between two molars. I sat heavily at my Life Skills desk.

  Why bother? All the work I had put in—okay, all the work Walter had put in—was undone. Missy would never let me have a say. Let her win.

  I glanced up at the ceiling tile above Evan Miller’s desk, the one with all the pencils stuck in it.

  Well, if I couldn’t win with the robot, at least I could gain some kind of victory. I leaned over and rooted around in my backpack until I found the pencil stub I’d been using for the past week. It was so short I had to contort my hand to write with it. It had teeth marks in it—which was somewhat unsettling since I hated the taste of pencils and never chewed mine—and the eraser was flat and slick.

  The perfect pencil to retire.

  I got up and gave it one last shaving, almost losing it in the sharpener. Then took it back to my desk and lined up the perfect shot. I could have gotten closer—say, Amber Watts’s desk, which had a much straighter path than mine—but that would have been an unfair advantage, and thus cheating according to the unofficial rules of the unofficial official game of Pencil Stick. Plus, throwing from my desk, there was always a chance that I would miss. And since Missy the Cruel was standing directly on the other side of Evan’s desk, my pencil might possibly fall and land right on the top of her head. Bonus.

  I decided to go with a traditional paper airplane throw method, winding up and giving a few practice aims. Satisfied with my trajectory, I pulled my arm back and let loose. My pencil stub sailed through the air and found its home—right smack in the center of the ceiling tile. I threw my arms up in victory just as Missy turned.

  “And another thing, Loser Luke Abbott,” she said, holding the robot. Her eyes traveled up to the ceiling tile, grew round, and then narrowed into two slits again as she looked at me. A grin crept up one side of her mouth. “Never mind,” she said mildly.

  This was bad. Very, very bad. There was no way Missy Farnham was going to let me get away with this.

  I sat at my desk and wondered about all the ways I could get in trouble for defiling school property.

  I imagined myself being a high school outcast. That’s Luke Abbott. You know, the guy who vandalized the middle school? We should stay far away from him. Protect our reputations.

  I imagined myself being kept in a special dorm in college. Here you go, Mr. Abbott. Your room is on the left—the one with no ceilings. We call this the defiling delinquents’ wing.

  I imagined myself trying to get a job and being turned away. I’m sorry, Mr. Abbott, but we have ceilings at this business, and your record clearly indicates that you can’t be trusted with those.

  I imagined mys
elf shelving library books and washing beakers in the chemistry wing as punishment until I was forty. Happy fortieth birthday, Mr. Abbott. You’ve worked off approximately one-sixteenth of your ceiling debt with us.

  I really needed to stop imagining things.

  After a few minutes, Mr. Terry came into the room. “Hello, team,” he said. “Good to see you’re all here. I have some things to show you. How’s the robot coming?”

  Mikayla held up a part with each foot. They sparkled. “We’re beautifying,” she said.

  “It’s just about finished,” Missy added. She snapped two more pieces in place. “There. That should do it.” She held up the robot. It looked pretty much exactly like it had looked before.

  “Much—”

  “Better,” the Jacobs added.

  “Are you kidding me? It looks just like it did when I brought it in,” I said. “You’re such a cheat—”

  Missy glared at me and then flicked her eyes up toward the ceiling tile. “Looks great, Missy,” I mumbled.

  “That’s the spirit!” Mr. Terry said. “I like to see the team working together. And so will the judges when we go to competition. Being good sports is very important in robotics. Can’t win without it.”

  Oh, great. We wouldn’t win unless Missy Farnham was a good sport? We would never win. Which, I guessed, wasn’t a totally bad thing. We were Forest Shade Middle School, after all.

  “Come on,” Mr. Terry said. “I need to show you something.”

  We followed him out of the classroom, Missy walking right next to him and carrying the robot. I lingered in the back, but not too far back, because I could feel Lunchbox Jones’s ox breath behind me, could hear the squeak of his lunchbox swinging back and forth on its handle.

  “Where are we going?” one of the Jacobs whispered to the other.

  “I was going to ask the same thing,” the other Jacob responded.

  Mr. Terry led us through the empty cafeteria, where the custodian was polishing the floor, down the sixth grade hallway, and into the industrial tech room. Back in one corner was a large rectangular table standing on two saw horses. Mr. Terry went to the table and ran his hand along one edge.

  “This is our competition table,” he said. He pulled a big roll of canvas out of a nearby cardboard box, stood at one end of the table, and unrolled the canvas, which perfectly fit the dimensions of the table. “And this,” he said, slightly out of breath, “is our mat.”

  We all leaned over the table and took a look. The mat was covered with lines and pictures and squares made out of dotted lines, kind of like a map.

  “We’ll put the obstacles in these squares,” he said. “And the robot will maneuver over the table completing tasks around those obstacles.”

  Stuart gazed at the robot, then back at the table, and then at the robot again. “How will it know what to do?” he asked.

  “We’ll program it using that computer over there,” Mr. Terry said, gesturing to a laptop on a desk near the industrial tech teacher’s office.

  “We’ll program it?” Stuart asked. “Us? Does anybody here know how to program a robot?”

  “Not exactly,” Mr. Terry said, scratching his neck uneasily. “But it can’t be too hard for a bunch of young people such as yourselves to figure out. I guess.”

  “You mean even you don’t know how?” Mikayla asked. “So nobody can do it?”

  We all looked at one another, each of us shrugging, except for Missy, who shrugged at everyone else but glared at me. And Lunchbox, whom nobody would make eye contact with, but who had nothing to say, anyway.

  “Huh,” Mr. Terry finally said. “Looks like we’ll have a bit of a learning curve ahead of us, then. I thought maybe since some of you were big video game players . . .”

  He directed his gaze at me, but I pretended to be really interested in the state of the toe of my shoe at that particular moment.

  “Luke?” he prodded.

  I turned up my palms in defeat. “I know how to beat them, not program them.”

  Missy made a noise. “Figures,” she said. “You know what else Luke knows, Mr. Terry? He definitely knows how to stick pencils in the ceiling tiles in the classrooms. He threw one in yours today.”

  Mr. Terry looked weary. “Thank you, Missy,” he said. “Let’s go back to the classroom.”

  CHAPTER 11

  PROGRAM NAME: Sink Terror

  STEP ONE: Robot needs refreshing

  STEP TWO: Robot stumbles upon terror at bathroom sink

  STEP THREE: Robot races away, shrieking

  I didn’t get in trouble for the ceiling tile. I’d braced myself for it and had slunk around the school for days, jumping half out of my skin every time I saw Principal McMillan coming my way. Once I nearly walked right into him rounding a corner in the hallway and actually screamed out loud.

  When we got to Life Skills class Tuesday, however, the ceiling tile above Evan Miller’s desk was empty, except for a whole lot of holes. Mr. Terry’s desk also sported a new pencil cup that was brimming with sharpened pencils. My stub pencil wasn’t there. I felt sad that it had gone from being the centerpiece of the beautiful ceiling tile, there for everyone to admire and appreciate, to most likely being in the Dumpster behind the field house. Also, since nobody but Missy had witnessed it, I had no proof that I had actually gotten it up there. And people were not given to just taking other people’s word for it when it came to Pencil Stick.

  But at least I never got in trouble for it. Mr. Terry must have figured he had bigger things to worry about than the ceiling tile, and he couldn’t afford to lose a robotics team member, even though that member knew absolutely nothing about how to program a robot.

  Plus everyone was really mad at Missy for tattling. Which would have been awesome had she not been absent from school for the whole rest of the week. It wasn’t very fun to be mad at someone who wasn’t there to know you were mad at them.

  But we were mad, especially those of us with the highest Pencil Stick scores to uphold, and most of our time that week was spent pondering the ways we could get back at Missy Farnham for what she did. I voted strongly for a jump-rope song, which I was still trying to formulate:

  Missy, Missy, she’s a sissy.

  She does things that are really fishy.

  And her underwear are crispy.

  And she eats rocks.

  It was still a work in progress. Also, I was starting to understand why I didn’t do very well in the poetry unit last year.

  And when we weren’t talking about revenge on Missy, we were trying to decide when would be a good time to start the Pencil Stick game over. Would Mr. Terry be more likely to notice, now that he knew it had happened the first time? Or would he assume we would be too scared to start the game over and so be less likely to notice? Maybe if we started the game over on a different ceiling tile he wouldn’t notice? Or maybe we should try another class? Maybe Señora Vasquez’s Spanish class. She noticed everything, which would definitely give the game higher stakes.

  By the time Friday got here, I was so exhausted from all the thinking and planning, I wasn’t sure how I’d ever make it through another round of football in gym class.

  “I’ve got licorice,” Walter said when I got to his locker. He twirled a licorice whip in front of my nose.

  “Nah,” I said. “Thanks, anyway.” I moved around him to my locker.

  The licorice whip swung around once more and then just hung there. Walter looked stunned. “You don’t want any?” he asked. His voice was soft and wary, like they do in the movies when they have to defuse a bomb and they aren’t sure if they should cut the blue wire or the red wire and suddenly the guy doing the cutting realizes that he’s colorblind, anyway. “What does this mean?” I heard him ask under his breath.

  I opened the locker. The empty beat-up robot box mocked me from inside. I kicked it for good measure, shoved my whole backpack into the locker, and shut the door.

  “I’m not very hungry,” I said.

  “
Okay,” Walter said in a way that sounded anything but actually okay. “We’ll just . . . walk, then? I guess? Can we do that?”

  “Sure.” But I found myself walking very slowly.

  “So my uncle and I put on the sunroof last night,” Walter said. “Actually, the hardest part was using the sheet metal shear. Well, that’s not exactly true. The hardest part was getting my mom to let us use a sheet metal shear, because she was worried that I’d cut off my whole arm or my head or something. But my uncle talked her into it, because he’s the big brother and says he has his ways of making her remember that, and once we got started”—he made two zipping sounds and swished his hands around—“we were done! Easy peasy! And”—he flailed his arm around dramatically and rolled his head on his neck—“arm and head intact. Awesome, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. But it was obvious I wasn’t into it, even more than usual. I wondered if maybe I should splash some cold water on my face to wake up a little.

  “You sure you don’t want some licorice?” he asked, swinging it at me again.

  “Yeah, I actually think I’m going to stop in the restroom on my way to the gym. I’ll catch you at lunch, okay?”

  Walter looked really uncertain now. Maybe even a little scared. “Okay. Sure, Luke. No problem. See you then.”

  I ducked into the boys’ room that nobody ever used back in the corner by the guidance office before he could ask any more questions, like if I was okay or if I needed anything or another one of those questions that grown-ups were always asking. Walter was kind of like a grown-up in a kid’s body, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he started saying grown-up things. Bless your heart, Luke, you let me know if there’s anything I can do. But that didn’t mean I wanted to answer those kinds of questions.

  Mostly because I couldn’t. I mean, was there anything wrong with me? I didn’t know. Seemed like maybe a lot of things were wrong, but I wasn’t used to a lot of things being wrong in my life. I was exhausted. I was still mad about my last conversation with Rob. I was dreading Friday night with the maws and paws. And I was stuck on the robotics team with Missy the Cruel and Lunchb—