Robots Don't Quit

I am walking too fast and I know it.

The hallway at Westbrook Elementary smells like the same three things every single afternoon: pizza from the cafeteria, somebody's strawberry lip gloss, and the industrial cleaner Mr. Patterson uses on the floors after lunch. I have walked this hallway four hundred and twelve times — I counted starting in September because I was curious about the number and also because I had nothing else to do during the fire drill — and it always smells exactly like that. Some things you can count on.

I am late.

Not late-late, not in-trouble late, but the kind of late where Robert is definitely already standing at the pickup spot with his arms crossed and his one earbud in and that look on his face like he has been waiting for a hundred years when it has been four minutes. I know this because I also know Robert. I have known Robert my entire life — I am ten, and he is fourteen, which feels like a long time until he starts talking about high school like it is a different planet and then it feels like we have never met.

I swing my backpack up higher and walk faster.

I pass the trophy case — second place district spelling bee, 2019, I was not in it — and the bulletin board outside the main office, and that is when I stop.

I do not mean to stop. My feet just do it.

The flyer is yellow. Not pale yellow, not the yellow of a sick sunflower, but the bright loud yellow of something that wants to be seen. It is pinned slightly crooked to the upper left corner of the bulletin board, which is mostly covered in reminders about picture day (already happened) and a sign-up sheet for something called Lunch Buddies (not for me). The yellow flyer says:

WESTBROOK ROBOTICS CLUB
ALL SKILL LEVELS WELCOME
Build. Learn. Solve.
First meeting: Thursday, Room 14B, 3:15 PM
Permission slip required. See Mrs. Alvarez in the main office.

Build. Learn. Solve.

I read it three times. I do not know why the word build is the one that hooks me because I have never built anything in my life except a birdhouse in second grade that my dad said was "structurally interesting" which I am now old enough to know means it was falling apart. But something about that word, build, makes my brain do a thing where it wakes up a little faster. Like the difference between regular morning and the morning before a field trip.

I take the flyer off the board.

Then I feel bad about taking the whole flyer because what if somebody else needs to read it, so I put it back, but then I realize I should take a picture on the school iPad except I already turned mine in at the end of the day so I just take the flyer again and put it in my backpack between my math folder and my library book and walk out of the building.

Robert is at the pickup spot.

His arms are crossed.

One earbud is in.

"Four minutes," he says, without looking up from his phone.

"Three," I say, even though I have no idea.

He looks up. He has our dad's face when he is not smiling, which is broad and steady and a little hard to read. But his eyes are our mom's, quick and dark and missing nothing. He looks at me for exactly one second and says, "You found something."

"I did not find something."

"You have the face."

"I don't have a face."

"Keiya." He says my name like it is the end of a sentence.

I pull the flyer out of my backpack and hand it to him. He reads it. His expression does not change, which is normal for Robert, but he reads it twice, which means he is actually reading it and not just pretending to read it.

"Robotics," he says.

"Yes."

"You know anything about robotics?"

"Not yet."

He hands the flyer back. "Okay."

"Okay meaning yes or okay meaning stop talking?"

"Okay meaning I don't have an opinion about it." He puts his earbud back in. "Kayla's with Mrs. Patterson. She lost a bead going down the slide."

This is how conversations with Robert end. Not badly. Just completely.

Kayla is standing outside the second-grade portable with one hand on her hip and a very specific look on her face that means she is waiting for someone to acknowledge that something unfair has happened to her.

She is seven years old and she has already perfected this look. I don't know if that's impressive or terrifying.

Her braids are perfect except for one near the left side of her face that is missing its bottom bead. She keeps touching the end of it like she is checking if it is still gone. It is still gone.

"I looked everywhere," she announces, before either of us says anything. "In the wood chips and everything."

"We'll get you a new one," Robert says, and takes her backpack off her without being asked because that is the kind of thing Robert does when he is not being fourteen.

Kayla considers this for a moment, then accepts it and falls into step beside us. Her remaining beads click and clack as she walks. She loves the sound of them. She has told me this four separate times — once while I was trying to read, once while I was asleep, and twice just as general information. She clicks them on purpose sometimes, a little rhythm she makes without thinking about it.

"Keiya found something," Robert says.

I look at him. He does not look back.

"What did you find?" Kayla asks, immediately interested in a way that means she will not let this go.

"A club," I say.

"What kind?"

"Robotics."

Kayla thinks about this for half a block. Her beads click. Then: "Can the robots dance?"

Robert makes a sound that is almost a laugh. For Robert that is practically a standing ovation.

Our house is eleven minutes from school if we walk at a normal pace, eight minutes if Kayla does not stop to examine anything on the ground, and fifteen minutes if it has rained because then she has to step around every worm on the sidewalk individually. Today it has not rained so we make it in nine, which is pretty good.

The house is a dark green split-level on Calder Street with a basketball hoop in the driveway that my dad put up when Robert was nine and has never once been taken down even in winter. There is a flag by the front door — the Air Force flag, the blue one with the eagle — that my dad put up when he retired and that my mom says is fine as long as he never puts up anything that plays music. There are two bikes in the carport and a recycling bin that is always too full because we apparently generate a lot of cardboard in this house.

It is home. It looks exactly like home. I love it in the specific way you love something you have never had to think about loving.

We have a routine on school days. Robert goes upstairs. Kayla has a snack and watches exactly thirty minutes of television before homework. I do homework at the kitchen table because my room is too interesting and I will stop doing homework to look at something. Then we reconvene for dinner at six, which is when Dad gets home, and we eat as a family because this is a rule and also because my mom genuinely likes it, which means it is not really a rule so much as just a thing we do.

Today I do my homework in twenty-two minutes because I want time to think about the flyer before dinner.

I take it out and put it on the table in front of me.

Build. Learn. Solve.

I open my notebook — the one with the dark green cover that I picked specifically because it matches my glasses — and I write those three words at the top of a fresh page. Then I sit and look at them.

I don't know anything about robots. I know they exist. I know they are used in factories and in surgery and in movies where they are either helpful or trying to destroy humanity. I know that building one is not the same as watching one. I know I have never done anything like this before.

I also know that I am good at things I have never done before, given enough time and a decent set of instructions.

I pick up my pen and write: What do I actually need to know?

Then I stare at that too, because the honest answer is: everything.

Dinner in the Coley house has a sound.

It starts with my dad's car in the driveway — the particular thunk of the door, then footsteps on the porch, then the front door opening in a way that is slightly louder than necessary because my dad does most things slightly larger than necessary, not because he is loud but because he has a big presence and the house just responds to it. Then Kayla yells "Daddy" from wherever she is. Then there is the sound of him picking her up, which is a whole production involving squealing, even though she is seven and technically too old for this, and nobody says that including Kayla.

Tonight my mom is already home, which doesn't always happen. She is still in her work clothes — dark pants, a white blouse, her hair in the twist-out she did on Sunday — but she has taken her shoes off, which is the signal that she is transitioning from work Kay to home Kay. She is at the stove finishing the rice and she and my dad do the thing they always do when he comes in, which is a kiss on the cheek and then a quick conversation that is not really about anything except catching up and is also somehow always about everything.

Robert comes downstairs. He goes directly to the cabinet for a glass of water. He is wearing his headphones around his neck.

Kayla is already at the table. She has put her braid with the missing bead in front of her like evidence.

We sit down.

For approximately ninety seconds nobody says anything because we are eating and in this house we actually eat. Then my dad looks up and says, "Keiya's quiet."

"I'm thinking," I say.

"About what?" my mom asks.

I reach into my hoodie pocket and put the flyer on the table.

My dad picks it up before my mom can. He reads it. His face does not change much — this is a thing he shares with Robert, the face that does not change — but his eyes move over the words carefully. He reads the whole thing before he says anything, which is a thing he does that I respect.

"Robotics club," he says.

"There's a robotics club?" my mom says, leaning over to look. "Since when?"

"The flyer says first meeting is Thursday." I take a bread roll. "I want to go."

My mom looks at me. Then at the flyer. Then back at me. "Is there a cost?"

"I don't know. I'll find out tomorrow."

"What's the time commitment?"

"I'll find out tomorrow."

"Is it—"

"Kay." My dad says her name the same way she says mine. End of a sentence. She looks at him. He is almost smiling. "Let her tell us she wants to do it first."

My mom picks up her fork. "I know she wants to do it. I'm asking the practical questions."

"I want to do it," I say. "And I will find out the practical answers tomorrow."

My dad points at me with his bread roll. "That's the move."

"Can robots dance?" Kayla asks. She is asking the table generally.

"Some of them," my dad says, completely seriously. "There's a robot from Boston Dynamics that can do backflips."

Kayla's eyes go wide. She looks at me like I am personally responsible for this information. "Keiya. Backflips."

"I know."

"You have to make a backflip robot."

"That is not a beginner project, Kayla."

"So? You're smart."

Robert, who has been eating steadily and saying nothing, says: "She's got a point." He does not look up.

I look at my brother. He is cutting his chicken with the focused efficiency of someone who has somewhere to be, which he does not. That is just how Robert eats.

"Thank you," I say.

"Didn't say you'd do it in the first week." He takes a bite.

"Robert." My mom's warning voice.

"I'm agreeing with her."

My dad sets his fork down and folds his hands on the table, which is his signal that he is going to say something and everybody else should let him say it. We all know this signal. Even Kayla stops eating, and Kayla does not stop for much.

"Here's what I know about starting something new," my dad says. He does not rush this. He never rushes. "You're going to walk in knowing less than most of the other kids. That's a fact. You haven't done it before and some of them have. That's also a fact." He looks at me. "What you do with that gap is the whole question."

I nod.

"The kids who quit," he says, "quit when the gap feels too big. The kids who don't — they just keep showing up until the gap gets smaller. That's the whole secret. It is not more complicated than that."

My mom is looking at him. She has a small smile on her face that I have seen before. It means she has heard this speech before and also that she does not mind hearing it again.

"Go Thursday," my dad says. "See what it is. Come home and tell us."

"Okay," I say.

"Backflips," Kayla says again, quietly, to herself. Like a reminder.

I fill out the permission slip after dinner. My mom signs it. She reads the whole thing first, including the part about liability that is printed in very small font at the bottom, because she is an accountant and that is what accountants do.

"No cost," she says, which I can tell satisfies her. She hands it back.

I put it in the front pocket of my backpack where I will not forget it. Then I go upstairs and get ready for bed and then I get in bed and I lie there looking at the ceiling.

I can hear Robert's music faintly through the wall. He's always working on something — beats, he calls them, layers of sound he builds on his laptop with headphones on for hours. Sometimes I can't hear anything. Sometimes I can feel the bass more than hear it. Tonight it is something slow and a little heavy, like a question the music is trying to answer.

I think about the flyer.

Build. Learn. Solve.

I think about what my dad said about the gap. I think about walking into a room where other people already know things I don't know, which is a thing I have done before and have never once liked.

I open my notebook to the page with the three words on it.

Under What do I actually need to know? I write: Everything. And then under that I write: Okay but like. What specifically.

I make a list:

1. What parts does a robot have
2. How do you make something move that isn't alive
3. What is a servo (I saw this word on a website)
4. Can I actually do this

I look at number four for a while. Then I cross it out because it is not actually a research question.

I put the notebook on my nightstand and close my eyes.

Thursday is in three days.

Three days is enough time to find out what a servo is.

I think.