Chapter 19: We Should Be Over All the Butterflies

The regional robotics competition, the one Dylan’s whiteboard had been counting down to for over a month, was at the community college across town. The gym was twice the size of the one at Harmon Heights High School, and by nine on Sunday morning the parking lot was already full of minivans and kids in matching team shirts.

Eliana was standing by the bike rack outside the main doors when Lexie came across the lot from the bus stop with her hood up and her bandaged hand in her pocket.

Dylan had asked them both on Friday. He had stopped them in the hall outside civics, swaying slightly, three empty cans of Monster sticking out of his backpack.

“Competition’s Sunday,” he’d said, looking somewhere between the two of them. “You should come.”

“Us?” Lexie had said.

“The clamp girl and the cable girl.” He’d nodded, like it was obvious. “You’re both weird. Come.”

And then he had walked into the door frame and kept going.

Now Lexie stopped in front of her, and for a second neither of them said anything.

“Birdie?” Eliana said.

Lexie looked at the sky.

“Rosebud,” she said. “Every time I say it, I die a little.”

“It’s you.”

“Obviously it’s me. Who else would be this miserable?” Lexie pushed her hood back and looked at the doors, at the crowd pouring through them. “So. Rules.”

“Rules,” Eliana agreed. She had thought about this most of Saturday night. “One. We stay away from Alfred. Every meter Emma owns jumps when I walk past it. I don’t know what we do to electronics, but I know it’s something, and I’m not frying his robot in front of a panel of judges.”

“So we’re spectators who can’t spectate.”

“We can spectate,” Eliana said. “From the top row of the bleachers.”

“Amazing. Best seats in the house.” Lexie sighed. “What’s two?”

Eliana looked at the crowd. Hundreds of people, parents and kids and teachers, all moving at once, all wearing name tags and matching shirts, all looking more or less the same.

“Two,” she said. “We watch everyone.”

Lexie followed her look. Her jaw tightened.

“It likes crowds,” she said quietly.

“It likes crowds,” Eliana said. “And it likes being where people are happy.”

They stood there a moment longer. Then Lexie pulled her hood back up, and Eliana clicked her pen cap once, and they went inside.

The pit was a long row of folding tables along one side of the gym, each one covered in tools and cables and laptops and kids in matching shirts, with a robot sitting in the middle of each table like a centerpiece.

Lexie found Harmon Heights near the end of the row by the sign, which somebody had made out of a pizza box and a Sharpie.

Dylan was standing behind the table. Or swaying behind it, more accurately, with a Monster in each hand and the expression of someone who had been awake since Thursday.

“You came,” he said. He sounded genuinely surprised.

“You told us to,” Lexie said.

“I tell people a lot of things. Nobody listens.” He set one of the Monsters down very carefully, like it might explode, and gestured at the table with the other. “Look at him.”

Alfred Esquire the Third was sitting in the middle of the table, and he looked like himself, mostly. Same shape. Same label-maker name tape across his chest. But his chest panel was open, and inside, where everything had been black and melted two weeks ago, there was a new board, bright green and crowded and absolutely covered in tape.

“Backup board,” Dylan said proudly. “It’s ugly. It works.”

“Is he still Alfred, though?” Lexie asked. “If you swapped out his whole brain?”

Dylan opened his mouth, closed it, and stared at the robot like she had just asked him the meaning of life.

“He’s Alfred,” said a flat voice behind him. “Don’t start.”

Emma came around the end of the table with her soldering iron in one hand and a coil of solder in the other. She had the same dark circles as Tuesday, the same gray smudge on her cheek, and she looked at Lexie the way she looked at everyone, like they were a loose wire.

Then she saw who was standing next to Lexie, and her face went hard.

“No,” Emma said.

Eliana stopped where she was.

“Stay away from him,” Emma said. She didn’t raise her voice. She pointed the soldering iron, cold, at the floor between Eliana and the table, like she was drawing a line. “I mean it. Not one step closer.”

“Emma,” Dylan said, mildly. “I invited them.”

“I don’t care who you invited.”

On the table beside Alfred, in the open toolbox, there was a multimeter with its leads still clipped to something. Lexie watched the needle. It had been sitting still.

Eliana took one small step forward, maybe to say something.

The needle jumped.

It swung hard to one side and stuck there, trembling, and Emma looked at it, and then at Eliana, and didn’t say anything at all. She didn’t have to.

Eliana stepped back. The needle settled.

“Okay,” Eliana said quietly. “We’ll sit in the back.”

“The very back,” Emma said.

“The very back.”

Lexie took Eliana’s arm, the one with no pen in its hand, and steered her away from the table before Emma could say anything else. Behind them, Dylan said, “Bye. Thank you for coming. That was weird,” to nobody in particular.

They climbed to the top row of the bleachers, as far from the pit as the gym let them get, and sat.

“So that went great,” Lexie said.

Eliana didn’t answer. She was looking down at the pit, at the little bright speck of Alfred on his table, at Emma bent over him with her iron.

“She’s not wrong,” Eliana said finally. “About me.”

“She thinks you’re sabotaging her.”

“I know. But she’s not wrong that I’m the reason it keeps happening.”

Lexie looked at her. Then she leaned back on her elbows against the top bleacher, so their shoulders touched.

“Well,” she said. “Best seats in the house.”

By noon, Eliana understood the rules of a robotics competition better than she understood volleyball.

It was simpler than it looked. Two robots on a square field fenced in with plexiglass, three minutes on the clock, little foam cubes scattered everywhere, and a set of goals at either end. You got points for every cube your robot stacked. You got more points if your robot stacked them on a higher goal. You lost points if it broke something or drove off the edge.

Alfred didn’t break anything. Alfred didn’t drive off the edge. Alfred, with his ugly taped-up brain, picked up cubes like he had been doing it his whole life.

He won his first match. Then his second.

“Okay,” Lexie said, after the second one, while the Harmon Heights kids in the pit hugged each other. “I get it. That’s actually kind of sick.”

“Look at the arm,” Eliana said, without thinking. “The claw stays flat the whole way up. That’s why he never drops anything.”

Lexie looked at her.

“What,” Eliana said.

“Nothing.” Lexie looked back at the field. “Nerd.”

Eliana felt her face go warm, and she let it.

The third match started badly. The other robot was faster, and it got to the high goal first and started stacking, and Alfred was trailing by six points with a minute left. Down on the field, Emma was gripping the controller so hard that Eliana could see her knuckles from the top row.

Eliana leaned forward without meaning to. Just a little, elbows on her knees, watching Alfred reach for a cube.

Alfred stuttered.

His arm jerked halfway up and stopped, trembling, and for one awful second he just sat there on the field with a cube in his claw while the other robot kept stacking.

Eliana sat back so fast she hit the wall behind her.

Alfred’s arm came back to life. He finished the lift, swung around, and set the cube down on the goal, and the Harmon Heights kids in the pit screamed.

He lost the match by two points.

Eliana didn’t breathe for a while.

“Was that…” Lexie said.

“I leaned forward.”

“From the top row?”

“I leaned forward,” Eliana said again.

Lexie stared at her. Then she stood up, picked up her hoodie, and moved over four seats, to the very end of the row, against the far wall, as far from the field as the bleachers went. She looked at Eliana and patted the bench beside her.

Eliana moved.

“I don’t know what it is with you and that robot,” Lexie said, once they were settled. “But just. Stay back.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“I know.” Lexie pulled her knees up onto the bench. “Don’t lean forward.”

“I wasn’t going to lean forward.”

“Don’t even think about leaning forward.”

They sat there, very carefully not leaning forward, through the next round. Alfred won it.

Somewhere in the middle of the fourth, under the noise of the crowd and the buzzers and the announcer, Eliana felt it.

It was very faint. A pressure, low in her chest, like the hum of a speaker in another room. It wasn’t the field. It wasn’t her. She looked down at her hands to check, and they were still, and the pen was in her pocket, and Alfred was fine.

It was coming from somewhere else.

She turned her head and looked out at the gym. At the pit tables, at the crowd in the stands across from them, at the snack table by the doors, at all the hundreds of people moving and cheering and wearing the same matching shirts.

“Lexie,” she said quietly.

Lexie didn’t look at her. She was already scanning the room.

“Yeah,” she said. “I feel it too.”

Lexie went down for snacks at one, mostly because Eliana was starting to look like she might pass out, and partly because somebody had to keep moving or they were both going to go crazy up there.

The snack table was by the main doors. It was a long folding table covered in a paper tablecloth, with trays of cookies and a bowl of pretzels and a pyramid of juice boxes some parent had built very carefully. Lexie grabbed two juice boxes and a handful of pretzels.

“Lexie! You came!”

Lexie turned around.

Emma was standing at the other end of the table. She had a cookie in each hand and another one in her mouth, and she was smiling. Not a little. All the way, with her whole face, the way Lexie had never once seen her smile in the robotics lab.

“These are so good,” Emma said, through the cookie. “Have you tried these? The chocolate ones. Oh my god.” She held one out. “Take one.”

Lexie looked at the cookie. Then at Emma.

Emma had looked at Lexie, two hours ago, like Lexie was a loose wire.

“I’m good,” Lexie said slowly.

“Your loss.” Emma ate it herself, happily. She turned to a mom in a team shirt who was refilling the pretzel bowl and beamed at her. “Thank you for doing all this. Seriously. It’s amazing.”

The mom looked startled, and then pleased. “Oh! Well, you’re welcome, sweetie.”

Lexie stood there with the juice boxes.

Dylan wandered up to the table, swaying, with an empty can of Monster, looking for another. Emma saw him and lit up.

“Dylan!” She threw her arms around him. Crumbs went everywhere. Dylan stood completely rigid, with his arms pinned at his sides and the empty can still in one hand, staring over her shoulder at Lexie with an expression of total, sleep-deprived confusion.

“Hi,” he said, muffled.

A man with a lanyard and a clipboard came up behind them. A judge. He smiled at Emma.

“You’re Harmon Heights, right? Great comeback in the last round,” he said. “How’s the drivetrain holding up after the rebuild? I heard you swapped the whole board.”

For a second, she just looked at the judge. Smiling.

“It’s great,” she said. “It drives.” A pause. “And it trains.”

The judge waited for more.

There wasn’t any more.

Dylan was staring at her now. The judge nodded politely, made a small note on his clipboard, and moved on.

“I’m going to go check on Alfred,” Emma said brightly, and went.

Lexie watched her cross the gym to the pit. She didn’t move like Emma. Emma walked like she was late for something, head down, fast. This Emma walked like she was enjoying the walk.

At the Harmon Heights table, Emma stopped in front of Alfred. She looked at him for a long moment. Then she put her hand on him.

She laid her palm flat against the metal of his chassis and left it there. She didn’t check anything, or adjust anything. She just stood there with her hand on him and her eyes half closed, for much too long, like she was trying to memorize what he felt like.

Lexie’s stomach went cold.

It does this every time you walk past. Electronics. Electricity. And whatever was wearing Emma’s face had been in the gym at eleven at night with Eliana’s face on.

Then Emma took her hand away, turned, and disappeared into the crowd by the bathrooms.

Lexie stood there.

Twenty minutes later, Emma came out of the hallway by the bathrooms with her soldering iron in one hand and a roll of electrical tape in the other, walking fast, head down, like she was late. She went straight to the pit table and stopped, staring at Dylan, who was covered in cookie crumbs.

“Why,” Emma said flatly, “are you covered in crumbs?”

“You hugged me,” Dylan said.

“I did not hug you.”

“You did. Twenty minutes ago. You were very warm. I didn’t like it.”

Emma looked at him like he had lost his mind. Then she turned to Alfred and got to work.

Lexie pulled out her phone.

Up in the far corner of the top row of bleachers, Eliana’s head came up.

Lexie came back up the bleachers with two juice boxes and her phone still in her hand, and Eliana watched her climb all the way up.

When Lexie dropped onto the bench beside her, Eliana didn’t say anything for a second.

“Birdie?” she said.

“Rosebud.” Lexie shoved a juice box at her. “Drink that. You look terrible.”

Eliana drank it. Her hands weren’t quite steady.

“It touched him,” Eliana said.

“I know.”

“If it does something to him in the final…”

“It’s gone. It went into the crowd by the bathrooms and the real one came out.” Lexie was scanning the gym while she talked, the crowd, the doors, the pit. “I’ll watch. You don’t go anywhere near him.”

“I know.”

“I mean it.”

“I know, Lexie.”

The final was at three. It was Harmon Heights against a team from two towns over, the same team that had beaten them by two points that morning, with a robot that was faster and newer and didn’t have tape all over its brain.

Down on the field, Emma was at the controls. The real Emma. Eliana could tell from all the way at the top of the bleachers, from the set of her shoulders, from the way she stood like she was about to defuse a bomb. Dylan was beside her, technically. He was leaning against the plexiglass with his eyes half closed, swaying very slightly, like a plant in a breeze.

The buzzer went.

Alfred went for the high goal first. The other robot was faster, but Alfred was steadier, and his claw stayed flat the whole way up, every time, and he never dropped anything. Halfway through, the other robot clipped a goal and lost a cube, and the Harmon Heights pit screamed.

Eliana realized she was leaning forward.

Lexie’s hand closed around her wrist, firm, and held on. She didn’t look away from the field. She just held Eliana’s wrist down against the bench, gently, like she was keeping it from floating away.

Eliana sat back.

Lexie didn’t let go.

With thirty seconds left, Alfred was up by four. With ten seconds left, the other robot went for one last cube on the high goal and missed. The buzzer went.

Harmon Heights had won.

The pit lost its mind. Kids in matching shirts were screaming, jumping, hugging each other. Somebody knocked over the pizza-box sign. Down on the field, Emma put the controller down very carefully, like it might break, and then put both hands over her face.

When she took them away, she was smiling. It was smaller than the smile at the snack table had been. Crooked, and a little shaky, and wet at the edges.

It was real.

Beside her, Dylan slid slowly down the plexiglass, sat on the floor of the field, and fell asleep.

Up in the top row, Lexie was on her feet, yelling. Eliana was too. She didn’t know when she had stood up. She was yelling for Alfred, for Dylan asleep on the floor, for Emma with her hands still shaking, as loud as she could from as far away as the gym would let her be.

Somewhere in the middle of it, she realized Lexie was still holding her wrist.

Neither of them let go until the trophy came out.

By the time the Harmon Heights kids finished screaming and the trophy had been passed around twice, it was almost five, and the sky over the parking lot had gone orange.

Lexie had gone to find a bathroom. Eliana waited by the bike rack outside the main doors, where they had started that morning, with her hands in her pockets and the pick at the bottom of one of them.

“Eliana.”

She turned.

Emma was coming across the parking lot toward her. Walking slowly. Enjoying the walk.

She was smiling.

“I wanted to find you before you left,” Emma said. She stopped right in front of Eliana, closer than Emma ever stood to anyone. “I owe you an apology.”

Eliana didn’t say anything.

“What I said on Tuesday. About sabotage.” Emma shook her head, still smiling. “That was really unfair. You came all the way out here for us. You sat in the back the whole time so you wouldn’t bother anybody. That’s, like, the opposite of sabotage.” She put her hand on her chest. “I was wrong about you. I’m really sorry.”

It was exactly what Eliana would have wanted the real Emma to say. Every word of it.

“It’s okay,” she heard herself say.

“It’s not okay. But thank you.” Emma’s smile got wider. “And thank you for coming. Really. It meant a lot.”

Then she stepped forward and hugged her.

It was a warm hug. Too warm. Emma’s arms went all the way around her and held on, and her palms pressed flat against Eliana’s back, both of them, through her jacket, and stayed there. Like she was memorizing what Eliana felt like.

Eliana stood perfectly still.

Over Emma’s shoulder, across the parking lot, she could see the Harmon Heights van with its back doors open. Dylan was asleep in the passenger seat with his mouth open and his forehead against the window.

And Emma was loading Alfred into the back.

The real one. She had her soldering iron in one hand, still, and the other arm under Alfred’s chassis, and she was lifting him into the van very carefully, with her shoulders hunched and her mouth flat, scowling at nothing, the way she always did.

Eliana watched her slide Alfred in, and shut the doors, and climb into the driver’s seat without once looking over.

The Emma hugging her let go.

“Congratulations to us,” she said happily.

Then she turned and walked away across the lot, into the crowd of parents and kids and minivans, and somewhere between one car and the next, Eliana lost sight of her.

She was still standing there when Lexie came back out of the doors.

Lexie looked at her face, then out at the parking lot.

“Birdie?” Lexie said quietly.

“Rosebud,” Eliana said. Her voice didn’t sound like hers. “It hugged me.”