I did a bunch of high-quality thinking, trying to come up with an answer to the question, “Where is your box?” I figured that this kid with the beret, having spent a few days in a wooden box, and going without food or water, might believe that all kids lived in boxes, making me the boxless freak while he was the normal kid.
“I don’t live in a box,” I said, “but it looks really cool and fun.”
No, I didn’t really believe that living in a box was cool and fun, but I was being nice to a person from a different culture. Mom says it’s important to be nice to everyone, not just people who look like us and talk like us and smell like us. I think she’s right, except when it comes to girls. Being nice to girls goes against everything I stand for.
So I said to the kid, “Would you like to come out of your box? Are you hungry? I can fix a snack—do you like grilled cheese sandwiches? Grape juice? We also have milk, but milk snots me up. Does milk snot you up?”
No answer from the boy, who was still giving me that creepy Where is your box? look. His head was tilted at a weird angle, and he was scanning me up and down and side to side, like I was a book he was reading. Then it dawned on me that he must be totally stiff and achy after being stuck in a box for who knows how long. He needed my help!
I reached in to yank him out, putting my hands under his Frenchy armpits, and pulled kind of hard, and I came away with the top half of a boy, his hips and legs and feet left behind in the box.
I just killed the boy in the box!
Ackkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!
I couldn’t think. I needed to think. Ackkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk! I just killed him! Ackkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!
Just as I was about to go call 911, my brain kicked in, and I noticed that the kid didn’t look close to dead, and there was no blood or guts anywhere. And then I saw cables sticking out of where his belly ended, the kind you use to hook up game machines and DVD players to a TV.
A kid with cables? Maybe on Planet Weird! I held him as far away from me as I could. What I really wanted to do was throw him as far away as I could, and hide in my closet until Mom and Dad came home. They’d know what to do. They always know what to do.
But I didn’t want to hurt the poor kid. A near-hysterical giggle bubbled out of my chest—hurt him? I had just torn him in half! At the giggle, the boy smiled at me like he didn’t know that I had left the lower half of him in the crate. I had seen worms survive when chopped in two, but never a kid.
And that could mean only one thing. The kid was—drumroll, please—a fake. A machine! A robot! Cool, cool, cool. Even though Norman wasn’t sent to me as a birthday gift, I was highly jazzed. We owned a talking robot! Could be lots of fun. Way better than a new bike or a snowmobile.
I sat the top half of Norman on the rug and quickly pulled the rest of his pieces out of the box—hips and legs covered by jeans and feet covered by socks and shoes—and lined them up in the proper order. Everything smelled new: new jeans, new socks, new shoes, new kid.
Meanwhile, Norman was giving me a funny look.
“Êtes-vous bien?” he asked. “Are you okay?”
I realized that I probably looked as pale and weird as I felt. So I slapped my face to move some blood there, smiled like everything was shipshape, and looked around to make sure this wasn’t a crazy dream. But everything looked too normal and boring to be part of a dream. Everything except the broken-in-six robot kid from France.
“I’m fine,” I said. “But what about you? You’re in pieces!”
“Oui,” said Norman. “And eager to be assembled, s’il vous plait.”
I gazed at the top half of the boy, and at the body parts I had just pulled out of the box. “You’re a robot, right?” I asked.
The kid flickered his eyes like he was searching his brain. Later I learned that Norman has no brain, just an advanced Axiom 96 quad-core central processor in his head, and lots of microprocessors and sensors throughout his body. But it’s still not later.
“An android?”
“Non, not an android.”
“A cyborg?”
“Non, not a cyborg.”
I couldn’t think of anything else he might be.
“Excusez-moi,” the boy said. “Ask me if I’m an artificial, genetically enhanced, cybernetically integrated, bionically modified life-form.”
O-kayyy. “Are you an artificial, genetic . . . whatever you just said?”
“Oui!” he said, smiling weirdly, the left side of his smile going way up and the right side hardly moving. “Model number NRM 2000-B at your service.”
“Cool,” I said. “So, um, hi, model number NR—uh, what did you say?”
“Model number NRM 2000-B at your service,” he repeated.
“That’s a mouthful!” I said. “Can I call you something else? How about . . .” I searched my brain, and the only name that popped out was this one: “Norman? I’m Matt, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Matt,” the machine said. “Mon frère.”
As has already been proven, I’m not the smartest kid in the world, but I do know that mon frère means “my brother.” My brother? The crazy robot must have wonky programming, I thought. “Garbage in, garbage out,” my dad likes to say.
Wonky programming or not, I realized that Norman could be a cool toy, once I got him snapped together. Maybe I could even train him to fetch comic books or my iPod. And fix sandwiches for me while I’m watching TV! Oh! Oh-oh-oh! And do my homework—at least math problems that normally give my brain trouble! And a thousand other things!
I always thought it would be fun to be so rich that I had my own butler. I guess a robot butler named Norman would have to do.