I couldn’t focus at school the next day. My head was filled with little toasters shooting baskets. It was all I could think about. Why had I let Reynolds drag me over to Gerald Forster’s house? Now I had the robot fever.
I had it bad.
“Chocolate milk or regular, Howard?” Margaret asked.
Margaret is the nicest lady in the cafeteria and maybe in the whole school. She’s sort of like my grandma, except she’s bigger and louder and no one likes her food.
“Chocolate, please,” I said. “Better make it two.”
Margaret looked concerned. “Rough day, hon?”
“Margaret, have you ever wanted something so bad it made you sick?”
“Now, what could you possibly want that bad, Howard?” she asked.
Margaret put the milk on my tray, then peered down at me.
“Nothing good ever comes from envy. The Bible says it makes the bones rot. You just remember that, hon.”
Great. Not only did I not have a robot, my bones were rotting. Gerald was going to pay for this!
I carried my sorrows and chocolate milk to the table with the wobbly leg in the very back of the cafeteria. That’s my usual lunch spot. OK, it isn’t the most popular location, but at least it was a safe distance away from Ernie Wilkins. Or, as he’s better known to the lunch crowd, “Wet Willie Wilkins.”
Ernie was a master of the ear assault. From my place at the wobbly table, I’d watch him sneak up behind some unsuspecting kid, put his finger in his mouth until it was good and spitty, and then stick it in their ear. Sometimes he’d get five or six ears before he left the lunch line!
Personally, I’ve never understood the appeal of the multi-Willie attack. Do you really want to put your finger back in your mouth after it’s been in someone’s ear? That’s just gross. But Ernie didn’t seem to mind. Today, he’d hit four victims already, and I saw him stalking a fifth — a new kid named Trevor Duke.
Nobody knew anything about Trevor. Well, except that he was a loner. I don’t mean a loner like me — Trevor was a loner by choice. And he looked the part. He was big and wore a leather jacket and had long black hair covering half his face. But mostly the thing that made him a loner was the way he acted. He didn’t talk to anybody. Not even the teachers. At least not that I’d ever seen. Trevor Duke was a mystery.
A mystery who was about to be introduced to Ernie Wilkins’ moist, disgusting finger.
But then something freaky happened. Just as Ernie was about to deliver the saliva-stab, Trevor grabbed him by the wrist, twisted his arm, and flipped him onto the ground. It was the coolest kung-fu move I had ever seen by a guy holding a corn dog.
My science teacher is Mr. Zaborsky. Personally, I think he looks more like a scientist than a teacher. He’s a little short and kind of chunky, with wild brown hair that doesn’t quite meet in the middle. Mr. Z calls himself a geek and knows all about inventors, and those are just two of the reasons he is my role model.
Well, not my main role model — that would be Benjamin Franklin, the greatest inventor who ever lived. But as far as teachers go, Mr. Z was tops.
“Even if you don’t plan on being a scientist,” he told the class, “science is still very important to your future. Each of you is part of the most technologically advanced generation the world has ever known. You’re using things right now your parents never dreamed of. What are some examples of technologies you have that previous generations didn’t?”
“My phone,” Crystal Arrington said.
“Very good. How is it different from the phone your parents had?”
“It’s prettier,” Crystal said.
Mr. Z smiled.
“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “It’s a lot prettier. It’s also a lot smarter. It takes pictures. It can text. You can play games and watch movies on it. All your parents could do on their phone is talk. And they couldn’t even do that unless they stayed home.”
“Sounds awful,” Crystal said.
“Oh, it was,” Mr. Z said. “If it wasn’t for the pointy sticks and dinosaurs, we’d have had no fun at all.”
The class laughed. Mr. Z scanned the room.
“What else?” he said.
“The Internet,” Tammy Kane said.
“Absolutely. The Internet puts an amazing amount of information right at your fingertips. If my generation wanted to know about something, we had to go to the library or, heaven forbid, talk to each other. Anything else?”
“Robots,” I said.
“Robots!” Skyler Pritchard yelled from way back in the part of the room I call Slackerland. “You mean like in the movies? He’s asking us for real stuff, doofus!”
“OK, first, watch the names,” Mr. Z warned him. “And second, robots are real, Skyler. We have robots that build cars and explore other planets. We have robots that perform delicate surgeries. Robots vacuum our floors and water our lawns. There are walking robots and flying robots and robot dogs, and, as we speak, scientists are developing microscopic nanobots so tiny they can be injected into the human bloodstream. There are a lot of jobs people are doing right now that robots can do just as well. And robots don’t have to sleep.”
“Or eat,” I said.
“Well, everything eats, Howard. It’s just that instead of a cheeseburger, a robot eats electricity. And if he doesn’t get it, he starves just like you and me. But you’re right, you don’t have to give a robot thirty minutes for a lunch break.”
After class, I stopped to talk with Mr. Z.
“This isn’t about school. I just wanted to ask if you know anything about a group called Believer Achievers.”
“The BAs?” he said. “Yeah, I know a lot about them, Howard. I’m actually one of their science advisors. Were you looking for something specific?”
“No, I just kind of wondered what it’s all about.”
“Well, let’s see,” Mr. Z said. “It’s a youth science organization, which I’m guessing you already know.”
I nodded.
“And you might have heard that there are quite a few kids from this school who are members. I’d say the biggest difference between BA and other science groups is that BA has a faith focus, which means we emphasize things like morality and personal responsibility. Is that the kind of information you were looking for?”
“Well, sort of,” I said, digging the toe of my shoe into the carpet.
Mr. Z broke into a broad grin. “And yes, Howard. We build robots.”
I looked up and smiled. Mr. Z can read me like a book.
“They’re a good group. I think you’d like them,” he said. “Right now, we’re getting ready for our annual Robotics Fair. If you get the chance, drop by this weekend and I’ll show you around.”
“I will,” I said.
Imagine that — me and Mr. Z hanging out on a Saturday with a bunch of robots. The future was looking brighter already.