“So how was it?” Lucy’s dad asked her, as she buckled herself into the back seat of the car for the ride home from coding camp.

It was wonderful!

Lucy turned toward Elena, who was in the back seat already, gazing out the window as if she had no interest whatsoever in how Lucy answered the question.

She wanted to ask Elena, Did Preston and Pippa do the same things on the first day of your camp? Did they teach you how to talk to aliens?

She wanted to tell Elena, Now I understand why you want to be on the computer all the time. Even talking about coding is tons of fun!

But something about the stiff way Elena held her shoulders and looked pointedly in the opposite direction made Lucy hesitate.

Swallowing down her enthusiasm, Lucy said casually, “It was okay.”

“Just okay?” her mother asked. “What did you learn so far about coding?”

If she had been alone with her parents in the car, she would have said, I learned computers are dumb, and aliens are dumb, too, and you have to spell out everything for them, like totally everything. And I did a good job of figuring out how to tell aliens what walking is, and how to make a double hair bun, and I think I might turn out to be good at coding, because I knew some of the answers to the teachers’ questions even though I felt too shy to raise my hand and say them.

But Elena kept staring out the window even though there was nothing to see but the same old walls of their same old elementary school.

Lucy took a deep breath. “I didn’t really learn anything. It was just, you know, an introduction kind of day.”

With a noisy exhale, Elena turned away from the window. “It looks like your camp is more basic than mine,” she said, sounding relieved. “On our first day, we learned how precise and exact you have to be when you give instructions to computers. Almost like you’re talking to aliens who just landed on Earth from outer space. It was supercool.”

Now what was Lucy supposed to say?

We learned the same things, and it WAS supercool.

She had a feeling that would be the wrong thing to say.

So she didn’t say anything.

Once they returned home, Elena raced inside to start her hour of computer time before setting the table for dinner. Was Lucy going to start having her own hour of computing time now, to do her own coding projects? Well, once she learned how to do them. What would Elena say then? Lucy pushed that thought away.

Lucy and her father lingered in the car for a moment after the others had gone inside. “If you aren’t enjoying the coding camp,” he told Lucy, “you don’t have to do it. Just because Elena loves something doesn’t mean you have to love it, too. It’s fine for you and Elena to love different things.”

But was it fine for them to love the same things?

Apparently not.

“I do like coding camp,” Lucy whispered. “I like it a lot.”

Her dad raised an eyebrow. She knew she certainly hadn’t made it sound as if she liked it.

“Just not as much as Elena,” she added, even though Elena wasn’t there to hear her.

While Elena was on the computer, Lucy made sure not to loiter behind her chair. Maybe, even though they had always done their badges together, Lucy should make up some new Let’s Have Fun Club badges she could earn by herself, without Elena’s assistance. Vera could help her earn a piano badge. Nolan could help her earn a basketball badge. Nixie could help her earn a dog-walking badge—if they could find a dog to walk. Boogie could help her earn a magic tricks badge; sticking a quarter on your forehead was sort of like magic.

But most of all, she wanted to earn a coding badge with Elena.

After supper both girls went upstairs to read for a while on their matching twin beds in the room they shared.

Before she had even turned the first page, Elena closed her book. “I’m still hungry. Do you want to bake some cookies?”

“Sure!” Lucy said. “We can get started on the cookie-baking badge!”

Elena rolled her eyes, but she hopped up from the bed and was first down the stairs to the kitchen.

The cookie-baking badge had six items on the badge list:

1. Bake chocolate chip cookies because they are the most famous cookies ever.

2. Bake cookies cut out in shapes with cookie cutters. Use at least ten different shapes.

3. Frost a batch of cookies.

4. Make some kind of bar cookies, like brownies or blondies.

5. Make Abuelita’s Mexican wedding cookies.

6. Create your own cookie recipe.

Plus, even though the handbook didn’t say it, the cookies for the badge had to be made from scratch. You couldn’t get a cookie-baking badge for dumping gobs of premade refrigerated dough on a baking sheet and sticking it in the oven for ten minutes.

“So what kind should we make tonight?” Elena asked, as she carried their family recipe box out of the pantry and set it on the kitchen table.

Chocolate chip cookies were definitely the easiest, since they had made them so many times before, though those times didn’t qualify because they hadn’t been done for the badge.

“Chocolate chip!” Lucy announced.

“With nuts?” Elena asked.

It was a joke question: they both loved cookies with nuts.

“Duh!” they said at the same time.

Lucy giggled, and then Elena giggled. Then they were both laughing “like hyenas.” That’s what their father called it whenever they laughed hysterically over things he thought weren’t even that funny.

As they pulled out the flour and sugar canisters, baking soda, cinnamon, and bags of chocolate chips and chopped walnuts from the pantry shelves, Lucy thought maybe she should have chosen cookie baking to teach the aliens during camp.

She would have had to explain measuring to the aliens: how you scoop the flour into the measuring cup and level it off with the side of a butter knife, but you have to pack the brown sugar in nice and tight. When she told the aliens how to cream the butter together with the brown sugar, she’d have to find a way to let them know when it had been creamed long enough. She could make a loop for the creaming motions, but when exactly would the loop stop?

“If you were telling aliens to keep mixing the dough, using one of those coding loops,” she asked Elena, as she was halfway through smushing the butter and sugar together, “how would you tell them when it was mixed enough to stop?”

She remembered too late that this was the wrong question to ask Elena.

Elena’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, we didn’t learn anything today, it was just introduction stuff,” she said, in a high-pitched little-girl voice.

“Well, it was this one boy, Nolan, who told me about the loops,” Lucy hastened to explain. “He knows everything there is to know about computers. Coding is definitely his thing.” Though Boogie had said Nolan knew everything there was to know about everything—so maybe everything was Nolan’s thing.

Elena broke two eggs to add to the batter. Then Lucy started adding in the flour, baking soda, and salt. As the dough got stiffer and stiffer, Lucy’s arm began to ache, but she didn’t ask Elena to take a turn, in case Elena was still mad about Lucy’s loop question.

Lucy did most of the work dropping the dough in rounded spoonfuls onto the lightly greased baking trays, too; Elena had to text Juniper to tell her something she had forgotten to tell her at school.

“Ow!” Lucy yelped, as her wrist touched the side of the last tray, hot from the oven. But the cookies did look scrumptious: golden brown, with the chocolate chips still a bit soft and gooey.

“Maybe baking is your thing,” Elena suggested to Lucy. “Gardening for Dad, dancing for Mom, coding for me, and baking for you.”

“Maybe,” Lucy said doubtfully.

With her mouth full of warm cookie, she had to admit they had turned out extra-yummy. And it was wonderful to have the first cookie-baking badge requirement crossed off.

But she also had a sore arm, specks of dough in her hair, and a burned wrist.

If it hadn’t been for the badge, Lucy would have been just as glad if she had figured out how to give nice clear instructions to the aliens, and they had baked the cookies for her.