On Sunday afternoon, while Elena was off at Juniper’s house, Lucy lay on the couch, finally starting to write down the requirements for a Let’s Have Fun Club coding badge. Maybe when Elena saw them written officially in the handbook, she’d get excited the way she had started to get excited about the dog-walking badge.
Lucy put the handbook down on the coffee table after she had a list of half a dozen items, and then set the timer for her computer hour. It was bliss to be able to use her computer time in perfect freedom. She wanted to try out some new ideas for animating her name. It would be cool to start with all the letters doing the same thing, and then have them change, one letter at a time. What if her L turned a somersault, and then her U jumped up and down, and her C jiggled like Jell-O, and her Y bounced right off the screen and then right back onto it again?
This would be the best animated name in the history of the world!
She giggled, thinking how much she sounded like Nixie now.
But when her name was done, it was amazing to watch the letters doing amazing things that she, Lucy Lopez, had told them to do.
She sensed someone behind her and whirled around to see Elena, clutching the Let’s Have Fun Club handbook as if she might hurl it at the computer screen.
“I thought you were at Juniper’s,” Lucy said, realizing too late how guilty it made her sound. But she didn’t have to feel guilty for using her own hour of computer time—she didn’t!
“Well, I’m not,” Elena said. “For your information, Juniper threw up. Twice. So Dad came to get me. For obvious reasons.”
With a shaking finger she pointed to the open page of the handbook.
“So you’re the one making up requirements for a coding badge, when you wanted to do coding only because I did it first? And now you’re the big know-it-all about coding? Number four: Animate the letters of your name in three different ways. We didn’t even do that activity in my camp. Number five: Help someone else with a coding problem. So now you’re the great coder guru, helping everyone else with their coding problems? What makes you think I’d even want to get another stupid fake badge from a stupid fake club—especially a stupid fake badge you’d get only because you copied me?”
Lucy felt her cheeks flushing, not with guilt, but with anger of her own to match Elena’s.
“Why shouldn’t we both get a coding badge? We both got the bracelet-making badge. We both got the reading badge. We both got the jigsaw-puzzle badge. We both got the hair badge. We’re both working together on the cookie-baking badge.”
“That’s right,” Elena snapped. “Why don’t you get a badge for doing every single thing I do? You already copy everything else about me. I picked out those running shoes with the light-up sparkles, and then you asked Mom for the very same ones.”
But half the girls in Lucy’s class had those light-up sparkle shoes!
“I did my third-grade life-cycle-of-an-animal report on porcupines, and then last month you did your life-cycle report on porcupines, too!”
How was Lucy supposed to remember what animal Elena had chosen for her animal report two years ago?
“And then you went to Mom behind my back to get her to sign you up for coding camp. You couldn’t let there be one thing that’s all mine, could you? Not one thing in the whole entire universe!”
Elena ended with a sound that was half gulp, half sob. And then Lucy couldn’t feel angry anymore.
Oh, why had she ever signed up for coding camp? Why hadn’t she let Elena have one thing in the universe that was all hers? She could still quit the camp. She would quit the camp tomorrow. All the fun she’d had with coding for the last three weeks wasn’t worth making her sister feel so miserable. She didn’t want coding to be her thing if it was going to make tears start running down Elena’s cheeks.
If only she had turned out to have a talent for basketball, like Nolan. If only she liked dogs as much as Nixie did. Although she might have liked dogs better if Bear hadn’t been so big and so…doggy. Maybe walking smaller, better-behaved dogs could be her one special thing.
Or maybe she’d never have one thing in the universe that was all hers, either.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered, with a half gulp, half sob of her own.
Through a veil of tears, she stumbled into the hall and ran upstairs. Alone in their room, she found her Let’s Have Fun Club sash, tucked carefully in a safe corner of her upper bureau drawer. It felt good to rip off all four badges. Then she started into the sash—tearing, tearing, tearing.
Tiny scraps of crepe paper rained down on the bedroom carpet like confetti.
Elena must have thrown away the scraps from Lucy’s torn-up sash because they were gone when Lucy came to bed that night, after a dinner where both girls hardly said a word. Lucy was glad to have the room to herself while Elena was still downstairs watching TV.
She lay in bed hugging her pillow, trying to forget how terrible it had been to hear Elena’s sobs and to see Elena’s tears.
If only, once Lucy quit coding camp, everything would go back to the way it used to be.
Lucy waited until the next morning to tell her parents she didn’t want to go to coding camp anymore. Even though her dad had seemed willing to let her quit on that first day, three weeks ago, she had a feeling they’d be upset if she quit now, with only one week left to go. Both her parents believed in sticking things out. They were both big on following through. And if they asked why she suddenly wanted to quit, and she told them the truth, they might be mad at Elena, and then Elena would be even madder and sadder than she was already.
But Lucy didn’t have to tell them the truth. She could just say she had finally figured out she wasn’t a coding person, the way Vera had calmly announced she wasn’t a dog person. Some people weren’t coding people, just like some people weren’t dog people—even if Nixie thought everyone in the world should be a dog person, even her own nonexistent sister.
“Dad?” she asked after breakfast, once Elena had left to brush her teeth. “I’ve been thinking, and…”
She could tell her father was too busy fixing lunches to be listening, so she let her sentence trail off.
Would Nixie still like dogs even if she had a sister who liked dogs first? It was hard to imagine Nixie switching to loving cats instead.
“And what, honey?” her dad asked. He had been listening, after all. “What have you been thinking?”
Lucy shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” her father gently pursued. “You girls were both so quiet at dinner last night. Is something wrong between you?”
Everything was wrong between them!
But Nixie truly seemed to think it was perfectly fine for two people in the same family to like the same thing. If Nixie had a sister who loved dogs, Nixie would love dogs, anyway. Nixie would never give up on loving what she loved.
“No,” Lucy said to her dad. “I wasn’t thinking anything.”
Except that maybe, just maybe, Nixie was right.