For the final week of camp, Pippa told them on Monday afternoon, they’d be learning how to take the first steps toward coding their own simple computer games.
The camp erupted into pandemonium. Two boys at the front of the room gave a good imitation of missiles blasting. Another boy fell off his chair onto the floor, clutching his chest as if he were dead.
Lucy saw Colleen catch Pippa’s eye and give a warning shake of her head.
“These will not be violent games,” Pippa hastened to add.
The missile-exploders and fake dead boy groaned in disappointment.
Lucy hadn’t played many computer games. Her parents liked old-fashioned board games or games played in what they called the great outdoors. But she couldn’t wait to learn how to code one.
Pippa explained that every game had to have an objective—a goal the players were trying to accomplish. Otherwise you’d never know whether you had won. Games had to have rules for what the players were allowed to do to reach the goal. Games were more challenging when players had to overcome obstacles along the way.
The first game they were learning to code was an easy one, where a little ball had to jump through a gap between two moving posts.
Lucy worked half-heartedly on coding the moving-ball game. It was hard to care about a little bouncing ball on the screen when your real-life sister wasn’t speaking to you, and you didn’t know how you were ever going to make things right between the two of you ever again.
“My ball wants to hit the posts,” Boogie said, but then he gave a sheepish grin. “But I bet he could get through them if he wanted to. And if I figured out how to help him.”
He stared at his screen, forehead furrowed.
“Come on, ball!” Boogie encouraged the screen. “Come on, Ballie! Come on, little Ballie-Wallie!”
Then Boogie gave a shout. “Ballie did it! I mean, I did it! Okay, Ballie, I’m going to change the game to make it harder for you. I’m going to make the gap between the posts smaller. Are you ready, Ballie?”
“Sure!” he made Ballie squeak.
Vera had been giving her own little squeaks of agitation as she tried to figure out how the game was supposed to operate.
“My ball wants to hit the posts, too,” she confessed to Boogie. “I don’t know how to fix the game so he can get through.”
“Your Ballie just needs to mess around for a while, to build up his confidence,” Boogie suggested. “Like this.” He leaned over Vera’s computer. The next thing Lucy knew, Vera was giggling. Her Ballie might still be crashing into the posts, but at least he was having fun. And it looked like Vera was having fun, too.
But Lucy wasn’t having fun. All she could think about was Elena’s words: You couldn’t let there be one thing that’s all mine, could you? Not one thing in the whole entire universe! Elena didn’t even seem like a sister right now, more like an alien who had showed up at the house from a faraway galaxy to share a bedroom with her. Talking to Elena—if she ever did talk to Elena again—would be like talking to those aliens from the first day of coding camp.
How would she talk to Elena if Elena was really an alien? She’d have to spell out everything super-clearly.
It’s all right for two sisters to like the same thing!
But maybe an alien wouldn’t know what a sister was.
Lucy remembered how Nixie had tried to explain pets to an alien. She had said a pet was a special kind of animal who loves you better than anyone in the world.
A sister, Lucy could say, is a special kind of human being who loves you better than anyone in the world.
It suddenly occurred to Lucy that no one, not even Nolan, had pointed out to Nixie that she’d also need to explain love to the alien.
How could you ever explain love to an alien? Or to a computer?
Or to a sister?
The next three camp days were devoted to making their own computer games. Friday, the last day of camp, would be the Coding Expo, where the campers could show off their dances, their animated names, their games—everything!
But it was as hard for Lucy to focus on making her own game as it had been to focus on Monday’s sample game. So on Tuesday she just watched what everyone else was making. Maybe she should have quit coding camp if she wasn’t going to be doing any coding anymore.
Nolan’s game, which he had started working on at home, was already so complex no one understood it when he explained it to them, not even Lucy. But from what she could hear, it had plenty of explosive sound effects.
“But no people, animals, or property are harmed in the playing of the game,” Nolan assured them.
Nixie’s game was exactly like the bouncing-ball game, only with a bouncing dog instead of a bouncing ball. Every time the dog bounced through the posts, you got a point. If you got ten points, your parents had to get you a dog. Nixie’s parents couldn’t come to the expo because of work, but she planned to play her game with them on the computer at home.
“They’re terrible at games,” Nixie gloated. “And I’m the one who made the game, so I’m bound to be good at it, so I’ll win, and I’ll get a dog! And I’ll get one you’ll love to walk, Lucy! And you too, Vera!”
To Lucy’s astonishment, Vera and Boogie decided to make their game together. Well, she would have been astonished a week ago, but she wasn’t astonished now. The game had Blobby in it, and Vera drew a face on him with a jolly expression just like Boogie’s. The objective of the game was for Blobby to wander around at random until he bumped into a big green dot, and then the dot turned into a flower.
“Do you get a point for every dot that turns into a flower?” Nolan asked.
Vera and Boogie both shook their heads.
“So what do you get?”
“You get pretty flowers,” Vera said.
“Vera’s drawing the flowers,” Boogie added. “So they’ll be very pretty flowers.”
And just like that, Lucy had an idea—a wonderful idea, an absolutely perfect idea—for her game.
If only Elena would come to the expo! And if only Elena would play Lucy’s game!
The Coding Expo was held in their classroom, but Colleen had gotten permission for it to spill out into the hallway, to have enough space for fifteen coders and their guests.
Lucy hadn’t mentioned the expo to Elena, and Elena hadn’t mentioned it to Lucy. They tried to act normal in front of their parents, but when it was just the two of them, they had barely talked about anything since their big fight on Sunday.
As Lucy sat with her open computer, at a desk in the hall near the library, she waited to see when her parents would come, and if Elena would be with them.
Would Elena criticize her choreographed dances? Get mad that Lucy knew how to animate letters when Elena hadn’t done that in her camp? Most important, would she refuse to play the game?
Next to Lucy, Boogie sat showing Colleen how he had coded the moves for one of Blobby’s dance routines. Vera, Nixie, and Nolan had their desks next in the row. Their families weren’t there yet, either.
“Wow!” Colleen said. “This is so cool!” She lowered her voice. “Believe it or not, I’m terrible at computers. But you’re a good teacher, Boogie. I think I could code a dance for my own Blobby now, if you helped me.”
Boogie beamed. Lucy felt herself beaming, too. Yay for Blobby, and yay for Boogie!
Then she looked up, and there was Elena.
“Mom and Dad are coming later,” Elena said stiffly. “They said I should come over to your expo now, without them, because they had to ‘finish up a couple of things’ first. And you know what that means.”
Nervous as she felt, Lucy stifled a giggle. Their parents were always finishing up a couple of things in their classrooms, and their couple of things always took forever.
Elena giggled, too, and suddenly both girls were laughing hysterically in their old hyena way. It was so good to laugh together again! It was the best thing in the world!
A moment later, the laughter ended abruptly, as if the laughing sound effect on a computer game had been shut off.
It was time for Lucy to ask the question that mattered to her most. “Do you want to play the game I made?”
Elena avoided Lucy’s eyes. “What’s it called?”
Lucy took a deep breath. “It’s called Sisters.”
Elena opened her mouth as if she was about to say something. But then she closed it as if she had changed her mind about saying anything.
Lucy handed her the set of instructions she had typed up and printed out.
The objective of this game is to gather a bunch of flowers to give your sister.
Elena still didn’t say anything, but Lucy could see her eyes glistening.
Like Vera and Boogie’s game, Lucy’s game involved flowers, but hers was more of a real game than theirs, because you had to figure out how to catch flowers that were floating through the air and put them into a vase. When you got ten flowers, a girl appeared on the screen, with long dark hair, like Elena. Lucy had been so glad when she found that figure in the program’s catalog of ready-made pictures you could put into the code. Even Vera couldn’t have drawn one as good.
“Go on, play it,” Lucy begged.
When Elena looked up from the end-of-game screen with its bunch of flowers for the girl who looked like her, she wiped her eyes with the side of her hand.
“I made something for you, too,” she said, sounding as shy as Lucy had.
From her backpack, she pulled out a brand-new Let’s Have Fun Club sash with four badges on it, exactly like the one Lucy had ripped into a hundred tiny pieces.
“I’m sorry I was mean,” Elena said. “I guess we can’t help liking so many of the same things. It sort of makes sense, because we’re—”
“Sisters,” Lucy finished the sentence for her.
“And I started making a new badge,” Elena continued. “Wait till you see this. You aren’t going to believe it.”
She reached into her backpack for the Let’s Have Fun Club handbook and gave it to Lucy.
Lucy flipped past the dog-walking badge and the coding badge, to a page that read:
SISTERS BADGE
1. Do the dishes for your sister some night even if it’s her turn, just to be nice.
2. Stick up for your sister if someone else is mean to her.
3. If you do anything mean yourself, tell your sister you’re sorry.
4. Help your sister get a badge.
5. Give your sister a great big hug.
“I love this badge,” Lucy whispered. “It’s my favorite badge of all.”
“And I just did number three on the list,” Elena crowed. “And I helped you with the hair badge, so that’s number four for me. And if you show me how to do the name-animation thing for the coding badge, then that’s number four for you, too.”
“Let’s cross off number five right now,” Lucy said. “Both of us.”
And they did.