Chapter 7

Inside the garage, Charlie was in the Corvette, removing its stereo system, while Bumblebee sat in front of the TV, which was playing The Breakfast Club. Charlie had watched the movie enough times to know it was almost over. She also knew her mother and Ron had retired for the evening, and she was pretty sure Otis had gone to bed, too, but she still took the precaution of locking the garage’s main door. She listened and checked the doors every few minutes to confirm they remained locked.

The Corvette’s original radio had been a Wonder Bar, equipped with a selector-bar electronic automatic tuner, the first of its kind, which tuned in listenable stations. But a previous owner had removed the Wonder Bar, and then Charlie had helped her father install a new stereo system with a radio and audiocassette player. As she undid the work she and her dad had done on the Corvette’s stereo, she said, “Okay, almost done.” She looked over at Bumblebee and noticed he was staring at the TV. On the screen, the actor was raising his fist in the air, and then his image froze.

“No way,” Charlie said. “You’re actually watching the movie?”

Bumblebee responded by raising his own large fist into the air. Charlie laughed. “You can pop in another video if you want.”

Even though Bumblebee’s fingers were large, Charlie had noticed that he could manipulate them carefully and also handle delicate objects. So when he tapped a button to eject The Breakfast Club from the VCR, and then removed the videocassette and placed it on a stack of others, Charlie was more amused than surprised.

While Charlie kept tinkering with the car radio, Bumblebee thumbed through the stack of videocassettes. The stack included a Vietnam War movie, a horror movie, and a romantic drama, but Bumblebee noticed a cassette with a paper label taped to it. On the label, someone had written, CHARLIE DIVING REGIONALS.

Bumblebee inserted that cassette into the VCR. A moment later, the TV screen displayed an image of a young girl wearing a swimsuit and cap, standing on a diving board above a swimming pool. The camera moved closer to the girl’s face—it was Charlie, but a few years younger.

The camera pulled back. Bumblebee watched as young Charlie took a deep breath before she leaped and bounced away from the diving board. She executed a double somersault before plunging into the water.

“Nice!” said a man’s voice from off camera. “Thatta girl! You’re doing great.”

Hearing her father’s voice from across the room, Charlie almost dropped the stereo component. She turned and looked at the TV screen and saw her younger self in the pool, smiling as she surfaced, waving to the camera.

“Not that one!” Charlie said as she moved fast for the VCR. “Where’d you find that?!” Still clutching the Corvette’s stereo, she stopped the video and ejected it. When she looked at Bumblebee, she saw he was cowering away from her like a scolded puppy. “Sorry, I just… I’m done with this, so…” She placed the cassette on a nearby shelf.

Bumblebee looked downcast. Charlie wished she could say something to make him feel better, and then she realized she was still holding the stereo system that she’d pulled from the Corvette. She moved close to Bumblebee’s chest, found his broken radio just below his metal rib cage, and popped it out of its socket. Then she placed the new stereo system into his chest, connected it to his wires, and said, “All right, let’s see if we’ve got something.”

She turned on the radio. It lit up. She heard a faint noise, and then the sound grew louder and became music. Charlie recognized the song, “Take On Me” by a-ha.

“Ha!” Charlie said. “Yessss!”

Bumblebee began to sway a little, moving with the music.

“Ah,” Charlie said, “you like that, huh?”

Bumblebee answered with a buzzing noise and then swiveled his hips.

Charlie laughed. “You got some moves!” She turned to a box of music cassette tapes and dug through it until she found the one by The Smiths. “Oh, you’re gonna dig this,” she said as she pushed the cassette into the player in Bumblebee’s chest.

A mournful song began playing. Bumblebee listened to it for a few seconds, then ejected the cassette from his chest with such force that it shot across the garage like a missile and smashed into the far wall.

“Okay,” Charlie said, “maybe not a Smiths fan.” She grabbed a cassette for a hard rock band from the box. “Try this.” She popped the cassette into Bumblebee’s chest.

The cassette hadn’t even started to play when Bumblebee shot it across the garage.

“Okay, not that, either,” Charlie said. As she rummaged through the box of cassettes, Bumblebee looked around the garage and noticed a group of boxy objects resting on a shelf. The objects were part of an old stereo system that included a record turntable with a transparent plastic cover, a receiver, and a pair of large speakers. All were covered by a fine layer of dust. Looking to the shelf below the stereo system, Bumblebee saw a neatly organized collection of record albums in cardboard sleeves. He started reaching for the records when Charlie yelled, “Don’t touch those!”

Bumblebee cringed, and Charlie felt terrible for having shouted at him again. She moved closer to him, pointed to the record albums, and said, “They belonged to my dad.”

Bumblebee cocked his head.

“They’re records. You put them on that thing.” Charlie pointed to the record player that rested between the two speakers.

Bumblebee leaned in to study the record player’s circular turntable. He examined the thin, articulated arm that extended beside the turntable. He touched the arm and then lifted it up and down. Moving one finger beneath the arm’s end, he found a sharp point, the tone arm’s diamond stylus. He poked at the machine, trying to figure out how it worked.

Charlie could tell Bumblebee was fascinated by the record player. “All right,” she said, “we’ll listen to this one. Okay? So you can see how it works.” She selected an album by Sam Cooke, removed the vinyl disc from its sleeve, and placed it on the turntable. She pressed a switch. The turntable began rotating, and then she moved the tone arm so its stylus rested against the disc’s outer edge. Music began playing from two speakers, and then Bumblebee heard a man’s voice singing.

Bumblebee was soon mesmerized by the sound of the music and Cooke’s voice. Charlie could see his entire body relax, and then he began swaying again, feeling the music.

“Ah, you finally approve,” Charlie said. She looked at the album cover. “Good taste. This was my dad’s favorite, too. That’s him, there.” She pointed to a Polaroid photo of her father that was thumbtacked above the workbench.

Bumblebee glanced at the photo, then looked around the garage. He cocked his head as he lowered his gaze to Charlie, and she realized he was wondering where her father was. She said, “Oh, he’s not here.”

Bumblebee cocked his head again.

“We don’t need to talk about it.”

Bumblebee didn’t respond to that. He started to survey the garage’s interior again, but then Charlie said, “He passed away a few years ago. Heart attack.”

Charlie couldn’t tell if Bumblebee understood, but something in his eyes conveyed that he was sympathetic. She gestured to the rusted-out Corvette. “See that car? He loved it. We used to work on it together every weekend. It was gonna be mine one day.”

Bumblebee looked at the Corvette and the pieces of its engine scattered around.

“I really wanted to finish it,” Charlie said, “just hear it start up, you know? Be able to say, Hey, Dad, we did it. We finally did it.” She felt tears welling up in her eyes. “I don’t know. It’s dumb.”

Bumblebee moved closer. He reached out and patted her head, his touch so gentle that she almost didn’t feel it. They’d reached an unspoken agreement: Bumblebee understood that Charlie wanted to take care of him, and she suspected that he wanted to take care of her, too.

After leaving his job at the churro stand, Memo rode his bicycle home. As he skidded to a stop in his driveway, he glanced at the house where the girl next door lived. He noticed lights on in the garage, and also odd, muffled noises. Curious, he popped his kickstand and walked closer to the garage.

He heard footsteps and turned to see a neighbor, an older man that Memo didn’t know by name, walking his dog. Fearing that the man might mistake him for a prowler, Memo turned his attention to a nearby bush and said, “This plant is nice, what is this?”

The man shook his head, said, “I don’t know anything about plants,” and kept walking, taking his dog with him.

Memo let out a long exhale. Then he heard more noises from the garage. It sounded like fragmented bursts of music and voices. He wondered if someone was playing with a radio, whipping through random stations. He wondered why anyone would do that. Interesting. Very interesting.

Inside the garage, Charlie watched with amazement as the tone-control knob and the manual tuning knob on Bumblebee’s new radio rotated on their own. As the knobs turned, the station selector bar shifted back and forth, and Bumblebee’s speakers released a stream of garbled noise.

“I know there are a lot of choices, man,” Charlie said, “but you gotta pick a station.”

Bumblebee continued to scan every frequency he could find and kept blasting bits of music until Charlie couldn’t stand it anymore. She reached for the tuning knob and tried to lock in one station, but Bumblebee gently swatted her away.

“Sorry,” Charlie said. “Didn’t mean to get handsy.”

The radio’s knobs continued rotating back and forth. Charlie wondered if Bumblebee was searching for one station in particular. She leaned in closer to the radio and said, “What are you trying to—?”

Charlie heard a loud gasp from behind her and then a loud clatter. She spun around and saw a teenage boy with frizzy black hair standing in the garage’s side doorway. The boy’s mouth hung open, and he’d just accidentally knocked over a bunch of garden shovels.

Charlie realized she’d left the garage’s side door open and felt like kicking herself. She also vaguely recognized the boy.…

Bumblebee saw the boy, too. Charlie hoped Bumblebee would remember what she’d told him about strangers, about changing into car form. But because the boy had seen him, she wasn’t sure what he should do. She sensed Bumblebee was just as flustered as he stepped away from her to give himself more space, then changed into a car as fast as he could.

The boy locked his wide-eyed gaze on the yellow Beetle. He began stammering, but clearly he was so frightened that the words wouldn’t come out. Charlie moved in front of him and said, “Just please don’t scream, okay?”

The boy’s jaw began shaking. He looked as if he actually was about to scream, so Charlie clamped her hand over his mouth. The boy’s entire body began trembling instead, so Charlie removed her hand from his face. “Sit down,” she said. “Breathe.”

Still shaking, the boy sat down on an overturned bucket. He looked as if he was going to be ill. He stammered out, “Was that… did I… what the—?”

“First of all, hi,” Charlie said, trying her best to sound calm. “I’m Charlie.” She extended her hand to him.

Dazed, the boy looked at her hand for a moment, then took it, shook it, and said, “Memo.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Memo’s eyes flicked to the Beetle and then back to Charlie. “Pleasure’s all mine,” he said, but his fear was evident in his voice.

“Look,” Charlie said, “I know what you just saw is a little crazy. I can explain it. Well, I can’t explain it, but here’s the deal. If you tell anyone… I will run you over with my car.”

Memo whimpered and said, “Really?”

“No, not really,” Charlie said. “I just need nobody else to know. All right?”

Memo nodded.

“You promise?”

Memo nodded again.

“You can come out, Bumblebee.”

Memo gasped as the Beetle changed back into a robot. Bumblebee looked at Memo and took a step back, apparently uncertain of how to behave around a new person.

“Wow,” Memo said. “It’s… wow. What is it?”

“Not it,” Charlie said. “He. Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you.”

“Wow,” Memo said again. “Before tonight, I was having the most boring summer.”