The next day at school, I had a knot in my stomach all morning. I hadn’t been able to corner my mom or dad to talk to them about Saturday—my mom wasn’t back from work before I left for school, and my normally hyper-organized dad rushed out so fast, he forgot his travel coffee mug. I texted them with my babysitter idea, but they hadn’t responded. They were probably too busy, and I knew they preferred to talk about that kind of stuff in person, anyway.
By the time I got to the cafeteria, my coding group was already at our usual table. I sat down next to Leila and slapped down my lunch bag on the table.
“Those are my favorite kind of granola bars,” Leila said as I pulled a chocolate chip pretzel bar from my lunch bag. She held up a matching bar. “Twins!”
“So good,” I agreed, unwrapping my bar and taking a big bite.
Erin leaned in. “Get this, I overheard Bradley and his team talking in Spanish class—they have something secret going on—”
“Hang on,” I cut Erin off before she could finish. “I need to tell you something.” I felt all their eyes on me. “About the hack—”
“Ladies!”
I looked up to see Bradley and his hackathon team—which included Sammy (!)—approaching our table. My stomach clenched like I was on a roller coaster. Bradley was always making jokes, and usually I found him kind of funny. But not today—not right now. I needed to get my bad news off my chest, and being within a foot of Sammy had apparently paralyzed me.
“So, what are your big plans for the hackathon?” Bradley asked in a mocking tone as he and Alicia, Ellie, and Sammy sat down at our table. I hadn’t seen Sammy since the awkward wave at the Bakeshop, and I could already feel my face heat up again. It didn’t help that he sat down right next to me.
“Hey, Soph,” he whispered, scooching over on the bench. There wasn’t much room for all of us, so I could feel his arm against mine. He had on a navy blue sweatshirt that brushed softly against my wrist. Cue heart thumps.
“Oh, we’re still brainstorming,” Maya said dismissively. “You were saying, Sophia, before we got so rudely interrupted—” She glared at Bradley. I didn’t answer, so she kicked my foot under the table. “Soph!”
“Huh? What?”
“You had something you were going to tell us?” Erin prodded.
“Oh, yeah.” I didn’t want to tell my friends about my hackathon problem in front of everyone. “It’s no big deal.” I turned to Bradley. “So, um, what’s your epic robot idea?”
Mrs. Clark had explained that even though there were prizes—and the chance to get ice cream with her, of course—the hackathon wasn’t competitive, and we shouldn’t be worried about stealing each other’s ideas. It was more about making a cool robot that worked, and helping each other out. In fact, Mrs. Clark told us that there’d be times at the hackathon to share ideas and help other groups with their robots. Still, I was hoping our robot would beat Sammy’s team.
“Our idea is so sick,” Bradley bragged, pushing back his curly red hair. He rubbed his hands together. “We’re going to make a clone army that will take over the school, replace all the teachers, and never assign homework ever again.”
Maya rolled her eyes, and the rest of us chuckled. Bradley was known for being ultracompetitive—he was always boasting about how well he did on tests. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t want to tell us about their idea.
Leila gave him a sidelong glance. “Wow, a clone army, huh? Sounds like a lot of coding. Are you sure you won’t need to clone yourself?”
I laughed. “Burn!” I gave Leila a fist bump.
Bradley gave us a dismissive look. “Totally enough time. We divided the work. Alicia and Sammy are doing the coding.” Then he nodded at Ellie. “And she’s building the robots.” He folded his hands behind his head. “I’m the evil mastermind behind the takeover, obviously.”
Ellie punched him lightly in the arm. “Stop being stupid, Bradley,” she said seriously, and then looked over at Leila. “Wait, are you all on one team? I thought you were with Mark and Maddie.” She reached back to tighten her ponytail.
Erin slung her arm around Leila. “She was, but they had to cancel, so she’s in our group now. And she knows all about robots.”
Bradley raised his eyebrows. “That’s cool, but we’ve got our robot all figured out.”
“Oh yeah? So what’s your robot going to do?” Maya asked warily.
“Well, we’ve got four items picked out,” Alicia said, leaning forward. “A movable arm, a sensor to detect walls, a ball, and—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t tell her!” Bradley cut Alicia off, waving his arms. “You’ll ruin the surprise.”
I had a bad feeling about the “surprise.” Even though the hackathon wasn’t competitive, I didn’t want our group to build the exact same robot as Bradley’s team. And so far, it seemed like we’d be using the same modules.
I started thinking that maybe we should go back to the drawing board with our idea. But then I realized that I probably wasn’t going to be on the team, so the Rockin’ Robots would need to figure that out without me. And they didn’t even know it yet. Ugh. This day was going from bad to worse.
I pushed myself away from the table. “I’m going to get some water,” I announced, raising my half-full bottle. I just wanted to get away for a minute. Maybe when I got back, Bradley’s team would be gone and I could tell my friends about my problem.
“Hold up,” Sammy said, drinking his entire water bottle in one long swish. “I’ll come with you.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my friends exchange looks.
“Remember, bro,” Bradley shouted from behind me, “she’s the enemy. Don’t tell her anything!”
I turned around, scowled at Bradley, and walked away, Sammy falling into step alongside me.
I wasn’t usually alone with Sammy—we always hung out in big groups or just texted. I started getting nervous. What were we going to talk about? What if I had bad breath?
“Bradley can be a pain sometimes, but he’s cool,” Sammy said as we made our way toward the water fountain.
“Yeah, really cool,” I said sarcastically, hoping Bradley didn’t yell anything else out at us in the crowded cafeteria.
Sammy laughed it off. “So hey, anyway, thanks again for the English homework.”
“No problem,” I answered a little too excitedly.
We walked in silence for what seemed like forever. Suddenly the water fountain felt like it was a million miles away. I clenched my water bottle so tightly, I thought I might break it.
“So Maya’s on the dance committee, right?” Sammy finally asked. His voice cracked a little.
I nodded awkwardly and kept walking. I didn’t know what to say. This was so embarrassing! When we finally reached the water fountain, Sammy held the button while I filled my bottle. Our hands brushed, and I thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest.
“So . . . do you know what the theme is?” he blurted out. I looked up and missed the water stream but pretended to ignore it.
“The theme?” I repeated, confused.
“Yeah, for the dance.”
“Oh right, the dance,” I said slowly, wondering why he was asking me that. “Um, I don’t think it’s been decided yet.”
“Oh, okay,” he answered. We headed back to our table with our filled-up bottles.
I decided I’d had enough of this weird vibe. “So . . . I know I’m the ‘enemy,’ but what is your awesome idea for the hackathon?” I asked. I was determined to say something to make things less awkward . . . and I was curious.
Sammy shrugged. “I don’t know how awesome it is. It’s probably not that different from your group’s, anyway.”
“Really? Do you think that’s okay?”
He nodded. “I don’t think it matters if we choose the same modules. The difference will be in how we use them.”
“True.”
“So . . . what’s your secret part?” I pressed forward with my questions, even though the butterflies in my stomach were zooming around like crazy. “You can tell me, Sammy. We’ve known each other forever, right?” As the words came out of my mouth, I realized how true they were. It was silly to feel weird around him.
He laughed. “Man, Bradley was right . . . you are the enemy!” But the way he said it I could tell he didn’t really think so. “Seriously, though, Sophia, I can’t tell you. You’ll just have to wait and find out.”
I snorted. “Okay, so on a scale of one to ten, how ‘amazing’ is the secret part?”
He thought about that for a few seconds. “Fifteen,” he finally said.
I laughed. “Fine. Don’t tell me. But I can tell you . . . me and my girls aren’t worried.”
The walk to our table felt a lot shorter than the walk to the water fountain. When we got back, Bradley stood up. “Enough romance, guys—we need to go. We’ve got work to do!” He raised his arms as if he was the king of the cafeteria and bowed. “And so, we bid you farewell.”
Did he say romance? I wanted to smack him. Suddenly the flip-flops in my stomach were back. I couldn’t even look at Sammy as he walked away. Instead, I slid into my seat and pretended like nothing had happened.
As soon as they left, Lucy didn’t miss a beat. “So . . . spill it, Soph!”
“Romance!” Erin said. “Bradley did say ‘romance,’ didn’t he?”
“Stop. I have ears, you know,” I said as I bit into my shiny red apple. “Bradley says a lot of dumb things.”
“What’s all this about?” Leila asked, gesturing with one hand as she took a sip of her juice.
Maya turned to her. “Sophia has a crush on Sammy, but she refuses to tell us anything about it.” She gave me an admonishing look.
“Ooh, a crush!” Leila gushed. “I thought something might be going on.”
“C’mon, Soph, you know you can tell us anything,” Erin said, grabbing a handful of her salt and vinegar chips. “And we want to know everything.”
I kept chomping my apple, but they kept staring at me.
“It was nothing,” I finally relented. “He asked me about the dance, and then we talked about our robots.” I zipped my sandwich bag closed. “See? Nothing to discuss.”
Maya put her hands on the table, her eyes widening. “Wait, what? You talked about the dance? Did he ask you to go with him?”
“No, of course not!” I scoffed. “He just asked me what the theme was.”
They all exchanged glances.
“I swear he didn’t ask me to the dance! It wasn’t even like that!”
Erin folded up her reusable lunch sack. “Well, not this time, but maybe he will soon,” she said, sounding like she knew what she was talking about.
“Or, better yet, you could ask him,” Maya added, a devilish grin on her face.
“Totally,” Lucy said.
Until then, I hadn’t even thought about going to the dance with Sammy. I assumed I’d go to the dance with my friends, like most people did. But then I started to wonder—why was Sammy asking me about the theme?
“So, about the hackathon?” Leila said. She must have sensed I didn’t want to talk about Sammy anymore. I gave her a grateful look, and she smiled back. “These guys have something up their sleeve, so we need to get to work if we want any chance of winning a prize. We have our idea; now we just need to figure out how to do it.” She pulled out a sheet of paper and showed it to us. She’d made columns for the four modules we’d chosen—a ball, an arm, a sensor, and speakers. She’d started to write details in each column.
“Wow, this is really helpful, Leila,” Erin said.
Leila smiled bashfully. “Mr. Miller had us watch a movie in history class today, and I’d already seen it, so I figured I’d work on this.”
I was feeling more and more guilty about not telling them my problem, so before anything else could interrupt us, I took a deep breath. “Hang on, I need to—”
Maya cut me off. “Lucy, you registered our group, right?” she asked. I’d forgotten that Lucy had volunteered to sign us all up online.
“Yep,” she answered, taking her phone out. “I added all of our e-mail addresses, so we should all have confirmations by now.”
We grabbed our phones. “Got it!” Maya said, shutting off her phone and putting it back in her pocket. The others nodded and put theirs away, too.
I scanned the information below the confirmation in my e-mail:
“We’d like to remind you that once the official deadline to register for the hackathon has passed at 1 p.m. on Thursday, there can be no further changes to any team. If all registered participants on the team cannot make it, your team will need to withdraw from the hackathon. You can participate as a team in the next event later this year.”
I looked at the clock on the wall, a lump forming in my throat: It was 1:05 p.m. I also remembered that I still hadn’t heard from my parents. The Wi-Fi inside school wasn’t great, though, and sometimes messages sent from outside the school never made it through. I guess I’d just have to wait until I got home to find out what they thought about getting a babysitter.
The warning bell rang, and everyone started gathering their stuff. My spirits sank. I knew I should just tell them, just blurt it out. But if I told them I had to drop out, I’d be disqualifying my whole team.
My mouth felt dry as I tried to think of the right way to tell them. Just handle it, Sophia, I thought. Slowly I crumpled up my lunch bag and picked up my binders.
Erin grabbed her books. “Group chat tonight, girls? We still gotta figure out our algorithm.” They all nodded.
“I—I—” I started.
The bell—the real one, not the warning one—rang.
I swallowed hard.
“Hurry up, Soph, we’ve got to get to class,” Lucy said, sounding exasperated.
I raised my phone to show them the time and said in a tight, tearful voice, “It’s past one p.m.”
They exchanged puzzled glances. “Yeah, so?” Maya said, raising her eyebrows.
I knew there wasn’t enough time to explain everything to them. And, anyway, what difference did it make if I told them now or later? We’d still be disqualified. “We better get to class,” I said finally.
Maya gave me a weird look but then let it go.
“You okay, Soph?” Lucy prodded as we headed out of the cafeteria.
“Mmm-hmm.” I nodded.
“Weirdo,” Lucy said, giving me a good-natured shove.
“Takes one to know one!” I said, faking a smile.
As we joined the hordes of people in the hall, the knot in my stomach grew. How was I going to tell them that we’d all have to drop out of the hackathon—all because of me?