Maya and the Robot: Chapters 1–5

Brown, thick, fudgy droplets cascaded from Zoe’s once-perfect curls into her eyes, and she stopped saying words and started making horrible gurgly sounds.

Desperate, she grabbed the nearest solid piece of furniture—the corner of the display table where my best friend Jada was trying to guard the scale model she had built of a suspension bridge.

Then she took a deep breath, furrowed her brow, and hollered at the top of her lungs: “THIS! IS THE WORST! SCIENCE FAIR! EVERRRR!”

First her voice, then her sobs, reverberated around the room, but no one seemed to hear her.

Ms. Hixon, the cafeteria lady, had transformed into some kind of acrobatic martial artist, leaping from table to table, slapping flying food projectiles out of the air with a huge metal spoon. “You think this is my first food fight? This ain’t my first food fight!” she yelled at no one.

Pudding was splattered on the windows. People were digging mashed potatoes out of their ears and wiping it off their glasses.
And smack dab in the middle of the mayhem, there he was.

Whirling in circles at top speed, scooping food out of industrial-sized vats and launching it in every direction.

This calamity, the screaming, the mess, the ruined science fair...this was his fault.

Right on cue, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Principal Merriweather.

And I found out that getting hit in the head with projectile pudding is more painful than it looks.

“Better hurry up,” Mom called over her shoulder as she hustled out of the room and back to the kitchen.

I know everyone thinks that their best friends are the best best friends, but my friends are the certified, record-breaking greatest friends in the solar system.

Jada, who is a basketball fiend, wishes she could jump in the game.

“Didn’t Coach Tanaka say she might let you try out next year?” I said to Jada, poking her gently in the arm to remind her that MJ and I exist. “Since you’re already as tall as most of the seventh-grade girls anyway.”
“Yeah,” Jada said wistfully.

She turned, consciously noticing me for the first time.

MJ was flushed red, ready to about die of embarrassment.

He’s always got this super-serious frowny face, and his brain tends to jump to thinking about the worst thing that could possibly happen.

“We both got letters last week saying that we’re gonna be in Ms. Montgomery’s class.” She furrowed her brow, worried about me. “We assumed you got a letter too.”

She was even friends with some of the people at the Museum of Science and Industry, and when she took her classes on field trips there, they got special behind-the-scenes tours.

Across the playground, kids were scurrying over to her, terrified to get caught in her glare.

I could sense that my classmates were grateful—as long as Ms. Rodríguez was focused on me, they were spared.

I was so mortified at having cried on the playground. In fifth grade! Who does that?

There was always
something new to learn from Mr. Mac, and it was a good way for me to earn a few dollars, since he would sometimes pay me to sweep the floor or organize the shelves. Nothing major, but it was useful to have my own money for the book fair or to order from American Science and Surplus.

If anything broke in the shop, he wouldn’t let me hire somebody before he tried to go to the library and see if he could find a reference book or some old dusty manual and figure out how to get it running again.

Kind of a mess. Talk about an understatement. It looked like a yard sale threw up in there.

Stevie Wonder’s song about being superstitious always reminds me of my grandma. She is very superstitious. I sang along, and soon enough, the first box was empty!

On the front of him was a panel with some gauges and buttons and meters of different colors.

Ralph had feet, sort of, but they were made of treads. The kind of treads you see on a tank—a rugged surface that could move across the ground even if it was bumpy or rough.

You could see that the wheels were covered with thick, durable tire treads, allowing the rover to travel effortlessly across the surface of the Red Planet.

His legs were hinged at the ankles and knees, so it seemed he could go up or down a flight of stairs, but I imagined that the treads would allow him to move quickly across a flat or bumpy surface.

The only thing on Ralph’s back was his name, scrawled by hand in wide letters with permanent marker.

He really was a hodgepodge, this robot—a fancy high-tech body with a goofy metal bucket for a head.

When I said I had heard of Stanford, what I meant was I was kind of obsessed with the place. And MIT, and Georgia Tech. Any famous university with a big robotics lab. When I started getting into science, Auntie Lou had shown me some pictures of the laboratories and the things that went on there.

I don’t even know if Christopher ever finished building him. I never actually saw Ralph in action. Christopher was always tinkering and poking around, adding new features, adjusting this, that, or the other.

Suddenly, a piercing beep broke the silence.