Chapter 9
Second Grade
(age seven)
Kelli’s robot had been the first thing to catch Am’s eye, but it wasn’t the only thing Am liked about her. For instance, Am loved the way that Kelli told stories.
It was something Kelli had done on her own at first, sitting in the leaves and spinning out a long monologue, in her singsong voice, to the robot.
The first few times she noticed it, Am had sat a safe distance away and not interrupted, just listened.
It was like getting read to by a grown-up but better, because grown-ups’ stories were all the same, all with big obvious morals, and Kelli’s stories were about anything that came to her head.
She’d talk on and on about a knight who’d gone up to slay a dragon, but then it turned out the dragon was nice and wanted to be friends.
Or a tiger who lived in the jungle and had to find a secret treasure the other tigers had hidden.
Or even what should happen next in the AdventureVerse show they’d been watching.
She’d spend all of recess telling the story, and when the bell rang, she’d turn to the robot and shyly say, “Was that a good story? Did you like it?”
“Certainly,” said the robot. “Sharing your thoughts and ideas is a positive social behavior. In a real social interaction, you would want to include more pauses for the other person to share in return. Remember, turn-taking is vital to any social activity, and no one wants to monopolize a conversation.”
Am didn’t think that was fair. Grown-ups didn’t have to put pauses into their stories. And the robot hadn’t even told Kelli anything important, like which parts of the story were exciting or which characters were mean.
Am could do better than that.
“Hey, Kelli, hey,” she said, the next day, plopping into the leaves next to her. “Tell me a story.”
“What?” said Kelli.
“Remember,” said the robot, “when someone comes up to you and says hello, you should look in their eyes and say, hi, my name is Kelli. . . .”
Am ignored the robot completely. “You were going to tell one to the robot, right? Tell it to me, too.”
Kelli looked daunted.
Am had trouble imagining, sometimes, just what it was like to be Kelli. Had she ever told a story to a human before? Hopefully her parents, at least. But Am couldn’t be sure.
“C’mon,” said Am, “I’ll say nice things after, I promise.”
“Only if they’re true,” said Kelli, scowling. “Only say true nice things.”
“Okay,” said Am.
Kelli took a deep, nervous breath.
“Okay, so once upon a time,” she said, “there was a pirate.”
She told the story to Am in the same singsong voice she would have used for the robot, staring fixedly just past Am’s head, like it never occurred to her that Am might have feelings about which parts of the story were coolest or scariest or boring, or that those feelings might show on Am’s face.
But the story was good. Am listened as Kelli gained confidence, as the pirate—a girl named Orlande, who had left her boring life on land to sail the high seas—assembled a crew, and prepared a raid on the most evil bullies in the whole land, who were also pirates, but who were boys and who lived in a castle for some reason.
Orlande was going to steal all their stuff, which was stuff they’d already stolen anyway, and then sail away triumphant.
Now that they saw Am listening, a whole handful of other girls had also snuck up and started to listen too. It was a cool story, but Am had forgotten that she had a problem the robot didn’t, which was that she couldn’t sit still.
She squirmed and started looking around, and then tried to make herself sit still, because people sat still when they were listening.
That’s what Am’s teachers said, and what the robot would have said too.
And Kelli needed to know that Am was listening!
That was the whole point of this. But her feet and hands started to twitch as the desire became overwhelming.
Am wasn’t going to be able to keep this up for long.
So, with a sudden idea, she sprang to her feet.
“Okay, one second,” she said. “Listen. We gotta act this out.”
“What?” said Kelli.
“I like your story! But I gotta move. So let’s move around. Look, I’ll be Orlande, see? I’m on my ship.” She shielded her eyes like she was squinting against the sun—a real Earth sun, like on television, not just the playground’s normal lights. “I’m sailing. And, uh—you! You can be in the crew.”
She pointed to the nearest girl—Elaine Liyanage, who was one of Am’s other favorite people, and who had long straight black hair and always looked scary. Elaine scrambled halfway up, looking uncertain. “Why?”
“Because I said so and I’m Orlande. Now, Kelli, you just keep on telling the story, but this time, you tell us what the crew does and we’ll do it.”
Kelli looked uncertain, but she said, “Um, okay. So, next the crew sailed past a big rock. It was a scary rock where lots of ships had gotten shipwrecks. But Orlande said, ‘don’t worry! We have the best sailors in the sea, and we’ll make it!’”
“We’ll make it!” Am echoed, raising a fist above her head in a heroic pose.
“Nuh uh,” said Elaine, who hadn’t wanted to be crew in the first place. She hopped out from behind Am and crouched on the ground. “Now I’m not your crew! I’m a shark, and I’m going to eat you, raaawr!”
Kelli’s eyes went very wide, and her lip trembled.
Am looked between the two of them and thought really fast. This was not what she had wanted.
Kelli didn’t like when surprises happened, or things that she couldn’t control, and Kelli could get really upset really fast. This was supposed to be Kelli’s story.
But Elaine hadn’t agreed to those terms. She’d gotten swept up in this because Am got too excited and commanded her to.
And Elaine was almost as unpopular as Kelli; like most of Am’s favorite people, she needed to hang around Am.
So it didn’t seem fair to let her keep going without some intervention, but it also didn’t seem fair tell her to stop.
Am crouched down hurriedly next to Kelli, careful not to actually touch her, and lowered her voice.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Kelli, it’s okay. You’re still in charge of the story. It’s just now there are other people in it too, right?”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Kelli, lip quivering.
“Yeah it does. What happens is, you took a turn and told us what was happening. And Elaine took a turn and told us there was a shark. So now it’s your turn again. What do the pirates do about the shark? What does Orlande do, huh? You get to decide that.”
Kelli frowned ferociously as she thought that over. Am had already noticed and loved this about Kelli. When Am told her to think about something, she really thought.
“Oh,” she said at last, while Elaine-the-shark tapped her foot impatiently somewhere behind them. Am wondered if she should remind Elaine that sharks didn’t have feet. “So . . . when it’s all three of us, we take turns. Like the robot says.”
“Not like the robot says!” said Am, who didn’t even remember what exactly the robot had said about turn-taking, but who liked to contradict it anyway. “Like we said. But that way, we all get to be part of the story together, you see?”
Kelli screwed up her face a little and Am was convinced, in that moment, that whatever she was doing right now in her genius-robot head, it was something that took courage.
Like the courage of a pirate on the high seas, only it was such a brain-type thing, on the inside of her head, that no one else might ever see how much strength it had taken.
“Okay,” she said at last, with a sharp nod. “The pirates saw the angry sharks circling in the water! And they knew, if they wrecked their ship on this rock, they’d get eaten by sharks! BUT they were the best pirates! So they steered as hard as they could, and they put on shark repellent . . .”
“Raaaaaawr!” said Elaine again, staggering back with a dramatic gesture, pretending to be repelled by the shark repellent.
So they played like that until the recess bell rang, a constant back-and-forth.
Am mediated, helping Kelli calm down and think when she needed, helping moderate Elaine and the other girls’ excesses so that they didn’t change the story more than Kelli could bear.
But it had already started to feel like a group effort.
And for the most part, in spite of the robot’s occasional admonitions that wanting to be a pirate was antisocial, all the girls in the class were happy that way.
Secretly, Am had already figured out that she did a better job helping Kelli than the robot could. Sometimes that made her feel like the smartest person ever. Other times it made her sad.
For instance, the robot always told Kelli to go up and introduce herself to people, but everybody already knew who Kelli was—she was the weird girl with the robot.
“Hi!” Kelli said to random classmates, with a determined look on her face, on the rare occasions when she gave in to the robot’s prodding. “My name is Kelli! What’s yours?”
“Oh my God,” said Rupa, a hair-braiding type of girl who didn’t like Am either. “What is your problem? You’ve been in class with us for literally forever and you still don’t remember my name?”
“I remember your name,” Kelli said uncertainly. “You’re Rupa. It’s just, I’m supposed to say . . .”
But Rupa had already stormed off.
“What did I do wrong?” Kelli asked the robot later, perplexed. And the robot went officiously into a list of social skills that Kelli could be better at. Smiling better, making better eye contact, and all that kind of thing.
“Nothing,” said Am, pressing forward. “The robot gave you the wrong words to say. That’s the robot’s fault.”
Kelli looked back and forth between them doubtfully. She always got a crumbly look on her face when people didn’t like her, which was almost all the time. Like she was going to curl up in a ball and turn to dust.
To Am’s irritation, Kelli turned to the robot, not Am. “What’s the right words for introducing yourself to someone?”
“When you are introducing yourself to someone,” the robot burbled, “you should say, Hi! My name is Kelli . . .”
That kind of thing happened all the time, which was why Am had stopped liking the robot, even though it looked really cool at first glance, like a character from television.
That kind of thing was why, a year later, she jumped on the chance to outwit the robot as fast as she could.
It was why she wasn’t sorry when the robot went away.
She’d turned into a hacker and she’d defeated it once and for all, so there.
But Am didn’t know yet that, when it came to robots telling people what to say, the worst was yet to come.