Weird Little Robots Read online

  The next part of her plan was the trickiest.

  Penny Rose bent down low as she tiptoed over to Lark’s doorbell. She poked it once — hard — and dashed toward her house as fast as she could, jumping over the ballpoint pen, over the rubber-band ball, over the stopwatch, until she got to the bushes next to her house’s front steps. She crouched down behind the fattest bush and waited.

  She waited and watched. Her knees ached. Her mouth turned dry and sticky. In the distance she heard the Gilmore boys charge out their back door and into their yard. If they found her interesting items first, her plan would be ruined.

  Penny Rose cautiously peered out of the bushes. She saw Lark pick up the ballpoint pen and put it in her pocket. She was holding Fraction.

  Lark crossed the street slowly, following Penny Rose’s trail. After she picked up the rubber-band ball and stopwatch, she straightened up and stared right at Clunk. She paused, her head tilted to one side. She picked up the sign Penny Rose had made and read it out loud.

  “I like your birdhouses. Would you like to help make a home for my robots?”

  Lark frowned. She looked up and saw Penny Rose watching her from behind the bush.

  “Let’s see these robots of yours.”

  Penny Rose climbed out from behind the bushes.

  “OK,” she said. “I can, um, take you . . .”

  She let her sentence trail off as she led Lark, holding both Fraction and Clunk now, to the shed. She pushed the door open and motioned Lark inside.

  “I made this one out of a pencil sharpener and, um, dentures,” she said, walking over to the card table. She reached down and turned on Sharpie. Her heart beat quickly as Sharpie moved a few inches forward on the card table and then stopped. “They still need . . . um . . . work and . . . stuff.”

  Lark put Fraction and Clunk down on the table with the other robots. She stood with her hands on her hips and stared at them.

  She didn’t say anything. Not one word.

  Penny Rose’s hands shook as she turned on each of the robots.

  “This is a marble I found in the Calvary Graveyard,” she said, pointing to Data’s one pink eye. She flipped Data’s switch. The eye spun once, then stopped.

  “I made this one from a cell phone.”

  When Penny Rose picked up iPam, her one antenna arm fell off. An ant crawled across her cracked screen. Penny Rose should have made them all perfect first. This was no way to show them to a possible new friend.

  “And, well, you saw the other two — Clunk and Fraction.”

  Penny Rose held her breath. She couldn’t help but look at the robots through Lark’s eyes, and now they all seemed like . . . junk. She nervously picked up Fraction and punched in 1 + 1 in the calculator.

  “See, she’s really just a calculator. They’re just, I don’t know, silly things I made. That’s all,” Penny Rose said. She glanced at Lark. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking while wearing those dark glasses.

  Before Penny Rose could say another word, Lark was gone. She could hear her closing the gate to the backyard.

  “That was weird,” Penny Rose said.

  The squirrel with the black smudge on his tail chattered at her from his perch on a branch.

  Penny Rose looked into his small black eyes.

  “I guess she thought they were dumb,” she said to him.

  The squirrel flicked his tail at her, as if he agreed with Lark’s assessment, and scurried into the bushes.

  It had been a mistake bringing Lark here. She would probably tell everyone at school that Penny Rose was a weirdo with ugly handmade robots in a moldy old shed.

  She flopped down onto her chair and sighed. She obviously hadn’t thought this through. It was too late now. She was destined to be friendless.

  Penny Rose jumped at the sound of the back gate’s creak. She got up and looked out the window. Lark was heading back to the shed with two large bags. She walked into the shed as though she had been coming there all her life and unloaded the contents of her bags onto the floor.

  “I have all these lava lamps,” she said, taking out a few strange-looking conical shaped lamps. “I haven’t been able to figure out how to use them as birdhouses, but as I was looking around, I thought they might make a good forest.” She straightened up and looked at Penny Rose. “Do you have electricity out here?”

  Penny Rose stared at Lark for a moment before motioning to the corner of the room.

  “Over there,” she said.

  Lark brought a lamp over to the power strip and plugged it in.

  “Perfect!” Lark said. “Let’s plug in all of them.”

  Penny Rose helped her until every single lava lamp was lit. The two girls watched silently as the colorful globs inside the lava lamps floated up and down.

  “It looks like a robot forest,” Penny Rose said quietly. She almost thought she could hear the robots cheering.

  “I also brought this,” Lark said. She took her metal box out of one of the bags.

  Penny Rose leaned closer. She held her breath as Lark opened the mysterious box. This was the box Penny Rose had been curious about since the first time she saw Lark.

  “So I like to bird-watch, and I like birds. I feed them, and I make them houses.” She paused and looked at Penny Rose carefully. She took a breath. “Sometimes they bring me presents.”

  “Oh,” Penny Rose said.

  Lark reached into the box and picked out a key. The top of it was painted pale blue. “This is one of my favorites,” she said. “I remember when I saw a crow carrying this in its beak. He dropped it right in the middle of my backyard.”

  “Really?” Penny Rose couldn’t help but frown. It didn’t seem plausible that ordinary birds would bring presents to a ten-year-old girl, but then nothing about Lark was ordinary.

  “Yes, he did,” Lark said. “I use all these things to make my birdhouses. Sometimes I have to travel a bit to find new stuff, but mostly I use what they drop into my yard.”

  “Huh,” said Penny Rose.

  “You said you wanted a home for the robots,” Lark said.

  “I think they could use one.”

  “I don’t think they need a home at all,” Lark said.

  Penny Rose inhaled sharply. “Oh, but I thought —”

  “What they really need,” Lark said, “is a metropolis.”

  “Most definitely!” Penny Rose said. “That is exactly what they need.”

  “I have tons of stuff from the birds,” Lark said. She dug through her box and brought out a small plastic bag. “They’ve brought me all kinds of coins. We could use them in the metropolis. Or this,” she said, holding up another bag. “This is filled with paper clips. We could bend them into — I don’t know — something.”

  Penny Rose looked at Lark and smiled. Lark smiled back. A big toothy smile.

  “Do you like birthday cake?” Penny Rose asked.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Wait here.”

  Penny Rose ran back to her house and put two slices of birthday cake and two forks on a tray. She ran up to her bedroom, tucked her Robot notebook under her arm, and hurried back to the shed. She and Lark ate and planned and planned and ate until it was time for Lark to go home.

  It was possibly the best Day After Her Birthday Penny Rose had ever had.

  That afternoon, just as she was about to leave the shed, she smiled at all the robots.

  “Looks like I have a friend after all,” she said.

  As she was turning to leave, she heard a strange whirring behind her. She spun around, but all she could see were the robots lined up on the table.

  “Must have been the wind,” she said. She stepped through the doorway.

  When she heard the whirring again, she decided not to turn around. It was only the wind. She was sure of it.

  The next few days were quite miraculous for Penny Rose.

  She and Lark were now friends, which made Penny Rose dizzy with happiness. They sat together on the bus a
nd ate their lunch together every day. Lark even let Penny Rose have half of her lunch when Penny Rose’s dad had made something especially weird, like the tomato and pickle sandwich he once packed. After school they went to the shed and worked on their robot metropolis.

  They even liked the same snack — cinnamon raisin toast with creamy peanut butter.

  Of course no friend was perfect. Penny Rose knew this. And Lark was definitely a bit odd. Kids sometimes made faces behind her back when she stood at the edge of the playground and stared at the trees through her binoculars. Penny Rose pretended not to notice the other kids and would sit on a swing until Lark was finished bird-watching, and they would walk back to their classroom together.

  Lark wasn’t afraid to let her weirdness show, and Penny Rose thought that was very brave.

  As if having a new best friend weren’t miraculous enough, on Thursday Penny Rose found a mysterious envelope tucked into the vents in her locker. Inside the envelope was a note written in green ink on notebook paper.

  Was this for real? Or was it a mean joke?

  Penny Rose looked up and down the hallway. Merry Zwack and Lily Proom, two popular girls, were whispering to each other. The Fantini twins were flipping through their notebooks. Pete Smithers, the biggest boy in class, was playing hacky sack while his best friend, Jose Goldbloom, loudly cheered him on. No one was paying any attention to Penny Rose.

  If it was a joke, kids would be watching her and snickering. No one was watching her at all.

  She reread the note, folded it up, and put it in her backpack.

  There was no doubt in her mind that she would do what the note asked. She knew exactly what to put in the envelope. She and her parents had gone to the Museum of Science and Industry this past summer, and there had been a display all about rocks and minerals. Penny Rose spent so much time there that her mom had bought her a book about minerals from the gift shop.

  Penny Rose put a pencil in the envelope, shut her locker, and race-walked down the hall to the library. She paused outside the door and wrote on the outside of the envelope:

  Graphite is a mineral, and it’s in pencils.

  She peeked inside. Lark was at the librarian’s desk, checking out books.

  Was Lark part of the Secret Science Society? It didn’t seem likely. Lark was not the kind of girl who would willingly be part of any club. She was, in fact, about as anti-club as you could get. But, more importantly, Penny Rose was the only kid at school Lark liked.

  Penny Rose’s heart pounded as she walked as casually as possible to the dictionary.

  Lark turned and saw her. “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Just looking up a word,” Penny Rose said. She flipped open the huge dictionary.

  “Oh, OK,” Lark said. She turned back to Ms. Codell, the librarian, and started talking about the latest book she had read on birds.

  If Lark was part of the Secret Science Society, she would have known what Penny Rose was doing. She would have given her a secret look, as if to say, “Hey, I know what you’re doing by the dictionary!”

  But Lark didn’t do that. She didn’t seem suspicious about what Penny Rose was doing at all.

  Still, Penny Rose didn’t want to take any chances. She flipped through the dictionary’s pages. While Ms. Codell checked out Lark’s books, Penny Rose quickly placed the envelope under the dictionary.

  “Got it,” Penny Rose said, turning around to face Lark.

  “What was the word?” Lark asked.

  Penny Rose stopped breathing for a moment.

  “I forget.”

  Lark laughed. “You’re so funny! Come on, let’s line up for the bus.”

  Once they were on the bus, Lark settled in next to Penny Rose and opened up her bird-watching notebook.

  “I decided today that crows are definitely my favorite kind of bird,” she said in her loud, scratchy voice. Lily Proom and Merry Zwack turned around in their seats to look at her. Pete Smithers shot her a mean look. Jeremy Boils got up with a huff and moved one seat away from them.

  “For one thing, crows are super smart. Also? I think they are beautiful, and so does my grandma on my mother’s side, Oma Maud. Mom doesn’t like them as much since a crow swooped down really close to Finn once when he was in the backyard, and he cried for, like, hours. So now he hates birds, which is weird since he’s my brother, you know?” She took a deep breath. “You wanna go bird-watching sometime?” she asked.

  Penny Rose had been trying to pay attention to Lark, but it was hard. All she could think about was the note. She couldn’t figure out how the Secret Science Society knew about her love of science. It was true that she had aced the first science test, and that Mr. Moyes had made a big deal about how she was the only one who got the question about the earth’s atmosphere right. And she had won a statewide science competition the year before and had had her name in the local newspaper. That was in her old hometown, though. How did they know about that?

  “Hello? Penny Rose? Do you want to bird-watch with me sometime?”

  Penny Rose snapped to attention. “Um, yeah, sure,” she said, although, if she was being completely honest with herself, it didn’t sound nearly as much fun as being part of a secret science society.

  On Friday Penny Rose practically ran to her locker. She opened it slowly, ready to catch the note from the Secret Science Society in case it fell out. Her heart thumped against her ribs. It had to be there. It had to.

  She took every notebook out and shook each one. Gently at first. Then she shook them all again frantically.

  Nothing.

  No note anywhere.

  She was sure she had done everything right. And she knew graphite was a mineral.

  She slammed her locker shut.

  It must have been a joke. Her cheeks burned hotter than a Bunsen burner. She didn’t dare look around.

  Of course it could have been a mistake. Maybe right now some kid was kicking himself for putting the note in the wrong locker.

  Yes, that was probably it.

  It was so very silly, really, to get excited over a note. She had a new best friend and the beginnings of a great robot metropolis, roboTown. That was enough.

  She and Lark worked on roboTown every day for the next two weeks. Penny Rose almost forgot about the note.

  Lark came over to Penny Rose’s house early in the morning the Saturday before Columbus Day carrying a Macy’s shopping bag. They would have three whole days to work in the shed, and they wanted to make the most of it.

  “I found these in the basement,” she said, pulling a tangle of Christmas lights out of the bag. “Mom said I could use them.”

  Along the top of the walls of the shed were hooks that probably once held rakes and shovels. These hooks, Lark had pointed out, were just right for hanging Christmas lights.

  “Great!” Penny Rose said. “Let’s go!”

  As soon as they walked into the shed, they saw it.

  “What happened to the fence?” Lark asked.

  Penny Rose shook her head.

  Ever since Penny Rose’s birthday, strange things had been happening in the shed. They were small at first. One morning iPam’s arms were raised. Another time the tin-can elevator in roboTown was up instead of down. She and Lark had wondered each time if they were misremembering. Did they put Clunk at the top of the slide the day before? Did they leave Sharpie standing in the corner facing the wall?

  But today the fence was knocked down. It was more than two feet long and consisted of fourteen Popsicle sticks and twelve pebbles. They knew they didn’t do that.

  “Do you think animals got in?” Lark asked as she picked up the Popsicle sticks. She blew on her hands to warm them.

  “I don’t think so,” Penny Rose said. “The door was closed.”

  “It’s so weird how these things keep happening,” Lark said. “Maybe we should stay up one night and spy.”

  “Or we could do some kind of video surveillance, like my mom has at the bank.”

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p; “Oooh, that’s a good idea,” Lark said. “We could be modern-day Nancy Drews.”

  Penny Rose considered the facts as she helped Lark pick up the Popsicle sticks. Something was definitely going on. The temperature in the shed dropped each day, even though the outside weather was warm and balmy for October. Sometimes, when everything outside was quiet, inside she could hear a low humming. And when Penny Rose walked into the shed these days, the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood up.

  Penny Rose tried to think of scientific explanations for all of it, but nothing fit. So she pushed the thoughts into the bottom drawer of her brain and kept quiet.

  Despite the odd happenings, roboTown was everything Penny Rose had hoped it would be thanks to Lark. A sign hung above the town. It spelled out roboTown in small lightbulbs that had been screwed into a piece of plywood painted electric blue. Stacked shoe boxes, gift boxes, and wooden crates made up the buildings, which were, in places, as tall as Penny Rose. There were ramps made from toy train tracks that went from one level to the next, as well as a bright pink slide that was originally made for her Barbie dolls. Some rooms were divided by sheets of pennies sandwiched between clear contact paper. One room had bubble-wrap wallpaper and a paper-clip chandelier. The battery-operated elevator made out of a soup can was one of her favorite parts of the town, along with the coffee table made from an old MP3 player.

  Penny Rose turned on the Lava Lamp Forest. In front of it was the obstacle course they had built for the robots made of toilet-paper tubes, springs, spools of thread, and thumbtacks.

  Lark told Penny Rose that some of the items they used to make roboTown were gifts from the birds, like the three-cent stamp and the green ribbon. Penny Rose would simply nod. She wasn’t quite sure what to believe when it came to Lark and her bird stories.

  Lark climbed onto one of the chairs. “Hand me a string,” she said.

  Penny Rose untangled a string of lights and handed it to her. Something scratched at one of the window screens.