Maya and the Robot Read online

  Kokila

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Kokila,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Text copyright © 2021 by Eve L. Ewing

  Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Christine Almeda

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  Kokila & colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9781984814647

  Design by Jasmin Rubero, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  pid_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  This book is dedicated to anybody looking for a friend.

  –E. L. E

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: The Worst Science Fair Ever

  Chapter 2: The First Day

  Chapter 3: The Perfect Friend

  Chapter 4: Kind of a Mess

  Chapter 5: Meet Ralph

  Chapter 6: The Best Science Fair Ever

  Chapter 7: Hustle

  Chapter 8: High Five, Maya

  Chapter 9: A Dream Come True

  Chapter 10: The Invisible Girl

  Chapter 11: Ralph Helps

  Chapter 12: Good Neighbors

  Chapter 13: A Sad Feeling

  Chapter 14: Christopher’s Gift

  Chapter 15: Practice Makes Perfect

  Chapter 16: Reset Button

  Chapter 17: A Real Scientist

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Chapter 1:

  The Worst Science Fair Ever

  If you looked outside through the cafeteria windows, it seemed like a perfectly normal day. The sun was shining. Birds were chirping. A regular day. A beautiful day, even. But inside the cafeteria, things were anything but normal. All around me, kids and adults were screaming. I tried to shut out the chaos for a second and focus on the sunlight. Just breathe, I told myself. Count your breaths. Calm down. One . . . two . . .

  “Yaaaaarghhhh!” came the ear-piercing yell from behind me. “My computer is covered in pudding! Pudding!”

  I spun around to see Zoe Winters, the most popular girl in my class, standing in front of a display table where her science fair project had once stood. When I had walked into the cafeteria carrying my own project, I’d noticed how neat the whole thing was—the letters that spelled the project title, “Coding and Circuits,” across the top of the board, the computer and circuits and batteries set up in a display at the front of the table.

  Now it was a mess that mostly resembled a pudding waterfall. Pudding dripped over the title, smeared across the letters so it said COD CIRCU S. Pudding filled the keys of the computer keyboard. But I really cringed when I saw something even worse than ruining an expensive computer. Zoe hadn’t noticed yet, but there was also—

  “PUDDING IN MY HAIR! CHOCOLATE PUDDING IN MY HAIR!”

  Okay. I guess she had noticed. 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. “Ayyyaaazzzrrrruuuuggghhhmaaargh!”

  I was going to go over and help her when a streak of something yellow flew past my ear. I looked behind me to see that it was creamed corn. It had been launched with the accuracy of a fastball, landing dead center in a huddle of screeching first graders. They were sheltering in the corner with their teacher, screeching and giggling at the pudding waterfall, but now that it was raining corn, they started panicking and running in circles, except for one kid who must have been hungry, because he started trying to catch the bits of flying corn with his mouth.

  “Mommy, I don’t like corn!” wailed a kindergartner. She took off running at top speed to try to get as far away from the corn hurricane as possible. “No, stop!” I yelled after her, but it was too late. She skidded on a gross mixture of pudding and corn that was waiting on the floor like a cartoon banana peel, her light-up gym shoes slipping and sliding as she struggled to stay upright. 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. It was a work of art. I could tell Jada must have fussed over it for weeks—it wasn’t any old thing she made out of a kit. There were LEGOs and toothpicks, tiny wires, plastic beads, Popsicle sticks, and even a tiny glowing LED light at the top of the bridge. It was complex and beautiful. The little kid grabbed the table, and Jada froze, seeing her creation in danger but not knowing what to do. She couldn’t push a younger kid out of the way, but I could see by the pain in her face that she was strongly considering it. “Noooooo!” a voice screamed, and when they both turned their eyes on me I realized that the voice was mine.

  Have you ever seen one of those videos that shows an avalanche coming down a mountain in slow motion? Imagine that, but replace the snow with LEGOs and toothpicks and beads, and you’ll see what I saw as Jada’s project came tumbling down onto the small girl sitting pitifully on the floor in a puddle of pudding.

  Jada stood there, arms hanging at her sides, and watched it happen. For a second she seemed to be in shock. Then she took a deep breath, furrowed her brow, and hollered at the top of her lungs: “THIS! IS THE WORST! SCIENCE FAIR! EVERRRR!” And then she began to cry. First her voice, then her sobs, reverberated around the room, but no one seemed to hear her. Everyone was too busy trying to handle the disaster that was unfolding.

  The gym teacher was blowing his whistle for order. But it stopped making any sound when a blob of mashed potatoes flew into his face. He kept blowing, but the whistle only shot out white specks of mashed potatoes with every breath. 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. In one corner, there was so much creamed corn spilled on the floor that it made a pond large enough for several preschool kids to be sitting in it and having the time of their lives, putting it in each other’s hair and throwing it at each other and grinning like it was a playground sandbox. Near the door, Mr. Samuels, the custodian, was standing forlornly with a bucket, shaking his head. “Nope,” he said over and over. “Nope, nope, nope. No way. I’m gonna need a bigger mop.” Pudding and mashed potatoes and corn were on everything. On the tables, the floors, the walls, in people’s hair. 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. Beeping at a terrible high pitch, flashing multicolored lights, and appearing perfectly willing to spend the whole rest of the day tossing potatoes at people with no sign of stopping. This calamity, the screaming, the mess, the ruined science fair . . . this was his fault.

  No, I realized. This was my fault.

  After all, he was my robot.

  My spinning, beeping, flashing, food-catapulting, going-completely-berserk-in-the-school-cafeteria robot.

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

  “You, my dear, are in big, big trouble,” she said. I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could speak, a glob of pudding hit me right in the middle of my forehead.

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

  How did I get here? I didn’t wake up, hop out of bed, and say, “I want to be a troublemaker kid who brings a robot to school and stands by doing nothing while it goes bonkers in the cafeteria, starts a creamed corn apocalypse, ruins the science fair, and makes my best friend cry.” Definitely not my goal. I swear, I’m really a regular person. And at the moment, a regular person who is probably about to get suspended, unless for some reason the principal enjoys wearing a pile of mashed potatoes as a hat.

  Well . . . I’m a mostly regular person. A regular person with a robot.

  But it wasn’t always that way. If the year had gone how I’d wanted it to, I probably wouldn’t have a robot at all.

  It all started on the first day of school.

  Chapter 2:

  The First Day

  Pancakes. Warm, golden, perfect pancakes. Thousands of them, piled high. A mountain of pancakes. I put on my climbing gear, threw my rope and grappling hook up Pancake Mountain, and started to make my way toward the summit. As I went along, I reached out and grabbed pieces of the mountain and popped them into my mouth. Glistening streams of maple syrup flowed down the side, and I stuck my tongue out to catch the droplets of sweetness. Then, in a booming voice, someone was calling to me from the peak. What’s that they were saying? They seemed upset. Who could be upset on Pancake Mountain?! Pancake Mountain is a place of joy and happiness. Who—

  “MAAAAYAAAAAAAA! I AM NOT! GOING TO TELL YOU! AGAIN! Turn that alarm off and let’s get a move on!”

  I sat straight up in bed and rubbed my eyes. I looked around. Not a pancake to be found. Not even the mini-size silver dollar ones. And my mom, from the sound of things, was not happy. It would be so nice to just drift back to sleep, where everything was cozy and warm and syrupy. If only I could turn off that alarm.

  My eyes darted to the corner of the bedroom I share with my little brother, Amir. On the desk was a bunch of dried Play-Doh he had left out, a couple of stuffed animals, a model of the solar system with little teeth marks in Saturn and Mercury (I mentioned the little brother, right?), a pile of my overdue library books (I’m almost done with that Mae Jemison biography, and then I’ll send it back! I swear!), and the beeping alarm clock. Next to it was . . . my book bag full of school supplies and the clothes I had laid out the night before. Oh my gosh. Today is the—

  “First! Day! Of! School!” The bedroom door flew open and my mother leaped into the room. She tugged the covers off of me.

  “Let’s go, Patricia Maya Robinson!” My mother has two jobs but somehow manages to have the most enthusiasm and energy of anyone in the world. I knew she had been up before the sun, getting Amir ready for my grandma to pick him up and take him to day care, getting my lunch together, and listening to the radio. Unlike pretty much every other adult I’ve ever met, she didn’t even drink coffee, but she always seemed ready to do backflips in the morning. Maybe that would be a good science fair project, I thought. Adult responses to caffeine. Does it have to do with age? Height? Weight? Blood type? What about—

  “Maya, don’t make me tell you again.”

  “I got it, Mom. I’m up.” I groaned and climbed out of bed. “I’ll get dressed.”

  “Oh, I know you will,” she replied. She went over to the desk, threw the dried Play-Doh in the trash with lightning speed, and picked up the neatly folded school clothes. She tossed them onto the foot of the bed. “You got five minutes, baby girl. I need you washed, dressed, and ready to eat, fast, so you can get out the door on time. I picked up Ms. Yolanda’s shift, and I can’t take you to school if you miss the bus.”

  “Okay,” I mumbled, still half-asleep. Drowsily, I tugged off the satin bonnet that I had worn to protect my freshly braided first-day-of-school hair. I was surprised it stayed on throughout all my sleeping and dreaming. I probably had a big line on my forehead.

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

  “Pancakes!” Suddenly I wasn’t so sleepy. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  I got dressed in record time.

  If only the first day of school had ended as well as it started. The pancakes were delicious, and then it was pretty much downhill from there.

  When I got to the playground, right away I headed to where MJ and Jada would be waiting for me. 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. Probably the galaxy. I was really excited to get back to school and see them. Most of the kids at my school live in different neighborhoods and different parts of the city, so I don’t get to see them as much as I want to. Sometimes I read books and see TV shows where the characters are riding bikes to each other’s houses every day after school, and that always makes me sort of jealous. If I could ride my bike to see Jada or MJ, I would be with them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Instead, I have to wait for someone to plan it out and give me a ride. That’s no fun.

  When we are able to get together, we think of really creative things to do. Jada and MJ are always down to assist with my latest science project, and they get just as excited as I do when I can actually get something to work. One time we spent twelve hours building a Rube Goldberg machine that could tip a watering can and water a plant when you put a race car on a track. Another time we made up our own movie, with a script and everything, and then MJ’s brother let us use his phone to record it and edit it. It was a mystery called The Case of the Missing Toaster, and I got to be the detective searching for the toaster, MJ was the villain who stole it, and Jada was the director. We tried to make MJ’s cousin Boogie play the role of the toaster, but he wouldn’t do it. Another time we went down to Jada’s basement, built a giant fort out of blankets, and spent the rest of the day with some flashlights, making up stories and looking through the photos and yearbooks Jada’s grandpa left down there, laughing at the funny old hairstyles and fashions. Jada’s mom has a catering business, and sometimes she lets us help her prepare food for someone’s birthday or wedding shower. One time she showed us how to test if a cupcake is done (you stick a toothpick in the center, and if it comes out wet, it needs more time) and how to perfectly balance a cherry on top of a bunch of frosting.

  On Halloween, sometimes we trick-or-treat at MJ’s because he lives in a really big apartment building with hundreds of people, not just three apartments like my building. Last year we went door to door inside, which was good because it was pouring rain out, and we still got a lot of candy. I knew that this year we could have just as much fun. When we hang out at my house, we usually play with Amir, and since I have the biggest LEGO collection of anybody, we work on those for hours and hours, either following directions or making our own LEGO designs. We don’t have to be super creative all the time. Sometimes we play video games or watch television and relax. Daddy calls us the Three Jedi Knights. He’s the on
e who showed us the original Star Wars movies, and then he showed us the old cowboy Westerns where George Lucas got his ideas from. Some people would laugh if they went to visit their friend and their friend’s dad wanted to watch a bunch of old movies, but Jada and MJ were completely into it. They’re really open to trying something new, and even if they weren’t feeling it, they wouldn’t have laughed. See what I mean? Greatest friends in the Milky Way.

  I spotted them right away, in our usual spot by the fence, overlooking the basketball court. MJ and I are into watching on the sidelines. Jada, who is a basketball fiend, wishes she could jump in the game. But the older kids always take over, and so Jada usually lingers at the edge of the fence with lost-puppy-dog eyes, trying to get up the courage to ask them if she can join.

  Today was no different. “I can’t wait until we’re in seventh grade,” she said when I arrived. No hello or anything, and she didn’t look at me directly. Her eyes were locked onto the ball as it bounced three times against the pavement and then soared through the air, arcing toward the basket. “As soon as I get a chance, I’m—”

  “Gonna be the first in line for tryouts,” MJ said. We’ve heard this speech so many times that he’s able to finish the sentence for her at this point. Jada barely noticed, still hypnotized by the action on the court.

  “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. “Hi, Maya.”

  “Hi, Jada! Hey, MJ!”

  Before MJ could respond, an older boy who overheard us walked away from the court and leaned over the fence, furrowing his brow. MJ rolled his eyes. He already knew what was coming.

  “Ay!” said the boy. “I got a question. If your name is Michael Jordan, why you so scrawny?” MJ ignored him. But Jada wasn’t here for it.