"Eliminations are at ten."
She had her Sunday shift. She had traded for it in January. She looked at her son across the plastic table and thought about the woman in the scheduling office who'd called her at home twice last year to beg her to cover, and how she'd said yes both times.
She called her charge coordinator, there at the table. She asked. She apologized. She offered two Saturdays in April. It took eleven minutes and cost her more pride than she'd expected. When she hung up, Jalen was grinning at the table and trying not to.
"We leave at five-thirty," she said. "You're buying the gas station coffee."
---
They came into the David L. Lawrence Convention Center at 10:20 a.m. Sunday, having parked badly and run four blocks, and the hall hit them like weather. Music thumped. Kids in team shirts of every color crowded the rails banging thundersticks, and somewhere a team in viking helmets was chanting. On the big screens over the main field, robots crabbed and lifted and shot foam hexagons into tubes.
"How do you find anybody in this?" Jalen said.
Renita was already looking. She found him the way she'd found him in every crowd since he was born, by some instinct below thought. Section C, the rail by Field 2. The red-and-white alliance banner. And in the bleachers behind it, a white goatee and a light blue shirt buttoned at the cuffs.
Walter saw her first. He didn't wave. He stood up, slowly, like a man getting up in church, and stayed standing.
Dez was at the driver station with Hector and the two drivers from the partner team, a group of high school juniors from Albany who towered over him. The semifinal was about to start. He didn't see her. He shouldn't. He was looking at Spool.
The buzzer went. For fifteen seconds of autonomous, no one touched anything, and the robots moved on their own, following the code. Spool slid sideways, turned, scooped a cell, and lifted, and the new gear rotated the arm in one clean motion. The cell dropped into the high tube, and the Albany kids screamed. Renita realized she was holding Jalen's sleeve hard enough to stretch it.
They won the semifinal by twenty-two points.
They lost the final.
They didn't lose it close. The first-seed alliance, two teams from a STEM magnet in New Jersey with matching jackets and a robot that looked machined by NASA, took them apart, 131 to 94 and 126 to 101, and there was nothing unfair in it. Spool's endgame lift worked in both matches. It didn't matter. The other robots were faster.
When the final buzzer sounded, Dez stood at the driver station looking up at the score. Renita watched his shoulders and couldn't tell what he was feeling. Then the announcer's voice came over the speakers: *Ladies and gentlemen, your Northeast finalists, who will join our champions at the National Championship in Houston, team 31187, Lake Effect, from Rochester, New York!*
Hector grabbed Dez around the neck. The Albany kids lifted him off the ground. Ms. Sato, at the rail, nodded once.
Then Dez turned, still up in the air, and saw her.