"I also want you to know that the fee is not the deciding factor. There's a scholarship fund. If it's money, it's handled. You don't need to tell me if it is. Just tell your mom that."
"She'll say we don't take charity."
"It isn't charity. It's a line item." Ms. Sato almost smiled. "Tell her it's a line item."
"Okay."
"And Desmond." She waited until he looked at her. "If the form doesn't come in, this team doesn't go short. This team doesn't go. Hector can't drive the code you wrote, and Patrice can't run the autonomous routine without you calling the start. I'm not telling you that to put it on you. I'm telling you so you know exactly what it is. You aren't a spare part."
He nodded. His throat hurt. He went back to the field and sat cross-legged in front of Spool and opened the laptop and pretended to look at the autonomous routine, which was perfect and didn't need looking at.
---
That night he texted his father. He'd thought about it most of the day and written it six times in his notes app before he sent it.
*Hi Dad. Our robotics team qualified for the Northeast qualifier in Pittsburgh. I need a parent signature by Friday 8am. You can sign a PDF on your phone and email it to Ms. Sato at [email protected]. I can send you the form. Mom hasn't signed yet. It's okay if you can't.*
The *it's okay if you can't* took the longest.
The three dots came up almost right away and his heart did something stupid. Then they went away. Then they came back.
*👍 proud of u man*
He waited twenty minutes. He sent the PDF. He waited an hour. Nothing else came.
He wasn't surprised, exactly. His father sent thumbs-ups the way some people said *uh-huh,* to show he'd heard without promising anything. Terrence had moved to Atlanta when Dez was six. He called on birthdays, mostly, and once flew up for Jalen's eighth-grade game and sat in the bleachers in a camel coat like a man waiting for a flight. Dez didn't hate him. It was hard to hate someone you didn't really have.
He put the phone face down on the dresser and lay on his back and looked at the glow-in-the-dark stars Walter had put on the ceiling when he was five, arranged, at Dez's insistence, in the actual shape of Orion.
---
On Wednesday, in practice, Spool's arm broke.