Lights, Music, Code!

by Jo Whittemore

  “I’ve been to a lot of school dances,” Erin informed me. “And spent a lot of time around the punch bowl.”

  “Aw.” I tilted my head to one side. “Because nobody wanted to dance with you?” I teased.

  I could practically hear Erin rolling her eyes at me. “No, because punch is awesome.”

  I snickered. “Glad to know you go for the right reasons.”

  “Yep. Watered-down punch and off-brand potato chips.”

  We both laughed. But again, since parents can tell when you’re having too much fun, Mom poked her head in.

  “Who are you talking to?” she demanded.

  I cupped a hand over my phone. “Erin.”

  Mom smiled. “Oh, good. Tell her I said hi! And when you get off the phone, we need to talk.”

  She waited for me to nod before she closed the door. In a softer voice, I told Erin, “You and I are never ending this phone call.”

  “Why is your mom mad?” Erin asked.

  I told her about Mom’s disapproval of Nicole, but when I came to the part where Mom and I started fighting, Erin groaned. “You really want to play that game?”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “What game?”

  “Defy the Parent.”

  “If my mom is being unfair, yes,” I said. “You don’t think I should?”

  Erin hesitated. “It would be one thing if your mom said ‘Get off the phone! No friends!’ But she seems to be singling out Nicole.”

  “Exactly!” I hammered my fist into the carpet. “She’s being unfair.”

  “Or she sees something bad in Nicole that you don’t.”

  I frowned. “You know, I wasn’t mad at you, but I can be.”

  “No, no, no!” said Erin. “I’m not saying I agree with your mom. I’m saying she has her reasons, and I don’t think one is ‘to be mean to my daughter.’”

  What Erin said made a little sense. And I didn’t like it.

  “Can we talk about something else?” I asked. “Like why Sophia and Lucy might be upset?”

  “At me,” Erin added.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. When Lucy’s mad, she gets really quiet, and when Sophia’s mad, she throws things.”

  “True,” said Erin. “So then why did they get so defensive about the dance?”

  We both sat for a moment and thought.

  I snapped my fingers. “Maybe Sophia’s having issues with Sammy.”

  Erin sucked in her breath. “And maybe Lucy likes him, too! Yes! It fits perfectly.”

  “We’ll talk to them tomorrow before school,” I said. “And see if we can help.”

  “As older and wiser seventh-graders, it’s our duty,” Erin said. Then in an old lady’s voice, she added, “Did I ever tell you kids about the time I went to a school dance that had name-brand potato chips?”

  I laughed and attempted my own imitation. “That’s right! No Spud Slivers or Taste of ’Tato for us.”

  Erin let out a squawk of laughter. “Taste of ’Tato!”

  Once we’d calmed down, she said, “Thanks for talking to me, Maya. I feel loads better.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” I said. “And really good friends will stay on the phone with you forever so you don’t have to talk to your mother.”

  She snickered. “Sorry, but I’ve got homework to do. Good luck with your mom!”

  “Thanks,” I said with a sigh and hung up.

  I changed into my most comfortable pajamas and went in search of Mom. She was sitting with Oliver, watching a movie, but paused it when I walked in.

  “You wanted to talk?” I asked.

  Mom glanced at Oliver, who jumped up.

  “I’m going to make some popcorn.”

  He squeezed my shoulder as he walked past and whispered, “Be nice.”

  Mom patted the couch cushion next to her, and I sat.

  “Why is this friendship with Nicole so important to you?” she asked.

  “Because I think people can change.” I picked up a pillow and hugged it to me. “And when you don’t agree, it makes me feel like you don’t think I’ve changed.”

  The corners of Mom’s mouth turned down, and she studied me in silence. For a few moments, the only sound was popcorn bursting from its kernels.

  Finally, Mom gave a deep sigh. “If you think Nicole’s changed, I suppose I could give her a chance,” she said. “I mean, you came home when I asked, so that’s a good sign.”

  “It is,” I agreed. After a beat, I ventured to ask, “So can I hang out with Nicole?”

  Mom stiffened, but all she said was, “As long as she doesn’t get you into trouble.”

  “She won’t,” I promised.

  After all, it’d only been one day. What kind of mischief could Nicole possibly cause?

  * * *

  The next morning I was running late, so Oliver dropped me off at school. As I approached the entrance, I saw something familiar and horrifying taped inside the windows.

  Squashed against the glass were the photocopied faces Nicole and I had made.

  “Nooo,” I whispered.

  I snatched the papers off the windows and crumpled them, hurrying down the hall and stopping outside the library doors, each of which had a window.

  Boom. Nicole’s face squashed into one.

  Boom. Mine squashed into the other.

  “Oh, come on!” I exclaimed, ducking into the library.

  I ripped the pages off the doors and another one of Nicole’s face from the librarian’s computer screen.

  Had Nicole gotten up at sunrise to do this? And how many were there?

  Tossing the papers into the trash, I ran back into the hall, almost colliding with Nicole.

  “Hey!” she said breathlessly. “I was just coming to put more of these in the library.” She held up our faces.

  “Don’t!” I said, a little too loudly. A group of guys looked at us, and one of them squashed his face with one hand. The others laughed.

  Nicole looked confused. “But I thought you said it’d be funny.” She gestured to the guys. “They think it is.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t want you to actually do it!” I said. “We could get in serious trouble.”

  “For taping funny pictures in the windows?” she asked with a snort. “How uptight is this school?”

  “I don’t want to find out.” I grabbed the stack of images from her. “How many more did you put up?”

  Nicole stared at the ceiling and counted quietly. The higher the number got, the higher my eyebrows rose.

  “Twenty,” she said. “Well . . . eighteen.” She pointed to the now-empty library windows.

  “Fifteen, actually,” I told her. “I pulled one off a computer screen and two from the school entrance.”

  “Awww!” She pouted her lower lip. “Those were the best!”

  I grabbed her arm. “Nicole, we have to get rid of the others before a teacher sees. Or worse . . . the principal!”

  “Ugh. Fine,” Nicole said with a dramatic eye roll.

  As we walked the halls collecting images, a strange thing happened: Kids begged us to keep the images up and complimented us on our epic prank.

  “You almost scared the pants off Mr. Henke!” one girl said, laughing. “He literally screamed when he saw the face in the window.”

  “So hilarious! Whose idea was it?” someone else asked.

  Nicole arched a brow at me, and I couldn’t help raising my hand.

  “Mine.”

  A guy high-fived it. “I never knew you were so funny!”

  I beamed at him.

  Okay, so Nicole should’ve told me before she put up the pictures, but I’d stopped her before she got us in trouble, so my mom couldn’t be upset.

  I had everything under control.

 
; As long as my parents never found out.

  Chapter Five

  One of the best parts of writing code for the school dance was getting to spend homeroom with my friends from coding club. But when I got to the library, nobody seemed to share my enthusiasm.

  Leila was playing a game on her phone (we weren’t allowed to use our phones in class, but at the library was fine); Erin was sitting in the corner watching Lucy and Sophia; Lucy was staring forlornly at something in her notebook; and Sophia was busy throwing a ball against the wall and ignoring everyone.

  “So how’s the project for the dance going?” I asked by way of greeting.

  “We were waiting for you,” said Leila, not looking up from her phone.

  Lucy and Sophia did look at me but neither said anything. Sophia threw her ball a little harder.

  Only Erin jumped up and approached me. “Where were you this morning? I thought we were going to . . .” She trailed off and subtly angled her head in Lucy and Sophia’s direction. “You know.”

  “Sorry, I was busy talking to some kids who loved the squashed-face prank Nicole and I pulled.” I grinned at her. “Did you see?”

  “What, those photocopies in the classroom windows?” asked Erin.

  I nodded. “Someone said we scared Mr. Henke!”

  Leila paused her game. “Really? With a black-and-white, one-dimensional photo? That wasn’t scary.”

  “I know,” I said, walking over to her. “But you’ve got to admit, it was pretty funny.”

  “I guess,” she said with a shrug.

  I looked at Erin for confirmation, and she tilted her hand from side to side. “Putting them in all the windows was overkill.”

  I flicked my hair to the side. “Well, a lot of other people found it funny.”

  “Maybe someone bullied them into saying that,” said Sophia.

  I exchanged a puzzled look with Erin.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your little buddy,” said Sophia, clearing absolutely nothing up.

  “I don’t—”

  “Do I need to spell it out for you? N-I-C-O-L-E.” Sophia punctuated each letter with the bounce of the ball.

  I reached out and caught it. “What are you talking about?”

  Sophia rocked her chair onto its back legs. “This morning she tried to bully me and Lucy into agreeing with your light-up bracelet idea.”

  I stepped back. “She what?”

  “Nicole didn’t bully us, Sophia,” Lucy finally spoke up. “It’s not like she threatened to hurt us or called us names.”

  Sophia held up a finger. “I believe she said ‘you guys are idiots if you don’t use Maya’s idea,’ and last time I checked, ‘idiot’ was a name.”

  I put Sophia’s ball on the table and pressed my hands to my cheeks, which were hot with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry, you guys. I’m sure she was just sticking up for me.”

  “Maybe she was, but she could’ve found a nicer way to do it,” said Lucy.

  “You’re right,” I said, reaching across the table. “I’ll talk to Nicole.”

  Lucy’s expression lightened, and she squeezed my hand. “Thanks.”

  “Soph?” I reached toward her. She rolled her eyes but offered me a fist to bump.

  “We’re cool.”

  “And hey, if you want, I’ll have Nicole come apologize,” I added.

  Sophia grimaced. “No offense, Maya, but I’d rather not breathe the same air as her anytime soon.”

  Lucy shot her a warning look. “Soph.”

  “What? I said ‘no offense.’”

  “Wow.” I leaned away from Sophia. “You really don’t like Nicole, do you?”

  Sophia smiled apologetically. “We saw her hanging those squashed-face pics”—she gestured to herself and Lucy—“and she was cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West.”

  I looked at Lucy. “Really?”

  Lucy squirmed but nodded. “It wasn’t a happy laugh. It was more . . . wicked, like she knew she was causing trouble.”

  No defenses for Nicole came to mind. “Well, at least we didn’t get in trouble,” I said.

  “You’re lucky,” said Leila, who’d resumed her game. “Last time I put up flyers without permission, I got sent to the principal.”

  “Yeah, you can’t even hang a funny doodle of the math teacher with a chicken body,” said Erin.

  We all looked at her.

  “What? His name’s Mr. Cluck. How can I not take advantage of that?”

  “I’m going to need to see that drawing,” said Sophia.

  “Oh, sure!” Erin reached for her backpack. “It inspired me to create a whole collection of teachers-as-animals.”

  I cleared my throat. “Aren’t we here to talk about coding for the dance?”

  Erin fumbled in her bag with a guilty grin. “I was totally getting my coding notebook, not my teacher-creature one.”

  “So everyone’s getting along now?” asked Leila. “Nobody’s mad at anyone?”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Sophia.

  Lucy nodded, and Leila finally put away her game.

  “Right. Down to business.” Erin uncapped her pen. “We should make a list of parts we need for our project. And before that, we should figure out how to . . . um . . . do our project.”

  The rest of us laughed.

  “First, do we want all the lights to flicker at once?” asked Erin. “Or do we want different colors for different volumes?”

  We all agreed different colors would be way more fun.

  “The music will come from speakers,” added Leila. “So there has to be a way to take that audio signal and transform it into the different-colored lights.”

  “That’s where the code comes in, right?” I asked. “So we need an input: some sort of sensor that picks up the music volume.”

  Erin did a quick search on her phone. “We can buy an audio sensor that plugs directly into an Arduino circuit board . . . which we’ll also need.” She started a supply list.

  “My sister has a bunch of Arduinos, so we can probably take one,” said Leila.

  “Cool!” said Erin. “I’ll cross that off the list.”

  “So if the audio sensor’s the input, then the flashing of the different-colored lights must be the output,” said Sophia.

  “And the code to do it all runs on the Arduino,” said Erin, taking notes.

  “Wait, what are you guys talking about? What’s an Arduino? I’m so confused.” Lucy buried her head in her hands.

  Leila started talking while she drew a human stick figure. “My sister explained this to me recently—she’s using an Arduino circuit board for a project of hers. Think of an audio sensor like your ear, and an Arduino circuit board like your brain.”

  She doodled music notes going from the stick figure’s ear to the brain.

  “Your brain processes the music that your ear picks up and turns it into something that it understands—”

  “Kind of like an Arduino that’s running code,” said Erin. “Except your brain processes music automatically, while an Arduino has to be told to get the input from an audio sensor.”

  “Exactly!” Leila continued. “Once the Arduino gets the input from the audio sensor, it’ll use more code to match the volume level with a light color. The last part of the code sends the information to a relay board that actually controls the lights and tells the different colors to flash.”

  Now I was the one who was confused. “A relay board?”

  Leila drew three little flashlights in the stick figure’s hands and labeled them different colors. “Yeah—it’s a board with magnetic switches that turn on or off through sensors, and we can write code so that it controls the lights the way we want it to.”

  Lucy stared at the diagram for a few s
econds. “I get it—the hands are turning the lights off and on, so they’re like the relay board!” She leaned back with a satisfied smile.

  “You are seriously good at explaining this stuff,” I told Leila, studying her diagram.

  She grinned. “It helps to have a sister who’s even more into robotics than I am.”

  “So if we want three colors, we need to run three connections off the Arduino,” said Erin.

  “And add extra code for each color, right?” asked Sophia.

  “Yeah, but it’s just making minor tweaks to each line depending on the light color,” Leila answered. “So we can just copy, paste, edit.”

  I was amazed that we were figuring all this out so quickly. I guess we’d learned a lot in a few months of coding club—and of course it helped that Leila and Erin already knew some coding stuff.

  “And there are five of us,” I pointed out, “so we can divide and conquer.”

  Erin looked at the list she had created. “Leila, I think it’s probably easiest for you to come up with parts.”

  She gave a thumbs-up. “On it.”

  Erin smiled. “Great! Who wants to write the code that makes the Arduino look for the audio sensor?”

  I raised my hand. “Me!”

  “And I’ll write the code to turn the music into light colors,” said Erin, making a note.

  “I can help, and maybe Mrs. Clark can, too,” Leila told her. “That section might get tricky. It takes a lot of figuring out.”

  Erin nodded. “So, Lucy and Sophia, can you write the output code to send the light colors to the relay board?”

  Sophia nodded, and so did Lucy, but she was twirling her pen nervously between her fingers.

  “We can all work together,” Leila assured her. “Why don’t we meet at my house after school and get started?”

  The rest of us agreed. I had a feeling Mom would be happy I was spending time with anyone but Nicole.

  “I’ll run our final plan past Mrs. Clark,” said Erin. “As long as she’s okay with our setup, we’re good to go.”

  The bell rang for the end of homeroom, and we gathered our things. I waited for Erin, and we walked to our lockers.

  “So I know how Sophia and Lucy feel. Do you dislike Nicole, too?” I asked.