Whatever Happened... to Robot Jones? Continued

Chapter 6: Anniversary

At the same time Robot was transfixed by the unexpected robot article in the paper, at the Westerburg house, Shannon was livid with her own research failure. "I can't believe it! The little snot who borrowed this last ripped out the pages that I need!"

She threw the book onto the floor of her room, not caring if it got lost between the piles of trash and clothes and dirty sheets. The other books that she had checked out from the library that afternoon had tons of information-none of which was relevant to her at all. Titles like Great Inventions of the 20th Century were at least close, but touched very little on robotics. So when she checked the contents of The Complete and Total History of Robotics book and found that they, indeed, had an entire section dedicated to JNZ, the American company that had shot up seemingly from nowhere in the middle of the Vietnam War, of course, the pages that had been ripped out by a previous borrower had been that entire section. The only remaining page left in the JNZ chapter was a dabble on the backstory of JNZ's creator, and even that was more speculative, as if the writer had little factual information about the man to cite at all.

Even if the pages had been left, Shannon realized, she might still not find a photo or a diagram of what she was looking for. Of who she was looking for. He was a recent invention of JNZ, wasn't he? And who was to say that her classmate was even important enough to them be conveniently covered in a book at the library?

She looked at the work space she'd cleared for herself on her desk, standing in the middle of the room. She hadn't been completely lying to the art teacher when explaining that she had materials at home to work with, but it mostly consisted of duck tape, pipe cleaner, felt cloth and old food container lids. How she was supposed to build a good sculpture out of just this was anybody's guess. All she'd done so far was build a frame for the feet by ripping the fuzzy parts off of the pipe cleaner off and bending them until they looked about as proportionate as they did in her head. The problem was that she was hoping to not be relying on solely her memory to do this.

This was gonna suck.

She rubbed her eyes and looked behind a pile of clothes to the clock on her nightstand-almost 10pm. She was tired, and a pinching nerve pain shooting from the back of her head was warning of an incoming caffeine withdrawal headache. Carefully, she closed the sketchbook where she'd earlier drawn the most basic plans for her sculpture-as bare bones as the materials she had to work with-and pushed it back under her bed, where even her parents couldn't see it.

She didn't think her mother was awake anymore, anyway. Her grandfather was out late with friends, and if expectation's prevailed, was probably not going to be back until the morning. Neither Shannon nor her mother tended to worry about him, though, since he was in good hands. That left Mrs. Westerburg with a day's worth of exhaustion from being both the bread winner, and the house's only cleaner, and caused her to turn in at a reasonable hour.

Being considerate of her sleep, Shannon tiptoed as quietly as possible past her door, which was especially hard, given one leg was stiff metal and that much harder to control. Thankfully the stairs and most of the 2nd floor was covered in a noise-absorbing, plush brown carpet, with carried her soundlessly down to the kitchen for a drink. Shannon was the only kid she knew who could sleep after a full can of soda. She had felt like she was growing a tolerance to caffeine's effect for a while now, but wondered if it was contributing to her paranoia, both awake and in her dreams.

Open can in hand, the skinny teenager slipped up the stairs, two by two, the floorboards making only the tiniest of squeaks under her feet. On her way back to her room, somehow only now did she notice the light to her mother's room was still on.