INTRUDER ALERT

Having an older brother would have been fine with Zoe if he hadn’t been such a complete moron.

As far as Zoe was concerned, dumb didn’t begin to cover it when it came to Scooter. This situation was made far worse by the fact that Zoe’s parents worshiped the ground Scooter walked on, all because he was apparently a very good athlete. That meant she, not her brother, was the oddball in the family.

“Why can’t you be more, you know, normal, like Scooter,” Zoe’s mom was known to say.

And then she would throw a basketball in Zoe’s general direction, and Zoe would bobble it around, drop it, and break one of the many trophies that covered every flat surface of the house. (There were even two in the bathroom, which Zoe liked to smear with toothpaste or wrap in toilet paper while no one was around.)

The problem was this: Zoe’s parents were both coaches at the local high school. Her dad coached softball and basketball, her mom coached volleyball and soccer, and together they coached track and field. They were obsessed with sports. If they weren’t coaching, they were playing. If they weren’t playing, they were watching it on TV. And Zoe hated sports. She was much more into science and math, particularly engineering and molecular gastronomy (the study of chemical processes that occur while cooking). She also liked astronomy and robotics.

“Scooter is dumber than a moon rock,” Zoe would complain. “He can barely tie his shoes.”

But the answer was always the same. Her mother or her father would look around the room at all the trophies Scooter had won running, jumping, hitting, and swimming, then say,

“Yeah, but have you seen him [insert: high jump, dunk a basketball, throw a fast ball, etc., etc.]?”

It was a sad truth Zoe had come to understand: she was an UBERnerd by the standards of her immediate family. The one saving grace was her Uncle Floyd, who stopped by the house about once a month to provide an update on his secret rocket project.

Floyd was like Zoe, only he had grown up and didn’t have to share a bathroom with any moronic siblings. He was building a rocket in his barn on the edge of town – a rocket Zoe’s family worried about. They were pretty sure that one day the rocket would blow up and the only thing left of Uncle Floyd and his property would be a fifty-foot crater.

“I brought something for you,” Uncle Floyd told Zoe on one of his many visits.

Zoe’s eyes lit up. If her mom or dad said that, and they often did, they would go on to reveal a football or a set of boxing gloves or some other unbelievably useless piece of equipment used for competing in sports. She knew Uncle Floyd would have a totally different idea of what made a good gift.

“What did you bring me?” Zoe asked. “Show me!”

“I’ve been making it, you know, between rocket building and all.”

And then Uncle Floyd handed Zoe a box. She flung the top open and found a bright blue, amazingly cool, and totally brilliant robot.

“It’s the best thing ever,” Zoe whispered, and it was.

She was simply over-the-moon for Hank, which is what Uncle Floyd called it.

“Be careful with Hank,” he warned while Zoe’s parents were in the other room. “He’s smart. He can learn things. I haven’t tested him as much as I’d like.”

Uncle Floyd went on to explain that the rocket building project was taking all of his time and he wouldn’t be working on Hank any more.

“You mean . . .” Zoe dared to dream. “You mean . . . I can keep him?”

“Sure you can.”

Uncle Floyd received an A-plus hug from Zoe, and then she ran up the long flight of stairs with Hank. Zoe’s room was right at the top of the stairs, and she slid across the wood floor on her slippery socks, slamming her door behind her.

Within days, Zoe had trained Hank to help her with her homework (he was particularly good at Geometry) and to protect her room from intruders (otherwise known as Scooter). Whenever her brother came near her room, Hank would yell in his super cool robot voice:

“Intruder! Intruder! Intruder!”

It didn’t take long for Scooter to laugh at Hank and come right inside anyway, but this turned out to be a mistake. Hank hit Scooter with a “death ray,” which consisted of a tiny laser blast that felt not unlike touching an electric fence. After Scooter stopped freaking out, he got mean.

“Keep that thing away from me, or I’ll throw it down the stairs. Don’t think I won’t,” he threatened.

Hank seemed to take notice of the staircase then, and spent some of his free time rolling up to the edge, looking down. It was a long way, thirty wood steps or more, and very dangerous.

Zoe continued to train Hank to do all sorts of things. He played chess with her, which she very much enjoyed, since no one else in the house would play the game and she got bored playing against herself all the time. Hank also learned to open soda cans and to search Scooter’s room for jawbreakers, which Scooter loved and kept hidden in his room.

On the very day that Hank found the jawbreakers and delivered them to Zoe, something big happened. Scooter came home injured. He’d hurt himself playing basketball – a sprained ankle – and Zoe just about barfed from all the attention he got. Zoe’s mom brought him comic books and milkshakes and treated him like he’d had a heart transplant. They smothered him with pizzas and video games and movies while Scooter just laid there acting all busted up. Whenever Zoe came near, he said something annoying, like:

“Shouldn’t you be doing my chores about now?”

And the worst part was that Scooter was hardly even hurt at all! He’d pretend when their parents were in the room, but as soon as they were gone, he’d get up and raid the fridge, chugging orange juice right out of the bottle and smacking his lips disgustingly.

Zoe was so frustrated, steam was practically blowing out of her ears.

“You know what I think?” Zoe told Hank in the privacy of her own room. “I think they’d only pay attention to me if I broke my whole dang leg!”

She poured Scooters jawbreakers out on the floor of her room and picked through them, licking each and every one.

“One of these days I will break my dang leg. Then they’ll see. I matter too! I do!”

She took a drink from the can of soda Hank had opened for her.

“Stupid sprained ankle. Who cares? I’ll show them. They’ll be sorry when I’m in traction!”

Zoe was only blowing off steam. But Hank took notice of everything he saw and heard.

His electronic brain processed the things Zoe was teaching him.

He understood – or so he thought – what she wanted him to do.