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anything.
    “What was the name of the cat?” he asked.
    They looked at him with confusion. Because of his allergies, they’d never had a cat.
    He made a motion of something drifting up and away. “The toy cat?”
    “Popoki?” Jillian cried. “No, we’re not calling it Popoki.”
    Once upon a time that was now growing to be a dim memory, they had a small robotic cat, Popoki. It had met an untimely end involving a pair of large helium balloons and their lack of understanding how much lift said balloons could generate versus the weight of the small toy. Louise’s last memory of Popoki was it floating up over the Steinmetz’s house. It went higher and higher, its electronic meows growing fainter, until the balloons were a tiny dot drifting toward the ocean. Jillian had been inconsolable for days.
    “George.” Their mother scolded their father with his name. “What was the dog in Peter Pan ? This one looks like it.”
    From the perked-up ears to its curled tail, the robot looked nothing like the nanny dog of Peter Pan . The only similarity was its size and the pattern of its markings—but then everyone always thought the twins were identical.
    “Nana,” Louise said. “She was a Newfoundland in the original story, but Disney made her a Saint Bernard. They’re the same size dog, only Newfoundlands are usually all black.”
    “Saint Bernards are easier to illustrate facial emotions, because of their markings,” Jillian said.
    “It doesn’t feel like a girl to me,” Louise said. “It feels like a boy dog.”
    “A boy dog?” their father said.
    “Something like . . .” Louise thought for a moment, but the only male names that were coming to her were Orville and Wilbur. What was another famous inventor? “Tesla.”
    Jillian giggled, recognizing the path that Louise took to get to the name. “Okay, Tesla!”
    “Very cool name.” Their father crouched down beside Louise. “Do you like it, honey?”
    She wanted to say no. It probably cost a lot of money that could have been spent on things she and Jillian would have liked more. It was, however, a practical gift considering the situation. If they couldn’t safely commute to school, their parents would probably take them out of Perelman School for the Gifted and enroll them someplace else. It wasn’t that she loved Perelman, but “someplace else” could be anything from a local high school with kids four years older than them to a boarding school. “It’s a wonderful present. Thank you, Daddy.”
    With the magical words, he melted, hugging her tightly. “Oh, I love you two so much. I want to give you the world.”
    * * *
    Jillian waited until they were safe in their room.
    “Merde!” Jillian cursed in French. “C’est des conneries. Fait chier! Fait chier! Fait chier!”
    Louise shook her head as she pulled up the website of the robot’s manufacturer. “If they hear you, they’ll ground you,” Louise warned, keeping to French until she knew if Tesla had an eavesdropping application or not. They had initiated the robot’s setup program in the kitchen by registering his name and that the twins were his primary owners. The big dog robot was slowly working its way around the room, mapping it.
    “They wouldn’t understand what we’re saying even if they heard us.” Jillian growled in French and flung herself onto the bed. “It’s the whole point of using another language.”
    “Merde!” Louise hissed her own curse and kept to French. “Yes, it has an eavesdropping application and GPS. Not only can they keep track of it via a phone app, they can ask it questions. It can answer in thirty-two languages!” She dialed Tesla’s number on her cell phone and he answered with a deep male voice. “Konnichiwa.”
    She cycled through the various breed voices. German Shepard said “Guten Tag” in a slightly more tenor male and Shih Tzu said “Nǐ hǎo” in a bright and chipper female voice. She groaned and cycled quickly through the voices,