Penfield's Greatest Swimmer

🌊~9

"I've never flirted with a girl before," I huffed, crossing my arms.

"Yeah, no kidding," Akunna laughed before moving past me to the tent, where Black beauty was now dabbing away tears of joy. "Sorry about that Shola, I swear he doesn't always talk like that."

"Nah don't apologise," she giggled. "It's been ages since someone made me laugh this much."

"Wait." My eyes darted from Black beauty to Akunna. "You two know each other?"

"Yeah," my roommate smiled. "Akwasi, meet Ms. Shola Obi-Uchendu. The first ever female president of Penfield's Engineering Club and my old school mate from junior high. She was two years ahead of me. Shola, this is Akwasi, my roommate."

"Hii," Black be--no, Shola threw me a wave.

Still feeling embarrassed, I managed to give her a short wave in return. I couldn't believe Akunna made me look like a complete idiot in front of her. "You should've at least told me you knew her," I sniped at him.

"C'mon, where is the fun in that?" He swatted my arm playfully before sending his attention to the pastries Shola had on display. "Ooo, *rockies. Can I have one?"

"Only if you're signing up for the club," Shola replied, closing the ice chest on the table. "We're giving out free *sobolo and rockies to anyone who joins us."

"Oooh, clever. You're luring people into your club with food." Akunna leaned against the table.

"It's not luring when the people who signed up expressed genuine interest," she countered, Igbo accent twisting with her words. "Our club's membership rate has declined over the past three semesters and we need new members if we still want to keep it afloat. I've already come up with a sick list of programmes for this sem, we..."

As Shola and Akunna continued their chat, I decided to take a look at some of the items the club had on display. Most of them being machines with brand new concepts. There was a desk lamp that had been designed like a robot with the lightbulb serving as its head, and a collection of metallic pipes forming its body. Under it was the tag, steampunk lamp. Out of curiosity, I turned the red valve in front of the robot. There was a mild click, followed by a fizzle then orange light flooded the bulb. "Huh."

I moved on to the next invention, checking their name tags and figuring out what each of them could do. The more I did that, the more I grew amazed. It was actually surprising that the students here built these stuff out of scrap metal, wires and a whole bunch of materials. There was even some sort of wireless magnetic power bank where all you had to do was stick your phone to the magnetic panel and, voila! The phone starts charging.

"I can see you're impressed."

At the sound of the voice, I lifted myself up. Shola stood a few feet away, arms crossed and smiling. Behind her, Akunna was now engaged in a conversation with some other guy.

"Yeah. All these things...they're amazing."

"Thanks." Shola drew closer. "They were all built by current and past members of the club. Some spent weeks, months, years just working on them."

My eyes continued to flit around, spying all the inventions until it froze on one particular item that had part of it wrapped in black polythene. "Hey, what's that?"

"Oh that thing? It's not on display. In fact, it's not even supposed to be here, I was just..."

Ignoring Shola, I covered the short distance to the item and pushed down the rest of the covering. "Whoa." I gaped at the bulky metallic machine. "What is it?"

"It's a robot, a luggage-carrying robot," came Shola's reply. "But it's not complete, it's still under testing." She grabbed the polythene and began covering it up again.