The Club Fair Crisis: Why Your Name Is Your First Superpower

The glow of Mia’s laptop screen burned into her retinas as she scrolled through the 17th list of “cool robotics club names” she’d found in 20 minutes of Googling. Her robotics mentorship club— the one she’d spent two months begging the overworked engineering teacher for a classroom, recruiting four upperclassmen mentors who actually knew how to solder, and begging her mom for $120 to buy spare motors and sensors for—had exactly 12 hours before the annual Westbrook High Club Fair, and it still didn’t have a name. Her desk was buried under half-assembled obstacle course robots, printed sign-up sheets with a blank line at the top for “Club Name,” and an empty poster board she was supposed to fill with the club’s logo and mission statement. Her best friend Lila had already texted her three times: “If you name it ‘Robots R Us’ I’m literally deleting the group chat and never helping you glue another Lego robot together again. Toys R Us will sue you before you even finish setting up your booth.”

Downstairs, her dad was yelling up the stairs that she needed to stop “messing around on the computer” and get some sleep, but sleep felt impossible. She’d spent the last club fair standing alone at a blank booth, watching the anime club hand out free Pocky to a line of 30 kids, the baking club give away samples of chocolate chip cookies that sold out in 20 minutes, the student government booth hand out silly string and fake tattoos. She’d walked away that day with exactly zero sign-ups, vowing that this year, she’d have a club that didn’t make her feel like she was invisible. Now, with 12 hours left, she had a bunch of parts, a handful of friends, and no name. She’d tried “Robotics Club 101” (boring, every school has one), “STEM Squad” (too generic, no one knows what STEM stands for half the time anyway), “Mia’s Robot Club” (too personal, she didn’t want it to be *her* club, she wanted it to be a place for anyone who liked building stuff to join), and “The Boring Engineering Thing” (a joke Lila made that Mia had almost typed into the form in a fit of frustration). She was this close to giving up, to telling her mentors she’d had to cancel the whole thing, when a loud knock echoed through her bedroom door.

It was her older cousin Javi, holding a Switch charging dock he’d left at her house the week before, his curly hair sticking up like he’d just rolled out of bed, a stack of custom hoodies slung over his shoulder. He’d started a custom hoodie side hustle his junior year of high school, called Campus Threads, and now, as a college sophomore, he was making enough money from it to pay his rent and still have cash left over for concert tickets and robot parts for his own competitive robotics team. He’d dropped by to pick up the charger before heading to a campus event, and froze when he saw the pile of crumpled paper on her desk and the blank line on the sign-up sheet.

“Whoa, you look like you’re about to cry over a club fair,” he said, leaning against her doorframe. “What’s up?”

Mia groaned, throwing her hands up. “I can’t find a name. I’ve been looking for three hours, everything is either taken, stupid, or sounds like something the school administration made up. I’m gonna have to cancel the whole club if I don’t have a name by tomorrow.”

Javi snorted, walking over to her desk and picking up one of the crumpled papers with “Robots R Us” scrawled on it in messy marker. “Bro, name isn’t just a label you slap on a poster. It’s your first superpower. It’s the first thing people see, the first thing they hear, the first reason they stop scrolling past your booth and go ‘wait, what’s that?’ If your name is boring, they