We spent months working on this thing, sketching diagrams and building prototypes and causing a not insignificant number of small but terrifying table fires. And finally, under what I can only imagine was my stellar leadership, we built ourselves a clunky monstrosity that put together a goddamn burger. I mean, barely, and only about 10 percent of the time. But we were proud of it nonetheless.

Here’s how it worked: our creation was carnival-themed, with the bottom bun sitting on a carousel in the center of the structure. When the machine launched, the carousel would start to spin, and each of the ingredients would fall neatly into place on top of the bun—the patty fell through a Plinko-style tower that triggered a hammer that smashed a bottle of ketchup that set off a bell that triggered a butcher knife that swung onto a head of lettuce, and so on and so forth until we had a fully constructed burger glistening in the center.

At least that was the idea. We were ten sixteen-year-olds with nothing but hot-glue guns, moldy sesame seed buns, and feral hormones. Our machine worked in theory, but more often than not, a string snapped here, a knife flung there, our machine would start smoking under duress, and we’d devolve into a battle over who fucked it up this time. There were days when we thought bringing this mess to a competition would surely bring more embarrassment than glory, and we considered letting it burn itself to the ground.

But by sheer force of will, we got our beautiful burger baby to cooperate just long enough to do what it had to do. And so, on the morning of the state championship in downtown Chicago, we lugged it onto a bus and brought her in. And by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a bus with a bunch of teenage nerds and a pile of cheap wood that’s been covered in raw beef and cheese for five months, but it’s not pretty. The fact that we survived that bus ride was a miracle unto itself.

But the biggest miracle of all was what happened when we got there. Because guess what? We won that shit. We won it all. Good ol’ Burger Machine did her very best, and we clobbered the other nerds and their measly attempts at engineering perfection. In retrospect, we more than likely won because the other Chicago schools were even more ridiculously underfunded than us. But still. We fucking did it.