Holly Black (21 page)

Sung, of course, wanted all of us to get matching varsity jackets to wear to Nationals. Damien already had a varsity jacket for cross country that he never wore, so he was out. Frances, Wes, and Gordon said they were using all their money on the tickets and other things for Indianapolis. I simply said no. And when Sung asked me if I was sure, I said, “You can’t possibly expect me to wear that.” Everybody got quiet for a second, but Sung didn’t seem fazed. He just launched us into yet another practice.

If there were four reasons that I’d joined the quiz bowl team, there were two reasons that I stayed on:

I had an unarticulated crush on Damien Bloom. (These things don’t change.)

I really, really liked beating people.

Note: I am not saying
I really, really liked winning
. Winning is a more abstract concept, and in quiz bowl, winning usually meant having to come back in the next round and do it all again. No, I liked
beating people
. I liked seeing the look on the other team’s faces when I got a question they couldn’t answer. I loved their geektastic disappointment when they realized they weren’t good enough to rank up. I loved using trivia to make people doubt themselves. I never, ever missed an English question—I was a fucking juggernaut of authors and oeuvres. And I never, ever attempted to answer any of the math, science, or history questions. Nobody expected me to. Thus, I would always win.

The hardest were the scrimmages, where we would split into teams of three and take each other on. I didn’t have any problem answering the questions correctly—I just had to make sure not to gloat. The only thing keeping me in check was Damien. Because around him, I wanted to be the good guy.

If I had any enthusiasm for Indianapolis, it was because I assumed Damien and I would be rooming together. I imagined us talking all night, me finding out all about him, bonding to the point of knowledge. I could see us laughing together about the quiz bowl kids from other states who were surrounding us in their quiz bowl varsity jackets. We’d smuggle in some beers, watch bad TV, and become so comfortable with each other that I would finally feel the world was comfortable, too. This was strictly a separate-beds fantasy…but it was a separate-from-the-world fantasy, too. That was what I wanted.

The closer we got to Indianapolis, the more I found myself looking forward to it, and the more Sung became a quiz bowl dictator. If I’d thought he was serious about it before, he was beyond all frame of reference now. He wanted to practice every day after school for six hours—pizza was brought in—and even when he saw us in the halls, he threw questions our way. At first I tried to ignore him, but that only made him YELL HIS QUESTIONS IN A LOUD, OVERLY ARTICULATED VOICE. Now anyone within four hallways of our own could hear the guy in the quiz bowl varsity jacket shout, “WHO WAS THE LAST AMERICAN TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE?”

And I’d say, much lower, “James Patterson.”

Sung would blanch and whisper, “Wrong.”

“Toni Morrison,” I’d correct. “I’m just playing with ya.”

“That’s not funny,” he said. And I’d run for class.

It did, at least, give me something to talk to Damien about at lunch. I accidentally-on-purpose ended up behind him on the cafeteria line.

“Is Sung driving you crazy, too?” I asked. “With his pop quizzes?”

Damien smiled. “Nah. It’s just Sung being Sung. You’ve gotta respect that.”

As far as I could tell, the only reason to respect that was because Damien was respecting it. Which, at that moment, was reason enough.

The afternoon, though, wore me down. Sung got increasingly angry as I was increasingly unable to give him a straight answer.

“WHAT WAS JANE AUSTEN’S LAST FINISHED NOVEL?”

“Vaginas and Virginity.”

“WHO IS THE LAST PERSON IAGO KILLS IN
OTHELLO
?”

“His manservant Retardio, for forgetting to change the Brita filter!”

“WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LITTLE MERMAID AT THE END OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN’S
THE LITTLE MERMAID
?”

“She turns into a fish and marries Nemo!”

“Fuck you!”

These were remarkable words to hear coming from Sung’s mouth.

He went on.

“Are you trying to sabotage us? Do you WANT to LOSE?”

The other kids in the hall were loving this—a full-blown quiz bowl spat.

“Are you breaking up with me?” I joked.

Sung turned bright, bright red. Which is not easy for an Asian American math geek to do.

“I’ll see you at practice!” he managed to get out. Then he turned around and I could see the five quiz bowlers on the back of his jacket, their blank faces not quite glaring at me as he stormed away.

When I arrived ten minutes late to our final pre-Indianapolis practice, Mr. Phillips looked concerned, Damien looked indifferent, Sung looked both flustered and angry, Frances looked flustered, Gordon looked angry, and Wes looked hungry.

“Everyone needs to take this very seriously,” Mr. Phillips pronounced.

“Because there are small, defenseless ponies who will be killed if we don’t make the final four!” I added.

“Do you not want to go?” Sung asked, looking like I’d just stuck a magnet in his hard drive. “Is that what this is about?”

“No,” I said calmly, “I’m just joking. If you can’t joke about quiz bowl, what can you joke about? It’s like mime in that respect.”

“C’mon, Alec,” Damien said. “Sung just wants us to win.”

“No,” I said. “Sung
only
wants us to win. There’s a difference.”

Damien and the others looked at me blankly. This was not, I remembered, a word-choice crowd.

Still, Damien had gotten the message across:
Lay off
. So I did for the rest of the practice. And I didn’t get a single question wrong. I even could name four Pearl S. Buck books besides
The Good Earth
—which is the English-geek equivalent of knowing how to make an atomic bomb, in that it’s both difficult and totally uncool.

And how was I rewarded for this display of extraneous knowledge? At the end of the practice, as we were leaving, Mr. Phillips offhandedly told us our room assignments. Sung would be the one who got to room with Damien. And I would have to share the room with Wes, the gargantuan hobbit.

On the way out, I swear Sung was gloating.

If it had been up to Sung, we would have had the cheerleading squad seeing us off at the airport. I could see it now:

Two-four-six-eight, how do mollusks procreate?

One-two-three-four, name the birthplace of Niels Bohr!

Then before we left, as a special treat, Sung would calculate the mass and volume of their pompoms. Each one of the girls would dream of being the one to wear Sung’s letter jacket when he came back home, because that would make her the most popular girl in the entire sch—

“Alec, we’re boarding,” Damien interrupted my sarcastic reverie. The karma gods had at least seated us next to each other on the plane. Unfortunately, they then swung around (as karma gods tend to do, the bastards) and made him fall asleep the moment after takeoff. It wasn’t until we were well into our descent that he opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“It hadn’t even occurred to me to be nervous,” I answered honestly. “I mean, we don’t have to win for it to look good on our transcripts. I’m already concocting this story where I overcome a bad case of consumption, the disapproval of my parents, a terrifying history of crashing in small planes, and a twenty-four-hour speech impediment in order to compete in this tournament. As long as you overcome adversity, they don’t really care if you win. Unless it’s, like, a real sport.”

“Dude,” he said, “you read way too much.”

“But clearly you don’t know your science enough to move across the aisle the minute I reveal my consumptive state.”

“Oh,” he said, leaning a little closer, “I can catch consumption just from sitting next to you?”

“Again,” I said, not leaning away, “medicine is your area of expertise. In novels, you damn well can catch consumption from sitting next to someone. You were doomed from the moment you met me this morning.”

“I’ll say.”

I wasn’t quick enough to keep the conversation going. Damien bent down to take an issue of
Men’s Health
out of his bag. And he wasn’t even reading it for the pictures.

I pretended to have a hacking cough for the remaining ten minutes of the flight. The other people around me were annoyed, but I could tell that Damien was amused. It was our joke.

We were staying at the Westin in Indianapolis, home to the Heavenly
^TM
bed and the Heavenly
^TM
shower.

“How the hell can you trademark the word heavenly?” I asked Wes as we dumped out our stuff. We were only staying two nights, so it hardly seemed necessary to hang anything up.

“I dunno,” he answered.

“And what’s up with the Heavenly
^TM
shower? Am I really going to have to take showers in heaven? It hardly seems worth the trouble of being good now if you’re going to have to wear deodorant in the afterlife.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Wes said, making an even stack of the comics he’d brought on the bedside table.

“What, you’ve never been dead?”

He sighed.

“It’s time to meet the team,” he said.

Before we left, he made sure every single light in the room was off.

He even unplugged the clock.

The competition didn’t start until the next morning, so the evening was devoted to the Quiz Bowl Social.

“Having a social at a quiz bowl tournament is like having all-you-can-eat ribs and inviting a bunch of vegetarians over,” I told Damien as the rest of us waited for Sung and Mr. Phillips to come down to the lobby.

“I’m sure there are some cool kids here,” he said.

“Yeah. And they’re all in their rooms, drinking.”

Some people had dressed up for the social—meaning that some girls had worn dresses and some boys had worn ties, although none of them could muster enough strength to also wear a jacket. Unless, of course, it was a varsity quiz bowl jacket. I saw at least five of them in the lobby.

“Hey, Sung, you’re not so unique anymore,” I pointed out when he finally showed up, his own jacket looking newly polished.

“I don’t need to be unique,” he scoffed. “I just need to win.”

I pretended to wave a tiny flag. “Go, team.”

“All right, guys,” Gordon said. “Are we ready to rumble?”

I thought he was being sarcastic, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I looked at our group—Sung’s hair was plastered into perfect place, Frances had put on some makeup, Gordon was wearing bright red socks that had nothing to do with anything else he was wearing, Damien looked casually handsome, and Wes looked like he wanted to be back in our room, reading
Y: The Last Man
.

“Let’s rumble!” Mr. Phillips chimed in, a little too enthusiastically for someone over the age of eleven.

“Our first match is against the team from North Dakota,” Sung reminded us. “If you meet them, scope out their intelligences.”

“If we see them on the dance floor, I’ll be sure to mosey over and ask them to quote Virginia Woolf,” I assured him.

The social was in one of the Westin’s ballrooms. There was a semi-big dance floor at the center, which nobody was coming close to. The punch was as unspiked as the haircuts, the lights dim to hide everyone’s embarrassment.

“Wow,” I said to Damien as we walked in and scoped it out. “This is
hot
.”

I almost laughed, because Damien had such a look of social distress on his face. I could imagine him reassuring himself that none of his other friends from home were ever going to see this.

“The adults are worse than the kids,” Wes observed from over my shoulder.

“You’re right,” I said. Because while the quiz bowlers were mawkish and awkward, the faculty advisors were downright weird, wearing their best suits from 1970 and beaming like they’d finally gone from zero to hero in their own massively revised high school years.

Either out of cruelty or obliviousness (probably the former), the DJ decided to unpack Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” A lot of the quiz bowlers looked like they were hearing it for the first time. From the moment the beat started, it was only a question of whose resolve would dissolve first. Would the team captain from Montana start break dancing? Would the alternate from Connecticut let down her hair and flail it around?

In the end, it was a whole squad that took the floor. (Later I would learn it was the home-state Indiana team, who may have felt more comfortable at the Westin.) As a group, they started to bust out the moves—something I could never imagine our team doing. They laughed at themselves while they danced, and it was clear they were having a good time. Other kids started to join them. And then Sung, Frances, and Gordon plunged in.

“Check it out,” Wes mumbled.

Gordon was doing a strut that looked like something he’d practiced at home; I had no doubt it went over better in his bedroom mirror than it did in public. Frances did a slight sway, which was in keeping with her personality. And Sung—well, Sung looked like someone’s grandfather trying to dance to “Hollaback Girl.”

“This shit really
is
bananas,” I said to Damien. “B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Look at that varsity jacket go!”

“Enough with the jacket,” Damien replied. “Let him have his fun. He’s stressed enough as it is. I want a drink. You want to get a drink?”

At first I thought he meant breaking into the nearest minibar. But, no, he just wanted to head over to the punch bowl. The punch was übersweet—like Kool-Aid that had been cut with Sprite—and as I drank glass after glass, it almost gave me a Robitussin high.

“Do you see anyone who looks like he’s from North Dakota?” I asked. “Tall hat? Presence of cattle? If so, we can go spy. If you distract them, I’ll steal the laminated copies of their SAT scores from their fanny packs.”

But he wasn’t into it. He kept checking texts on his phone.

“Who’s texting?” I finally asked.

“Just Julie,” he said. “I wish she’d stop.”

I assumed Just Julie was Julie Swain, who was also on cross-country. I didn’t think they’d been going out. Maybe she’d wanted to and he hadn’t. That would explain why he wasn’t texting back.