QUIZ BOWL ANTICHRIST
by david levithan
I am haunted at times by Sung Kim’s varsity jacket.
He had to lobby hard to get it. Nobody denied that he had talent—in fact, he was the star of our team. But for a member of our team to get a jacket was unprecedented. Our coach backed him completely, while the other coaches in the school nearly choked on their whistles when they first heard the plan. The principal had to be called in, and it wasn’t until our team made Nationals that Sung’s request was finally heeded. Four weeks before we left for Indianapolis, he became the first person in our school’s history to have a varsity jacket for quiz bowl.
I, for one, was mortified.
This mortification was a complete betrayal of our team, but if anyone was going to betray the quiz bowl team from the inside, it was going to be me. I was the alternate.
I had been drafted by the coach, who also happened to be my physics teacher, because while the four other members of the team could tell you the square root of the circumference of Saturn’s orbit around the sun in the year 2033, not a single one of them could tell you how many Brontë sisters there’d been. In fact, the only British writer they seemed familiar with was Monty Python—and there weren’t many quiz bowl questions about Monty Python. There was a gaping hole in their knowledge, and I was the best lit-boy plug the school had to offer. While I hadn’t read that many of the classics, I was extraordinarily aware of them. I was a walking CliffsNotes version of the CliffsNotes versions; even if I’d never touched Remembrance of Things Past or Cry, the Beloved Country or Middlemarch, I knew what they were about and who had written them. I could only name about ten elements on the periodic table, but that hardly mattered—my teammates had the whole thing memorized. They told jokes where “her neutrino!” was the punch line.
Sung was our fearless leader—fearless, that is, within the context of our practices and competitions. Put him back into the general population and he became just another math geek, too bland to be teased, too awkward to be resented. As soon as he got the varsity jacket, there was little question that it would never leave his back. All the varsity jackets in our school looked the same on the front—burgundy body, white sleeves, white R. But the backs were different—a picture of two guys wrestling for the wrestlers, a football for the football players, a breast-stroker for the swimmers. For quiz bowl, they initially chose a faceless white kid at a podium, probably a leftover design from another school’s speech-and-debate team. It looked as if the symbol from the men’s room door was giving an inaugural address. Sung didn’t feel this conveyed the team aspect of quiz bowl, so he made them add four other faceless white kids at podiums. I was, presumably, one of those five. Because even though I was an alternate, they always rotated me in.
I had agreed to join the quiz bowl team for four reasons.
(1) I needed it for my college applications.
(2) I needed a good grade in Mr. Phillips’s physics class for my college applications, and I wasn’t going to get it from ordinary studying.
(3) I did get a perverse pleasure from being the only person in a competitive situation who knew that Jane Eyre was a character, while Jane Austen was a writer.
(4) I had an unarticulated crush on Damien Bloom.
An unarticulated crush is very different from an unrequited one, because at least with an unrequited crush you know what the hell you’re doing, even if the other person isn’t doing it back. An unarticulated crush is harder to grapple with, because it’s a crush that you haven’t even admitted to yourself. The romantic forces are all there—you want to see him, you always notice him, you treat every word from him as if it weighs more than anyone else’s. But you don’t know why. You don’t know that you’re doing it. You’d follow him to the end of the earth without ever admitting that your feet were moving.
Damien was track-team popular and hung with the cross-country crowd. If he didn’t have a problem with Sung’s varsity jacket, it was probably because none of the other kids in our school defined him as a quiz bowl geek. If anything, his membership on the team was seen as a fluke. Whereas I presumably belonged there, along with Sung and Frances Oh (perfect SATs, tragic skin) and Wes Ward (250 IQ, 250 lbs) and Gordon White (calculator watch, matching glasses). My social status was about the same as a water fountain in the hall—people were happy enough I was there when they needed me, but otherwise they walked on by. I wish I could say I was fine with this, and that I found what I needed in books or food or drugs or quiz bowl or other water-fountain kids. But it sucked. I didn’t have the disposition to be slavishly devoted to popularity and the popular kids. And at the same time, I was pretty sure my friends were losers, and barely even friends.
When we won the States, Sung, Damien, Frances, Wes, and Gordon celebrated like they’d just gotten full scholarships to MIT. Mr. Phillips was in tears when he called his wife at home to tell her. A photographer from the local paper came to take our picture and I tried to hide behind Wes as much as possible. Sung had his jacket by that time, its white sleeves glistening like they’d been made from unicorn horns. After the article appeared, a couple of people congratulated me in the hall. But most kids snickered or didn’t really care. We had a crash-course candy sale to pay for our trip to Indianapolis, and I stole money from my parents’ wallets and dipped into my savings in order to buy my whole portion outright, shoving the crap candy bars in our basement instead of having to ask my fellow students to pony up for such a pathetic cause.
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 HeavenlyTM bed and the HeavenlyTM 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 HeavenlyTM 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.
Clearly, Damien and I weren’t ever going to get into the social part of the social. He had something on his mind and I had nothing but him on my own. We’d lost Wes, and Sung, Frances, and Gordon were still on the dance floor. Sung looked like it was a job being there, while Gordon was in his own little world. It was Frances who fascinated me the most.
“She almost looks happy,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her happy.”
Damien nodded and drank some more punch. “She’s always so serious,” he agreed.
The punch was turning our lips cherry-red.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Okay.”
We were alone together in an unknown hotel in an unknown city. So we did the natural thing.
We went to his room.
And we watched TV.
It was his room, so he got to choose. We ended up watching The Departed on basic cable. It was, I realized, the most time we had ever spent alone together. He lay back on his bed and I sat on Sung’s, making sure the angle was such that I could watch Damien as much as I watched the TV.
During the first commercial break, I asked, “Is something wrong?”
He looked at me strangely. “No. Does it seem like something’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “No. Just asking.”
During the second commercial break, I asked, “Were you and Julie going out?”
He put his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes.
“No.” And then, about a minute later, right before the movie started again, “It wasn’t anything, really.”
During the third commercial break, I asked, “Does she know that?”
“What?”
“Does Julie know it wasn’t anything?”
“No,” he said. “It looks like she doesn’t know that.”
This was it, I was sure—the point where he’d ask for my advice. I could help him. I could prove myself worthy of his company.
But he let it drop. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to watch the movie.
I realized he needed to reveal himself to me in his own time. I couldn’t rush it. I had to be patient. For the remaining commercial breaks, I made North Dakota jokes. He laughed at some of them, and even threw in a few of his own.
Sung came back when there were about fifteen minutes left in the movie. I could tell he wasn’t thrilled about me sitting on his bed, but I wasn’t about to move.
“Sung,” I told him, “if this whole quiz bowl thing doesn’t work out for you, I think you have a future in disco.”
“Shut up,” he grumbled, taking off the famous jacket and hanging it in the closet.
We watched the rest of the movie in silence, with Sung sitting on the edge of Damien’s bed. As soon as the credits were rolling, Sung announced it was time to go to sleep.
“But where are you sleeping?” I asked, spreading out on his sheets.
“That’s my bed,” he said.
I wanted to offer Sung a swap—he could stay with Wes and talk about polynomials all night, while I could stay with Damien. But clearly that wasn’t a real option.
Damien walked me to the door.
“Lay off the minibar,” he said. “We need you sober tomorrow.”
“I’ll try,” I replied. “But those little bottles are just so pretty.”
He chuckled and hit me lightly on the shoulder.
“Resist,” he commanded.
Again, I told him I’d try.
Wes was in bed and the lights were off when I got to my room, so I very quietly changed into my pajamas and brushed my teeth.
I was about to nod off in my bed when Wes’s voice asked, “Did you have fun?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Damien and I went to his room and watched The Departed. It was a good time. We looked for you, but you were already gone.”
“That social sucked.”
“It most certainly did.”
I closed my eyes.
“Good night,” Wes said softly, making it sound like a true wish. Nobody besides my parents had ever said it to me like this before.
“Good night,” I said back. Then I made sure he’d plugged the clock back in, and went to sleep.
The next morning, we kicked North Dakota’s ass. Then, for good measure, we erased Maryland from the boards and made Oklahoma cry.
It felt good.
“Don’t get too cocky,” Sung warned us, which was pretty precious, since Sung was the cockiest of us all. I half expected “We Are the Champions” to come blaring out of his ears every time we won a round.
Our fourth and last match of the day—the quarterfinals—was against the team from Clearwater, Florida, which had made it to the finals for each of the past ten years, winning four of those times. They were legendary, insofar as people like Sung had heard about them and studied their strategies, with some tapes Mr. Phillips had managed to get off Clearwater local access.
As usual, even though I was the alternate, I was put on the starting lineup. Because Clearwater was especially known for treating the canon like a cannon to demolish the other team.
“Bring it on,” I said.
It soon became clear who my counterpart on the Clearwater team was—a wispy girl with straight brown hair who could barely bother to put down her Muriel Spark in order to start playing. The first time she opened her mouth, she revealed their secret weapon:
She was British.
Frances looked momentarily frightened by this, but I took it in stride. When the girl lunged with Byron, I parried with Asimov. When she volleyed with Burgess, I pounced with Roth. Neither of us missed a question, so it became a test of buzzer willpower. I started to ring in a split-second before I knew the answer. And I always knew the answer.
Until I did the unthinkable.
I buzzed in for a science question.
Which Nobel prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People?
I realized immediately it wasn’t Saul Bellow or Kenzaburo Oe.
As the judge said, “Do you have an answer?” the phrase TheDoubleHelix hit in my head.
“Crick!” I exclaimed.
The judge looked at me for a moment, then down at his card.
“That is incorrect. Clearwater, which Nobel prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People?”
It was not the lit girl who buzzed in.
“James D. Watson,” one of the math boys answered snottily, the D sent as a particular fuck you to me.
“Sorry,” I whispered to my team.
“It’s okay,” Damien said.
“No worries,” Wes said.
Sung, I knew, wouldn’t be as forgiving.
I was now off my game and more cautious with the buzzer, so Brit girl got the best of me on Caliban and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. I managed to stick One Hundred Years of Solitude in edgewise, but that was scant comfort. I mean, who didn’t know One Hundred Years of Solitude?
Clearwater had a one-question lead with three questions left. And it ended up that the last questions were about math, history, and geography. So I sat back while Sung rocked the relative areas of a rhombus and a circle, Wes sent a little love General Omar Bradley’s way, and Frances wrapped it up with Tashkent, which I had not known to be the capital of Uzbekistan, its name translating as “Stone City.”
Usually we burst out of our chairs when we won, but this match had been so exhausting that we could only feel relieved. We shook the other team’s hands—Brit girl’s hand felt like it was made of paper, which I found weird.
After Clearwater had left the room, Sung called an emergency team meeting.
“That was too close,” he said. Not “congratulations” or “nice work.”
No, Sung was pissed.
He talked about the need to be more aggressive on the buzzer, but also to exercise care. He said we should always play to our strengths. To make a blunder was to destroy the fabric of our entire team.
“I get it, I get it,” I said.
“No,” Sung told me, “I don’t think you do.”
“Sung,” Mr. Phillips cautioned.
“I think he needs to hear this,” Sung insisted. “From the very start of the year, he has refused to be a team player. And what we saw today was nothing short of an insurrection. He broke the unwritten rules.”
“He is standing right here,” I pointed out. “Just come right out and say it.”
“YOU ARE NOT TO ANSWER SCIENCE QUESTIONS!” Sung yelled. “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?”
“Hey—” Damien started to interrupt.
I held up my hand. “No, it’s okay. Sung needs to get this out of his system.”
“You are the alternate,” Sung went on.
“You don’t seem to mind it when I’m answering questions, Sung.”
“We only have you here because we have to!”
“That’s enough,” Mr. Phillips said decisively.
“No, it’s not enough,” I said. “I’m sick of you all acting like I’m this English freak raining on your little math–science parade. Sung seems to think my contribution to this team is a little less than everyone else’s.”
“Anyone can memorize book titles!” Sung shouted.
“Oh, please. Like I care what you think? You don’t even know the difference between Keats and Byron.”
“The difference between Keats and Byron doesn’t matter!”
“None of this matters!” I shouted back. “Don’t you get it, Sung? NONE OF THIS MATTERS. Yes, you have knowledge—but you’re not doing anything with it. You’re reciting it. You’re not out curing cancer—you’re listing the names of the people who’ve tried to cure cancer. This whole thing is a joke, Captain. It’s trivial. Which is why everyone laughs at us.”
“You think we’re all trivial?” Sung challenged.
“No,” I said. “I think you’re trivial with your quiz bowl obsession. The rest of us have other things going on. We have lives.”
“You’re the one who’s not a part of our team! You’re the outcast!”
“If that’s so true, Sung, then why are you the only one of us wearing a fucking varsity jacket? Why don’t you think anyone else wanted to be seen in one? It’s not just me, Sung. It’s all of us.”
“Enough!” Mr. Phillips yelled.
Sung looked like he wanted to kill me. And at the same time, I knew he’d never look at that damn jacket the same way again.
“Why don’t we all take a break over dinner,” Mr. Phillips went on, “then regroup in my room at eight for a scrimmage before the semifinals tomorrow morning. I don’t know who we’re facing, but we’re going to need to be a team to face them.”
What we did next wasn’t very teamlike: Mr. Phillips, a brooding Sung, Frances, and Gordon went one way for dinner, while Wes, Damien, and I went another way.
“There’s a Steak ’n Shake a few blocks away,” Wes told us. Clearly, he’d done his research.
“Sounds good,” Damien said.
I, brooding as well, followed.
“It was a question about books,” I said once we’d left the hotel. “I didn’t realize it was a science question.”
“Crick wasn’t that far off,” Wes pointed out.
“Yeah, but I still fucked it up.”
“And we still won,” Damien said.
Yeah, I knew that.
But I wasn’t feeling it.
Damien and Wes saw I was down and tried to cheer me up. Not just by getting my burger and shake for me, but by sitting across from me and treating me like a friend.
“God, there are a lot of fat people in Indiana!” Wes exclaimed.
“They’re probably looking at you and saying the same thing,” Damien replied.
Wes smiled and shook his head. “I know, I know.” Then he ate his three cheeseburgers.
“So how does it feel to be the Quiz Bowl Antichrist?” Damien asked in a mock-sportscaster voice, holding an invisible microphone out for my reply.
“Well, as James D. Watson said, I’m the motherfuckin’ princess. All other quiz bowlers shall bow down to me. Because you know what?”
“What?” Damien and Wes both asked.
“One of these days, I’m going to be the goddamn answer to a quiz bowl question.”
“Yeah,” Wes said. “‘What quiz bowl alternate murdered his team captain in the semifinals and later wrote a book, Among Boring People?’”
Damien shook his head. “Not funny. There will be no murder tonight or tomorrow.”
“Do you realize, if we win this thing, it’s going to come up on Google Search for the rest of our lives?” I said.
“Let’s wear masks in the photo,” Wes suggested.
“I’ll be Michelangelo. You can be Donatello.”
And it went on like this for a while. Damien stopped talking and just watched me and Wes going back and forth. I was talking, but mostly I was watching him back. The green-blue of his eyes. The side of his neck. The curl of hair that dangled over the left corner of his forehead. No matter where I looked, there was something to see.
I didn’t have any control over it. Something inside of me was shifting. Everything I’d refused to articulate was starting to spell itself out. Not as knowledge, but as the impulse beneath the knowledge. I knew I wanted to be with him, and I was also starting to feel why. He was a reason I was here. He was a reason it mattered.
I was talking to Wes, but really I was talking to Damien through what I was saying to Wes. I wanted him to find me entertaining. I wanted him to find me interesting. I wanted him to find me.
We were done pretty quickly, and before I knew it we were walking back to the Westin. Once we got to the lobby, Wes magically decided to head back to our room until the “scrimmage” at eight. That left Damien and me with two hours and nothing to do.
“Why don’t we go to my room?” Damien suggested.
I didn’t argue. I started to feel nervous—unreasonably nervous. We were just two friends going to a room. There wasn’t anything else to it. And yet…he hadn’t mentioned watching TV, and last time he’d said, “Why don’t we go to my room to watch TV?”
“I’m glad it’s just the two of us,” I ventured.
“Yeah, me, too,” Damien said.
We rode the elevator in silence and walked down the hallway in silence. When we got to the door, he swiped his electronic key in the lock and got a green light on the first try. I could never manage to do that.
“After you,” he said, opening the door and gesturing me in.
I walked forward, down the small hallway, turning toward the beds. And that’s when I realized—there was someone in the room. And it was Sung. And he was on his bed. And he wasn’t wearing his jacket. Or a shirt. And he was moaning a little.
I thought we’d caught him jerking off. I couldn’t help it—I burst out laughing. And that’s what made him notice we were in the room. He jumped and turned around, and I realized Frances was in the bed with him, shirt also off, but bra still on.
It was all so messed up that I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears were coming to my eyes.
“Get out!” Sung yelled.
“I’m sorry, Frances,” I said between laughing fits. “I’m so sorry.”
“GET OUT!” Sung screamed again, standing up now. Thank god he still had his pants on. “YOU ARE THE DEVIL. THE DEVIL!”
“I prefer Antichrist,” I told him.
“THE DEVIL!”
“THE DEVIL!” I mimicked back.
I felt Damien’s hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go,” he whispered.
“This is so pathetic,” I said. “Sung, man, you’re pathetic.”
Sung lunged forward then, and Damien stepped in between us.
“Go,” Damien told me. “Now.”
I was laughing again, so I apologized to Frances again, then I pulled myself into the hallway, where I doubled over with more laughter.
Damien came out a few seconds later and closed the door behind us.
“Holy shit!” I said. “That was hysterical!”
“Stop it,” Damien said. “Enough.”
“Enough?” I laughed again. “I haven’t even started.”
Damien shook his head.
“You’re cold, man,” he said. “I can’t believe how cold you are.”
“What?” I asked. “You don’t find this funny?”
“You have no heart.”
This sobered me up pretty quickly. “How can you say that?” I asked. It made no sense to me. “How can you, of all people, say that?”
“What does that mean? Me, of all people?”
He’d gotten me.
“Alec?”
“I don’t know!” I shouted. “Okay? I don’t know.”
This sounded like the truth, but it was feeling less than that. I knew. Or I was starting to know.
“I do have a heart,” I said. But I stopped there. I couldn’t tell him what was inside it. Because I still wasn’t sure of myself. The only thing I was sure of was that he wouldn’t want to hear it.
I could feel it all coming apart. The collapse of all those invisible plans, the appearance of all those hidden thoughts. I couldn’t let him see it. I had to get out of there.
I bolted. I left him right there in the hallway. I didn’t wait for the elevator—I hit the emergency stairs. I ran like I was the one on the cross-country team, even when I heard him following me.
“Don’t!” I yelled back at him.
I got to my floor and ran to my room. The card wouldn’t work the first time, and I nervously looked at the stairway exit, waiting for him to show up. But he must’ve stopped. He must’ve heard. I got the key through the second time.
Wes was on his bed, reading a comic.
“You’re back early,” he said, not looking up.
I couldn’t say a thing. There was a knock on the door. Damien calling out my name.
“Don’t answer it,” I said. “Please, don’t answer it.”
I locked myself in the bathroom. I stared at the mirror.
I heard Wes murmur something to Damien through the door without opening it. Then he was at my door.
“Alec? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, but my voice was soggy coming out of my throat.
“Open up.”
I couldn’t. I sat on the lip of the tub, breathing in, breathing out. I remembered the look on Sung’s face and started to laugh. Then I thought of Frances lying there and felt sad. I wondered if I really didn’t have a heart.
“Alec,” Wes said again, gently. “Come on.”
I waited until he walked off again. Then I opened the door and went into the bedroom. He was back on his bed, but he hadn’t picked up the comic. He was sitting on the edge, waiting for me.
I told him what had happened. Not the part about Damien at first, but the part about Sung and Frances. He didn’t laugh, and neither did I. Then I told him Damien’s reaction to my reaction, without going into what was underneath.
“Do you think I’m cold?” I asked him. “Really—am I?”
“You’re not cold,” he said. “You’re just so angry.”
I must’ve looked surprised by this. He went on.
“You can be a total prick, Alec. There’s nothing wrong with that—all of us can be total pricks. We like to think that just because we’re geeks, that means we can’t be assholes. But we can be. Most of the time, though, it’s not coming from meanness or coldness. It’s coming from anger. Or sadness. I mean, I see fat people, and I just want to rip them apart.”
“But why do I want to rip Sung apart?”
“I don’t know. Because he’s a prick, too. And maybe you feel if you rip apart the quiz bowl geek, no one will think of you as a quiz bowl geek.”
“But I’m not a quiz bowl geek!”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” Wes asked. “Nobody’s a quiz bowl geek. We’re all just people. And you’re right, what we do here has no redeeming social value whatsoever. But it can be an interesting way to pass the time.”
I sat down on my bed, facing Wes so that our knees almost touched.
“I’m not a very happy person,” I told him. “But sometimes I can trick myself into thinking I am.”
“And where does Damien fit into all this, if I may ask?”
I shook my head. “I really have no idea. I’m still figuring it out.”
“You know he likes girls?”
“I said, I’m still figuring it out.”
“Fair enough.”
I paused, realizing what had just been said.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked Wes.
“Only to me,” he said.
It would take me another three months to understand why.
“Meanwhile,” he went on, “Sung and Frances.”
“Holy shit, right?”
“Yeah, holy shit. And you know the worst part?”
“I can’t imagine what’s worse than seeing it with my own eyes.”
“Gordon is totally in love with Frances.”
“No!”
“Yup. I wouldn’t miss practice tonight for all the money in the world.”
We all showed up. Mr. Phillips could sense there was some tension in the room, but he truly had no idea.
Frances was wearing Sung’s varsity jacket. And suddenly I didn’t mind it so much.
Gordon glared at Sung.
Sung glared at me.
I avoided Damien’s eye.
When I looked at Wes, he made me feel like I might be worth saving.
Amazingly enough, during practice we were back in fighting form, as if nothing had happened. I felt like I could admit to myself how much I wanted to win. And, not just that, how much I wanted our team to win. More for Wes and Frances and Gordon and Damien than anything else.
After we were done, Damien asked me if we could talk for a minute. Everyone else headed back to their rooms and we went down to the lobby. Other quiz bowl groups were swarming around; those that hadn’t made the semifinals were taking it for what it was—a night where, for a brief pause in their high school lives, they were free from any pressure or care.
“I’m sorry,” Damien said to me. “I was completely off base.”
“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have been so mean to Sung and Frances. I should’ve just left.”
We just sat there.
“I don’t know why I did that,” he said. “Reacted that way.”
It would take him another four months to figure it out. It would be a little too late, but he’d figure it out anyway.
We lost in the semifinals to the Des Moines School for the Blind. I knew from the look Sung gave me afterward that he would blame me for the loss for the rest of his life. Not because I missed the questions—and I did get two wrong this time. But for destroying his own invisible plans.
Looking back, I don’t think I’ve ever hated any piece of clothing as much as I hated Sung’s varsity jacket for those few weeks. You can’t hate something that much unless you hate yourself equally as much. Not in that kind of way.
It was, I guess, Wes who taught me that. Later, when we were back home and trying to articulate ourselves better, I asked him how he’d known so much more than I had.
“Because I read, stupid,” was his answer.
We lost in the semifinals, but the local paper took our picture anyway. Sung looks serious and aggrieved. Gordon looks awkward. Frances looks calm. Damien looks oblivious. And Wes and me?
We look like we’re in on our own joke.
In other words, happy.