tion id="ubfdb828e-96e5-57fb-b8b0-b726266f46d4">
Published in the United States in 2020
by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,
a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York.
First published in Great Britain in 2020
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited,
2 Minster Court, 10th floor, London EC3R 7BB
Text copyright © 2020 David Levithan
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First e-book edition 2020
ISBN 978 1 4052 98056
eISBN 978 1 4052 98063
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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To Mayling and Lynda, there at the start
and
To my parents, there long before the start
Track List
Track One: Quiz Bowl Antichrist
Track Two: Day 2934 (An Every Day Story)
Track Four: The Quarterback and the Cheerleader (A Boy Meets Boy Story)
Track Five: The Mulberry Branch
Track Six: Your Temporary Santa
Track Ten: Snow Day (A Two Boys Kissing Story)
Track Twelve: A Brief History of First Kisses (Illustrated by Nick Eliopulos)
Track Thirteen: As the Philadelphia Queer Youth Choir Sings Katy Perry’s “Firework” . . .
Track Fourteen: The Vulnerable Hours
Track Seventeen: How My Parents Met
Track Nineteen: Give Them Words
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 five 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