“Are you breaking up with me?” I joked.
Sung turned bright, bright red.
“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 flustered and angry, Frances looked flustered, Gordon looked angry, and Wes looked distracted by whatever game he was playing on his phone.
“Everyone needs to take this very seriously,” Mr. Phillips pronounced.
“Because there are small, defenseless koalas who will be killed if we don’t make the final four!” I added.
“Do you want to stay here?” 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 a room with Wes, who liked to watch Lord of the Rings battle scenes to prepare for competition.
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 pom-poms. Each 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 jerks) 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 hasn’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.”
“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 now.
We were staying at the Westin in Indianapolis, home to the Heavenly™ Bed and the Heavenly™ Bath.
“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™ Bath? 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 on the bedside table of all the comics he’d brought.
“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 back 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 jackets. 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.”
“Alright, guys,” Gordon said. “Are we ready to rumble?”
I thought he was kidding, 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. “That should strike fear into their hearts.”
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