by Lara Avery
Well, the highlighters are out of ink. Maddie and I chugged a couple of glasses of tap water, tucked into our parallel beds, and turned on some shitty TV.
As we turned off the lamps, Maddie said, “Sammie.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m super stressed.”
As she said this, I realized I was grinding my teeth. “Me too.”
Her voice sounded different than normal, a little higher, a little softer. “It’s okay if we don’t win, right?”
I sighed. “I don’t even want to think about that.”
“Me neither,” she said quickly. “But I was thinking about what you said the other day, about cutting your losses.”
“Yeah?”
“Like, even when we’ve gotten second or third before, it was like, ‘Whatever, that was a fluke. We just need to get to Nationals.’ I mean, even you would say stuff like that, and you hate losing.”
“It’s true.” I would say, Whatever, this doesn’t matter. Nationals is what matters.
“We didn’t really decide to cut our losses by coming here, did we?”
I held my breath, staring at the ceiling. “What do you mean?”
“We put all our eggs in one basket.”
I was quiet. She continued.
“This year has been weird. I…” She blew out a breath. “I feel like I can do a lot of the things I do because I usually go after stuff that I know I can do. I can act and run QU and make out with people not just because I want to, but because I know I can. You know? And lately this year, I’ve actually started to want things. And not just things that depend on me being able to be good at them. I want bigger things that have nothing to do with me.”
I believed her, though I was surprised. I knew why I wanted this, but never really thought Maddie was as wrapped up in this world as I was. Then I remembered the other day at practice, her jacket over her head. Last week, inviting me to places even though she didn’t have to. We were in this together.
“I’ve noticed that,” I said.
“Yeah?”
I swallowed. I hoped this is what she was talking about. I hoped I wasn’t going to sound stupid. “You used to make fun of me for being so invested in debate. Even when you were super good at it. But now you’re as crazy about it as I am.”
She laughed, almost her regular cackle, and I joined in, and there’s something about laughing on your back that makes you keep going long after anything is funny. It’s like something solid from your back and shoulder and chest is being released in the air to dissolve.
After the laughter faded, it got quiet again. We could hear the elevators whoosh.
“I actually want Stacia,” Maddie said quietly, almost as if she were talking to herself. “Not just because… whatever.”
“I know what you mean,” I said after a while. “I actually want to win. Not just because I’m competitive. It doesn’t even have to do with anyone else. I just want it for me. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” Maddie said. “I want it, too.”
Soon after that, she fell asleep. I can almost see all the stuff we laughed about hanging in the air, rising, moving elsewhere through the walls, and I think I’ll sleep, too.
SUCK IT
FIRST ROUND
Madeline Sinclair and Samantha McCoy,
Hanover High School, Hanover, NH
vs.
Thuto Thipe and Garrett Roswell,
Stuyvesant High School, New York, NY
Hanover High School: 19 Stuyvesant High School: 17
Yep. Staying focused. Victory meal at Legal Sea Foods.
SECOND ROUND
Madeline Sinclair and Samantha McCoy,
Hanover High School, Hanover, NH
vs.
Anthony Tran and Alexander Helmke,
St. Louis Park High School, St. Louis Park, MN
Hanover High School: 18 St. Louis Park High School: 16
Two down. Had a splitting headache last night, so we were worried, but it went away by round time. Would normally be judging Maddie right now for taking a phone call from Stacia outside, but I can’t freak out about that. Whatever we’re doing, it’s working.
In the elevator just now, two eliminated dude debaters reeking of cologne got on, not even seeing me.
“Did you hear about Hanover’s pair?” one of them was saying.
“The girl with a Mohawk? And the one with the ass? Yeah, dude.”
“They’re in the finals.”
“My money’s on Hartford.”
The doors opened.
As the doors closed, I called out, “You’re mistaken!” and flipped them off.
Watching Caddyshack with the sound off on the hotel TV, gargling with salt water. Trying to keep my mouth limber. I’m on edge but not nervous. I’m feeling blank but not scattered.
Third round’s tomorrow at ten a.m. When we win that, we go to the championship round.
UNTITLED
Remember this, Future Sam, because so help me God and Jesus and all the other saints, it will never happen again. This morning I first looked at the clock at exactly 7:56 a.m. Maddie spiked her hair like always and I slicked my curls as tight as they could go back into a bun at the nape of my neck. We went down into the lobby and split a bagel from the continental breakfast. We went outside briefly to pose for a picture in front of the WELCOME DEBATERS sign. I remember there was a maroon Corolla idling in front of the Sheraton, just outside the sliding doors. I remember there was a man in a Carhartt jacket smoking a cigarette. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not crazy. My brain still works. It was a poppy seed bagel with plain cream cheese, I remember that. And I remember that the carpeted halls smelled like they had just been shampooed, and the sun coming through the big windows in the lobby was so bright, people were shading their eyes with their hands. We rolled our tubs into the Paul Revere Room. The Hartford team was comprised of a sharp-faced Nigerian girl and a chubby white kid, Grace Kuti and Skyler Temple, respectively. The chairs were filled with eliminated teams and their families, some of them staring us down, some of them laughing and screwing around, relieved to be done. The lights dimmed in the huge hall and they flicked on the hot stage lights, and after the short-haired woman in dress slacks and a linen shirt welcomed everyone, there were about SEVEN SECONDS of applause. The moderator’s name was SAL GREGORY. And he had a BALD SPOT and a ROLEX WATCH. I’M CAPITALIZING EVERYTHING TO EMPHASIZE HOW DEEPLY I REMEMBER EVERYTHING. MADDIE CLEARED HER THROAT BEFORE SHE STOOD UP, AND AGAIN AFTER SHE GOT TO THE PODIUM. SHE LOOKED DOWN, AND WHEN SHE LOOKED UP, SHE SAID, “LADIES AND GENTLEMAN, ACCORDING TO A RECENT ANALYSIS FROM THE CENTER FOR ECONOMIC AND POLICY RESEARCH, THIRTY-SEVEN PERCENT OF AMERICANS WHO GAIN THEIR SOLE SOURCE OF INCOME FROM MINIMUM-WAGE JOBS ARE BETWEEN THE AGES OF THIRTY-FIVE AND SIXTY-FOUR. LOW WAGES AREN’T JUST FOR TEENAGERS LOOKING TO EARN SPENDING MONEY. THESE PEOPLE ARE MOTHERS, FATHERS…”
I remember I had just finished second affirmative. Maddie had stepped up, given me a pat on the back as we passed each other, and I’d sat down. I remember squinting my eyes against the stage lights, and itching my calf. We were fine. Someone was talking. Everything was going perfectly fine. And somehow, then it wasn’t. It wasn’t like a moment, or a flash, it just was. It was like waking up, except I had already opened my eyes, and I was trying to remember a dream. Maddie was looking at me, and without knowing what I was doing, I kind of laughed, because it was funny that we were there, in the morning, after I was just waking up. My first thought was, What is Maddie doing here?
Then she said, “And my partner will now [something, something],” because it was sort of garbled, and then I thought, Oh, I’m at practice, and then I remember squinting at her and wondering if we were at practice, why was it so bright?
I looked across at our opponents and wondered who they were. And I looked out at the crowd, and that’s when I realized we were in the middle of Nationals, and I was supposed to be doing something, but I wasn’t sure at what point in the round
we were, or which round, and I looked down at my cards, and back at Maddie, who was now standing beside me and making the stand up motion with her hand.
“Time-out,” I said.
The judges gave us thirty seconds.
“What’s up?” Maddie whispered. Her voice was clipped with annoyance.
My throat was so dry it hurt. “I don’t know where we are. I mean, I do now, but I don’t know… yeah. I don’t know where we are.”
“What the fuck? What are you talking about?”
I felt like I was blinking at five miles an hour. My fingertips started to tingle. “Just tell me if we’re at 2AR or closings.”
“What?”
“2AR or closings? Just tell me!”
“Closings! What is wrong? You look pale. Do you need water?”
“Yes.”
Maddie pushed her half-drunk bottle toward me and I drank in deep gulps.
Thirty seconds were up.
I stood. My knees shook, my hands shook, I tried to keep them tight. I knew the major points. The closing was not the problem—it was that I didn’t know what our opponents had said over the entire round, or what Maddie had just said, or even what I had just said. I took a deep breath.
I didn’t know, so I guessed.
I summarized, vague and bleak and choppy.
I didn’t even make it the full four minutes.
When I sat back down and they concluded the round, I didn’t look at Maddie.
I didn’t look at anyone.
I just went outside the hall, up the elevator to our room, locked the bathroom door, and cried. I’ve spent the last three hours sobbing so hard that Maddie’s mom knocked on the bathroom door, asking if I was choking. I messed everything up really bad. Really, really bad.
I have been dreaming about this day forever.
I turned fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen by blowing out birthday candles, thinking of this room, this hotel, this tournament.
And we lost because I forgot where I was.
THIRD ROUND
Madeline Sinclair and Samantha McCoy,
Hanover High School, Hanover, NH
vs.
Grace Kuti and Skyler Temple,
Hartford Preparatory Academy, Hartford, CT
Hanover High School: 14 Hartford Preparatory Academy: 19
You know, sometimes it’s good to be reminded that you’re just a weak sack of floppy bones in a polyester pantsuit who talks to herself on a tiny laptop computer in a hotel bathtub.
You are not actually the star debater of the East Coast, you are not “the team to beat,” you are not the valedictorian, you are not a Future Anyone, you are not a strong young woman, and in fact, you remind yourself of the same pubescent girl you always were, wearing your huge glasses. You are reminded specifically of that day you were sitting at the kitchen table with a gallon of chocolate milk from the general store in Strafford, reading a fat Terry Goodkind book, drinking glass after glass of milk while you read for hours, until it’s time for dinner but you don’t want to stop reading, but there’s not enough room for everyone to sit down, they say, and they get annoyed, and they send you outside with your lukewarm half gallon of chocolate milk, your one pleasure in the world. And at first you think to yourself, wow, you finished a fantasy novel and drank an entire gallon of chocolate milk in one sitting. Good for you.
And then you realize everyone else is inside, being normal, and even your family can’t stand you, and you are completely and utterly alone.
These other losers, the ones who got knocked out, the ones you strode past feeling like a million bucks, they’re going to go home and move on to the next thing. They’re going to come back next year, or they’ll graduate, like Maddie, and they’ll look back and say, well, it was just a bad weekend.
I thought that’s what I’d be saying, too, just six months ago.
But now I have to worry if this, the shittiest weekend of my life, my ultimate failure, is actually going to be the best weekend I can remember.
What if this is just the beginning of a series of failures?
What if this is all I am?
What if this is it?
FUCK IT
When I heard the door close and Maddie’s and Pat’s voices fade down the hallway, I came back here, to my bed, and kept the lights off. We leave tomorrow morning.
Maddie had left me alone, except briefly asking me to dinner, so I think I’m in the clear. As in, though my mom had told Pat about NPC before we left for the tournament, Pat had not told Maddie.
As in, to Maddie, the episode earlier was just a breakdown. The thing is—and, Future Sam, I have had some time to think this through while snotting on myself for the entire day—this was not a fluke meant for both Maddie and me. It was part of a bigger fluke. A huge, blank, stinking hand of cards that, if I’m not careful, will last the rest of my life. But that’s not Maddie’s fault. She deserves to know that none of this, in any way, was meant to happen to her.
And Christ, if humans supposedly know how time works, how can it be possible to blow four years of work in thirty seconds? It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair.
SERIOUSLY, FUCK THIS
I wish we were riding home in a limo—not for the glamour, but so Maddie and I could sit on opposite ends. I’m writing this with the screen facing away from Maddie, in the car home.
On the elevator ride down to the pool, I had rehearsed how I would tell her why I forgot everything, and that I was sorry, and if we could do it over again, I would not have even tried to go to the tournament. I would have let Alex Conway have my spot so that Maddie could have won.
I found her in the hot tub, wearing a sports bra and basketball shorts. Other debaters laughed and splashed one another across the room in the pool. I sat next to her and put my feet in the boiling water. My face felt crusted like a salt lick. Her face was red, too, and her hair was flat and slick. She didn’t speak.
“Well,” I said. “It’s over.”
She tried to smile at me. “Yeah. We did our best.”
I jumped on this. “Actually, no, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, it’s just…” Maddie’s face scrunched up, trying to keep her cool. “Now is not the best time. Can we not get into this?”
“Let me say one thing. Actually, a couple of things. You were amazing. I messed up.” I took a deep breath. “When we were talking the other night, before the tournament began—actually, before the party—I should have told you something really important that I found out about myself recently. Actually—god, I’m saying ‘actually’ a lot.”
“I’m going to pause you for a second,” Maddie said, her jaw clenched. “I’m requesting this as a friend. It’s nothing to do with you, okay? I let you be with your thoughts. Can you let me be with mine?”
“Yes, but this is something pertaining to why we lost—”
Maddie’s voice got louder, echoing around the pool. “I don’t care! You don’t care. People do things. Let’s just not care.”
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. I was close to crying again, because I knew what she was saying wasn’t true. What about what we had said before we went to sleep that first night? I wanted her to acknowledge that, at least. “But we both wanted…”
“You don’t get what you want! You don’t always get what you want!” She was yelling now.
The debaters at the deep end giggled and looked over at us.
“What are you looking at?” Maddie yelled.
They grew quiet.
She got out of the hot tub and walked out, hitting the glass wall so hard it shook. My stomach felt like it had taken the punch. I stood and noticed a phone lighting up on one of the plastic tables. I picked it up, thinking it had been left behind. It was open to several texts.
Stacia: We need a break
Stacia: We weren’t even serious
Me: At least give me a reason. What did I do?
Stacia: Idk while you were away I had time to think
Stacia: It
’s not anything you did
Stacia: I just need to be on my own
The phone was Maddie’s.
Some other key highlights of this four-hour car ride home, so far:
• Me saying I’m sorry about Stacia
• Maddie saying I don’t know what I’m talking about
• Maddie’s mom telling us not to snap at each other, that we had a stressful few days
• Me saying at least we got that far
• A deer running into the road
• Maddie saying she wishes she was a deer so she could get hit by a car and die
• Me telling her not to take death lightly
• Maddie telling me to stop being so intense for once in my life
• Maddie’s mom chastising both of us
• Maddie wishing she had never joined debate in the first place
• We got ice cream
TRUTH BOMBS
As we got about a half mile to my house, I was about to burst out crying again because as you know, when I had tried to tell Maddie about NPC she wouldn’t listen, so like any reasonable human being, I tried again.
The car was kind of quiet because Pat had turned down the radio so I could give her directions, and it was sort of peaceful just hearing the air-conditioning and watching the trees go by, SO SUE ME, I THOUGHT IT WAS A NICE MOMENT.
I said, “Maddie, I have a disease that makes me forget things. That’s why I blanked during the round.”
Maddie was silent, which I thought was a good thing, until I looked back at her from the front seat and she was staring straight ahead.
She said, “What.”
Pat sighed and I continued. “I was diagnosed with Niemann-Pick Type C, which is a degenerative brain disease. Me forgetting where I was—that’s a symptom of the disease.”