by Bromberg, K
A full ride to college rested on how I performed. Two different colleges had coaches who said if I could get into the top three for Nationals, I could make my way through their schools with no debt. Dad didn’t have a college fund for me. He said I could go to a Bible school if I couldn’t get a free ride somewhere else.
A school he picked.
I’d rather scrape and save and work five jobs to pay for a different college than go to the kind of Bible school my father would choose for me.
Here in debate the rules were objective. They never changed, and the goal posts weren’t moved. The answers were challenged with fact and reason and analysis, not with emotional mudslinging and accusations. This was a world that made sense.
It was like drumming. The notes were on the page, the measures were clear. Which instrument needed to be struck at which time was laid out in an orderly pattern. How you tackled it emotionally was up to you. Emotions and debate didn’t really have much to do with each other, except in one area.
Amy.
And she walked past me just as I bent down to get a drink of water.
Amy
“Hey! Amy!”
I stopped and froze, skittering a little bit on the tile floor, unaccustomed to wearing high heels. I turned around gingerly, making sure I didn’t fall. The last thing I needed was to split my skirt open or bang up my knee, or worse, embarrass myself in front of him.
“Yeah?”
Sam leaned back against the wall and crossed his long legs at the ankles, his elbow bent, the skin around his eyes crinkled up as those warm eyes took me in. The seconds ticked by. My skin floated inches above my body and I took my hand and rested it on my thigh, unsure what to do.
“I’m not going to ask if you’re nervous,” he said, looking down.
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” a guy’s voice said, interrupting us.
I turned, and then my heart picked up in double time because there stood Joe Ross. Every, and I mean, every girl except for the gay ones, had a crush on Joe at some point. He looked like a really hot version of Orlando Bloom, and yet that wasn’t quite right. Add in a little Brad Pitt, and then some George Clooney, and a touch of Channing Tatum, all mixed into a Roman God, and you had Joe.
Too bad his personality didn’t match.
He was the biggest grade grubber you could imagine, and in the debate world, he was the great white shark. What I didn’t like about him was that he had this way of making comments that pierced my confidence. He wasn’t a sexist jerk. He was a jerk to guys and girls alike.
An equal-opportunity jerk.
With a blank look on his face, Sam turned to Joe and said “Doing your pre-debate damage, Ross?”
Joe pretended to look offended, even taking one hand and pressing it over his heart, as if shocked. “What are you implying, Hinton?”
“Take it however you want,” Sam said, his face impassive.
His eyes were hooded and his face was slack, leaving the other person absolutely no way of knowing what he was thinking. It undermined Joe and made my face crack with a smile.
“If your case is as droll as your face, then good luck getting to third place.” Joe’s eyes narrowed as he tried to stare Sam down.
“You’re a poet, and you know it,” was all Sam said in return.
They stared each other down. I began to feel a strange, tingling sense of arousal. The naked aggression that each showed triggered something more adult in me.
This was a high stakes game, but nobody realized just how high the stakes really were that day.
Sam
What the fuck was Joe up to? Nothing I’d done should have triggered this kind of bullshit.
Faking placidity wasn’t just a skill I’d honed; it was a survival strategy at home. When your father screams at you for forgetting to mop up the water you spilled on the floor while in the shower, or hauls you out back for a thrashing because God told him to keep you from mouthing off after you forgot to say “Sir,” you learn to hold it all together and act as if nothing upsets you.
Nothing.
It can’t, because giving that little splash of emotion to the world means that anyone can pick it up and use it like a hammer against you.
Joe was trying to provoke me and while he might be a master at finding weak spots in people, I was the fucking king of impassivity when it came to emotionally charged situations.
“Why should I care?” Ross asked, feigning ambivalence. “I already got into BU on early acceptance. I don’t need a trophy.” But his eyes said otherwise.
“Then just do your best and have fun,” Amy replied in a sing-songy voice.
He glowered at her. “I’ll shred you if we face off, Smithson.”
“Like you did three weeks ago on the voting topic?”
Zing. Amy had practically ripped his balls off and pinned them to the grill of his school’s bus. She’d gone 4-0 and won the entire tournament.
“Like I—? Oh, shut up.” He stormed out, grumbling to himself. His phone rang and we heard the distant echo of his voice as he talked to his mother, muttering something about making sure he had his car back by four o’clock.
We both laughed, and the tension lifted. Good. In that moment everything changed, as if color itself became brighter, the air more infused with oxygen, the quality of light making everything about Amy ethereal and so real. As if everything else in the world was fake, and the only way to connect to a different level of the universe was to touch her.
So I did. She tipped her face up to me as I took two steps toward her and reached for her hand, the smooth, soft skin like a lifeline. I didn’t realize how much I’d been drowning, but when I felt her skin against mine I was suddenly on dry ground. Solid land. She was my anchor, my savior.
My home.
Her lips were the front door, and I crossed the threshold with a boldness I didn’t know I possessed.
Amy
The rasp of his palms sliding around my waist, the wool of his suit crackling static against mine, the softness of his lips, all told me I wasn’t dreaming. And then my own hands were behind his neck, my lips were returning the kiss as ardently, and my brain and body melted into a puddle of Amy.
He pulled his lips away and then came back, this time with more intensity. This was the kind of kiss I’d read about in books, the kind of kiss I’d hoped for.
“Hey, you two! Go to your assignments!”
We broke away, completely shocked, and I slid backwards and almost fell, only saved by Sam’s strong arms grabbing onto me, lifting me up. We both turned in surprise and Sam wiped his mouth, while I pressed my fingertips to my lips as if holding the kiss in. It was Erin, my best friend.
“What. Are. You. Doing?” she said, in a hushed voice. She pointed to the pairing sheet. “Get to your classrooms before you’re disqualified.” When she turned to me, her eyes lit up like a string of Christmas lights. “And you and I are going to talk about this later!” She looked at Sam, then me, and skittered down the hall to her own event.
“Amy,” he said. It was a command, not a question.
“You have a hell of a way of trying to undermine me, Hinton,” I said, keeping my face slack, matching him.
He shook his head violently, brow furrowed. “No,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Amy that’s not what I...”
I held my hand up and touched him for the first time since we’d pulled apart, this time my fingertips on his lips. So soft. His clean shaven face, just rough enough for me to imagine what it would feel like brushing against my bare skin. A rush of warmth pooled in my belly, and other places, places untouched but in need of exploration.
“It was a joke, Sam.”
He smiled and then reached up and took my hand, interlacing our fingers. “Whatever happens today, Amy...”
I cut him off. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen today, Sam.”
Laughter twinkled in his eyes. “You will?”
“Yeah, I’ll predict it.”
“Go ahea
d.”
“We’re both going to Nationals.”
“Good prediction,” he said, nodding slowly.
And then we parted quickly, my ankles wobbling as I shuffled to my room, ready to take on the world.
Sam
A huge ball of guilt bowled through my veins, planted there firmly by the image of my father telling me that I was a sinner. I could sit here and think not about the way she tasted like cotton candy and vanilla and lust, but instead about my dad’s eyes, hard and black if I came home with anything less than third place.
I could think not about how her hands had responded and slid up my chest and around my neck, the tips of her fingers curling into the hair at the nape of my neck, but instead about his shouts and how he would quote Bible verses in a way that made me feel unconditionally flawed.
I could think not about the raging hard on—
No, wait.
I actually couldn’t not think about that.
Now I had to clear my head, my lips, my fingers, and my body of all the traces of Amy and go in and face my first opponent. How do you do that, though? How do you shift like that, compartmentalizing your life so that, from one minute to the next, you have laser focus on the thing that’s in front of you?
I mopped the floor with my first opponent that morning, a geeky tenth grader from Cambridge Rindge and Latin. He came in wearing a suit two sizes too big and a nasty snarl of contempt that told me everything I needed to know before he even opened his mouth.
Staying slack, loose, respectful, and pleasant was the best weapon against that kind of arrogance. Too bad it didn’t work against my father.
I won that first debate.
After results were posted, I kept craning my neck, looking around the cafeteria, trying to find Amy’s team. The groups at the tables were all generally segregated by school, although plenty of people crossed over. You made friends when you spent every Saturday together from October to March. I couldn’t find her anywhere though; she wasn’t with her normal group of friends.
I decided to go on a walkabout.
This school was like any other in the area. Nashoba Regional, Lincoln-Sudbury, they were all the same, long hallways lined with lockers, the rooms stretched out and uniform. Cubes that held us day in and day out. Our school days, from afar, looking like an ant hive as we ran in and out of each cube according to some sort of large system run by a queen.
Amy wasn’t in any of the usually suspected places.
I had given up and figured I better get back and grab something to eat, when a glimpse of that long, brown hair caught my eye. I swallowed and closed my eyes. Was she... crying? Her back was to me and her shoulders were hunched a little forward.
“Amy?” I said, my own voice surprising me, the firmness in it.
She looked up, eyes red rimmed. “Sam,” she said, wiping one eye with the back of her hand.
Compassion, or something close to it, hit me right in the heart. “You were eliminated, huh?” I asked.
“No, um, actually,” she said, smiling a shaky grin that twisted her lips into a funny expression I couldn’t understand. “No...uh, uh, I’m still in...uh, I just...” she stumbled over her words.
The air felt like a giant cotton ball between us, a transparent cotton ball. I didn’t know what to do. I knew sort of what to do, but there weren’t any manuals for this. How do you talk to a girl after you surprise kiss her before going off to be deadly enemies in a debate contest, where your father will practically kill you if you don’t win?
It’s not like there is a Dummies Guide for that, or even a Reddit AMA.
“Why are you crying?” I asked, the question so obvious that I had to hold back rolling my eyes.
“Because of you,” she said, quietly.
“Me?” I said. It felt like marbles were in the back of my throat.
“Yeah, you.” Her face was tipped down, her eyes looked up at me.
I had never seen a girl more sensual, more open and raw. Were we really having this conversation in a classroom painted that puke-green institutional color, with boring gray tiles that were supposed to look like fake marble, and plastic chairs attached to little pseudo-desks? Was this where the most intense romantic encounter of my life was about to happen?
She took three steps toward me, planted her palms on either side of my face and not-so-gently pulled me down to her.
A kiss. A fiery unleashing of a girl I wanted to know.
Her tongue pressed between my lips and mine didn’t need to be asked twice to do the same. My arms slid around her, taking a chance at cupping one breast while her hands wrapped around me. Her body pressed against mine, our torsos pushing into each other, as if trying to introduce ourselves that way. Her mouth said so many things to me that I couldn’t even comprehend because all of the words spilled out of my head and down into my raging hard on.
And then, just as fast as she had kissed me, she pulled back, breaking the contact. My mouth felt cold and abandoned.
Her eyes were wild. “Go to prom with me,” she demanded. It felt like a cross examination.
“Hell, yes,” I said, “especially if you kiss me again.”
“You guys want Joe Ross to win?” Erin hissed, skittering in on weak ankles, her stilettos skating on the linoleum. She moved her wrist in a circle and flashed wide, wild eyes at me. “You can make out any time. Right now you’re late for your round!”
She wobbled out, only to be replaced by my coach, Mr. Feehan.
“Sam!” he barked, eyes flitting to Amy. Mr. Feehan looked like a barrel-chested wrestling coach, with red-Irish hair and pale skin freckled in every place possible. “Get to your assignment! They’re looking for you! You too, Amy.”
And with that, my future began and ended, though I didn’t know it.
Amy
Had I really asked him to go to prom? Had he really said yes? How was that possible? I came out of the round after shaking hands with my opponent, reading his defeat in his eyes, and shifted all of my attention to that thumping roar inside me. I needed to find Sam, I needed to know that the kiss we had just shared was real—that it wasn’t going away, that it wasn’t ephemeral or something he’d done on a whim.
Finding truth in everything had become my singular pursuit over the past few years, and that included that kiss.
Sam
The blood pumped through my body like the most intense beat ever. It never varied.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Loud and hard, like a bass drum, with a searing edge of a snare, right around the fringe of the sound. It made me win—until it didn’t. The best debater in the entire region, the girl we knew would end up being number one, was Talia Sheridan. So far, she was undefeated, the only person in the entire tournament undefeated, and everyone had just assumed that of course she’d be number one and the rest of us would fight for the table scraps.
I walked into the cafeteria and halted at the threshold. My stomach was churning. The room felt like it would spin if I gave it a long enough stare, and everything in my mind was pure, unadulterated chaos.
Boom, boom, boom.
Amy, Amy, Amy.
We had about fifteen minutes before they’d announce the pairings, and if Talia won, which was pretty much a given, then it was all about the power of opponent, and how many debates we’d lost. I didn’t know how Amy had done in this last round. The pairing sheets were pulled down already, so I had to ask her.
Amy. Her name triggered a flash of emotion that slid through my body from toe to head, but settled in between. Thank God for long suit jackets.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked softly, suddenly there. Her voice was like a caress, a stroke, as if her hand had reached down into me and taken me.
Something in her half-lidded eyes told me that for as sweet, gentle, and smart as she was, more was waiting to be unleashed. I wanted to be the one to open that door.
Maybe we could open each other’s doors and find the treasures inside.
She
reached over and took my hand, not palm to palm, the way you hold a friend’s hand, or a little kid’s, but interlacing the fingers like a promise of bodies entwined, all in the form of a simple hand. She didn’t have to drag me. I went willingly, and we entered a classroom.
She was a little shaky in those high heels, but damn, the lines of her calves, the way it made her hips sway, made me feel like a man. They made me feel a lot of things that were new and old all at once.
“I meant what I said,” she said, bold now, her eyes blazing, “will you go to prom with me?”
We didn’t go to the same school, and at my school I wasn’t planning to go to prom. It seemed like a stupid ritual a bunch of us had decided to forgo in favor of just hanging out, getting drunk, and then going to after-prom parties. But for Amy?
“Yes,” I said, so quickly the word came out of me a grunt, “Of course.”
The tux, the limo, the flowers, the dinner, the ritual and the silliness, all started to make sense as I stared into her eyes. Something inside me rose up and I leaned down to take her mouth, which she gave freely.
The tournament itself melted away as her hands, the same fingers that had intertwined with mine, wrapped around my back and my own embraced her, our lips hungry, our mouths making invitations that I hoped to God would be extended till the end of time.
“Hey,” a voice barked. Ross. We pulled apart. He shot us a what the fuck? look.
“How can you make out at a time like this? The pairings were just announced.”
“What do you mean?”
“Talia took number one, she was the only one undefeated, but there are four people, two debates, to square off for spots two and three. I’m not one of ‘em, obviously,” he said, bitter, “but you two are.”