I couldn’t sleep.
There was a strange energy that overtook me once I had decided on The Plan. Like, finally I was doing something with my life. Finally I was striking back for the losers of the world. Every team I had ever been on had been pathetic, and I wasn’t dense enough to think that I might not have been partly responsible. Whether it was the elementary school soccer team, or the middle school volleyball team, or my high school cross-country team, I had always been the weak link—the reason why we lost.
My family had always lost, too. My father had lost. My mother, clearly, was losing.
Was this going to change it? At long last, would there be an opportunity to use my ability to destroy the internal cohesion on any team to my advantage?
I thought about Mom and Luke, and I felt a pang of guilt. There had to be some way to help out. How was I going to fit that in between my plans of secret revenge, infiltration, and conspiracy?
Elijah drilled me on the rules Monday at school.
“So it’s like this,” he said over lunch, munching his way through limp, greasy pizza. “There are two basic sides to speech. The debate side of things, which we’re going to avoid like the plague, and the interp side of things.”
I took notes.
“In interp, you generally have up to ten minutes to present a piece of literature. It’s not reading out loud, it’s acting, you’re creating different characters, you’re switching back and forth between them. There are different categories you can compete in: humorous, dramatic, duo, and original oratory. There are others, but let’s not get overly complicated right now.”
“What’s original oratory?”
“That’s where you make shit up. You basically create a speech on any topic. That’s what Andrew Chen is doing when he’s talking about Thomas.”
“All right.”
He slurped on his chocolate milk, then held me with his eyes. “You have to understand—these people, speech is their life, okay? All summer they go to speech camp. They have private coaches in the off-season. Once one season ends, they start prepping for the next season. They’re obsessed and they’re good, and they’re going to see right through you if you suck.”
“Have you been to speech camp?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk about speech camp.”
“What happened at speech camp?”
“Focus, Sydney.”
“Is that where you learned to repress your feelings and not ask out a girl you like?”
He dropped his crust onto his tray to mingle with the other crusts and hid his face in his hands. “I’m trying to get you to focus.”
“You know, we should have put that into the plan: falling in love.”
Elijah leaned forward. “You are waay too invested in this.”
“You should’ve said something Saturday night. Like, just drawn something on the tablecloth with crayon. Maybe a cartoon heart or something.”
“No thank you.”
I elbowed him. “This is going to be my new mission.”
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to join the speech team.”
“I can do two missions at once. I’m multidimensional.”
“I think,” he said, setting down his chocolate milk and fixing me with his blue eyes, “that you should focus on your plan and I’ll focus on mine.”
“Do you have a plan?” I asked, needling him.
“I have many plans.”
I snorted. “Sure you do.”
“Can we please talk about what you’re going to do today? I want you to imagine yourself as a griffin. You need big griffin energy.”
I stared at him.
“Do you know what a griffin is?”
“Yes. I’ve read Harry Potter, Elijah.”
“All right, then—”
“I will have big griffin energy if you have big griffin energy.”
He smiled just a bit. “Deal.”
The speech team met in a large room on the first floor, with high windows that let you look out at the leafy trees that shielded the school from the rest of the world like the forest surrounding Narnia.
I had one of those moments where I saw myself walking as if from above, a determined look on my face, my backpack shouldered against the storm of unsuspecting humans around me. Everyone else was talking and laughing and preparing for their oh-so-amazing lives of special creativity—the piano lessons, the jazz band practice, the strange abstract art made from discarded rolls of toilet paper. I breezed through all of them, unnoticed: I was the spy. The ninja. The double agent. The ninja griffin double agent.
I had to convince them I knew my shit. That I was worthy of their attention.
I’m not here to ruin your life, I’m just a simple, not-so-hot junior looking to be awesome and make friends. Nothing to see here. No reason to be suspicious. By the way, do you mind giving me the passwords to all your phones because that would be super helpful.
They had built a special row of shelves above the windows, which went all the way around the top of the room, and sagged under the glorious weight of the enormous shiny trophies. Some of them were five feet tall at least, with four spires like they were cathedrals from the Middle Ages. You could practically hear the voices of previous speech teams, echoing down from the rafters.
We kicked ass once. Now it is your turn.
Someone had also painted CHAMPIONS ARE MADE HERE across the back wall, with a disturbing portrait of a steroid-infused knight practically bursting out of his ill-advised armor.
Logan was passing out little forms once we crossed the threshold. He stopped when he saw me.
“Sydney,” he said, looking up at me. “I didn’t expect to see you here. I didn’t think this was your scene.” He made air quotes around “scene” like a jackass.
I had prepared for this moment.
“Look, I am so sorry about what happened in peer counseling. I was being kind of awful to you, and I realize that you were just trying to help. I feel like you did an amazing job trying to penetrate my… walls.” I brushed my hair behind my ears and shrugged just a little bit, overdoing it. I touched his elbow.
He huffed. “You can’t just try out for the team on a lark.”
“I did forensics at my last school,” I said, dropping the vocab word I’d learned. “Maybe I wasn’t the LeBron James of speech, but I was pretty good. I thought I could help.”
“Help us do what?”
“Win a National Championship.”
His eyes narrowed. “There’s no National Championship.”
“You know what I mean. Go to Nats. As a team. Get that third Diamond for Coach Sparks.” I punched him playfully in the shoulder. “You know, I was thinking about getting a makeover, too, seeing if that would help, because of the… studies… showing that attractive girls do better. I googled it.”
He nodded suspiciously. “It’s good to live in a reality-based universe.”
It was everything I could do not to crush his pasty skull between my not-attractive meat paws, but I managed it, rushing over to my seat before I killed him.
Hanson, the reigning champion in Humorous Interp, was clearly the leader of the group. He was sitting on top of one the chairbacks, with his feet on the seat of it, like it was some kind of throne, or he was so awesome that he couldn’t sit like a mere human. He was hunched over with his elbows resting on his knees, ready for battle. You could tell that he practiced the superhero pose.
“New blood,” he said, giving me a cool head nod.
I went over to him. “It’s so awesome to meet you.”
He closed his eyes and nodded. Yes, it was awesome.
“I’m new to Eaganville, but everybody is like in awe of you.”
He smiled a dazzling white smile. “I’m just a guy like everybody else.” He blinked. “I know that it might seem like I’m some kind of other species, but I’m really just a guy. With a loooot of talent.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I work really hard. And also I have a loooot of talent.”
“I get it,” I said.
“Do you? I always think it’s important to acknowledge that my gifts come from,” he said, pointing silently to the ceiling. “The ghost people above. That’s why after every speech I point up.” He smiled again, his dimples flaring so deep you could plant crops in them.
I mean, he was funny. You had to give him that.
The other varsity members of the squad sat in the back of the room while the underclassmen huddled up front. I spotted a girl who looked like a smaller, tamer version of Lakshmi sitting front of center. She looked wide-eyed and innocent, which was strange, seeing as how she was related to Lakshmi. I settled in next to her.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Sydney.”
“Rani,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, she’s cool.” How was I going to save her brain? “Speech and Debate is fun, huh? Like a fun time. Like a fun leisure-type activity?”
“Yeah.”
“Probably good not to get too wrapped up in it.”
At that moment, Coach Sparks strode into the room.
All conversation stopped. Everyone sat completely still.
I noticed his Keds first, lightly squeaking on the hardwood floor. He had changed from his tracksuit to his regular teaching uniform: pleated khakis and a tucked-in burgundy polo shirt that stretched to show off his dad bod. His arms were thick and heavily covered in Italian hair, while the cords of his neck muscles seemed permanently flexed.
There was no way he remembered me, so I sat confidently in the front row.
When had I first seen him? Five years ago?
I smiled inwardly. He had no idea who I was. This was going to be fun.
I felt like Arya Stark, a cheerful young girl with a murder list.
Logan. Hanson. Taryn. Andrew. Coach Sparks.
(Except I wasn’t going to murder them, I was just going to crush their dreams and toss their broken, battered egos into a pit of gnashing wolf-beasts that I had trained for just such an occasion. I wasn’t a monster, honestly.)
Coach Sparks stood in front of us, looking at the team, faintly disapproving. “This is what we’ve got?” he said quietly. “This is the team?” He looked sad.
You could hear the egos deflate. Nobody moved.
“All right,” he said, putting his fists on his hips. He lifted one fist into the air and dropped his head, like he was about to launch into a prayer. I glanced around.
I’ve been here thirty seconds and this is already fucked up.
“You might not believe in God,” he said. “But I want you to believe in yourself. And believe in this team. You come to me because you want to be winners. You think you know what winning means. But I am going to teach you that there is no winning, and there is no losing. There is only… domination. Because we don’t win, we dominate. Dominate on three. ONE, TWO.”
“DOMINATE,” said everybody, and that wasn’t disturbing at all.
“Domi… nate,” I said, a half second too late because I wasn’t sure whether he meant for us to say it after three or on three and I was never very good at chanting in unison because it always made me feel a little self-conscious and, frankly, cultish.
He looked us over. “I’m not sure I see people ready to dominate. I don’t see people who are up to the challenge, to be honest with you. I see people who’d rather sit at home, watch television, text with their friends. Meanwhile, there’s some kid in Saint Paul or Mankato or Burnsville and she’s up before dawn and she’s already in the library, and when you face her in a tournament, she’s going to kick your ass. That’s what I see. If you think you can’t do it, you’re right, you can’t do it. If you think you can’t work hard enough, you’re right, you can’t work hard enough. Is anyone here a loser?”
A gangly freshman boy in the back of the room laughed. Sparks zeroed in on him.
“You think that’s funny? I just a made a funny statement?”
The boy didn’t say anything. “I asked you a question. You can’t answer it. Half a second ago you were perfectly willing to INTERRUPT me, and now when I’m asking you a question, you don’t have the decency to ANSWER IT? Do—you—think—that’s—funny?”
“… Yes?”
“Why?”
“Why is it funny?”
“Am I an idiot? Is that all you do? Repeat questions and waste my time? WHY.”
“Why is it funny?”
Sparks kicked a chair.
“Um…” stammered the boy, “because it was a funny question.”
“So—what you’re saying—is that my question was funny BECAUSE it was a funny question. That’s what you just said. This is a SPEECH team, Junior. We learn to TALK here. We learn to MAKE SENSE. I might have my work cut out for me with you. Don’t I? Don’t I have my work cut out for me?” He nodded, staring directly at the boy.
The freshman looked up at him, terrified, unsure of what to do.
“This is your chance, right now, to run. You hear me? There is an open door over there. If you can’t mentally take it, if you aren’t strong enough, I suggest you pick up your little pansy-ass backpack and skitter your cowardly rear end out that door. Because if you stay, sunshine, you better be ready to work.”
Sparks locked eyes with him. Then, haltingly, the boy grabbed his backpack, took one look back at the rest of us, and raced out of the room. That might have been the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.
Sparks smiled in satisfaction. “Anyone else feeling like it’s time to give up?” He waited. “We’ll see. We shall see. Newbies, I want you to approach one by one. Veterans, you’re gonna partner up and select a piece.”
Coach Sparks sat on the edge of a long folding table and looked me over.
“I’m new to the team, but I’m not a newbie. I do dramatic interp,” I said confidently as I approached.
“Where were you before?”
“Edina.”
His gray eyes regarded me coolly. “I don’t remember seeing you on that team.”
“I got injured, so I missed a lot of meets,” I said, trying to make shit up as fast as I could.
Injured? How do you get injured doing speech?!
“You got injured?”
“Like, um… I had a vocal cord injury. The piece I was doing was pretty intense, and it required a lot of um… vocal… like screams. So I kind of threw out my voice, so my doctor told me I needed to take some time off.”
I’d like to point out here that being a secret agent is a lot harder than it initially appears. I made a mental note to myself that I needed to write down an entire fake history for myself and memorize it, which I probably should have done prior to actually meeting these people and inventing a monumental pile of bullshit that I needed to keep in order.
“Never heard of that. What piece were you doing?”
Oh, great, I need to make up more lies.
“It was like a German piece. In translation. I had kind of a bad experience with it, so I want to change to doing something else.”
“Uh-huh. Did you go to State?”
“Uh… no, I didn’t qualify for State.”
He was not impressed.
“Show me what you’ve got.”
Shit.
“I just want to start fresh this season.”
“You don’t have a piece selected already?”
“Um… I had one, and I think it was unworthy of me, so I’m going to find a new one.”
He leaned back. “It’s Sydney, right? Sydney. Look, I have a minimal tolerance for bullshit.”
“Right.”
“Right. So if you want to be on this team, you’re gonna work. Maybe in Edina you could get away with coasting on the team, and getting hurt and being a whiny little girl, but on my team, you excel or you’re gone. I only want people on this team who want to win.”
“Okay,” I said.
“There’s no space for people who want to have an experience or camaraderie or a good time. This is not a good time. This is work.”
“I got it.”
“Are you gonna work?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? ’Cause if you don’t have the stones, you can chicken out now. I don’t have time to waste.”
“Right.”
“And you will address me as Coach.”
“Right, Coach.”
I felt the wind sucked out of me, like I was in the presence of someone with so much gravity that he stole all the air out of a room. I was already sweating, and deep down, I felt the need to try to please him.
I’ll show you. I’ll impress you.
Then I swallowed it back down. That’s not what I was here to do.
“You start on JV. Blaize does DI on varsity, so you can check in with her. And, Sydney? You do the work or you’re gone. I’m not running a day care for losers.”
“Yes, Coach,” I said.
I found Blaize already practicing her piece in the hallway. She was less of a girl and more like a Valkyrie who had descended from Asgard and was blowing shit up down here on Earth. She was six feet tall, and had her blond hair braided in a complicated ropelike structure. She was clearly hot enough for debate and had probably parked her flying horse outside. She had a shiny Apple watch. She smelled like vanilla and joy and was going to be a major problem.
I felt like a sad, dull potato next to her.
I’d never actually seen someone perform a speech piece before, so I lingered at the hallway, spying on her. She stood facing the wall, pacing back and forth slightly, an imaginary cigarette in one hand and an imaginary glass of scotch in her other hand. Her face, when I could see it, was contorted into a sardonic smirk; her eyelids were heavy, and she even managed to quiver slightly, as if she was suffering from the tremors of alcoholism.
She was amazing. Her voice had a caramel throatiness to it, as if ravaged from years of smoking and hard living. She didn’t seem like a high school girl anymore; she seemed like a washed-up golden age actress in her death throes. How the hell was I going to do this? How was I possibly going to get good enough to impress these people?
I clapped loudly when she finished.
“That was fantastic,” I said, rushing up to her. “I was like, oh my God, you are like… who are you supposed to be?”
“Judy Garland.”
“Dorothy? From The Wizard of Oz?”
“Yeah, this is post-career. After she got really screwed over by the studio and she got hooked on alcohol and drugs.”
“Ohh. That makes more sense, then. I’m Sydney, by the way. Coach Sparks told me to check in with you ’cause I’m doing DI, too.”
She smiled a perfect smile. “Awesome! I love DI—it’s like my favorite thing in the whole world! You get to just like embody pain, you know? It’s so cathartic. You’re gonna be amazing, I can already tell!”
“Thanks. I’m pretty sure I’m amazing already, too.”
Even her laugh was beautiful. “Do you have a piece yet?”
“No. I think maybe you’re supposed to help me find something.”
“Of course! We’ve got some pre-cut pieces in the script library, and if those don’t work, I can help you find something else.”
I was taken aback. I was expecting her to be a clone of Sparks, full of herself in the grand, pretentious manner of the other Sinister Seven. Shit. How am I going to be able to ruin someone so damn nice? Maybe it would involve holding one of her adorable stuffed animals hostage and then decapitating it. Maybe not, but I was open to all possibilities at this point.
“My theory is that DI is all about pain,” she said as we headed back into the common speech room. The JV members of the team were pairing up, hunting through pamphlets and playscripts, reading material. I spied Rani working with a dark-haired girl in the corner. I resisted the urge to run up to her and tell her to run for her life.
“The best things are memoirs,” Blaize continued. “You find someone who’s been like tortured or kidnapped or homeless or something. The more your person has suffered, the better you’ll do. Basically, if the audience cries, you win. Alcoholism is good. Diseases. If you can find something with cancer, that’s great. Spina bifida. I haven’t seen anybody doing spina bifida lately, so that’s wide open. Depression is kind of played out, so I’d stay away from that. Plus it’s low energy, too, no fun.”
“Thanks.”
She took out a half-dozen plays and spread them out on a folding table. “I don’t really like to die at the end of my piece; some people love dying, but it’s hard to do onstage and make it look decent. So if you’re going for leukemia, make sure it’s not all the way to the end of leukemia, know what I mean? What did you do at your last school?”
“Um… it was like about a girl who joined a gang. And it had um… like really harsh initiation stuff.”
“That sounds amazing! What was it called?”
“‘Girl… in a Gang.’” Awesome, now I needed to go home tonight and write a fake ten-minute piece about a girl joining a gang and forced to eat a live cat or something.
“Oh. Do you have a video of yourself doing it?”
“Why would I have one of those?”
She seemed concerned. “That way you can watch your performance. We record everything. You can even check it out on our YouTube channel.”
“You guys are hard-core.”
“I don’t know that recording your performances is hard-core; I think it’s pretty standard really—”
“But you know what I mean,” I said. “Sparks.”
She smiled sweetly. “He can be tough sometimes, but that’s why we love him.”
“Right.”
“His favorite saying is that someone, somewhere, is rehearsing right now to beat you.”
“I like that level of paranoia.”
It was nearly six o’clock by the time practice was over. The sun had already set when we exited the building into the parking lot. Great mounds of dirty snow flanked the plowed area, and a freezing wind whipped in from the north, ruffling my hair and pricking my skin.
My mind buzzed with possibilities. I had done it. Step one: Infiltrate the team. Granted, I needed to go home and write a fake piece about being in a gang, possibly record it, and secretly upload it to the internet without anyone noticing, but that was minor. Then I needed to find a piece, cut it to ten minutes, secretly practice the hell out of it, and get good before I showed it to anyone on the team. I’d need Elijah for that. And then I needed to slowly excrete poison into the wellspring of the group creativity, fomenting conflict and driving them all mad.
I took a deep breath. This conspiracy was going to be a lot of work.
I smiled bitterly as I watched the other members of the team heading to their cars.
Anesh, Logan’s debate partner, pulled his black leather jacket around him and headed for a Porsche SUV. I looked at the other cars: Saabs, BMWs, Mercedes. These people lived in a different world than I did. They were going to college, they were going places, they were going to win long after I was gone from the scene.
I spotted Logan striding across the parking lot, puffed up in his own arrogance, heading for a sleek silver BMW.
“You need a ride?” he said as his car beeped.
“Nope,” I said, not relishing the amount of time I’d need to stand outside for the bus.
He stopped for a second. “You don’t need to pretend like you can handle this, you know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean—I know why you’re doing this.”
I smirked, brushing the hair out of my face. “Wow, you’re really perceptive, Logan.”
“Sure. You want to prove a point to me. You want to say, ‘I’ll show you.’ And that’s fine, I guess. If that’s your motivation. Michael Jordan basically did the same thing. Of course, he was blessed with natural talent.”
“How do you know I’m not blessed with Michael Jordan–level talent?”
He chuckled. “Oh, I think it’s pretty clear. But honestly: This is going to be too much for you. You’re not going to be able to succeed under these circumstances. It takes a person with a special drive to compete in speech. Did you go to a speech camp this summer? I didn’t see you there. Everyone who is anyone in speech goes. Because this isn’t a regular extracurricular activity. If you want to win, this is your life.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You got me there, Logan. I guess I’ll never be good enough.”
“Like, is it cool with you that you’re just going to be sort of good? Is that a thing? Why do anything if you’re just going to be okay? Why not be the best? What’s the point of doing anything if you’re not going to be the greatest ever?”
“Maybe I just enjoy the agony of defeat.” I smiled.
“O-kay,” he said, slipping into his car and pressing the button to start it.
I made like I was heading to a gray Lexus, then watched as he drove off. The parking lot grew silent, occasionally brightened by the passing headlights of a car. I tromped over the crusty snow to the bus stop, thrusting my hands in my pockets to protect them from the cold.
Life was unfair.
Did you expect it to be otherwise?
Instead of having to get a job, or having to help their families, these kids got to spend all summer working on their passion. They never had to worry about whether or not their parents could afford it; they had tutors, private coaches. They had a head start on everything, and did their best never to look back. No wonder they won and we lost. Their parents had won, and now they were making sure their kids won too. And that’s how it would go until the end of time unless somebody stopped them.
I thought about my mom, working her ass off and still not making enough money to keep us safe. Not making enough money to send me to college or hire SAT tutors or put me in summer camps to fill out my résumé. Not having money for a therapist to see me through the worst of it.
Then I thought about me.
When the city bus came, I let it pass and called Lakshmi instead—I had something to go do.