She didn’t get home until after eleven, and by then I was lying in bed with Charlie and didn’t feel like coming out. He blobbed on my bed, settling heavily onto my lower back.
Mom gingerly opened the door to my room and sighed.
“I can handle it,” I said, facedown on the bed and unable to move.
“Charlie, get off of her.”
“He’s appreciating me right now. Charlie, don’t move, please.” Charlie looked back and forth at each of us, not understanding anything, his tongue dabbing happily.
“You don’t need to do this, Sydney.”
“What the hell, Mom? You said you weren’t making enough money and—”
“That doesn’t mean that I’m asking you to sacrifice yourself—”
“Holy shit, it’s ten hours a week at the Great American Cookie Factory, it’s not like I’m going to work in the mines! It’s a little extra money for us. That’s it. I’m tired of not having anything ever.”
She was silent a moment. “Well, I’m sorry about that.”
“I’m not blaming you. Okay? I’m helping. Let me help.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. “I just want you to have the same life as the other kids at your school have.”
“Well, I don’t and I can’t, so…”
“I want you to focus on school. You need to get good grades so—”
“I know.”
“So you can get a scholarship. That’s more important than a job.”
She was just so hopeful for me. “They don’t give you a scholarship when you have a two-point-two GPA, all right? They don’t. It doesn’t matter how good my grades are in the second half of my junior year, it’s already done. So, you know, the sooner I just decide to have a job and stop having stupid dreams about college, the better.”
It hurt as I said it. Of course it did. My parents had both gone to college; I had worked under the assumption that I was going to go practically from birth.
And, not gonna lie, I didn’t have a specific desire to do something in college. I wasn’t one of those people who had already mapped out their entire life—the kind of person with a very special passion who was going to get a feature written about them in the local paper. I had no idea what I was going to do, even if I went to college. I had always seen it as a glowing goal on the horizon, ivy-coated ancient buildings bursting with knowledge and importance and light. That’s where people figured out who they were, and what they were going to do with their lives. How they fell in love. How they found their purpose. What kind of life could you have without it?
The mall, I guess.
But that’s not fair, either. I’m sure there were plenty of people having amazing lives who didn’t go to college, but in my mind there was so much pressure about it that not going felt like a death sentence. Your future would be slammed shut like a door. And then where would you be? In apartments like this, with boyfriends like Luke, for the rest of your life until you died.
“You’re gonna be okay, Sydney,” said my mom, noticing my death spiral.
“Sure,” I lied.
“But if your grades don’t stay up, you’re quitting that job.”
On Wednesday, speech practice turned into a bloodbath.
“Resolved,” read out Coach Sparks. “A manned mission to Mars is a vital investment for the United States.”
This was policy debate. Today two teams were practicing—Logan and Anesh on one side, with Rani and her partner, Sarah, on the other. Sarah was a tall, shy sophomore with long brown hair curtaining the side of her face, an oversized nose, and reams of eyeliner. She looked like a cautious deer that had wandered into our speech practice and was about to be slaughtered.
Rani was laying out the affirmative case, which was essentially a list of arguments in favor of a manned mission to Mars. She had a laptop in front of her, which she glanced at repeatedly as she fired off reason after reason why a Mars mission was important. As far as I understood it, after a certain amount of time, Logan would respond. Then Sarah would have a rebuttal, and then Anesh would rebut the rebuttal. There were a lot of butts.
“All right, stop,” said Coach Sparks, cutting off Rani in the middle of her list. “You did a lot of work on this?”
“Yes?”
“Impressive.” He walked a step away from her.
“Thanks.”
“It’s dogshit, but it’s impressive.”
The room went silent. Sparks turned back to Rani. “You think that’s all it is? You find some sources on the internet, you make a list, you say them as fast as you can? You try to get all your ‘research’ out there? I don’t care. The judges don’t care. YOU ARE MAKING A CASE, YOU ARE NOT RECITING A LAUNDRY LIST. I thought you were gonna get up here and do something interesting! I don’t want a list! It’s not about ‘work,’ it’s about how you present the work! Are you coherent? Are you persuasive? Are you clear? Does each piece of evidence follow up on the previous piece? I didn’t hear any of that. Do better.”
Rani’s voice was broken and soft. “Yes, Coach.”
I felt awful but managed to steal some glances at the other members of the team. The younger members, the JV kids, were watching in silent terror. Hanson was sitting in the back of the room, on top of a desk, smirking. He was enjoying this.
Sparks turned to Logan. “You think you can do better? Give me your first negative.”
Logan consulted his own laptop, looked to the timer, and launched into a vigorous defense. He refuted Rani’s points one by one, citing a litany of sources, and then sprayed a dozen more reasons why space travel was impossible, ruinously expensive, and unlikely to yield anything that would help us on Earth. He talked like a cheetah, running his words into each other, and gesticulated passionately. I didn’t really understand a word he said because he was too fast, but it sure as hell seemed impressive.
“Time,” called Sparks, cutting him off mid-sentence.
Logan sat back down in his chair.
“Why are you sitting down?”
“Because I’m finished?”
“You think you’re finished?”
“My time is up.”
“And you sat down because your time is up?”
Logan’s confidence began to falter. He could sense the trap coming, but he didn’t know how it was about to be sprung. Tension filled the room like a membrane.
“Did you do a good enough job to sit down?”
“Yes, I did a good job?”
“You thought that was good? In your opinion of yourself, you thought what you just did was good?”
“Pretty good.”
“Oh, it was just pretty good? A moment ago it was good and you were feeling pretty full of yourself and now all of a sudden you’re not? Which is it, pretty good, or good? Or can’t you tell the difference?”
Logan’s smirk died on his face.
“What is the difference between pretty good and good?” said Sparks.
“Um…”
“Um is the difference? I missed that before. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PRETTY GOOD AND GOOD?”
“I don’t know.”
“You better learn!”
“I mean, I had a lot of sources.”
“And you didn’t just hear me tell that girl that wasn’t enough? Did you not just hear me explain that to Rani? And yet you come up here with your ‘list of sources,’ with NO FLOW, NO COHESION, NO ARGUMENT.” He spun back to the room. “What are we doing here?” Nobody answered. I could hear people’s hearts beating. “Somebody tell me what we’re doing here.”
I could feel my instinct—just say something funny, Sydney, everyone will love you—welling up inside of me. But everyone was so scared, so still, it seemed like suicide to say anything.
“Nobody can tell me what we’re doing here? Not one of you, NOT ONE OF YOU IN THIS ROOM HAS ANY IDEA WHAT WE’RE DOING HERE?!” He spun back on Logan. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
Logan’s eyes opened in shock. He couldn’t answer.
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING?! ANSWER THE QUESTION. DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING?!”
“I don’t—I don’t—”
“What?!”
“I don’t understand—”
“You don’t understand WHAT? You don’t understand what?! What don’t you understand?!”
Logan was like a beached fish gasping for water. His mouth was open, his eyes were wide, he had no idea what was going on. Coach Sparks got closer to him.
“You come in here, you’re all confident that you can beat this freshman, and you don’t bother to learn anything—you don’t bother to put any effort into this, you think you can just cakewalk through an argument. What. Are. We. Doing. Here.” He turned back to us. “ANYONE?”
I spoke before I could stop myself. “I mean, like, in a general sense, in life, we’re here to procreate and continue our species, but in a specific sense, we’re here to be fucking winners. Coach.”
The whole room held their breath, waiting to see if I was to be executed or not. Sparks stared at me, blinked, then broke into a smile. “Sydney gets it.”
The class exhaled. A lot of people probably started to hate me.
Sparks quietly turned back to Logan, who was red-faced and sweating. He spoke in a whisper, almost sweetly. “Go out into the hall. Get back to work. And next time, do something worthy of my attention.”
Logan and Anesh collected their laptops and rushed into the hall. Sarah and Rani did likewise.
Coach Sparks paced in front of the room, then settled into a chair, straightening out his polo shirt. “Who else is ready to show me something?”
I shrank in my seat. I am not ready to show you something.
Nobody volunteered.
“Why are we having practice if you aren’t working?” he asked casually.
“We’ll go,” said Milo from the back of the room.
I looked at him, remembering him in history class browbeating Lakshmi for mentioning her basketball game. Talking to her the same way Sparks talked to the team. Milo had wicked eyebrows; soft, puffy hair that he constantly ran his fingers through; and a deep non-Minnesotan tan. Taryn, his partner, skittered to his side, looking tiny and gorgeous next to him.
They were doing duo, which was essentially a two-person acting piece with a ridiculous number of specific rules that made no sense. They couldn’t make eye contact with each other, they couldn’t physically touch each other, and there were no props or costumes allowed. All they had to work with was their bodies and their voices.
They were doing The Hobbit, which was impossibly complicated. Milo had seven different voices for dwarves. Taryn somehow acted out the roles for Gandalf, a goblin king, Gollum, and an elf, since there were essentially zero roles for girls in the entire book. The two of them together formed the neck of the dragon Smaug, speaking in unison in an otherworldly growl that froze the blood of the audience.
The highlight of the piece was when the two of them somehow combined to become a giant spider. Milo crouched behind Taryn, putting his arms out, moving them synchronously with her. They spoke in a doubled hiss, making the spider sound terrifying and unreal. Despite their awfulness as human beings, I was hugely impressed.
I did manage to steal another look at Hanson, though. He was watching them with a detached, slightly annoyed look on his face, as if the fact that they were good was a problem for him.
Sparks nodded when they were done. “You been working on that a lot?”
“Since summer,” said Milo, fluffing his hair again.
“Taryn, what did you think of your performance?”
She squeezed Milo’s hand. “Um… I think Smaug still needs work, but, um… I think we did okay.”
They waited. The class waited. I spotted Hanson and Andrew, Thomas’s nemesis, waiting in the back, uncertain whether they should attack or not.
Blaize raised her hand. “You guys are incredible. I mean, that was phenomenal.”
Milo nodded and looked to Sparks. “What did you think, Coach?”
Sparks paused, then folded his hands in front of him. “It was solid. Good job!”
A ripple of relief went through the group, except for Hanson and Andrew, who seemed miffed.
Afterward, I found Taryn and Milo in the hall, working on their Smaug voice.
“That was so amazing, guys,” I said.
Milo winked ever so slightly and you could tell he was thinking, Yes, I am so amazing.
“I mean, wow, the way you guys were in sync like that and the voices and everything—incredible. I like aspire to be like you guys.” I was laying it on thick.
Taryn regarded me coolly. “I’m still waiting to see your piece.”
“I’m not quite ready to show it yet.”
“What are you doing?”
“Um… you’ll see.”
“Sure.”
“You guys are so inspirational, maybe I should do a duo, too.”
Milo’s eyebrows flared. “Duo is all about empathy with your partner.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“I don’t know if you can have that, honestly, if you’re self-centered.”
I swallowed the wicked comeback that came to mind. “I don’t think I have that problem.”
“Lots of people don’t think they have that problem.”
I was going to have a hard time not killing her. They had survived the crucible of Sparks and were now top dogs in the group, apparently. I tried to get the conversation off the evil of my self-centered existence and onto what was most likely their favorite topic: their self-centered existence.
“So how do you guys, like… do all that stuff?”
Taryn was unimpressed. “Do all that ‘stuff’?”
“Like, get in sync like that?”
Milo fluffed his hair and probably imagined himself being fanned by a warm Mediterranean breeze. “Some duo teams out there, they think it’s about memorizing lines and creating characters. But what takes you to the next level”—he turned toward Taryn and mirrored her—“is the ability to feel what your partner is feeling: Two… become… one.” He put his hands out and spread his fingers. Taryn slinked toward him, splaying her fingers but not touching. “In duo, you’re not allowed to physically touch or make eye contact, so everything has to be instinctive, primal.”
He turned to me, his eyes glinting wolfishly in the fluorescent light. “Taryn and I have a bond.”
“A completely non-sexual bond,” she added.
“That’s right. Sometimes I don’t know where I end and she begins.”
“It’s probably that actual physical space between you,” I said.
“Sometimes,” Milo nearly whispered, “there is no space between us. I can have my face right next to her butt, and I feel nothing. I mean, I am a heterosexual guy, don’t get the wrong idea about me, but my eyes can be literal inches from her ass, and I am able to completely eliminate any sexual attraction to her.”
“It’s amazing,” said Taryn. “Milo is so superior to regular guys. Most guys would look.”
“I look. I just feel nothing,” he said.
Taryn turned to him. “That’s inspirational.”
“Because I choose not to feel anything. I am greater than my hormones.”
“If only other guys were like him.”
“Other guys disappoint you.” His eyes bored into her.
“They do.” Taryn sighed, staring right back at Milo, reveling in her disappointment in the entire male gender.
“Maybe you’re just asexual,” I said. “That’s cool.”
“Oh no. I am very sexual.” His eyes zeroed in on me, his mouth open ever so slightly. “But my mind is my greatest sexual organ.” He pointed to it and then casually brushed his fingers through his fluffy hair again.
In my mind, also my greatest sexual organ, I began to sketch out the path to their destruction.