The charter bus was waiting at six thirty in the morning. The sun was about thirty minutes from coming up; there was only a faint bruising on the horizon, and the temperature had dipped into the single digits overnight. The parking lot near the school was crusty with old ice and dirty snow, and my breath escaped in puffs. I hustled to the bus in my skirt, the frigid air biting through my panty hose. Goddamn sexism.
My stomach was flipping over and over again. I had managed to perform my routine a few times for other team members, getting encouragement from Blaize and subtle yet persistent denigration from Milo. I hadn’t showed it to Sparks, which was contributing to my nervousness. He tended to focus only on his varsity team and let the rest of us fend for ourselves. You had to make him notice you before he would take an interest.
Why did I have to pick a plan that required me to succeed? Wasn’t there a way to simply lower the average score of everybody and call it a day? Nope. Before every competition ever I had felt like this; felt my insides crawl around my ribs, looking for a way to escape. The unwholesome addition of gas might cause me to fart in the middle of a competition—I suppose that might help with the Mötley Crüe thing, but it wasn’t exactly inspiring.
No, I was a loser. I had always been a loser. Secretly hoping to join the winners. And here I was.
The bus was largely quiet when I clambered into it—everyone was in their own rows, headphones on, leaning against the windows and deep in concentration. Except Taryn and Milo, of course. Taryn was sitting on Milo’s lap. But they still had headphones on and were completely ignoring each other.
I spotted Hanson in the back. He had huge headphones on and was reading the Bible, which he carried around constantly. Not that he was religious or anything; he was doing the Bible for his piece. He had performed his HI once during the week, which was phenomenal, of course. He was doing Genesis, and everything about it was designed to be blasphemous. He had funny voices for God, Adam, Eve—he’d taken a black Sharpie and crossed out half the words of the Holy Word of God. Last year he had apparently won Nationals with Hop on Pop, by somehow turning Dr. Seuss’s cute story into a drug-fueled hallucinogenic nightmare about attacking your father, and this year he was planning on outdoing himself. He was mouthing the words to himself silently—then screwing up his face, practicing his expressions.
I was nearly the last person on the bus. I spotted my own row just in front of Blaize, who had found an enormous and fancy coffee and was downing it like a champ. Her suit was burgundy and beautiful and amazing and probably cost a thousand dollars.
“Hi!” she said, reaching around the top of the seat like the walking dead. “How are you feeling?”
“All right,” I lied.
“You’re gonna be awesome,” she said, rubbing my shoulders. “Just do your thing. Your piece is gonna kill.”
“Thanks.”
The next thing I knew, Sparks was sliding down the aisles, putting his meaty hands on the tops of the headrests. He had also dressed up for the affair. Instead of his usual polo and khakis, he had donned a sport coat and wore a tight black T-shirt. His constant stubble was gone, and his hair was slicked back and orderly. He had spent a lot of time on it.
He raised one finger and the team CLAPPED like a bunch of trained seals. “I need headphones off and eyes and ears up here.”
It was amazing. The headphones were off in an instant and everyone’s eyes were glued to him. Sparks should’ve sold instructional videos to parents on how to get teenagers to listen.
“It’s okay to have some butterflies on the first meet, that’s normal.”
The bus released its brakes, and we pulled out of the parking lot.
“I want you to harness that energy. Take those butterflies, collect them, and grind them into butterfly paste. Then I want you to DEVOUR them.” I looked around. Logan was nodding, and pantomiming catching, grinding, and eating butterflies. He had probably done this in real life.
“I want to talk a little bit about the teams at this meet. Yeah, Brooklyn Park is weak. Lakeville is weak. Burnsville… they got some talent. But I know one thing: You destroyed them last year. That’s all they’ve been thinking about since: revenge. They want you to come in here and they want to TAKE YOU OUT. They want to see you humbled, beaten, defeated.”
I cocked an eyebrow. I was pretty sure the Burnsville speech team had not been working their asses off to unseat us in a gory apocalypse of revenge. Then again, that’s what I was doing.
The monster is inside the house. I smiled.
“Are we gonna let ’em?”
“No!” shouted the team in unison.
“I SAID, ARE WE GONNA LET ’EM?!”
“NO!”
The bus was on a major street now and lurched to a stop at a red light. The bus driver, a paunchy, middle-aged white guy with a cartoonish mustache, twisted in his seat. “I’m going to need you to sit down, sir.”
Sparks raised one finger. “People are going to give you rules. People are gonna tell you to stop.”
The bus driver turned around again. “Sir? Do you mind, please?”
“People are gonna tell you, ‘Please stop, you are scaring me, you are too awesome.’ I say you make your own rules.”
“This is actually a law, sir.”
“I say choose victory. On three—ONE TWO—”
The bus turned a corner, and Sparks fell to the side.
Brooklyn Park was a typical high school; a huge, blocky building with two stories and banks of windows and long, empty hallways. It was just after seven when we arrived. Our fans (that’s right, we traveled with fans) were going to be flooding the scene a little after noon; no need to show up to see us cruise through the preliminary rounds.
We gathered in an open atrium to warm up.
This was my first team warm-up with the entire group, and it was enough to freeze my blood.
This is a cult.
Hanson stood in the center of all of us. We locked arms around one another’s shoulders, ties swaying for the boys—I caught sight of Rani and Sarah and some of the other underclassmen who were being indoctrinated. The whole group moved as one, rocking back and forth like a basketball team, but without as strong a sense of rhythm.
Hanson chanted tongue twisters in the center of the scrum, twirling, worshipped like a demigod.
“UNIQUE NEW YORK, UNIQUE NEW YORK, UNIQUE NEW YORK!”
“UNIQUE NEW YORK, UNIQUE NEW YORK, UNIQUE NEW YORK!” we all shouted back at him like this was a completely normal thing.
“TOY BOAT, TOY BOAT, TOY BOAT, TOY BOAT!”
“TOY BOAT, TOY BOAT, TOY BOAT, TOY BOAT!” we yelled.
We yelled, we stretched our mouths, we chanted tongue twisters, and by the end of the display I was sweating, embarrassed, and chilled. If there had been any outside observers, they would have run for the hills.
ROUND ONE:
The first-round room was a science lab of some kind. There were no desks, only blacktopped workstations with stools next to them. A corridor led to a secret lab, which was blocked off with duct tape and a sign saying, YOU WILL BE DISQUALIFIED IF YOU PASS THIS SIGN. Nice. Clearly the science teacher loved having her lab used for speech on the weekends. She had perhaps also sabotaged the heating system, since it was barely fifty degrees. I could see my breath. I rubbed my legs together, using the friction to generate a semblance of warmth and trying to hide my envious glare at anyone who was wearing pants.
I sized up the rest of my competition. There were five of them, and they twisted nervously around on the stools or doubled over their phones, trying to remember their scripts. One of the boys was pacing back and forth in the back of the room, gesturing to himself like a madman.
The judge, a short Indian kid who had probably graduated last year, sat in the middle of the room with a stack of yellow ballots. Elijah told me there usually was a desperate scramble to procure judges, so judges were plucked from unlucky community volunteers—some of them had done speech before, some of them were parents, and some, I assume, were simply kidnapped off the street. Our judge twirled a fountain pen between his fingers like he was cool, but then he dropped it, and it slid under one of the stools.
The first kid who went, a reed-thin blond freshman boy who didn’t even have a proper suit, did a piece about getting cancer. He forgot his lines about two-thirds in and stood there, frozen for a good thirty seconds, right after his chemo, before he stumbled into the next part, shaking his head and silently cursing himself for being an idiot. The next kid also did a piece about getting cancer. He remembered his lines, though. Both of them survived, I guess.
My turn was coming up.
Adrenaline fizzed in my veins, and I felt light-headed. If I failed here, now, it could throw a serious wrench into our plans. What if it meant that I was always going to be a loser, no matter how hard I tried? That had been my experience with all competitions prior to this one. Why would now be any different?
But this was speaking. Just using your mouth. I had always been good at that. I thought about the pet store story my dad had told me.
By what right do you imprison these animals?
I smiled and focused on the whiteboard in the front of the room, concentrating on my name.
You can do this, Sydney Williams. You are a goddamn rock star. But not the kind that passes out in public; the kind that actually kicks ass before they pass out later in the privacy of their hotel room.
“Sydney Williams,” said the judge, looking up from his notes.
Go time. I slapped my hands on the granite countertop.
“Ow.”
You thought cancer was bad, motherfuckers? You have no idea how bad life can get.
I didn’t actually say that out loud.
“Whenever you’re ready,” said the judge.
I was barely conscious during my routine, vaguely aware that I was acting like Nikki Sixx to a nearly empty room of overdressed teenagers at eight in the morning. I hissed, I stomped around the stage, I felt the spirit of a heroin addict move through me—acting out the routine task of tying off my arm with a strip of cloth, holding it in my teeth and slapping my vein (my browsing history on YouTube was a parent’s nightmare). I tried to capture his voice, snarling here and there with pleasure and pain, then launching into highly articulate riffs on the nature of addiction.
When it was over, I dropped my head, my chest heaving from the exertion of my second overdose in ten minutes. I caught a glimpse of the skinny blond freshman staring at me in openmouthed horror. Yeah, little boy, you just grew up a hell of a lot, didn’t you? There was no applause. The judge silently scrawled some notes on the back of a notecard and said, somewhat shakily, “Thank you.”
I sat back down.
If I thought my nervousness before the round started was bad, it was only because I hadn’t yet experienced the joy of waiting for the results to be posted. Throngs of teenagers waited in the tiled hallways, shaking out their arms, warming up voices, and burning off energy. I paced back and forth, trying not to keep my eyes laser-focused on the scrap of wall where the advancers would be posted. Every time someone walked down the hall I analyzed them, trying to figure out if they would be the person to announce my fate.
Two strong arms wrapped around me from behind, and I smelled Lakshmi’s shampoo.
“What’s up?!” she said, spinning me around to face her.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m fucking supporting you. Jesus.” She winked. “I might check out my sister’s round, too, but she generally gets pissed off because I cheer loudly. Supposedly, you’re not supposed to be like, ‘FUCK YES!’ after the first affirmative.”
Several concerned underclassmen glanced toward her. Lakshmi stared back.
“What? I’m celebrating fucking language. Deal with it.” She turned back to me. “How’d the first round go?”
“Um, I didn’t puke, so that was good.”
“You killed it.”
“You weren’t there.”
“I sensed it. Like it came to me in the ether. I was thinking, Sydney is killing it right now.” She slapped my shoulder, kind of hard. “You got this. Let’s obliterate these sons-of-bitches.”
“Now you sound like Sparks.”
And just like that, the results were posted. I made it.
ROUND TWO:
An English classroom, still largely empty, but now the other competitors had gone through puberty. The suits fit; they looked more polished and secure. Juniors and seniors. Lakshmi settled loudly into the back to watch, giving me a thumbs-up and a snarl.
And then I saw Blaize.
“Oh my God, we’re in the same room!” she said, enveloping me in a hug. “Sweet!”
Shit.
Two of the six competitors in this round would move on to the quarterfinals. I immediately started cataloging the other kids, seeing if there was anyone else I was likely to beat. I had seen Blaize’s routine. She was phenomenal.
She was looking down at me with her perfect blue eyes; she was wearing heels, so she stood even taller than normal. I am a sad little potato reverberated through my mind.
“You’re going to do so awwwwesommmme,” she said, her words slowing down into an echoing, low-pitched jackhammer of noises. “I believvvve in yoooouuuu.” Even her encouragement was perfect.
My energy dropped out through my feet, slipped to a drain in the center of the floor, and disappeared. I was going to lose.
The first guy went. Then the second. Then a girl who did a piece about a female Renaissance painter being tortured by the patriarchy. Then it was my turn.
I caught Lakshmi’s dark eyes right before I headed to the front of the room.
She was mouthing something to me.
Fuck. Their. Shit. Up.
I took a deep breath. I started my intro, feeling the spirit of rock and roll take over my body. I had practiced this every spare moment I had—after school, on the bus, at night while holding Charlie; I knew what I was doing. I thought about who Nikki Sixx was, the trouble he’d had in his childhood, the way his life was different from the other kids around him. He was carrying a burden and the only way to ease that burden was through drugs. I went to that place inside me, remembering my father, when he lived with us, going straight to the time things were falling to shit. The screaming arguments my parents had. The times I hid in my room, headphones on, music blasting, trying to drown out the sound of my life collapsing.
“The Heroin Diaries, by Nikki Sixx,” I said, my whole posture and voice changing. I was in the groove.
I made the slightest eye contact with Blaize. Her smile was fading. She looked… concerned. Was I actually going to be good?
It was like that moment in a boxing movie where the hero first makes the invincible opponent bleed.
She’s human.
She can be beat.
It was on.
I killed the rest of my routine. Better than I had ever done it. My voice was smooth, powerful. I raced from side to side; I had my movements down, my lines memorized.
I was good. I was better than good.
When it was over, Lakshmi stood and clapped. No one else did.
“Um,” said the judge. “If we can hold our applause, please, till after all the performers have gone?”
Lakshmi looked down at him. “I’m not going to do that.” She looked at his name tag. “Steve.”
Blaize whispered, “Good job,” to me, and got up to do her turn as Judy Garland.
QUARTERFINALS:
Blaize scored the highest in the round, but I took second. Because of the nature of the tournament we were going to be paired up again from here on out. To the end.
This time Blaize went first. Her performance was flawless; devastating. People were crying afterward. Blaize had been to Nationals the year before, which meant she was in the top hundred or so performers in the country. She had won this tournament last year. At this rate, she was going to win it again.
“Dude,” whispered Lakshmi after she was done. “She seems like she’s been chain smoking for like forty years.”
“I know.”
“Like, did you see her hold those imaginary cigarettes? I’m like, holy shit.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She held my eyes again. “Listen, I’m going to tell you something I tell myself before every basketball game. You are a warrior queen bitch goddess.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Now you say it.”
“I’m not sure I am a warrior queen bitch goddess.”
“The hell you aren’t,” she growled. “Say it. Say it.”
I felt energy surging in me. “I am a warrior queen bitch goddess.”
“Fuck yeah, you are.” She slapped me on the butt as I headed to the front of the room.
SEMIFINALS
Blaize scored ahead of me again, but I was second again.
This time we were in the choir room, and there was an audience. There was a smattering of parents in the stands, but now there were other kids as well. People who had been knocked out in the earlier rounds had come to watch. I looked around for members of the varsity squad, but I didn’t see anyone. They were still competing in their rounds.
Just before we were set to begin, Sparks walked into the room.
He stood in the back, but his presence was felt. People from other teams turned to look at him—you could hear his name being whispered on their lips. He was a legend. He stood like a statue, arms crossed over his chest, watching.
The judge this time was an older white man wearing a sweater over a button-down. He had a trimmed white beard and the air of someone who had been doing this a billion years.
The first boy who went, a tall, impossibly gorgeous Black kid with a lantern jaw, did a piece about testicular cancer that destroyed everyone in the room. Kids were weeping afterward for his balls. It was easily the best routine I’d seen all day, maybe even better than Blaize. Certainly better than me.
If that was the case, that meant only one of us was getting to the finals.
I swallowed hard. This was my moment. If I made it to finals, if I did well…
I turned to look back at Sparks. His eyes caught mine; his expression was like granite. I couldn’t tell if he was impressed by me or not.
“Don’t do it for him,” whispered Lakshmi. “Do it for you.”
“Thank you for being here,” I said, holding on to her wrist. My mind flicked to my mom; she was working today and couldn’t make it. I thought about my dad, who I was usually visiting at this time of the day. Neither of them was here. Unlike these other kids’ parents, who had planned their whole day around this. These other kids who got camps paid for them during the summers, who didn’t have to juggle jobs or other family bullshit around this. Who could afford their own clothes. Who had futures in front of them at expensive colleges. The winners.
I got to my feet and started my routine.
I did well, but I slipped up ever so slightly on a few of the moments. It wasn’t my best routine of the day. Blaize had scored higher than me in every round so far—the scoring was cumulative, so all she needed to do was not come in last to beat me out for the finals.
I was doomed.
I hung my head, looking down at the scuffed tile. I couldn’t look at Blaize as she performed, her caramel voice conveying the bitter disappointment of thirty years in Hollywood. I practically knew every word and every moment of her piece by this point.
“I wasn’t a person,” she crooned. “I was a property, something to be used and—“
She paused. She never paused here.
I looked up.
Blaize’s eyes went the slightest bit blank.
She had forgotten her line. Everyone in the room knew she had forgotten her line.
The pause stretched from five seconds, to ten, to fifteen. A look of worry crossed her perfect face, replaced quite quickly with desperation.
She said her line again and managed to catch the thread of what she was saying, but the damage had been done: She had committed the inexcusable error of losing her momentum. Her perfectly executed veneer crumbled before us; she stammered a bit, lost her place again, and finally finished. She was the last one to go, so a smattering of applause followed her performance.
Lakshmi grinned.
When the results were posted twenty minutes later, it wasn’t even a surprise.
I had beaten her.
I was going to the finals.