Sparks was not in a good mood on the way to our next meet, the Minnetonka Masher. (Okay, it wasn’t actually called the Minnetonka Masher, but that was what Blaize had dubbed it. This was going to be our first serious competition; most of the strong programs in the Twin Cities were going to be there.)
“I have to say,” he said, standing in the aisle again, “that in all my years of coaching, this was one of the worst weeks of practice I’ve ever had.” He looked down, biting his lip. Nobody said anything. “No cohesion. No effort. You want to whisper behind each other’s backs, you want to spend your time complaining that life is unfair, DO IT SOMEWHERE ELSE. Not on my team. You got that? Not on my team.” The last bit he said almost in a whisper, shaking his head.
We were disappointing him. We were letting him down.
He made his way down the aisle. The varsity members were in the front of the bus, while the junior varsity were clustered in the back for safety. “I could put any of these freshmen in your spots and they would do better. Because they care. And you don’t.” He turned to me, eyes blazing.
I thought I was ready, but his words blindsided me. I was so wrapped up in thinking about Elijah and how the day would unfold that I didn’t see it coming.
“This is your first tournament as varsity, and how are you going to do?”
“Me?”
“Do you imagine I’m talking to somebody else?”
“How am I going to do?”
“Why are you repeating my question? Are you incapable of answering my question? YES OR NO.”
My head swam. I couldn’t even figure out what he was asking but I desperately wanted to come up with the right answer. I had to.
“Yes?”
“Yes, you are incapable of answering my question. YOU CANNOT ANSWER MY QUESTION.”
“No!”
“No what?”
“I—”
“NO WHAT?!”
“Jesus, it’s like talking to an idiot. Do you understand words, do you understand language, can you hear? Can you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, you can?! ’Cause I was just asking you a perfectly clear question and you started stammering like a STROKE VICTIM! HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DO TODAY?!”
I started crying.
“You’re crying. What the hell. You’re crying now. That’s your response to my question? You just start crying like a little girl? That’s your solution here.” He turned to the rest of the bus. “Does anyone have a pacifier? Sydney needs one.”
I covered my face with my hands, tears streaming down my face. He leaned in close, hovering just over my head. “I don’t think you’re going to do well today,” he whispered, then left.
Blaize found me afterward. The Sinister Six treated me like I was contaminated and stayed away. Fine with me.
“It’s not about you,” she whispered, wrapping me up in a warm hug. “That’s what he does.”
I could barely stand.
“You’re all right,” said Blaize, stroking my hair. “You’re all right. You’re gonna get him.”
I wiped the tears out of my eyes. “I know. I know in my brain this is what he does but… shit…”
“I don’t know why I feel so bad; he’s not even letting you compete in DI,” I sniffled.
“Part of the plan,” said Blaize. “I’m cross-entered today.”
I looked up at her.
“I knew he was going to do that, so I entered in OO today, too. Didn’t even tell him.”
“You can do that?”
She winked at me. “You just concentrate on winning this tournament, all right? I’ve got my own part to play today.”
In order to qualify for Nationals, you had to accumulate enough points over the season. Some tournaments held automatic bids, like winning the State Championship, but if you placed enough times in the tournaments throughout the season, you could qualify. My third-place finish at Brooklyn Park had garnered me a meager haul. I would need to do better this time.
As expected, the competition was rough. There were no bottom-feeders like at the last meet, kids who had joined speech on a lark and had stumbled into an event.
I tried to shut out what happened on the bus, but I couldn’t. I barely made it through the first two rounds. My overdose wasn’t as intense this time; my breathing wasn’t as ragged as it could’ve been, the way I bugged out my eyes as the heroin flooded my system wasn’t as persuasive. The shock of a girl doing Nikki Sixx had worn off.
And then it came. The list for the semifinals didn’t include me. I had lost. Just like Sparks said I would.
Frodo, come to the OO Semis, texted Blaize. I shook off my disappointment and headed over.
The semis for original oratory were in a lecture hall. This school has lecture halls, I mused. The crowd that had gathered, about fifty of us (complete with our own Eaganville traveling cheering section), was mostly in the bottom rows of the stadium seating. There was a huge whiteboard behind a lectern with the names of the competitors scrawled in dry-erase marker.
Andrew Chen was going third. Blaize was fourth.
“How’d you manage that?” I whispered to Blaize when I found her contentedly sitting in the fourth row.
“Told the judge I was cross-entered. She let me pick the order.” She smiled.
“I didn’t even know you had a piece!”
“It’s my piece from last year. It’s about dying fruit bat populations in North America. It’s pretty heartbreaking.”
“Oh.”
“Since you’re here, you can help with the recording. Make sure to get Andrew’s piece, and then my piece afterward.”
We watched the first two competitors (Baby Boomers Are Ruining the World Because of Global Warming—Screw You, Old People, and Dating while Muslim) before Andrew got up.
Andrew stood silently in front of the whiteboard for a moment, his head down and his hands clasped in front of him. His hair was spiked to perfection; his black suit fit him amazingly well. He looked like a winner. I started recording on my phone.
“It wasn’t love at first sight,” he began, making eye contact with the audience. “And it wasn’t like they show it in the movies, the swooning, the gazing into each other’s eyes, the little text messages in the middle of the night. Thomas was not what I was expecting when I fell in love.”
Once again, a tremor ran through the audience. He had them in the palm of his hand.
His routine was even more polished this time around. Every joke was practiced, every line was smooth, even his little pauses for dramatic and emotional importance landed like a hammer blow. The audience loved him. It felt for him when he came out to his imaginary homophobic parents, it laughed along with him at the awfulness of Thomas’s writing, it agonized with him when the imaginary Thomas broke his heart.
When he was done, the audience snapped into a standing ovation.
I turned to Blaize, who was still smiling.
The judge finished scrawling her notes on a little table in the center of the audience. “Blaize Rasmussen?”
Blaize didn’t move. She kept smiling. I nudged her.
“Blaize Rasmussen?” the judge repeated.
And that’s when Thomas walked into the room, dressed in a suit and bow tie.
“Blaize?” asked the judge, looking up.
“Yup,” said Thomas. You could almost hear Andrew shitting himself.
“Whenever you’re ready,” said the judge.
Thomas gathered himself for a moment, then looked up at the audience. “The first thing you need to know about me is that my name isn’t Blaize. It’s Thomas.” A wave of shock smashed through the audience. “And I’m actually gay.
“Everyone’s experience coming out is different. My dad’s a professional athlete and his one wish for me was that I would follow in his footsteps. There are actually videos of me at two years old holding a baseball bat taller than me. So my path has been challenging for him. My first experience coming out was when I was ten. I told my parents I was a pirate.” The audience laughed. “In the school play. Mom, Dad… I need to tell you something: I’m a thespian.”
The crowd gurgled with joy. “And I love other thespians. My dad didn’t know what to do—he kept shoving more and more balls at me. Here, play with these. Here, play with these.” Thomas stopped mischievously. “Dad, these are not the kind of balls I want to play with.”
Laughter thundered in the room. He was good. He was so good. Thomas’s routine was just as polished as anyone else’s—he walked around the room, holding court like he was born on the stage. It was pretty obvious that he’d been practicing with Elijah since the night of the party.
“But I love my parents. And my parents love me. And when I did come out, my mom was ecstatic. ‘I just thought you were uncoordinated!’ But my dad… my dad cried. He didn’t cry because he was sad I was gay, he cried because he was proud. He was proud because at fourteen years old I was strong enough to know who I was. And that’s an amazing thing.”
He kept going. He related the story of his writing; he even acted out little pieces from his play, which he put in context.
“I’m not gonna lie, it was not Shakespeare.” The audience laughed with him.
Then finally, eight minutes in, he stopped. He took a deep breath, then looked directly at Andrew before turning back to the audience.
“Now, I could’ve stood up here and told you about Andrew Chen, but I didn’t do that. I could’ve talked about the fact that he just talked about me using my real name. He assassinated my character for laughs; he lied about our relationship. We were never in love. Oh, sure, I liked him, and I did write that play, but he never liked me back. I don’t feel bad about that, because, you see, Andrew Chen isn’t gay.”
The crowd murmured.
“But Andrew Chen’s story isn’t my story to tell. I don’t have the right to tell his story. I only have the right to tell my story. So that’s why…” He pulled out his phone; the audience gasped. This was propping—using a prop in competition—an automatic disqualification. “Blaize” would not be passing on to the next room. “I’ll let him do it.” Thomas hit play on his phone, and held it up to the microphone.
ANDREW: Why do you think I’m gay?
ME: I saw your piece.
ANDREW: Oh, shit, really? Dude. That’s fucking hilarious. No, I’m not gay. Jesus.
The crowd grumbled.
ME: Why do you say you’re gay if you’re not actually gay?
ANDREW: Are you serious right now? ’Cause it helps me win. I can get up there and be like, ‘Oh, my dad wanted to send me to conversion camp, everybody cry for me!’ What, I’m gonna be like, ‘Yeah, I’m rich, and I’m tall, and I’m good-looking, and my parents are doctors. Tough life, right?’ Nobody’s gonna vote for me.
ME: So you’re like lying with your piece?
ANDREW: Yeah, I make shit up. And the audience is so stupid they just fall for it.
Thomas stopped the playback. The audience roiled with anger. Thomas smiled serenely. “Thank you,” he said, bowing and walking out the door.
I spotted Andrew in the second row, sitting entirely still like a statue, hoping that no one would see him. But they did. And they were angry.
He turned to shout at everyone. “Everybody lies!” Then he turned and bolted out of the room like a frightened deer before the mob descended on him.