Dawn rose on the Day of Reckoning. It would be nearly a full day off for the rest of the school; the final rounds of each event were scheduled back-to-back, all about to be on the livestream. I imagined Rani and the younger members of the team settling in to the auditorium. They were going to get quite the show today.
I double-checked everything: the speech I’d prepared, my makeup, my outfit, my steely plan for world domination. I wouldn’t be winning today, but winning isn’t everything, I told myself.
The finals rounds were all held in the main theater of the convention center, a double-balconied monster that could seat almost five thousand people. Everyone would be there. Except for the finalists for the other events. We were expected to be mentally preparing.
I’d be able to follow the carnage on my phone, though, which buzzed with a group text just as the policy debate finals were beginning.
Scarlet Witch
Execute order 66.
T’Challa
Seriously?
Scarlet Witch
Yes.
T’Challa
We’re going with this lame-ass prequel reference?
Scarlet Witch
The prequels are underrated.
T’Challa
I’m stopping this conspiracy right now so I can kick your ass.
Sylvia
Guys. FOCUS.
It started simply enough. Logan and Anesh were facing two girls from Florida, one of whom had a shaved head, an eyebrow ring, and a voice like a machine gun. They would have been formidable under any circumstance and might have won the round without our help. But for a true disaster, we provided a little aid.
I watched on my phone as Anesh took the First Affirmative. He did fine in the beginning, speaking from memory in rapid fire as he cruised through his opening, but eventually he had to glance at his laptop. His faced drained of color; his eyebrows knitted together in the briefest flicker of consternation. He kept speaking, paging down, trying to find the reference that he was looking for. Instead, I knew he was finding things written there like I won’t let you ruin this, Anesh and I am the only one doing anything on our team. Anesh did his best, but his concentration was off—every time he needed a reference he glanced at the laptop only to come away angrier. He finished his argument as best he could, a mounting fury overtaking him as he returned to his seat. He glowered at Logan.
Scarlet Witch
Switching documents now…
Logan was unaware of the fact that Elijah, watching this live on his laptop, was inside the Google Doc. Just before Logan rose to provide the Second Affirmative, he merged the old Google Doc with a new one.
Logan rose and glanced at the laptop as he rattled off sources and statistics. Of course, when he looked at the file, he saw things like I know what you’re trying to do, Logan, and it won’t work and then I can change passwords, too and the words Anesh Rules Anesh Rules Anesh Rules followed by a reference to a BuzzFeed article.
Logan’s brain was boiling inside his skull. Every time he looked at the document, he saw fresh evidence of Anesh’s tampering. He tried to force a smile, he tried to keep soldiering on from his own memory, but without the digital references, he was even more sunk than Anesh, who was still staring at him with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. The gloating, malicious additions leered at Logan from every corner of the Google Doc, causing him to twitch and foam at the mouth. Finally he got to the coup de grâce.
“You’re quoting the National Enquirer?!” he shrieked, spinning on his partner and flipping over a chair.
At the exact moment the debate round was devolving into a professional wrestling match, I knew that Blaize was passing Milo in the hallway and handing him a thick envelope.
“Taryn wanted you to read this before you go onstage,” she whispered.
She didn’t turn around to watch him take three handwritten pages out of the envelope—if she did, she probably would have seen him begin to tremble, then spasm, then nearly collapse in a feverish sweat.
It had taken Thomas weeks, but he had fully mastered the looping, heart-laden script from Taryn’s notebook. He had even found the exact same kind of pen, the forest-green ink that she used to write down her deepest thoughts.
And he had created an erotic masterpiece of epic proportions. All focused on Milo and all FILTHY as hell. I had read it the night before and nearly had a heart attack.
“The key is getting inside Taryn’s brain,” he’d confided to me, showing me a poem that she had written about global warming that doubled as a metaphor for Milo’s eyes. “It’s a very dark place.”
“That is messed up.”
“She has a very limited but very effective vocabulary in smut. And her two-thousand-word erotic fanfiction on just what she wants to do to Milo in front of five thousand people is really exhaustively complete.”
By the time Milo and Taryn stepped onto the stage for the duo finals, I could tell he had read and digested the letter. His eyes were a little wider than normal, like he had been freaked out to his core. He had the thousand-yard stare of a boy who had peered into the abyss of hobbit-based erotica and had emerged on the other side, a broken and terrified—yet still aroused—young man. Thomas had put his extensive nerd-knowledge to glorious, perverted madness. Taryn, oblivious, continued as normal. One of the rules of duo was that partners weren’t allowed to make eye contact, which was probably helpful to Milo since he couldn’t bear to look at her. He also couldn’t touch her, which only served to heighten the erotic tension between them.
Milo was off the entire performance. When he was Bilbo Baggins and Taryn was Gandalf, you could tell he was lost in imagining Gandalf’s sexy legs. When Taryn became a troll ready to eat the tiny hobbit, his mind was flashing back to Thomas’s evocative descriptions of the bizarre sexual role-play she wanted to do about trolls and hobbits. That’s not to even mention the deliciously wicked scenarios she had fantasized about as Gollum.
The moment when they formed the spider, when Milo crouched behind Taryn (who was wearing the tightest suit in her repertoire—encouraged, of course, by me), was the breaking point. Sweat poured down his forehead. His voice, a moment late, cracked, his movements were wrong, and finally he lost his balance, toppled backward, and fell on his ass.
Four members of the Sinister Six down. Two to go. The biggest fish, Hanson. The boy with no weaknesses. The returning National Champion, the person who’d won every tournament he’d entered this season.
The night before, Thomas had smiled as he laid out the plan. “It’s perfect. Here’s how it’s gonna go down.…”