I took a deep breath.
The first thing you notice onstage is that the lights are blinding. You can barely see anything. You know there are a few thousand people out there—you can hear them shuffling and laughing and talking, but the most you can make out are the silhouetted outlines of heads. Otherwise it’s just a presence; a massive, gravitational presence.
As the lowest qualifier, I was the first to go. All the finalists were waiting in the wings (well, except Andrew, but I wasn’t letting on that I knew anything about his whereabouts) with our microphones attached. I caught Elijah’s text just before I turned off my phone:
Elijah
In the audience now. Can’t wait to see you.
Jasmine came up to me. “Good luck!”
“You too!”
The crowd was revved up.
I looked out at the blinding lights.
“From Eaganville High School for the Arts, Sydney Williams performing My Dad!”
The crowd roared in applause. The noise was deafening. Quite a lot of people in the audience had seen one iteration or another of my speech—some had seen the one where my dad died of a heroin overdose; others had seen the more honest version. None of them were going to see anything like that again.
I strode to the middle of the stage, looked out into the blinding lights, and spoke.
“Someone once said that Vince Lombardi said, ‘Winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.’” I paused just a second. “The first problem with that statement is that it’s a lie. Vince Lombardi never said that. It was actually said by the football coach at UCLA, Henry Sanders. He knew about winning, too. His football team won a lot of games. And when he was found dead in a hotel room with a sex worker named Ernestine Drake, she reported that his final words were, ‘Football is a great game.’”
It was silent in the theater. The audience had no idea what to make of what I just said. You could tell half of them wanted to google Henry Sanders. The people who had seen my previous performance were stunned: This is not at all what I was talking about before.
“The man who followed Coach Sanders was named George Dickerson. He coached UCLA for three games before he had to be hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. His career record was one win, two losses, and two nervous breakdowns. He’s in the UCLA Hall of Fame, by the way.”
I paused again. I could feel the confusion rolling through the audience. No one knew what was going on.
“I’m not going to win this competition today. There are some really great performers coming after me, and one of them deserves to walk home with one of the trophies behind me. You see, I’m not trying to win today. That’s going to make my coach, Joey Sparks, very angry. He cares about winning a lot. It’s probably the only thing he truly cares about.
“And why shouldn’t he care about winning, right? Everyone cares about winning. The principal at my school, who has been ignoring rumors for years about Joey Sparks, cares VERY MUCH about winning.” A buzz went through the audience. “The parents who send their kids to my school care about winning. The parents who allow their kids to be on this team care about winning. They care SO MUCH that they don’t care what happens to their kids because of it.
“Maybe it doesn’t bother them that their kids stop sleeping. Maybe it doesn’t bother them that somebody develops an ulcer from the stress. Maybe it doesn’t bother them that kids on the team are forced to take drugs so they can push themselves past their limits. Maybe nobody cares if they feel like their lives are over forever if they don’t win.
“I used to think that this was Joey Sparks’s problem. It’s not. I used to blame him for my father going to prison, but my father didn’t go to prison because of Joey Sparks. He went to prison because there’s a system that rewards people like Joey Sparks.
“And we love him, right? We love WINNERS. We even love cheaters who get away with it. The Supreme Court recently ruled that gerrymandering was legal. That’s right. If you win, you get to cheat. You get to change the rules of the game so you can win easier next time. Fair? Fuck fair! Hell, if you cheat well enough you could be president of the United States.”
The crowd roiled with surprise. Some people clapped. A current of nervousness was rumbling everywhere now.
“We love winners in this country and losers deserve to lose. That’s what America is built on, and that’s what my coach taught me. One of the other things he taught me is that everybody lies. And the other thing he taught me is that if you win, NOBODY CARES HOW YOU DID IT. If you’re a winner, you can do anything. As a coach you can create an atmosphere where you pit your teammates against each other, right? That makes us stronger, doesn’t it? That’s being tough, yes? You can tell a girl on the team she’s a personal disappointment and everything she’s doing is trying to ruin your career. You can scream into a kid’s face, you can insult them, you can terrorize them, you can emotionally torture them because that’s all part of coaching, right? You BREAK someone down so you can build them up again, right? Haven’t we all learned that? And if someone can’t hack it, if someone gets depressed, quits, attempts suicide, WHO CARES? That person was a loser.
“And if anyone crosses you, you can get their scholarships revoked, you can shatter their self-confidence, get them to hate themselves, and no one will blame you. And if anyone has the audacity to complain about it, your principal will back you up. Hell, they’ll probably BLAME the VICTIM for ruining the team!”
I paused, shaking. There was so much adrenaline in my neck that I could barely keep it together. The audience, all five thousand of them, was a thunderstorm now.
“And because he’s a winner, Joey Sparks can tell me that he’s gonna slap the shit out of me. And he’s probably right, friends. He could probably do that. And two days later he could still get up on this stage and be inducted into the Hall of Fame.”
I sensed him before I saw him. There was a flurry at the edge of my vision—someone climbing over the lip of the stage from the audience. It took my brain a second to register what was happening: Sparks was climbing out of the audience and charging right at me.
A couple of things happened at once: The audience roared in alarm, I nearly fell over as he got to his feet, and four other teenagers in suits, the other finalists, leaped from the wings to hold him back.
He was shouting something, spittle was flying from his angry mouth, but I couldn’t hear it because of the noise of the crowd.
I turned to look at the audience as more people came to yank Sparks off the stage.
“That’s pretty much it,” I said.
Applause.