The Memory Book(22)

I remember I had just finished second affirmative. Maddie had stepped up, given me a pat on the back as we passed each other, and I’d sat down. I remember squinting my eyes against the stage lights, and itching my calf. We were fine. Someone was talking. Everything was going perfectly fine. And somehow, then it wasn’t. It wasn’t like a moment, or a flash, it just was. It was like waking up, except I had already opened my eyes, and I was trying to remember a dream. Maddie was looking at me, and without knowing what I was doing, I kind of laughed, because it was funny that we were there, in the morning, after I was just waking up. My first thought was, What is Maddie doing here?

Then she said, “And my partner will now [something, something],” because it was sort of garbled, and then I thought, Oh, I’m at practice, and then I remember squinting at her and wondering if we were at practice, why was it so bright?

I looked across at our opponents and wondered who they were. And I looked out at the crowd, and that’s when I realized we were in the middle of Nationals, and I was supposed to be doing something, but I wasn’t sure at what point in the round we were, or which round, and I looked down at my cards, and back at Maddie, who was now standing beside me and making the stand up motion with her hand.

“Time-out,” I said.

The judges gave us thirty seconds.

“What’s up?” Maddie whispered. Her voice was clipped with annoyance.

My throat was so dry it hurt. “I don’t know where we are. I mean, I do now, but I don’t know… yeah. I don’t know where we are.”

“What the f*ck? What are you talking about?”

I felt like I was blinking at five miles an hour. My fingertips started to tingle. “Just tell me if we’re at 2AR or closings.”

“What?”

“2AR or closings? Just tell me!”

“Closings! What is wrong? You look pale. Do you need water?”

“Yes.”

Maddie pushed her half-drunk bottle toward me and I drank in deep gulps.

Thirty seconds were up.

I stood. My knees shook, my hands shook, I tried to keep them tight. I knew the major points. The closing was not the problem—it was that I didn’t know what our opponents had said over the entire round, or what Maddie had just said, or even what I had just said. I took a deep breath.

I didn’t know, so I guessed.

I summarized, vague and bleak and choppy.

I didn’t even make it the full four minutes.

When I sat back down and they concluded the round, I didn’t look at Maddie.

I didn’t look at anyone.

I just went outside the hall, up the elevator to our room, locked the bathroom door, and cried. I’ve spent the last three hours sobbing so hard that Maddie’s mom knocked on the bathroom door, asking if I was choking. I messed everything up really bad. Really, really bad.

I have been dreaming about this day forever.

I turned fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen by blowing out birthday candles, thinking of this room, this hotel, this tournament.

And we lost because I forgot where I was.





THIRD ROUND


Madeline Sinclair and Samantha McCoy, Hanover High School, Hanover, NH

vs.

Grace Kuti and Skyler Temple, Hartford Preparatory Academy, Hartford, CT


Hanover High School: 14 Hartford Preparatory Academy: 19


You know, sometimes it’s good to be reminded that you’re just a weak sack of floppy bones in a polyester pantsuit who talks to herself on a tiny laptop computer in a hotel bathtub.

You are not actually the star debater of the East Coast, you are not “the team to beat,” you are not the valedictorian, you are not a Future Anyone, you are not a strong young woman, and in fact, you remind yourself of the same pubescent girl you always were, wearing your huge glasses. You are reminded specifically of that day you were sitting at the kitchen table with a gallon of chocolate milk from the general store in Strafford, reading a fat Terry Goodkind book, drinking glass after glass of milk while you read for hours, until it’s time for dinner but you don’t want to stop reading, but there’s not enough room for everyone to sit down, they say, and they get annoyed, and they send you outside with your lukewarm half gallon of chocolate milk, your one pleasure in the world. And at first you think to yourself, wow, you finished a fantasy novel and drank an entire gallon of chocolate milk in one sitting. Good for you.

And then you realize everyone else is inside, being normal, and even your family can’t stand you, and you are completely and utterly alone.

These other losers, the ones who got knocked out, the ones you strode past feeling like a million bucks, they’re going to go home and move on to the next thing. They’re going to come back next year, or they’ll graduate, like Maddie, and they’ll look back and say, well, it was just a bad weekend.

I thought that’s what I’d be saying, too, just six months ago.

But now I have to worry if this, the shittiest weekend of my life, my ultimate failure, is actually going to be the best weekend I can remember.

What if this is just the beginning of a series of failures?

What if this is all I am?

What if this is it?





FUCK IT


When I heard the door close and Maddie’s and Pat’s voices fade down the hallway, I came back here, to my bed, and kept the lights off. We leave tomorrow morning.