Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 98345 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 492(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98345 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 492(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Before I joined, Fairview Prep’s middle school quiz-bowl team was mediocre at best, but in my eighth-grade year, we were unstoppable. Partly because Shelby made us practice three nights a week, and partly because I had a preternatural talent for quick buzz-ins. I mean, not to brag, but even Alex Trebek would have sat up and taken notice of my nimble thumbs.
Still, Shelby would stand at my side during practice. “Faster! Faster!”
Her mom would knock on the basement door. “Yoo-hoo! Anyone want some Cheetos Puffs?”
“Not now, Mom!”
There was only one other team as good as ours, and it was our all-male private school counterpart, Hillandale Academy.
And guess who went to Hillandale?
Phillip Woodmont.
He was the shining star on the Hillandale team, quick on the draw with his buzzer, just like I was.
I actually remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him. It was on a Saturday afternoon—a time when other kids our age were out riding their bikes, lounging aimlessly in front of the television, enjoying their lives. It was tournament day, which meant my grandmother had dropped me off on the curb of some randomly assigned public school, and I was left to rot there for eight to ten hours. The tournament experience consisted of quick bursts of action thickly sandwiched between hours of downtime.
I’m sure I’d tried to bring a book or something, but there was no way Shelby was having that. We were seated on a cold tile floor, trying to get far enough away from the bathrooms so that we didn’t have to listen to every single flush but near enough to the auditorium so that we’d know when it was our turn to duke it out in front of a crowd brimming over with tens of fans.
Shelby was forcing us to endure round after round of last-minute warm-up questions when I looked up and saw the Hillandale boys making their way toward us.
There were four in total—each one drastically different in size, so much so that it was like seeing a giraffe and a mouse in the same posse.
To say they were good looking would have been a stretch. None of us were turning heads. We were middle school quiz-bowl participants. Hello, there wasn’t a good haircut or a stylish article of clothing in the entire vicinity.
Still, though, I thought Phillip was . . . cute. Maybe the way his braces glinted off the light was really attractive to my midpubescent brain. Maybe his starched uniform and the way it hung off his slim shoulders really called to me.
Whatever it was, something about Phillip compelled me to smile and wave at him as his team walked by us. Phillip caught my wave and stared down at me like I’d just sprouted a second head. His look of consternation was my first hint that I might have messed up.
The second hint came when Shelby grabbed my hand and forcibly yanked it down. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “We aren’t friends with the enemy!”
I paid for that wave.
My buzz-in thumb was arthritic by the time I made it home that evening, and I’d had my head chewed off for losing to Hillandale. Never mind that Shelby herself had cost us the win, wrongly answering three easy questions.
What followed after that day was a tension-filled quiz-bowl season that saw us neck and neck in the standings with Hillandale. We’d perpetually swap first and second place with them depending on the week.
As far as Shelby knew, the most interaction I had with Phillip was onstage when we’d stand across from each other, posed behind our respective tables, buzzers in hand, facing off in a way that felt deeply, life-alteringly serious, but was, in fact, not.
However, the truth is Phillip and I formed an illicit friendship that Shelby never found out about. On tournament days, I liked to eat lunch as far away from Shelby and the crew as I could get, which usually meant finding a weathered bench outside, facing an all-but-empty school parking lot. I’d repeated this same routine a few times up until one day, while I was working through a turkey sandwich my grandmother had packed me, when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of someone approaching my bench, and I looked up to see Phillip standing there. He’d taken off his blazer and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. He looked shy. His eyes didn’t quite meet mine when he pointed to the opposite end of the bench and asked if he could sit.
I jolted into action, quickly shoving aside my bag to clear a space for him. “Of course, yeah.”
He sat, and though it was clear he meant to join me—there were plenty of other empty benches outside he could have claimed—we didn’t immediately rush into conversation. Deep in the throes of middle school, we were still sprucing up our social skills. Seasoned conversationalists? Not even close. We were all but silent as Phillip unloaded his lunch. I carefully appraised his decadent spread: warm pasta, fluffy garlic bread, proper silverware. The sight of his expensive name-brand soda convinced me to push my Dr. Cola off to the side of the bench, out of view.