by Kent, Julia
“I’m not going to even ask if you’re nervous,” he said, looking down.
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” a guy’s voice said, interrupting us.
I turned, and then my heart picked up in double time because there stood Joe Ross. Every, and I mean, every girl except for the gay ones, had a crush on Joe at some point. He looked like a really hot version of Orlando Bloom, and yet that wasn’t quite right. Add in a little Brad Pitt, and then some George Clooney, and a touch of Channing Tatum, all mixed into a Roman God, and you had Joe.
Too bad his personality didn’t match. He was the biggest grade grubber you could imagine, and in the debate world, he was the great white shark. What I didn’t like about him was that he had this way of making comments that pierced my confidence. He wasn’t a sexist jerk; he was a jerk to guys and girls alike. An equal-opportunity jerk. I slid a step away from him, as if being closer to him would make it more likely that he could wound me and make me go into my first debate unstable and questioning myself. His presence snapped me out of the wonder of Sam.
With a blank look on his face, Sam turned to Joe and said “You doing your pre-debate damage, Ross?”
Joe had the decency to pretend to look offended, even taking one hand and pressing it over his heart, as if shocked. “What are you implying, Hinton?”
“Take it however you want,” Sam said, his face impassive.
One-on-one in a debate, that impassivity was Sam’s greatest tool. The power in the ability to appear unruffled was something so divine that a part of me would have traded anything for that skill. Okay—almost.
Almost trade.
His eyes were hooded and his face was slack, leaving the other person absolutely no way of knowing what he was thinking. It undermined Joe and made my face crack with a smile. I bit my lips and turned away to try to hide it, but Joe just nudged me, making me wobble on these damn high heels.
“If your case is as droll as your face, then good luck getting to third place.” Joe’s eyes narrowed as he tried to stare Sam down.
“You’re a poet, and you know it,” was all Sam said in return.
I took two steps back and turned, standing at the midpoint between them. Sam, tall and slim with that wavy red hair and those speckled eyes, eyes that gave no quarter. Joe, with a face carved out of marble, an angry red flush in his cheeks, and clenched hands. They stared each other down and I began to feel a strange, tingling sense of arousal. The naked aggression that each showed triggered something more adult in me. It transcended all of the silly flirting, and skirting, and questioning that made up the web of high school relationships and gave me a glimpse into a world of something completely different between men and women, and between men and men.
This was a high stakes game, but nobody realized just how high the stakes really were that day.
Sam
What the fuck was Joe up to? Nothing I’d done should have triggered this kind of bullshit. With Amy’s eyes on us I tried to keep myself in neutral. Faking placidity wasn’t just a skill I’d honed; it was a survival strategy at home. When your father screams at you for forgetting to mop up the water you spilled on the floor while in the shower, or hauls you out back for a thrashing because God told him to keep you from mouthing off after you forgot to say “Sir,” you learn to hold it all together and act as if nothing upsets you.
Nothing. It can’t, because giving that little splash of emotion to the world means that anyone can pick it up and use it like a hammer against you. Joe was trying to provoke me and while he might be a master at finding weak spots in people, I was the fucking king of impassivity when it came to emotionally charged situations. Joe wasn’t my dad, and I could probably kick his ass if I had to, but who wants to do that at a debate tournament? It wasn’t like we were at a cage fighting event, you know?
“Why should I care?” Ross said, feigning ambivalence. “I already got into BU on early acceptance. I don’t need a trophy.” But his eyes said otherwise.
“Then just do your best and have fun,” Amy replied in a sing-songy voice.
He glowered at her. “I’ll shred you if we face off, Smithson.”
“Like you did three weeks ago on the voting topic?” Zing. Amy had practically ripped his balls off and pinned them to the grill of his school’s bus. She’d gone 4-0 and won the entire tournament.
“Like I—? Oh, shut up.” He stormed out, grumbling to himself. His phone rang and we heard the distant echo of his voice as he talked to his mother, muttering something about making sure he had his car back by four o’clock.
We both laughed, and the tension lifted. Good. In that moment everything changed, as if color itself became brighter, the air more infused with oxygen, the quality of light making everything about Amy ethereal and so real. As if everything else in the world was fake, and the only way to connect to a different level of the universe was to touch her.
So I did. She tipped her face up to me as I took two steps toward her and reached for her hand, the smooth, soft skin like a lifeline. I didn’t realize how much I’d been drowning, but when I felt her skin against mine I was suddenly on dry ground. Solid land. She was my anchor, my savior.
My home.
Her lips were the front door, and I crossed the threshold with a boldness I didn’t know I possessed.
Amy
The rasp of his palms sliding around my waist, the wool of his suit crackling static against mine, the softness of his lips, all told me I wasn’t dreaming. And then my own hands were behind his neck, and my lips were returning the kiss as ardently, and my brain and body melted into a puddle of Amy. He pulled his lips away and then came back, this time with more intensity. This was the kind of kiss I’d read about in books, the kind of kiss I’d hoped for.
“Hey, you two! Go to your assignments!”
We broke away, completely shocked, and I slid backwards and almost fell, only saved by Sam’s strong arms grabbing onto me, lifting me up. We both turned in surprise and Sam wiped his mouth, while I pressed my fingertips to my lips as if holding the kiss in. It was Erin, my best friend.
“What. Are. You. Doing?” she said, in a hushed voice. She pointed to the pairing sheet. “Get to your classrooms before you’re disqualified.” When she turned to me, her eyes lit up like a string of Christmas lights. “And you and I are going to talk about this later!” She looked at Sam, looked at me, and then skittered down the hall to her own event. It was a miracle that I could even hear her with the blood pounding in my ears. I couldn’t look at Sam at first, so stunned by the kiss, until his warm, deep voice reached out.
“Amy,” he said. It was a command, not a question.
I could have held back if I had tried really hard. I could have walked away at that moment. I could have held up my hand and marched off and said ‘no,’ but I didn’t. I turned and followed the demand in his voice. The heat in his eyes burned me, the movement of his hands, those fingers trying to find the resting tone, all of it triggered by one not-so-simple kiss.
“You have a hell of a way of trying to undermine me, Hinton,” I said, keeping my face slack, matching him.
He shook his head violently, brow furrowed. “No, no,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Amy that’s not what I...”
I held my hand up and touched him for the first time since we’d pulled apart, this time my fingertips on his lips. So soft. His clean shaven face, just rough enough for me to imagine what it would feel like brushing against my bare skin. A rush of warmth pooled in my belly, and other places, places untouched but in need of exploration. “It was a joke, Sam.”
He smiled and then reached up and took my hand, interlacing our fingers. “Whatever happens today, Amy...”
I cut him off. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen today, Sam.”
Laughter twinkled in his eyes. “You will?”
“Yeah, I’ll predict it.”
“Go ahead.”
“We’re both going to Nationals.”
“Good prediction,” he sa
id, nodding slowly.
And then we parted quickly, my ankles wobbling as I shuffled, half ran, to my room, ready to take on the world.
Sam
A huge ball of guilt bowled through my veins, planted there firmly by the image of my father telling me that I was a sinner. He had this funny way of infiltrating my deepest thoughts with just a word, a phrase, or a sentence. Joe Ross had the same ability, except it wasn’t as refined. Dad had it honed. I suppose pastors had to, at least the ones who were hypocrites. Did God really care that I had just kissed Amy? Was there something wrong with an eighteen year old kissing a seventeen year old? But the expectations at home were that I would do whatever Dad told me to do.
Except, he couldn’t control me. He could send me here and tell me that I had to win. I could sit here and think not about the way she tasted like cotton candy and vanilla and lust, but instead about his eyes, hard and black if I came home with anything less than third place. I could think not about how her hands had responded and slid up my chest and around my neck, the tips of her fingers curling into the hair at the nape of my neck, but instead about his shouts and how he would quote Bible verses in a way that made me feel unconditionally flawed. I could think not about the raging hard on—no, wait, I actually couldn’t not think about that, it was too uncomfortable.
Now I had to clear my head, my lips, my fingers, and my body of all the traces of Amy and go in and face my first opponent. How do you do that, though? How do you shift like that, compartmentalizing your life so that, from one minute to the next, you have laser focus on the thing that’s in front of you? I could do it most of the time; it wasn’t even hard. Maybe it was an instinct built into me from birth, but right now that instinct was shattered by her response, by my own boldness.
I mopped the floor with my first opponent that morning, a geeky tenth grader from Cambridge Rindge and Latin. He came in wearing a suit two sizes too big and a nasty snarl of contempt that told me everything I needed to know before he even opened his mouth. Staying slack, loose, respectful, and pleasant was the best weapon against that kind of arrogance. Too bad it didn’t work against my father. By the time the results were processed and my coach came over to tell me, and the next set of pairings were put together in the room where the tournament administrators cooked up their alchemy and produced final results that they taped to the walls, I was a teeming mess on the inside, but a damn fine debater on the outside. Maybe being rattled, maybe being risky, actually helped my performance. Who’d have thought it?
I kept craning my neck, looking around the cafeteria, trying to find Amy’s team. The groups at the tables were all generally segregated by school, although plenty of people crossed over. You made friends when you spent every Saturday together from October to March. I couldn’t find her anywhere though; she wasn’t with her normal group of friends. I decided to go on a walkabout.
This school was like any other in the area. Nashoba Regional, Lincoln-Sudbury, they were all the same, long hallways lined with lockers, the rooms stretched out and uniform. Cubes that held us day in and day out. Our school days, from afar, looking like an ant hive as we ran in and out of each cube according to some sort of large system run by a queen. Amy wasn’t in any of the usually suspected places. Not the cafeteria, not the auditorium where the final ceremonies would take place, and not outside at any of the entrances where some of the competitors went to catch fresh air, or go for a long, pacing walk.
I pretty much had given up and figured I better get back and grab something to eat, when a glimpse of that long, brown hair caught my eye. I swallowed and closed my eyes. This was it, man, time to face my own boldness. Was she...crying? Her back was to me and her shoulders were hunched a little forward. A plume of concern filled me, a protectiveness I didn’t know I could possess, something far deeper than anything I’d felt for my sister when I caught her crying, or even my mom. This was a mix of worry, of evaluation, and of anger, because God help whatever guy may have done this to her.
Why was I even thinking that way? What a weird, random thought. And yet, it filled me, even in the seconds that it took to walk quickly over to her, muscles tight, body resigned, and on fire all the same.
“Amy?” I said, my own voice surprising me, the firmness in it.
She looked up, eyes red rimmed. “Sam,” she said, wiping one eye with the back of her hand.
Compassion, or something close to it, hit me right in the heart. “You were eliminated, huh?” I asked.
“No, um, actually,” she said, smiling a shaky grin that twisted her lips into a funny expression I couldn’t understand. “No...uh, uh, I’m still in...uh, I just...” she stumbled over her words.
The air felt like a giant cotton ball between us, a transparent cotton ball. I didn’t know what to do. I knew sort of what to do, but there weren’t any manuals for this. How do you talk to a girl after you surprise kiss her before going off to be deadly enemies in a debate contest, where your father will practically kill you if you don’t win? It’s not like there is a Dummies Guide for that, or even a Reddit AMA.
“So, why are you crying?” I asked, the question so obvious that I had to hold back rolling my eyes.
“Because of you,” she said, quietly.
If Amy had reached through my skin, and ribs, and cartilage, and grabbed my beating heart with her fingers, and squeezed, she couldn’t have put me in more pain. “Me?” I said. It felt like marbles were in the back of my throat.
“Yeah, you.” Her face was tipped down, her eyes looked up at me.
I had never seen a girl more sensual, more open and raw. Were we really having this conversation in a classroom painted that puke-green institutional color, with boring gray tiles that were supposed to look like fake marble, and plastic chairs attached to little pseudo-desks? Was this where the most intense romantic encounter of my life was about to happen? And then, Amy did something that would be branded in my brain for the rest of my life. Confident and alluring, her hips moving as if her entire body were one long, luscious thread of ribbon, she took three steps toward me, planted her palms on either side of my face and not-so-gently pulled me down to her.
A kiss. A fiery unleashing of a girl I wanted to know. Her tongue pressed between my lips and mine didn’t need to be asked twice to do the same. My arms slid around her, taking a chance at cupping one breast while her hands wrapped around me. Her body pressed against mine, our abdomens pushing into each other, as if trying to introduce ourselves that way. Her mouth said so many things to me that I couldn’t even comprehend because all of the words spilled out of my head and down into my raging hard on. And then, just as fast as she had kissed me, she pulled back, breaking the contact. My mouth felt cold and abandoned.
Her eyes were wild. “Go to prom with me,” she demanded. It felt like a cross examination.
“Hell, yes,” I said, “especially if you kiss me again.”
“You guys want Joe Ross to win?” Erin hissed, skittering in on weak ankles, her stilettos skating on the linoleum. She moved her wrist in a circle and flashed wide, wild eyes at me. “You can make out any time. Right now you’re late!”
She wobbled out, only to be replaced by my coach, Mr. Feehan. “Sam!” he barked, eyes flitting to Amy. Mr. Feehan looked like a barrel-chested wrestling coach, with red-Irish hair and pale skin freckled in every place possible. “Get to your assignment! They’re looking for you! You too, Amy.”
And with that, my future began and ended, though I didn’t know it.
Amy
I once added up how many debates I had done so far, and it came to about 200. You do four debates in an average tournament. I’m in sixteen or so tournaments a year, and you multiply that by three and you get...well, my brain was scrambled, and the math didn’t much matter, but it was more than 200. Here I stood as the affirmative, which meant that I had to defend the resolution. In Lincoln-Douglas debate everyone debates the same topic, which changes throughout the year, and it tends to be a value proposition. Our topic wa
s “When in conflict, the rights of the majority ought to supersede those of the minority.”
Typical debate fare.
It sounds about as boring as watching paint dry, right? Except for us, this was pure joy. If you were assigned the affirmative, you had to defend that proposition. My job was to go in there like a shark and say that no matter what, when in conflict, the rights of the majority ought to supersede the rights of the minority. Majority rule should prevail. Period. End of story. And defend that point to the death, like a pundit on Fox News or MSNBC who sticks to his guns no matter what the evidence.
My opponent had to defend the negative, meaning he had to disprove that statement. He or she had to convince the judge that majority rights weren’t always more important that minority rights.
Sounds easy, except that you had to convince yourself, to the core, that whichever side you argued was absolutely true. And in another debate, you would have to totally convince yourself of the opposite.
For weeks I had sat down with my coach after school, every day, sometimes in the morning, too, before school, banging out value propositions, finding philosophers and political scientists and theorists who supported the idea. Of course, I had to create a negative case, too, because I never knew which side I would defend. You typically go in and defend either side twice in a tournament.
The tournament to go to national competition was different. I didn’t know what I would end up defending and I didn’t know how many debates I would be engaged in that day because they took us all the way to the top until they had three winners. And that was that. It was like a Geek Celebrity Death Match, except the stakes were higher.
At least they were to us.
I felt great at the end of this first debate, but the problem was that I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t think, because the steady drumbeat of Sam’s name was behind every word that came out of my mouth. Cutting myself off emotionally was the only option I had—because otherwise I was a whirling dervish of feeling, and in debate, that was like a gazelle getting a deep scratch and bleeding around a pack of lions.
