David Levithan - 19 Love Songs

“Do you see anyone who looks like they’re from North Dakota?” I asked. “Tall hats? Presence of cattle? If so, we can go spy. If you distract them, I’ll steal the laminated copies of their SAT scores from their fanny packs.”

But he wasn’t into it. He kept checking texts on his phone.

“Who’s texting?” I finally asked.

“Just Julie,” he said. “I wish she’d stop.”

I assumed Just Julie was Julie Swain, who was also on cross-country. I didn’t think they’d been going out. Maybe she’d wanted to and he hadn’t. That would explain why he wasn’t texting back.

Clearly, Damien and I weren’t ever going to get into the social part of the social. He had something on his mind and I had nothing but him on my own. We’d lost Wes, and Sung, Frances, and Gordon were still on the dance floor. Sung looked like it was a job to be there, while Gordon was in his own little world. It was Frances who fascinated me the most.

“She almost looks happy,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her happy.”

Damien nodded and drank some more punch. “She’s always so serious,” he agreed.

The punch was turning our lips cherry red.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Okay.”

We were alone together in an unknown hotel in an unknown city. So we did the natural thing.

We went to his room.

And we watched TV.

It was his room, so he got to choose. We ended up watching The Departed on basic cable. It was, I realized, the most time we had ever spent alone together. He lay back on his bed and I sat on Sung’s, making sure my angle was such that I could watch Damien as much as I watched the TV.

During the first commercial break, I asked, “Is something wrong?”

He looked at me strangely. “No. Does it seem like something’s wrong?”

I shook my head. “No. Just asking.”

During the second commercial break, I asked, “Were you and Julie going out?”

He put his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

“No.” And then, about a minute later, right before the movie started again, “It wasn’t anything, really.”

During the third commercial break, I asked, “Does she know that?”

“What?”

“Does Julie know it wasn’t anything?”

“No,” he said. “It looks like she doesn’t know that.”

This was it, I was sure—the point where he’d ask for my advice. I could help him. I could prove myself worthy of his company.

But he let it drop. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to watch the movie.

I realized he needed to reveal himself to me in his own time. I couldn’t rush it. I had to be patient. For the remaining commercial breaks, I made North Dakota jokes. He laughed at some of them, and even threw in a few of his own.

Sung came back when there were about fifteen minutes left in the movie. I could tell he wasn’t thrilled about me sitting on his bed, but I wasn’t about to move.

“Sung,” I told him, “if this whole quiz bowl thing doesn’t work out for you, I think you have a future in disco.”

“Shut up,” he grumbled, taking off the famous jacket and hanging it in the closet.

We watched the rest of the movie in silence, with Sung sitting on the edge of Damien’s bed. As soon as the credits were rolling, Sung announced it was time to go to sleep.

“But where are you sleeping?” I asked, spreading out on his sheets.

“That’s my bed,” he said.

I wanted to offer Sung a swap—he could stay with Wes and talk about polynomials all night, while I could stay with Damien. But clearly that wasn’t a real option. Damien walked me to the door.

“Lay off the minibar,” he said. “We need you sober tomorrow.”

“I’ll try,” I replied. “But those little bottles are just so pretty. Every time I drink from them, I can pretend I’m a doll.”

He chuckled and hit me lightly on the shoulder.

“Resist,” he commanded.

Again, I told him I’d try.

Wes was in bed and the lights were off when I got to my room, so I very quietly changed into my pajamas and brushed my teeth.

I was about to nod off when Wes’s voice asked, “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Damien and I went to his room and watched The Departed. It was a good time. We looked for you, but you were already gone.”

“That social sucked.”

“It most certainly did.”

I closed my eyes.

“Goodnight,” Wes said softly, making it sound like a true wish. Nobody besides my parents had ever said it to me like that before.

“Goodnight,” I said back. Then I made sure he’d plugged the clock back in, and went to sleep.

The next morning, we kicked North Dakota’s ass. Then, for good measure, we erased Maryland from the boards and made Oklahoma cry.

It felt good.

“Don’t get too cocky,” Sung warned us, which was pretty precious, since Sung was the cockiest of us all. I half expected “We Are the Champions” to come blaring out of his ears every time we won a round.

Our fourth and last match of the day—in the quarterfinals—was against the team from Clearwater, Florida, which had made it to the finals for each of the past ten years, winning four of those times. They were legendary, insofar as people like Sung had heard about them and had studied their strategies, with some tapes Mr. Phillips had managed to get off Clearwater local access.

Even though I was the alternate, I was put in the starting lineup. Clearwater was known for treating the canon like a cannon to demolish the other team.

“Bring it on,” I said.

It soon became clear who my counterpart on the Clearwater team was—a wispy girl with straight brown hair who could barely bother to put down her Muriel Spark in order to start playing. The first time she opened her mouth, she revealed their secret weapon:

She was British.

Frances looked momentarily frightened by this, but I took it in stride. When the girl lunged with Byron, I parried with Asimov. When she volleyed with Burgess, I pounced with Roth. Neither of us missed a question, so it became a test of buzzer willpower. I started to ring in a split second before I knew the answer. And I always knew the answer.

Until I did the unthinkable.

I buzzed in for a science question.

Which Nobel Prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People ?

I realized immediately it wasn’t Saul Bellow or Kenzaburo Oe.

As the judge said, “Do you have an answer?” the phrase The Double Helix hit in my head.

“Crick!” I exclaimed.

The judge looked at me for a moment, then down at his card. “That is incorrect. Clearwater, which Nobel Prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People ?”

It was not the lit girl who buzzed in.

“James D. Watson,” one of the math boys answered snottily, the D sent as a particular fuck you to me.

“Sorry,” I whispered to my team.

“It’s okay,” Damien said.

“No worries,” Wes said.

Sung, I knew, wouldn’t be as forgiving.

I was now off my game and more cautious with the buzzer, so Brit girl got the best of me on Caliban and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. I managed to stick One Hundred Years of Solitude in edgewise, but that was scant comfort. I mean, who didn’t know One Hundred Years of Solitude ?

Clearwater had a one-question lead with three questions left, and the last questions were about math, history, and geography. So I sat back while Sung rocked the relative areas of a rhombus and a circle, Wes sent a little love General Omar Bradley’s way, and Frances wrapped it up with Tashkent, which I had not known was the capital of Uzbekistan, its name translating as “stone village.”