David Levithan - 19 Love Songs

Usually we burst out of our chairs when we won, but this match had been so exhausting that we could only feel relieved. We shook hands with the other team—Brit girl’s hand felt like it was made of paper, which I found weird.

After Clearwater had left the room, Sung called an emergency team meeting.

“That was too close,” he said. Not congratulations or nice work.

No, Sung was pissed.

He talked about the need to be more aggressive on the buzzer, but also to exercise care. He said we should always play to our strengths . To make a blunder was to destroy the fabric of our entire team .

“I get it, I get it,” I said.

“No,” Sung told me, “I don’t think you do.”

“Sung,” Mr. Phillips cautioned.

“I think he needs to hear this,” Sung insisted. “From the very start of the year, he has refused to be a team player. And what we saw today was nothing short of an insurrection. He broke the unwritten rules.”

“ He is standing right here,” I pointed out. “Just come right out and say it.”

“YOU ARE NOT TO ANSWER SCIENCE QUESTIONS!” Sung yelled. “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?”

“Hey—” Damien started to interrupt.

I held up my hand. “No, it’s okay. Sung needs to get this out of his system.”

“You are the alternate, ” Sung went on.

“You don’t seem to mind it when I’m answering questions, Sung.”

“We only have you here because we have to!”

“That’s enough,” Mr. Phillips said decisively.

“No, it’s not enough,” I said. “I’m sick of you all acting like I’m this English freak raining on your little math-science parade. Sung seems to think my contribution to this team is a little less than everyone else’s.”

“Anyone can memorize book titles!” Sung shouted.

“Oh, please. Like I care what you think? You don’t even know the difference between Keats and Byron.”

“The difference between Keats and Byron doesn’t matter!”

“None of this matters!” I shouted back. “Don’t you get it, Sung? NONE OF THIS MATTERS. Yes, you have knowledge—but you’re not doing anything with it. You’re reciting it. You’re not out curing cancer—you’re listing the names of the people who’ve tried to cure cancer . This whole thing is a joke, Captain. It’s trivial . Which is why everyone laughs at us.”

“You think we’re all trivial?” Sung challenged.

“No,” I said. “I think you’re trivial with your quiz bowl obsession. The rest of us have other things going on. We have lives.”

“You’re the one who’s not a part of our team! You’re the outcast!”

“If that’s so true, Sung, then why are you the only one of us wearing a fucking varsity jacket? Why do you think nobody else wanted to be seen in one? It’s not just me, Sung. It’s all of us.”

“Enough!” Mr. Phillips yelled.

Sung looked like he wanted to kill me. And I knew at the same time that he’d never look at that damn jacket the same way again.

“Why don’t we all take a break over dinner,” Mr. Phillips went on, “then regroup in my room at eight for a scrimmage before the semifinals tomorrow morning? I don’t know who we’re facing, but we’re going to need to be a team to face them.”

What we did next wasn’t very teamlike: Mr. Phillips, a brooding Sung, Frances, and Gordon went one way for dinner, while Wes, Damien, and I went another way.

“There’s a Steak ’n Shake a few blocks away,” Wes told us.

“Sounds good,” Damien said.

I, brooding as well, followed.

“It was a question about books,” I said, once we’d left the hotel. “I didn’t realize it was a science question.”

“Crick wasn’t that far off,” Wes pointed out.

“Yeah, but I still fucked it up.”

“And we still won,” Damien said.

Yeah, I knew that.

But I wasn’t feeling it.

Damien and Wes tried to cheer me up. Not just by getting my burger and shake for me, but by sitting across from me and treating me like a friend.

“So how does it feel to be the Quiz Bowl Antichrist?” Damien asked in a mock-sportscaster voice, holding an invisible microphone out for my reply.

“Well, as James D. Watson said, I’m the motherfuckin’ princess. All other quiz bowlers shall bow down to me. Because you know what?”

“What?” Damien and Wes both asked.

“One of these days, I’m going to be the goddamn answer to a quiz bowl question.”

“Yeah,” Wes said. “ ‘What quiz bowl alternate murdered his team captain in the semifinals and later wrote a book, Among Boring People ?’ ”

Damien shook his head. “Not funny. There will be no murder tonight or tomorrow.”

“Do you realize, if we win this thing, it’s going to come up on Google Search for the rest of our lives?” I said.

“Let’s wear masks in the photo,” Wes suggested.

“I’ll be Michelangelo. You can be Donatello.”

And it went on like this for a while. Damien stopped talking and watched me and Wes going back and forth. I was talking, but mostly I was watching him back. The green-blue of his eyes. The side of his neck. The curl of hair that dangled over the left corner of his forehead. No matter where I looked, there was something to see.

I didn’t have any control over it. Something inside of me was shifting. Everything I’d refused to articulate was starting to spell itself out. Not as knowledge, but as the impulse beneath the knowledge. I knew I wanted to be with him, and I was also starting to feel why. He was a reason I was here. He was a reason it mattered.

I was talking to Wes, but really I was talking to Damien through what I was saying to Wes. I wanted him to find me entertaining. I wanted him to find me interesting. I wanted him to find me.

We were done pretty quickly, and before I knew it, we were walking back to the Westin. Once we got to the lobby, Wes magically decided to head back to our room until the “scrimmage” at eight. That left Damien and me with two hours and nothing to do.

“Why don’t we go to my room?” Damien suggested.

I didn’t argue. I started to feel nervous—unreasonably nervous. We were just two friends going to a room. There wasn’t anything else to it. And yet . . . he hadn’t mentioned watching TV, and last time he’d said, “Why don’t we go to my room to watch TV?”

“I’m glad it’s just the two of us,” I ventured.

“Yeah, me too,” Damien said.

We rode the elevator in silence and walked down the hallway in silence. When we got to his door, he swiped his electronic key in the lock and got a green light on the first try. I could never manage to do that.

“After you,” he said, opening the door and gesturing me in.

I walked forward, down the small hallway, turning toward the beds. And that’s when I realized—there was someone in the room. And it was Sung. And he was on his bed. And he wasn’t wearing his jacket. Or a shirt. And he was moaning a little.

I thought we’d caught him jerking off. I couldn’t help it—I burst out laughing. And that’s what made him notice we were in the room. He jumped and turned around, and I realized Frances was in the bed with him, shirt also off, but bra still on.

It was all so messed up that I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears were coming to my eyes.

“Get out!” Sung yelled.

“I’m sorry, Frances,” I said between laughing fits. “I’m so sorry.”

“GET OUT!” Sung screamed again, standing up now. Thank God he still had his pants on. “YOU ARE THE DEVIL. THE DEVIL!”

“I prefer Antichrist, ” I told him.

“THE DEVIL!”