Alarm clocks are near the top of the list of inanimate objects that need more recognition, sandwiched between erasers and trash bags. Their entire career is based off of forcing themselves to regularly do something that they know will make their beloved masters shower them with hatred, and yet they continue on through the heartbreaking agony, every day at six in the morning. Religiously. Diligent little bastards.
And mine did so much to try and impress me this morning, too. There I was, bestowed with the gift of waking up on my first day of junior year to “Flagpole Sitta”, as opposed to the low-budget car dealership ad any other alarm clock would have given me, and I reacted by handing out dirty looks to everything in sight and turning off the radio with the same motion one uses to swat a mosquito sitting on the cheek of That-Jerk-From-College.
My brain wasn’t yet at the level of functioning to be aware of what it was doing, so by the time my sluggish feet managed to manhandle the rest of me down to the kitchen, I realized that I didn’t quite remember putting on my Philosoraptor t-shirt or that red denim skirt I had found last March at the thrift store, applying eyeliner, or even brushing my hair, which only a few years ago had been a 20-inch long black puppy, until the beginning of freshman year when I had gotten fed up enough to take a picture of P.J. Harvey into the salon and politely demand that the stylist chop it all off until I matched the photo.
“You look cute today,” I heard my mother’s voice behind me just as I was stuffing a zucchini muffin into my mouth.
“Ayyyyngs,” was all that managed to fight its way through the chunks of ground vegetable. I pushed it down my esophagus and turned to face her on my way to the fridge. She was also already fully dressed. Pantsuit. The usual. Silver jewelry, maroon lipstick.
“So?” she asked as I made a grab for the orange juice. I waited expectantly. “So, what are your goals for this year?”
“Goals?”
“Yes, goals,” she affirmed. “What would you like to accomplish this year?”
“Well, I want to eventually find the money for a car...”
“No,” She cut me off. “I mean academic goals. What about your grades, or your test scores or...” she trailed off, moving her hands around in the air as if she were trying to brush past an idea. “What about student council?”
I tried to conceal a small laugh, but the movement rattled through my arm until the stream of juice coming from the carton dripped down the rim of the glass. “Mom, do I really strike you as the student council type?”
“Of course you do,” she said in the ubiquitous obligatory encouragement tone. “You’re smart and you work hard, and you’re responsible--” My right hand involuntarily froze as it held the paper towel over the spot of citrus acid burning its way into the rose granite countertop.
“Mom, there are a lot of things I care about,” I smiled, “But between world hunger and human rights, making posters for mixers doesn’t quite make the cut.”
She sighed. “You don’t have to do it because you care, Lucy; you do it to show that you have good leadership qualities. To show you’re motivated.”
I jumped up to sit on the counter. “I see, so I’m motivated to go through all that effort to put together a campaign, go to meetings, and pretend to be extraverted for an entire year just so I can demonstrate to college people who I’ll probably never even meet how motivated I am? Seems legit,” I said through another mouthful of zucchini.
“Just because you’ll never meet them doesn’t mean you don’t have to impress them,” she nearly sang with her back turned toward me, reaching into a cabinet for two identical glasses.
“Did I miss the transition from ‘Hey kids, don’t worry what people think of you,’ and ‘You must impress people you’re never going to meet,’ because I might just be getting mixed signals here,” I asked as she poured some skim milk into each of the glasses, only halfway teasing. “So, do Connor and Logan have school today, too? I thought Goodyear didn’t start until tomorrow.”
I heard two clinks as she put two small white plates in front of each glass. “All the sixth graders go a day early for orientation. It is their first time using lockers and all that, you know.”
I smiled to myself. “Remember how long we waited for someone to help us open mine?”
“And you’re supposed to be the smart one,” she sighed, waving her hands across the countertop towards the sink. Before they could reach their destination, however, they stopped in mid-air and came to rest on a small prescription bottle. “Have you taken your meds yet?” she asked, suddenly serious.
My eyes widened as I nodded appreciatively. “Darn, I guess waking up early threw off my schedule, didn’t it?”
She gave me one, somber smile and placed the bottle next to me on the counter, patting my shoulder as she walked past me to wake up my brothers.
My friends and I didn’t need to find each other upon entering the school. Two years can sync up a lot of things. We moved through the same set of hallways to get to the junior lockers, employing different rhythms in our gaits until we were a small cloud, none of us touching, but still moving together as if there was a series of cables snaked through all of our backpacks. The conversation seemed to arise without a starting point, like we were picking up where someone else left off, until we were back in our natural state of chatter.
“There was one thing that geometry did for me, I have to admit,” Haley absentmindedly zipped and unzipped the smallest pocket on my backpack from behind me. Her eyelids, massive clouds of silver and purple, hung nearly all the way over her eyes, and she was slouched over so the dirty blonde mass on her head concealed most of her face; I could see she wasn’t quite on amicable terms with her alarm clock either.
“I find that when I get into arguments with my relatives,” she continued with a little yawn, “I can use postulates, or at least postulate-sounding phrases, to make whatever shit’s coming out of my mouth halfway valid. Like, you let Kelsey go to concerts without parental supervision at sixteen. She is your daughter. I am your daughter. I am sixteen. Transitive property of logic and crap dictates that I should be able to—”
“Hey Brooke,” I turned to face the set of teal plastic-framed glasses to my right. “Does saying ‘transitive property of logic and crap’ after every three sentences work at debate tournaments?”
The round, freckled face gave a warm smile. “Socrates would roll over in his grave,” she said quietly, head tilted the tiniest fraction towards the linoleum.
“I’m not saying I have to name the damn postulates, just that it makes me feel empowered, you know?” Haley said in her trademark tone of mock-defensiveness. “Besides, it’s not like anyone I’m arguing with is gonna be able to call me out on making them up or anything.”
“Don’t even pretend like you don’t remember half of them word for word,” Char, who was walking in the front of the formation, said as she broke away to what must have been her new locker. The rest of us piled into a small crowd hovering around her as she fished a small slip of paper out of the pocket of her skinny jeans and began working away at her combination lock. “So, what’s the deal? We put our stuff here and go to the assembly?”
Her gaze subconsciously fell on Brooke, although she conspicuously looked away a moment later; she knew as well as the rest of us how Brooke hated being everyone else’s appointment book.
Brooke sighed. “Yeah. The usual round of speeches and then all the clubs.”
“Oh God, I forgot about that,” Char muttered as her locker swung open with a resounding series of clangs. “Lucy?” she said slowly as her shoulders sunk back to let her backpack slide down into the grasp of her hand. She lifted it to the height of the hook in her locker as she turned to face me with her best puppy dog eyes. “Brian messaged me that he’s not coming to junior orientation after all, and because I’m not going up there alone, I hereby, with the power vested in me as vice president, dub you secretary of the Glenwood Earth Pals.”
“Wha—?”
“You’ll represent the club with me, right?” she asked with a pleading smile. Her cheeks pushed out at her chin length mass of caramel curls until her entire head seemed to expand.
“I don’t know, Char, I have Symposium…”
“Come one,” she said, “You don’t have to man the booth, just stand with me during the presentations and list a few activities we did last year.” I slowly threw my head to the right, trying to escape the influence of the puppy face. “Please, Lucy? It would mean a lot.”
I trained my eyes on a distant fire alarm for a second longer, and finally shrugged and turned back to her. It couldn’t hurt. “Sure. Just let me get to my locker or we’re going to be late.”
“And really, we tell you this every year, guys,” Mrs. Vanderhorn, the assistant principal, pleaded with us almost mechanically after so many failed attempts. “The easiest detentions to avoid are the ones caused by dress code violations. I don’t see why anyone would want to—”
“So, what exactly does being secretary of the Earth Pals entail?” I leaned back and whispered to Char, who sat at the top of our small cluster in the gym bleachers. The clumps were dispersed all around us, with the members all lackadaisically leaning on something, be it a propped up elbow, the bench behind them, or, in my group’s case, the nearest student.
“You know,” she breathed tiredly. “Take attendance, keep track of what we do, get people’s contact information, write stuff on the board when Brian asks.”
“Sounds back-breakingly strenuous,” I muttered as whatever scrap of my attention span existed found itself focused on Mrs. Vanderhorn again, if only for a moment. It was fuzzy, but I could barely make out the general message: now is not the time to do drugs. I turned back to Char. “Why me? Out of curiosity. You know, as secretary? I thought you were going to have an Effort Sophomore do it?”
Her right shoulder rose about a millimeter, but she couldn’t muster the energy to give a traditional shrug. “Do you see any sophomores at junior orientation?”
“Conceded,” I sighed, “But you didn’t have to give me an office. I could just be an enthusiastic club member that wants to share the joys of being green with all these brilliant, environmentally aware youths I see here before me.”
She gave a half-hearted scowl at my deadpan tone. “Careful, your dedication is making us all look bad.” She yawned. “Brian and I talked about it a bit, and we figured you’ve been in this thing since freshman year, and you actually care about the environment—”
“Yeah, in the sense that I want it to be livable for humans for the remainder of my life span; I’m not about to beat someone up because they don’t use those twisty light bulbs.”
Half of her mouth curled up in a microscopic grin as she slowly poked my back. “I didn’t think someone so misanthropic could be such an anthropocentrist.”
I opened my mouth, and I’m sure whatever sleep-garbled comeback was about to come out would have been lucky to scratch twenty-five percent of how cool I thought I was being, but the retort was cut off by Haley blindly slapping her hand on my left shoulder. “Hey,” she whispered urgently, motioning towards the podium below. “It’s the new college lady.”
I glanced down just in time to catch Mrs. Vanderhorn flittering down the steps of the wooden platform, apparently convinced she had done all she could to keep us all from turning into pregnant teen heroin addicts. Just as the toe of one of her clunky black heels found the hardwood of the gym, she was replaced by a new presence.
The stranger slowly ascended the steps, looking right and left across the bleachers, as if she thought that our ability to talk was a sign that we were conspiring against her. If she had any stage fright, it had been tucked in tight behind her thin, wrinkleless face as it smiled like a carnival mask.
“She looks a tad bit on edge,” I thought out loud as I watched her. She was well-dressed, professional, but youthful, wearing a black jacket and pencil skirt, her chocolate-colored hair tied in a neat bun. Nothing too imposing, but there was still something about the way she kept looking at us…
“I’d be on edge, too, if I had to replace Havermeyer,” Haley muttered, pupils moving to follow the newcomer up to the regal, oak podium. “He was sort of a big deal.”
“Big deal?” Char leaned down, placing her head between Haley’s and mine. “He was practically a deity. I heard he got one of the seniors into Dartmouth with an 1875 last year.”
“Damn.” God, I knew our old college counselor, Mr. Havermeyer, was good, but not that good. “If he would have spent two more years in the workforce…”
“Although, I did hear this one was supposed to be pretty good, too,” Brooke looked up from the row in front of me. “Used to work admissions at Cornell.”
The revelation was met with a whispered chorus of hms and really?s.
“Well I guess we can know one thing for sure,” I muttered, keeping my eyes on the woman as she adjusted her microphone to fit her small stature.
“If everyone could quiet down, please?” She said sternly, scanning the student body with the smiling lips of an ally but the eyes of a military strategist, picking out her enemies. For the briefest moment, I almost thought I saw those black pupils close in on me like a rifle scope until they shifted again a millisecond later.
“It’s going to be a long, hard, no-nonsense ride from here on out,” I whispered quickly before she had a chance to reprimand anyone for talking again.
“Let me introduce myself,” her voice echoed through the gym’s silence as if it was empty; it wasn’t as if she was mean or scary, but whatever about her presence had made me shut up seemed to be like duct tape on the entire junior class’s mouths. “My name is Ms. Wright, and I’ve been hired as your school’s new college counselor.” At the end of this statement, her smile widened and she momentarily looked genuinely pleased, but it passed. “I’ll be spending quite a lot of time this year with the senior class for obvious reasons, but it’s also a big year for you, juniors. This year, you take your first big SATs, not to mention the PSAT. You’ll start looking at colleges…”
“Start?” Brooke whispered. I saw Haley smile.
“Maybe you’ll visit a few campuses,” Ms. Wright continued. While your regular guidance counselors will still serve as your primary guides through this academic year, I will be seeing you very frequently. Not only will I come and talk to you and your parents about things like planning your year and options for test prep, but one of the first things I will do is schedule a one-on-one meeting with each and every one of you sometime in these first few weeks of school, just to see if we’re on the same page, and if you’re on the right track for college admissions.”
The right track. Something about that sentence gave me a weird feeling deep in the dark corners of my digestive tract. As the words passed through me, they dissolved into a bitter aftertaste that seemed to settle in my stomach and whisper, I don’t think you’re on this track, señorita. Tied to it, maybe.
“Also, on behalf of all the counselors, I want you to know that our offices are always open if you need anything,” she went on. “Junior year is always a very, very demanding one, academically and socially, especially in this day and age when college admissions are so, for lack of a better word, cutthroat…”
I saw no apparent lack for a better word.
“I wish you all the best of luck and look forward to seeing all of you soon.” She smiled, cocking her head to the side just so, as if she was programmed to turn that exact number of degrees, and silently walked down the stairs, her only applause the tap of her red high heels on the wood.
The chatter from earlier gradually began to reappear as the frazzled, but altogether calming and familiar entity that was our assistant principal surfaced behind the podium. Brooke was the first member of our group to come back from the stupor. “Club time?” she wondered hopefully.
The rest of us were still too unsettled to meet her with anything more than a moan of agreement until Vanderhorn cleared her throat. “Would the students who are doing the club presentations please come down to the front of the gym at this point?”
“Club time,” Char muttered definitively. She stood up and prodded my spine with the tip of her right sneaker. “Come on, Madame Secretary, let’s save the planet.”
The long line to the microphone might as well have been Medieval Europe. So many clubs. So many club leaders, lords of their own little principalities, all competing over who received the loyalty of those poor peasants still sitting in the bleachers. Sure, they were busy peasants, who, between participating in backbreaking manorialist agricultural labor and praying they wouldn’t get the bubonic plague, didn’t have forty minutes every week or so to plan bake sales for other fiefs, but we feudal lords had at least some assurance that anyone with over a 3.5 GPA would come running the second they found out they had an opening in their schedules and could put it on their résumés. You could see them crouching down in the bleachers, nervously listening for their opportunity to strike.
Maybe that was an unforeseen advantage to being a club officer for the first time. Never before had I gotten to watch both spots of interest, the podium and the audience, all sitting in clumps with their social groups, visibly reacting to each presentation with a frantic mob of whispering , nodding, shoulder-tapping, to establish interest. So much potential for sociological study.
As a tall, artificially tanned girl stood and said something about the Homecoming committee, a small cluster of Abercrombie-wearing , Vera Bradley-toting heads started rotating on their axes towards each other, the shoulder-length, force-straightened blond highlights flapping around like strawberry-scented whips.
I smiled. Like watching neurons fire in an fMRI.
Improv club. They weren’t consolidated into one group, but they were all within quiet-to-moderate shouting distance of each other, infiltrating the margins of other groups. As their leader addressed the civilians, they all turned their chipper, cheery little faces towards the nearest drama muggle and began going into histrionics self-advertising, bending down, contorting their mouths into the types of smiles you didn’t know people could make, patting shoulders, pleading with the surrounding students to come to an improv club meeting, or even better! Fall play auditions!
They cycled through all the regulars. Insert-cultural-background-here youth alliance. Young [political party]’s of America. The same people that were bound to react to student council whenever it reared its commercialized head were excited; Democrats, Republicans, Progressives, but sigh, no Commies or Anarchists. Boring. Next club.
Next were all the oddball clubs: manga, sci-fi/fantasy, robotics, video games, mythology, stuff like that, the kind of thing that theoretically denoted intelligence but didn’t do much for your college prospects other than add a little quirk to that black and white sheet of paper. I saw Brooke and Haley perk up a bit up in our group’s corner; Brooke had been known to enjoy a good anime here and there, while Haley had a long, happy history of bringing nerdy boys from other schools to tears at the hands of her fighting robot.
Meanwhile, I sensed movement in various small groups scattered around the edges of the bleachers and on the fringes of the big clump in the center, the kids that were into their stuff and didn’t bother anyone. The gamers, the Otakus, the technology buffs, the nerds, if it’s even still possible to be a nerd. I guess in any other era, probably any other type of school, maybe even in some of the other graduating classes at Glenwood, they would all be lumped together as nerds and dorks, but there was something haunting the junior class that protected them from bullies and mean girls, protected all of us, really. There was an occasional minor drama, a ridiculed youth, a stolen boyfriend, a less-than-good-natured eye roll here and there, but for the most part it seemed as though the junior class could control their hormones to some unheard-of extent, at least to the extent where any mean girl culture was small potatoes compared to Cerebrum culture.
The Cerebrums tend to always find their way into the gigantic mass of students sitting in the center of the bleachers; there aren’t many divisions among them. They don’t have the time to discriminate amongst their peers. They don’t have time for anything.
You don’t want to go up against the full force of the Cerebrums. They are motivated and like to challenge themselves. They work well both independently and in group settings. They communicate effectively and concisely. They apply learned knowledge to real world problems. They make attendance a priority. They’re also friendly and accepting, and it’s partly due to their population spike that all manner of smart people are more socially accepted, but let me tell you, you do not want to anger them; they’re everywhere. They take all the AP classes, they’re on all the committees, they run all the clubs. If you’re going up against the Cerebrums, you might want to take a practice round first spitting in a mob boss’s face.
They reacted quickly to all the big ticket clubs as they file onto the podium. Student council: Look at me, Columbia, I have leadership qualities! Debate: Ooh, nothing like an academic extracurricular for the college apps! National Honor Society: I don’t even know what that entails, but I know I’m part of it! GSA: I am so open-minded. Look how open-minded I am. Students Against Destructive Decisions: Here’s an applicant that won’t raise your on-campus car accident rates! Glenwood Earth Pals: Look at me, I’m such an activist!
Wait, Glenwood Earth Pals? Crap, how did I get to the podium?
When I shook myself out of it, I was standing behind Char, who was raving into the microphone about the state of the environment. “As the human population gets closer and closer to its carrying capacity every day, conservation is becoming more and more important. This is important, guys, probably more important than everything else going on right now, and if you join the Earth Pals, we can take action to improve the situation.” She turned to me. “List some stuff we did last year, Lucy.”
“Well,” I scooted up towards the microphone, trying not to look too caught off guard. “We went on a lot of cleanups, we sponsored that recycling competition, we made all of those factsheets about current… uh… environmental issues and stuff…” Oh God, can I be done now? “We almost went to a protest one time, but we never got the logistics worked out.” I paused briefly, trying to signal to Char that I was about done, but she shot me a prompting glance, not escaping so easily, Lucy. “I would have to say I’ve quite enjoyed my time in the Earth Pals and would definitely recommend it to everyone,” I finally blurted out. Char smiled and gently pushed past me to speak again.
“So, as you can see,” she said, “Club membership is fun, but it’s also a really serious business, so I wouldn’t join just to add another club to your list of activities, but if you really care about the planet and the human race overall, it’s a good place to be.”
As a formality, this declaration was followed by a second or two of muted applause while Char and I descended from the platform. As the treasurer of the Disaster Relief Club found the microphone, I muttered to Char, “Noble effort, but my money’s still on the serial joiners.”
She sighed and gave a miniscule shrug. “You can try, I guess.”
“I guess we’ll find out at the first clean-up trip when everyone suddenly has other commitments,” I tried to console her as she turned back towards the seats.
There was no reply at first, but I saw her shoot one, brief, lamenting glance at the gigantic mass of Cerebrums sitting across the gym from us. “Good luck with Symposium, Luce,” she said softly and walked away, back towards where Brooke and Haley were slouching boredly.
In the split second between the time she left and the time I regularly would have started my own departure, I came to the realization that I felt naked existing somewhere other than the bleachers at an assembly without her, and my situation descended on me like a swarm of Africanized killer bees, all buzzing around me whispering, you still have to go present another club, ALL BY YOURSELF this time. Can you do it, huh? Huh? Huh? They bounced up and down on my shoulders, like little, fuzzy, deadly puppies on Ritalin. You won’t freeze up, right? Right? No, silly bees, of course I can do it, I tried to tell them. I’m just talking to people I know about a club that I happen to know a lot about because I’m the president. It can’t be that hard. Oh, they all said in chorus. We were just wondering because you seemed nervous up there, and not only that, but Char knows these people and she knows about her club and she still needed you to stand there. And she must be twice as confident as you!
I need to stop talking to these imaginary insects all the time.
I took a deep breath and started retreating in the opposite direction of Char, snaking back around the platform to the end of the line, just hoping that maybe I would get there and there would be someone there to talk to that would take my mind off of whatever I had going on, someone that wasn’t six-legged and just a few points away from being a hallucination.
Unfortunately, upon arrival, I found myself staring at the back of some guy’s head. Some guy I didn’t know. He was tall, at least six inches on me, although not too muscular. Short, but still bushy brown hair…
Funny, that almost looks like Damian’s hair...
Holy crap, Damian hit puberty. Holy crap. Holy crap.
When did this happen? Summer? No, he’s been sixteen for a while. I’m not going to insult him by assuming he hit puberty at sixteen. So earlier, then? But I would have noticed, right? I mean, it’s Damian. I would have noticed if Damian Lehr grew a foot; I talk to him… Well, I guess not all the time… I guess the last time was…
Jesus, how long had it been since I talked to Damian? We talked a lot at the beginning of freshman year, I remember that, then a few times later in the year…There had been plenty of short exchanges scattered around the beginning of sophomore year…
Oh my God, I was a terrible friend. Talk to him, you jerk! The bees admonished in chorus.
“Hey,” I whispered in the general direction the back of his neck. “Damian!”
His head twitched a bit, as if he was looking for the source of the noise, and then he rotated towards me. As the blank stare he had probably been directing at the podium seconds earlier warped into a small smile of recognition, I could see that his recent height boost hadn’t done much to offset the sheer size of his gigantic brown eyes. “Oh, hi Lucy!” He said quietly as I tried to fight back the grin threatening to materialize on my face due to the sudden realization that his voice had changed, too.
“It’s been forever,” I said with the slightest hint of an inward cringe; usually when I say that it’s been forever I’m exchanging awkward pleasantries with mere acquaintances, but I meant it this time. I had pretty much kicked social interaction with Damian to the curb for a long, long time. “Did you have a good summer?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Took a few credits at the junior college. How ‘bout you?”
I shook my head as if to brush the question off. “Worked at the AMC again. Pretty uneventful. But really, though, even more college credit?” I smiled. “You’re going to leave all of us high-school-courses-during-high-school ne’er-do-wells in the dust. What was it this time?”
“No, I’m not going to tell you,” he laughed. “You’re going to murder me like the education-less delinquent you are.”
“Oh come on, it can’t be that bad,” I mock-pleaded. He shrugged, as if to say, I don’t know… “Damian, work with me here. It’s small talk, not national security.”
His head tilted towards the wooden floor and his eyelids dropped down, almost completely obscuring those gigantic brown irises. “Calculus AB,” he muttered with the slightest shy grin.
“Oh my God, you would,” I said as a quiet swell of laughter caught my jaw as it dropped. “You didn’t test out of it this year, did you? Can you even do that?”
A sly glint appeared in his eyes as he looked back up at me. “Apparently, yes.”
I shook my head. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing, just remember, in twenty years when you have some fancy job in a time-travel corporation or whatever the hell is going on, to come visit me in my cardboard box in the Hooverville for people who only took two years of AP calculus.”
“Well it’s not my fault you only took the most rigorous classes offered,” he pretended to roll his eyes. “You won’t have the math skills required to flip burgers by the time you get out of here.”
“You dirty capitalist,” I grumbled.
“Oh yeah, speaking of political rage, I see you’re secretary of the Earth Pals now.”
I shot a glance over at Char, Haley, and Brooke in the bleachers. “Oh, that? I’m really more of a body double than anything. Char needed moral support.”
His eyebrows scrunched together. “Since when does she give a damn about stage fright? God, if Char needs moral support, I need a paper bag to breathe into.”
“I know, right? What hope do the rest of us have?” This was why I needed to talk to Damian more often. He knew me. He knew Char. After all those years, conversations didn’t have to be forced between us; they just sprung up into existence.
“So I guess you’re here for Symposium?” he asked.
“Yep. Wanna join?”
“Depends,” he said, glancing at the podium. There was only one person in line between him and the microphone. “Want to join the Knowledge Bowl team?”
“Oh, it’s open to ne’er-do-wells now?”
“Oh, come on, Lucy,” he said, rolling his eyes for real this time. “Don’t pretend like you don’t want to.” I started to say something along the lines of, am I even qualified?, but he cut me off, saying, “Do you even remember when we were on the team in middle school? You were good, Lucy. Really, really good.”
“I don’t know,” I said defensively. “I’m sure the difficulty gap between middle school and high school is considerably—”
“Who used quipu?” He interrupted me.
“What?”
“The civilization that used quipu as an alternative to writing. Real question,” he said, suddenly refusing to turn his focus away from my face.
“Unfair,” I crossed my arms. “You specifically picked that one because you were there in World History with me. Trying to instill a false sense of confidence in me.”
“Then who used to the quipu?” he persisted.
“Why is this necessary?” I asked. He didn’t look away. “Fine,” I said. “The Inca, and on the off chance they’re looking for a core civilization, the Norte Chico. Happy now?”
The right corner of his mouth curled up into a miniscule grin. “Damn, I forgot about the Norte Chico altogether.” We heard the last round of halfhearted applause as el presidente del club español finished up his speech. Damian threw a sidelong glance at the podium, turning back to me for a brief moment before ascending those steps. “There’s an open varsity spot with your name on it, if you want it.”
And then he was gone, leaving me nothing but an image of a lost day dream from those long, frizzy-haired days. Me and three other little Nobel Laureates sitting behind a table in an auditorium somewhere in Washington D.C. In front of three judges-- Ray Bradbury, Jonas Salk, and Elizabeth Blackwell, who had all conveniently re-animated themselves for the evening-- a shining, fluorescent green scoreboard. We are tied with four nobodies with blurred-out faces. The moderator reads the final question, and lo and behold! It’s about Pearl Jam! My thumb sends the sound of lightning through my buzzer, and the audience cheers to meet my triumphant cry of “Even Flow”, and as Alex Trebek hands me the hefty, golden cup that looks suspiciously similar to the Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy, he tells me that the whole team now has a full ride scholarship to whatever college we choose. We die happy. Our names appear on a page of the children’s almanac.
I watched as Damian addressed the crowd, leaning in towards the microphone, making wild hand gestures like a politician. When he talked about all the shenanigans that had arisen during the last Knowledge Bowl season, he was not that scrawny kid from middle school anymore; he cared about it, really cared, and that made him a presence.
He spoke for a few moments longer, and suddenly he was on the long trek across the glossy wooden desert to the bleachers, and I was hobbling up the steps until I could hear the ugly human monsters that were my lungs spitting out their wastes into the microphone like a fierce growl out of spiritus mundi. The hard, white lights beating down on me burned into my skin as they blended in with the reflections off the thousand corneas, sleep-filled and half-shaded though they were, moving in for the focus on the façade I was slowly positioning over my cheeks.
“Hello everyone,” the polyurethane lips said as the wires behind the eyelids and brows contracted so my smile materialized. “It’s me, Lucy, and I’m the president of Symposium club this year.” I heard my own altered voice with a few seconds’ delay, and approved of the changes, the slightly higher pitch, the tone variations, the effortless coordination with my facial aberrations. The machinery had warmed up; it was safe to sink into the auto-emote setting. My heart rate slowed back to a healthy pace and my knees, shaking ever so slightly, locked into a standstill.
“So, we get asked multiple times each year what the Symposium club does, but the thing is,” split-second pause for effect, “We have never had an actual answer to that question.” There’s some laughter, but it’s not ha-ha-funny laughter, but more so its socially inept second cousin, oh-my-god-so-tired-all-of-these-people-are-boring-can-I-go-home-now? laughter.
“A lot of times we’ll just eat food and talk about current events, issues, conspiracy theories, music. Movies, literature, the apocalypse, Walt Whitman…” Information is running low, interest levels are running lower. Initiating termination program... “So, I can’t promise you anything except that it’s generally a good time. It’s good if you just want some variety, you know? Add a little element of surprise to your busy schedule.” And Houston, we’ve lost contact. “We meet Tuesdays at 3:30.” Smile here. “Be there or be a rhombus.”
And before I knew it, I was striding back to my seat, and the hyperventilation finally reared its head. As I was calming down, Char leaned to her right. “The rhombus was a cheap laugh if I ever saw one.
“You might have trouble believing it, little miss involved,” I whispered, “But some of us actually use these club presentations to try and attract new members.”
She conceded a good-natured humph and straightened back up.