Random Acts of Trust (14 page)

Not in some ridiculous romantic game where I was supposed to read signals that were subtle or where subterfuge became some kind of twisted, sexual joke.

Oh, no, I was their equal. In fact, most of the time, I was their
better
. I could use information and analysis the way other girls used a hair flip or played with the neckline of their shirt. When these guys looked into my eyes they didn’t lick their lips—they ruffled their papers and straightened their arguments. The air crackled between us because the stakes were so high. High school debate—competing to go to Nationals? That was
huge
.

Living in the suburbs of Boston, with nationally-ranked school districts and parents who mortgaged their careers to get a house, everything was about competition. Getting into the right preschool, the right school district, having parents work extra hours to make sure that they could afford the house and the property taxes that came with being in a top ten school district—the pressure began before you were potty-trained.

I had to do all the
right
activities starting in middle school, learn the
right
instruments, speak the
right
foreign languages, volunteer at the
right
centers, all for the Holy Grail of getting into the best college possible. Around here that was Harvard, MIT and Yale—and if you couldn’t get into one of those top three, you were
lesser
. Right here, right now, as we got ready for the crackdown where people stopped making eye contact in the halls, where people—competitors that you’d joked with three weeks ago—suddenly clung to their notes and turned away, whispering in corners. This was real life.

All of it changed
relationships
.

I think that was the part that scared me the most; how eviscerated people felt as they were eliminated. Some of my debate friends hadn’t even made it this far, but Sam had. So far when I’d passed him in the halls he’d made eye contact, even smiled, though his face was a bit gray, and there was a sickly sense of something about him. Butterflies probably churned in his stomach as if someone had fed them meth.

We
all
felt that way. Every single one of us had spent the last few weeks poring over our cases, constructing careful analogies, worrying through wordings, sayings, and statistics. It was preparation for law school for plenty of us, and yet—nothing like it.

Let me explain how intense the world of Lincoln-Douglas debate can get. If you did well on your PSATs, the brochures began coming in. The emails started to pop up. You received invitations to visit the top debate teams at colleges across the country. Alluring and enticing comments about full tuition scholarships for a handful of students nationwide made you want to
win
. A phone call might even come from one of those top schools, a coach on the other end, friendly talks with your parents—all revolving around one thing.

Winning
. And not the Charlie Sheen kind.

It was nothing like sports. Most of us were sports rejects. A handful of golden boys and girls managed to balance it all. That definitely wasn’t me. For as mentally agile and coordinated as I was in a classroom or in a debate session, I might as well have been an octopus on roller skates when it came to a baseball, a soccer ball, a track hurdle or anything else other than the occasional recreational swim. College tuition was on the line for plenty of debaters, but I had a full ride already lined up. So for me, it was more ephemeral. I could go into this just wanting the glory, adding the notch on my academic belt.

As I flipped through my pages, preparing for my next debate, I saw Sam walk by again, running a hand through that auburn hair. Oh, how I wished it were
my
hand. Memory took over my mind and body, the thought of his arms around me just two weeks ago so evocative.

He stopped at a drinking fountain and bent over, the gray wool of his suit stretching tight across his shoulders. His lips drank greedily from the stream of water, and suddenly everything else disappeared. The butterflies
in
my stomach, the tightness in my shoulders, the sense that everything hinged on what I was about to do today—it all rushed away in one mad wave.

All that was left was me taking in everything about this one person who mattered more than anything I was about to do today.

Sam

Don’t throw up, don’t throw up
.

I felt like a genie was trapped in my stomach and struggling violently to get out. A burning sensation rose up through my esophagus, and tension squeezed my jawline. I felt a fiery flush from the anxiety, up my cheeks all the way to my scalp, and I bent over the water fountain as much to hide it as to cool it down. My
entire future
rested on today. My dad had told me that everything weighed on this win—
everything
. I had to make it to Nationals, and I must win without question. The top three would make it, and I had to be one of those three. Just third would do; even dad had relented on that point. It wasn’t about being number one.

For once, it was about being good
enough
.

And yet, good enough would be damn hard.

Dad was a minister at a local church, a pillar of the community, right? Then that made me a preacher’s kid. He wasn’t a preacher in the southern sense, though. No one here in New England would tolerate anything quite as big as what Dad called a “Holy Roller,” but he had a way of making sure that God infused everything in our lives. Funny how God always seemed to have the same exact views as Dad. I’d gone to a small private school from preschool to eighth grade, learning everything through the lens of God. When money started to get tight, he’d relented and let me go to the local public school.

I’d been shocked my first session of science class, sitting in a biology lecture, and learning about evolution. Dad had told me that evolution was something that people had created as a way to separate us from God, so I knew the basics. The scary part was that now I was being told to bridge two worlds, somehow to remain devout and without sin—or at least with as little sin as possible, at the same time that I accepted what so many people at my old school and at my church, Dad’s church, told me were signs of moral failure.

“Fake it,” Dad said. “Get good grades and pretend enough to get the grades you need, and don’t let it bother you. God knows that you understand it’s just not true, and there’s no violation of God’s law unless you choose to actually believe it.”

That’s what he said, but you know, things have a way of backfiring when you lie, and that’s exactly what Dad taught me.
To lie
. To lie to myself by learning something that I wasn’t supposed to believe in, and then realizing I did believe in what they taught, and realizing I had to lie at
home
. That? That I could master. Easily. Because what Dad didn’t know is that I had been doing it most of my life.

Violently poison-tongued, my father could wield words like weapons, especially when he had too much to drink. And
that
was the first lie, the central lie, that taught me how to really pretend to believe something that wasn’t true. The fact was that my father was supposed to be an ethical man, the interpreter of God for his flock, and yet at home he was a tyrant, a real son of a bitch. My stomach tightened at the thought of calling him that, at the contradiction between the truth that it represents and the sin that it is.

Back then, though, in ninth grade, sitting there while my teacher explained the role of vestigial limbs or why humans walk upright, I found a divergence. It was the same feeling today, getting ready for debate. It was a sense that I was being told to go through the motions for the sake of the motions, but I was actually doing it because it’s what I believed. A full ride to college rested on how I performed. Two different high level schools had coaches who said if I could get into the top three, I could make my way through their schools with no debt. Dad didn’t have a college fund for me. He said I could go to a Bible school if I couldn’t get a free ride somewhere else. I’d rather scrape and save and work five jobs to pay for a different college than go to the kind of Bible school
my
father would choose for me, where people couldn’t touch each other, where dancing was considered a sin, and where attitudes about homosexuality were like something out of a 1960s documentary.

Anything outside of the authoritarian rules set up in the structure for someone else was deemed an abomination.

Here in debate the rules were objective. They never changed, and the goal posts weren’t moved. The answers were challenged with fact and reason and analysis, not with emotional mudslinging and accusations. This was a world that made sense.

It was like drumming. The notes were on the page, the measures were clear. Which instrument needed to be struck at which time was laid out in an orderly pattern. How you tackled it emotionally was up to you. Emotions and debate didn’t really have much to do with each other, except in one area.

And she walked past me just as I bent down to get a drink of water.

Amy

Harboring a crush on a guy for years is probably the definition—no, the
epitome
—of desperate. I talked to Sam, sure, and I debated him, and I joked with him, and I did plenty of other things that gave me an opportunity to interact, but when it came to sending out a signal, or flirting, or finding some way to communicate how I felt? Nope. I closed up. Watching him take a drink from the water fountain, knowing he was just as nervous as I was about the debates today, gave me a warm sense of camaraderie with him, yet I kept my feelings to myself.

It was easier that way because if I didn’t take the chance I couldn’t get rejected, right? I was torn between wanting to let him know, and terrified of the genie I’d be unable to tuck back in its bottle if I pulled the cork.

Instead, I lived in that world of ambiguity, where I knew that the feelings I had for him were becoming larger and stronger, at the same time that I couldn’t take any of the pressure off by letting them out. When our eyes met, there seemed to be a kindred spirit there, but if he felt anything, even one one-thousandth of what I felt for him, I had no way of knowing it. You would think that our hug from two weeks ago would have calmed me even now, that it told me how he felt, and yet a deep insecurity in me left me with more questions than answers from his touch.
More
was what I wanted.

Did he?

I walked past him at the water fountain, and he stood, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then called out to me when my back was to him. “Hey! Amy!”

I stopped and froze, skittering a little bit on the tile floor, unaccustomed to wearing high heels. I turned around gingerly, making sure I didn’t fall. The last thing I needed was to split my skirt open or bang up my knee, or worse, embarrass myself in front of him.

“Yeah?” I replied. Witty, I was, first thing in the morning. Shaking inside—and not just from the specter of the day’s debates. His smile made me feel like none of it mattered. As if the entire world was nothing but us.

He leaned back against the wall and crossed his long legs at the ankles, his elbow bent, the skin around his eyes crinkled up as those warm eyes took me in. The seconds ticked by. My skin floated inches above my body and I took my hand and rested it on my thigh, unsure what to do. The tangible feeling of my own fingers against my body felt like the most real thing on the planet. The only thing more real would have been if his hands had touched the same place.

“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?”