the next morning, so the evening was devoted to the Quiz Bowl Social.
“Having a social at a quiz bowl tournament is like having all-you-can-eat ribs and inviting a bunch of vegetarians over,” I told Damien as the rest of us waited for Sung and Mr. Phillips to come down to the lobby.
“I’m sure there are some cool kids here,” he said.
“Yeah. And they’re all back in their rooms, drinking.”
Some people had dressed up for the social—meaning that some girls had worn dresses and some boys had worn ties, although none of them could muster enough strength to also wear jackets. Unless, of course, it was a varsity quiz bowl jacket. I saw at least five of them in the lobby.
“Hey, Sung, you’re not so unique anymore,” I pointed out when he finally showed up, his own jacket looking newly polished.
“I don’t need to be unique,” he scoffed. “I just need to win.”
I pretended to wave a tiny flag. “Go, team.”
“Alright, guys,” Gordon said. “Are we ready to rumble?”
I thought he was kidding, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I looked at our group—Sung’s hair was plastered into perfect place, Frances had put on some makeup, Gordon was wearing bright red socks that had nothing to do with anything else he was wearing, Damien looked casually handsome, and Wes looked like he wanted to be back in our room, reading Y: The Last Man.
“Let’s rumble!” Mr. Phillips chimed in, a little too enthusiastically for someone over the age of eleven.
“Our first match is against the team from North Dakota,” Sung reminded us. “If you meet them, scope out their intelligences.”
“If we see them on the dance floor, I’ll be sure to mosey over and ask them to quote Virginia Woolf,” I assured him. “That should strike fear into their hearts.”
The social was in one of the Westin’s ballrooms. There was a semi-big dance floor at the center, which nobody was coming close to. The punch was as unspiked as the haircuts, the lights dim to hide everyone’s embarrassment.
“Wow,” I said to Damien as we walked in and scoped it out. “This is hot.”
Damien had such a look of social distress on his face, I almost laughed. I could imagine him reassuring himself that none of his other friends from home were ever going to see this.
“The adults are worse than the kids,” Wes observed from over my shoulder.
“You’re right,” I said. Because while the quiz bowlers were mawkish and awkward, the faculty advisors were downright weird, wearing their best suits from 1980 and beaming like they’d finally gone from zeros to heroes in their own massively revised high school years.
Out of either cruelty or obliviousness (probably the former), the DJ decided to unpack Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.” A lot of the quiz bowlers looked like they were hearing it for the first time. From the moment the beat started, it was only a question of whose resolve would dissolve first. Would the team captain from Montana start break dancing? Would the alternate from Connecticut let down her hair and flail it around?
In the end, it was a whole squad that took the floor. As a group, they started to bust out the moves—something I could never imagine our team doing. They laughed at themselves while they danced, and it was clear they were having a good time. Other kids started to join them. Even Sung, Frances, and Gordon plunged in.
“Check it out,” Wes mumbled.
Gordon was doing a strut that looked like something he’d practiced at home; I had no doubt it went over better in his bedroom mirror than it did in public. Frances did a slight sway, which was in keeping with her personality. And Sung—well, Sung looked like someone’s grandfather trying to dance to “Hollaback Girl.”
“This shit really is bananas,” I said to Damien. “B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Look at that varsity jacket go!”
“Enough with the jacket,” Damien replied. “Let him have his fun. He’s stressed enough as it is. I want a drink. You want to get a drink?”
At first I thought he meant breaking into the nearest minibar. But no, he just wanted to head over to the punch bowl. The punch was übersweet—Kool-Aid that had been cut with Sprite—and as I drank glass after glass, it almost gave me a Robitussin high.
“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?”
