Chapter 115: Doing No Harm

Friday, April 20, 1984

The bus took us, and our cherished cases and boxes and files, over to Churchill High School in the morning. They were serving a catered breakfast, and that seemed like the best idea.

Most likely the food would’ve been better if we’d gone out. They had fairly plain scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles, and toast. All of it was ‘free’ hotel buffet quality. On the other hand, it was hot and plentiful, two very good things for hungry teenagers.

The coffee was a most welcome touch, too.

They repeated last year’s format, which I thought was a great idea. All of prelims today, all of elims tomorrow.

My day was proportionately lighter without Humorous. All things considered, I was pretty sure I’d made the right decision. I wasn’t going to win State in Humorous. I probably wouldn’t make finals or even semis. On the other hand, I had at least an outside shot at finals in Extemp, and CX finals were a firm goal.

Better to concentrate on those two and not spread myself overly thin.

Jas, though, was busy every minute of the day, it seemed like. She was fully in her element, though, and that’s what mattered.

We had lunch after the first round. Two more this afternoon, then dinner, and then one more.

My first Extemp round was exactly that: an Extemp round. It wasn’t great, and it wasn’t bad. I probably did fine. If the rest went like that, I’d be good.

Our first CX round was, frankly, a laugher. It wasn’t even one of those so-bad-it’s-bad rounds where the other team drags you into a chaotic round that no one can make sense out of (and sometimes wins because of it). No, in this case, they were straight-up outclassed, but not fundamentally a bad team.

Their biggest problem was that they were running a close variation of our Exclusionary Rule case, and we knew both the case and every argument against it better than they did. There was no point playing the ‘Did we win or not?’ game. If we hadn’t, this was going to be a short and very disappointing tournament. Best to assume we kicked ass and then move on.

Lunch was pizza. As far as I was concerned, that was a good thing, even if pizza wasn’t perhaps the ideal food for tournament clothing.

While we were eating, Natalie and Brenda came by.

“Hey,” Natalie said.

“Hey,” Cammie said.

“Mutual friends said to say hi,” Natalie said.

I chuckled. “Hi right back.”

“I don’t know if you heard, but we’re both going to Texas,” Brenda said.

“Cool,” I said. “A&M, but you probably knew that.”

“Ditto,” Cammie said.

“Yeah, we heard. Boo!” Natalie said, grinning. “Seriously, though, it’ll be cool.”

“We’ve got friends going there,” Cammie said. “Hopefully, you’ll meet them. Huge place, I know, but maybe we can figure out a way to get you in touch with them.”

“I’d like that,” Brenda said. “You guys seem to have cool friends.”

“Candice and Sherry kinda prove that,” Natalie said. “I know what happened, but you’ve made a real effort to stay connected. Plus, both of you have always been nice to us. That, and it’s nice to have more girls doing well.”

“We’ve got three CX teams continuing next year,” Cammie said. “All of the boys that do CX are graduating, though.”

“That is kinda cool!” Brenda said.

“We saw your friend. The guy from Bellaire. Still annoyed at him,” Natalie said, grinning, “but he’s really a cool guy. We’ll forgive you getting him into Debate.”

I shrugged. “Still only my doing in a very strange and roundabout manner, if that.”

“Still counts!” Cammie said, grinning. “But I agree. If you’d seen him a couple of years ago, though...”

“That bad?” Brenda said.

“That bad,” Jasmine said, leaning over. “Tragic. One of those guys who thought he was a thousand times more suave than he actually was.”

“He got better, though,” Angie said.

“Much better,” Jas said. “He’s going to UT, too, by the way.”

“The place is big enough for all of us,” Brenda said.

“Jas, you know Natalie and Brenda, right?” I said.

“Yeah. Not well, but ... good to see you!”

“Good to see you, too!”

Angie said, “This is the only place I want to see you.”

“Ditto! Unless it’s finals!” Natalie said.

“We could go for that,” Cammie said.

“Us, too!” Angie said.

“Some of us may have to compromise on semis,” Brenda said.

“No compromise!” Natalie said, but she was grinning.

We said goodbye and let them get on their way.

After they left, Cammie said, “No change. Natalie yes, Brenda no.”

“Gaydar?” Paige said.

Cammie giggled and nodded.

“Mine’s still a work in progress,” Paige said.

Angie said, “And mine’s more nuanced. Natalie yes, Brenda curious.”

“Really?” Cammie said. “I didn’t get that.”

“You miss ‘curious’ sometimes,” Angie said. “You missed it in me.”

“Or did I?” Cammie said, then giggled. “Okay, fine, I totally missed it until you’d gotten involved with the Drama girls. I figured they showed you the error of your ways.”

“Nah. From day one. Just hidden,” Angie said, grinning.

“I totally missed it, too,” I said.

Cammie chuckled. “I would mock you for that, except your gaydar worked perfectly when it really counted.”

Angie nodded. “That was huge.”

“The biggest ever,” Cammie said, leaning over and hugging me.

History almost repeated itself in the second round, but not quite. Instead of Cammie and I getting the ‘pleasure’ of debating Nick Bell and Ryan Mason, Linda and Darla did.

They felt very confident about their round, too. There was a certain karma in that, I thought. Once, they’d sparred with Janet and Lizzie (and usually got the worst of it). We’d gone back and forth with them, gaining ground, until we were clearly better. Heck, Dave Mayrink and his partner were Bellaire’s unquestioned ‘A’ team right now. Nick and Ryan were perhaps the ‘B’ team, and perhaps not even that. Adding insult to injury (from their perspective, at least), one of our four two-girl teams had probably beaten them this time.

Of course, Memorial would start next year with three veteran CX teams, and all three would be two-girl teams. Hopefully Meg would wind up with a few more boys!

Cammie and I, meanwhile, took on Doug Hollander and Kent Trent from Grapevine. We’d just seen them a month or so ago in Austin. This round was pretty much the same: they were good, we were better. It was a much better round than our first one, though.

Especially with State breaking to octofinals, one loss in prelims might well leave a team in contention. Hopefully, they (or we, if I was misreading the round) would get that sort of break. They were too good to just have to go home.

We chatted with them after the round. They were juniors and were heading off to Northwestern this summer. We both said great things about it, and Cammie told them to say hi from us. She added that, if anyone on the staff pretended not to know who we were, mention the truck.

I had to explain that, yes, I’d really been hit by a truck, and that, yes, it’d been fine.

They seemed to be impressed.

“No fair mentioning the truck,” I said.

Cammie grinned. “That’ll get them thinking when they cross Sheridan, at least, and they’ll be doing plenty of that.”

“True enough!”

“So far, so good,” she said, grinning a bit, her hand finding mine.

“I agree.”

“We’ve got this, you know.”

“I don’t know it, but I’m willing to believe it.”

She stopped abruptly and squeezed.

“A little slower, or a bad fall, or some cop, or ... hell, even a rapist ... and we’d have no shot. I’d be off somewhere screaming my head off about the injustice of it all.”

She was suddenly all sniffles. I wrapped her up in my arms.

“So ... so ... so fucking close!” she said, face buried against my shoulder. “I don’t want to overwhelm you with gratitude. I made my own luck, and I know that. But you were there for me every step of the way once I did, and more than I might have imagined you could be.”

“Always. We’re going to be close a lot longer than we’ll be debate partners, Cammie Clarke.”

“The truck made me think ... what if it hadn’t been okay? How many lives would’ve been fucked up?”

“Way too many, I think,” I said, nodding.

“You did the right thing. No doubts, no second-guessing. But ... again ... so fucking close!”