Chapter 38: Competitions

Friday, September 16, 1983

Debate was weird. The group that was going to Clear Lake had already left by the time the rest of us got to class. We’d prioritized the less experienced teams with the exception of Sue and Amit. Besides them, we had Natasha Grimm and Penny Harrison, Darla and Linda, and Anne and Megan. In Extemp, all of the CXers were competing, plus Paul Harrison and Stacey Yates.

LD was perhaps the most interesting. We’d lost Callie and Kenzie, but we’d picked up a lot of people in their place. Janice and Eric were veteran seniors now, and Jaya was almost certainly our best LDer overall, and just a sophomore. To them, we added Danny and Lori Bell, Kenny Lanier, and Paul Harrison. Crystal and Jeff were considering just doing Extemp, but they were skipping this tournament in any case. Since we could only take five people, Kenny and Paul were skipping Clear Lake.

In Drama, Sam Myers and James Johnson joined Sheila and Lexi and Ben and Penny in Duo. I had a sneaking suspicion Sam and James might be an item, but no one was telling yet. Angie and Jasmine probably already knew, but I hadn’t twisted their arms.

In Dramatic Interp, we were sending Sheila and Lexi along with Gordon Everett, Sandy Scott, and Sierra Gutierrez. In Humorous, we had Lexi, Sara, Carole, Darren, Sandy, Sierra, Carla, Gordon, Marsha, and finally Leslie Schwartz.

Class felt weird. Steffie (who’d stayed behind today) was nominally our substitute, but that just meant we did whatever we wanted.

It’s not like we were there that long, anyway. It was a Friday during football season, and that meant we had a pep rally.

I hadn’t hated pep rallies during my first go-round, but I’d been a bit bored by the whole thing. Angie had treated them as a big social opportunity, of course.

Now, we were into them. It helped that we knew so many more people, but mostly ... they were just fun. Somehow I’d failed to notice that during my first go-round.

Jas and I held hands, as did Angie and Paige. My guess was that a few people might have read something into it. We were the school of Lizzie and Janet now, after all, and nothing would ever be entirely the same.

Still, they could’ve just been friends.

We had a great turnout for the game. Our little group wound up on the forty-five yard line, up fairly high. Memorial had brought far more students than our opponent, Fort Bend Dulles, but then we were fifteen minutes at most from our school. They were forty-five minutes or more away.

Almost half of that time would go away when the toll road opened (under a decade from now), but right now only two people in the stadium knew it was going to open.

We had the whole team back, and it showed pretty quickly. I don’t want to take anything away from Dulles, though. They were good, or at least they looked good to me.

We scored twice in the second quarter, with one pass to Andy and one long run by the same running back who’d fumbled last weekend. I was glad he had a chance to redeem himself in this game.

The defense didn’t allow anything. Dulles got in distant field goal range twice, but missed one and had the other partially blocked.

The second half was more of the same. We picked up a third touchdown in the third quarter. At that point, leading 21-0, we started playing more of the backups on offense, then defense.

Dulles never managed to score, and we never scored again, leaving it 21-0.

That was it for our non-district opponents. The next seven games would determine if we made the playoffs and how we were seeded. All we had to do was win. Of course, that’s all the other teams needed to do, too.

We went out for ice cream after the game but got home early enough for a reasonable bedtime. Our parents might jokingly claim we were old before our time, but ... well, I was, and the others had learned from my example. There was a lot to be said for keeping a good sleep schedule, all things considered.

Saturday, September 17, 1983

I had two papers to write, one for Ms. Epstein (on ‘The Great Gatsby’, a book I’d never read my first go-round, somehow or other) and one for Tom Myerson (on why we needed the branches of government to act as checks and balances, and whether what we had was sufficient).

The second one was ... interesting. I tried not to get too far afield, but I’d seen things in the 2000s, particularly the 2010s, that no one in the 1980s would believe. Despite what seemed like a near miss with Nixon, very little true reform had been put into place, and much of that had turned out to be inadequate.

The entire system rested on a default assumption: that the voters would collectively choose people who were relatively good of heart, wanted to do a good job, cared about their constituents (and, hopefully, the country), and so forth. Of course, that didn’t always happen. We’d had corrupt Presidents, incompetent Presidents, leaders with disdain for their constituents, and so forth.

What we hadn’t had (or not in a long time, anyway) was a government where the President and their appointees had pretty much collectively said, ‘We don’t care about the rules, we’re going to do what we want. You can sue us, but we’ll keep going, stonewall you, and try to run out the clock.’

Against that, it turned out that our system was only barely adequate. I only skirted the issue in my paper, but noted some weaknesses and gave proposed solutions.

So many things had been messed up about politics in the last years of my first go-round. I was hopeful that I could make at least some of them better. In some cases, though, the time to do that was the 1980s or 1990s. Trying to fix the problems once things started going downhill might not work all that well.

Jas and I, Angie and Paige, and Candice and Sherry went to the mini-golf and go-kart place for a triple date. We’d considered going to the movies but there wasn’t anything we wanted to see.

Candice and Sherry were duly amazed that I’d gotten to meet Reagan, however briefly. Beyond that, they seemed to be doing great. Sherry was on track to graduate, Candice’s grades were solid, and the plan of meeting at UH (or moving to another school) was looking good.

Things might still fall apart, but ... so far, so good.

Had Candice and Sherry not been going out, this would’ve been when things might really go wrong. Candice seemed to be completely her old self. I could very easily have convinced myself that she was fine and that we could get together for old times’ sake — or she could have convinced me of that.

It might have been fine, too. It really might have. But it might also have been an enormous mistake with serious consequences.

Sherry removed the temptation for us to test fate, and that was a very good thing.

Sunday, September 18, 1983

Study Group felt almost normal. The loss of Mike still hurt. Sarah was still waffling, and that was fine.

While it felt like we’d just had tests, the calendar was relentless and we were up to end-of-six-weeks tests already. Thus, we had plenty to do, and we did it. Even if we hadn’t had tests coming up, there were still no naps yet.

Curtis would find out in the next week or two if he was moving to New Orleans, but everything was already ready to go if he was. He had an option on a rental in the Garden District that could become a purchase down the road. He could commute to work via the streetcar, which seemed pretty great to me.

The odds that the Senate wouldn’t confirm him still seemed extremely low.

The odds that I would’ve known someone whose job required Senate confirmation at this point in my life, however, were extremely high, if lower than I’d thought. I was pretty sure that we’d done a very good thing, but time would tell.

We got the scoop about Clear Lake from Amit. One thing was no surprise: he’d won Extemp. Darla, surprisingly, had finished third, not qualifying but still good. More surprisingly, everyone but the freshmen had broken.

Sue and Amit had won CX, as well. Darla and Linda lost in semis. Anne and Megan and, surprisingly, Natasha and Penny had lost in quarters. Natasha and Penny breaking at their first tournament was, I thought, a testament to how good we’d gotten at mentoring new students.

In LD, Jaya surprised no one by winning. Janice lost in semis, while Eric lost in quarters.

Three Debaters had qualified in the first tournament, with one double-qualified. Not quite last year, but this was with restricted attendance.

We’d done even better in Drama. Sheila and Lexi had edged out Ben and Penny in duo, placing first and second, respectively. Sheila had placed second in Dramatic, with Lexi placing fourth. Lexi made up for it in Humorous by winning, while Sara placed third and Carole fourth. Of the new kids, Sam and James made quarterfinals in Duo, while Sandy and Sierra both made quarters in Dramatic, and Sierra got to quarters in Humorous, too.

Monday, September 19, 1983

When we got to school, we were greeted by posters urging us to vote for Mike for Homecoming King and Trish for Homecoming Queen. Angie wasn’t surprised, but I was stunned.

Angie, of course, had seen it before. It had been normal at her previous high school to campaign. It’d been normal at Trish’s school, too. There were probably campaigns at many high schools.

At Memorial? It’d never been common, or at least not in many years. We’d evolved a tradition of ‘campaigning’ by word of mouth. No one ran for the positions, though certainly various factions vied for positions and tried to get their members, plus as many others as possible, to vote for their candidate.