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?”
“Take it however you want,” Sam said, his face impassive.
One-on-one in a debate, that impassivity was Sam’s greatest tool. The power in the ability to appear unruffled was something so divine that a part of me would have traded anything for that skill. Okay—almost.
Almost trade.
His eyes were hooded and his face was slack, leaving the other person absolutely no way of knowing what he was thinking. It undermined Joe and made my face crack with a smile. I bit my lips and turned away to try to hide it, but Joe just nudged me, making me wobble on these damn high heels.
“If your case is as droll as your face, then good luck getting to third place.” Joe’s eyes narrowed as he tried to stare Sam down.
“You’re a poet, and you know it,” was all Sam said in return.
I took two steps back and turned, standing at the midpoint between them. Sam, tall and slim with that wavy red hair and those speckled eyes, eyes that gave no quarter. Joe, with a face carved out of marble, an angry red flush in his cheeks, and clenched hands. They stared each other down and I began to feel a strange, tingling sense of arousal. The naked aggression that each showed triggered something more adult in me. It transcended all of the silly flirting, and skirting, and questioning that made up the web of high school relationships and gave me a glimpse into a world of something completely different between men and women, and between men and men.