19 Love Songs Read online

  “Again,” I said, not leaning away, “medicine is your area of expertise. In novels, you damn well can catch consumption from sitting next to someone. You were doomed from the moment you met me.”

  “I’ll say.”

  I wasn’t quick enough to keep the conversation going. Damien bent down to take an issue of Men’s Health out of his bag. And he wasn’t even reading it for the pictures.

  I pretended to have a hacking cough for the remaining ten minutes of the flight. The other people around me were annoyed, but I could tell that Damien was amused. It was our joke now.

  * * *

  —

  We were staying at the Westin in Indianapolis, home to the Heavenly™ Bed and the Heavenly™ Bath.

  “How the hell can you trademark the word heavenly?” I asked Wes as we dumped out our stuff. We were only staying two nights, so it hardly seemed necessary to hang anything up.

  “I dunno,” he answered.

  “And what’s up with the Heavenly™ Bath? Am I really going to have to take showers in heaven? It hardly seems worth the trouble of being good now if you’re going to have to wear deodorant in the afterlife.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Wes said, making an even stack on the bedside table of all the comics he’d brought.

  “What, you’ve never been dead?”

  He sighed.

  “It’s time to meet the team,” he said.

  Before we left, he made sure every single light in the room was off.

  He even unplugged the clock.

  * * *

  —

  The competition didn’t start until 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 commerc
ial 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?”

  “Does Julie know it wasn’t anything?”

  “No,” he said. “It looks like she doesn’t know that.”

  This was it, I was sure—the point where he’d ask for my advice. I could help him. I could prove myself worthy of his company.

  But he let it drop. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to watch the movie.

  I realized he needed to reveal himself to me in his own time. I couldn’t rush it. I had to be patient. For the remaining commercial breaks, I made North Dakota jokes. He laughed at some of them, and even threw in a few of his own.

  Sung came back when there were about fifteen minutes left in the movie. I could tell he wasn’t thrilled about me sitting on his bed, but I wasn’t about to move.

  “Sung,” I told him, “if this whole quiz bowl thing doesn’t work out for you, I think you have a future in disco.”

  “Shut up,” he grumbled, taking off the famous jacket and hanging it in the closet.

  We watched the rest of the movie in silence, with Sung sitting on the edge of Damien’s bed. As soon as the credits were rolling, Sung announced it was time to go to sleep.

  “But where are you sleeping?” I asked, spreading out on his sheets.

  “That’s my bed,” he said.

  I wanted to offer Sung a swap—he could stay with Wes and talk about polynomials all night, while I could stay with Damien. But clearly that wasn’t a real option.

  Damien walked me to the door.

  “Lay off the minibar,” he said. “We need you sober tomorrow.”

  “I’ll try,” I replied. “But those little bottles are just so pretty. Every time I drink from them, I can pretend I’m a doll.”

  He chuckled and hit me lightly on the shoulder.

  “Resist,” he commanded.

  Again, I told him I’d try.

  * * *

  —

  Wes was in bed and the lights were off when I got to my room, so I very quietly changed into my pajamas and brushed my teeth.

  I was about to nod off when Wes’s voice asked, “Did you have fun?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Damien and I went to his room and watched The Departed. It was a good time. We looked for you, but you were already gone.”

  “That social sucked.”

  “It most certainly did.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Goodnight,” Wes said softly, making it sound like a true wish. Nobody besides my parents had ever said it to me like that before.

  “Goodnight,” I said back. Then I made sure he’d plugged the clock back in, and went to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, we kicked North Dakota’s ass. Then, for good measure, we erased Maryland from the boards and made Oklahoma cry.

  It felt good.

  “Don’t get too cocky,” Sung warned us, which was pretty precious, since Sung was the cockiest of us all. I half expected “We Are the Champions” to come blaring out of his ears every time we won a round.

  Our fourth and last match of the day—in the quarterfinals—was against the team from Clearwater, Florida, which had made it to the finals for each of the past ten years, winning four of those times. They were legendary, insofar as people like Sung had heard about them and had studied their strategies, with some tapes Mr. Phillips had managed to get off Clearwater local access.

  Even though I was the alternate, I was put in the starting lineup. Clearwater was known for treating the canon like a cannon to demolish the other team.

  “Bring it on,” I said.

  It soon became clear who my counterpart on the Clearwater team was—a wispy girl with straight brown hair who could barely bother to put down her Muriel Spark in order to start playing. The first time she opened her mouth, she revealed their secret weapon:

  She was British.

  Frances looked momentarily frightened by this, but I took it in stride. When the girl lunged with Byron, I parried with Asimov. When she volleyed with Burgess, I pounced with Roth. Neither of us missed a question, so it became a test of buzzer willpower. I started to ring in a split second before I knew the answer. And I always knew the answer.

  Until I did the unthinkable.

  I buzzed in for a science question.

  Which Nobel Prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People?

  I realized immediately it wasn’t Saul Bellow or Kenzaburo Oe.

  As the judge said, “Do you have an answer?” the phrase The Double Helix hit in my head.

  “Crick!” I exclaimed.

  The judge looked at me for a moment, then down at his card. “That is incorrect. Clearwater, which Nobel Prize winner later went on to write The Double Helix and Avoid Boring People?”

  It was not the lit girl who buzzed in.

  “James D. Watson,” one of the math boys answered snottily, the D sent as a particular fuck you to me.

  “Sorry,” I whispered to my team.

  “It’s okay,” Damien said.

  “No worries,” Wes said.

  Sung, I knew, wouldn’t be as forgiving.

  I was now off my game and more cautious with the buzzer, so Brit girl got the best of me on Caliban and Vivienne Haigh-Wood. I managed to stick One Hundred Years of Solitude in edgewise, but that was scant comfort. I mean, who didn’t know One Hundred Years of Solitude?

  Clearwater had a one-question lead with three questions left, and the last questions were about math, history, and geography. So I sat back while Sung rocked the relative areas of a rhombus and a circle, Wes sent a little love General Omar Bradley’s way, and Frances wrapped it up with Tashkent, which I had not known was the capital of Uzbekistan, its name translating as “stone village.”

  Usually we burst out of our chairs when we won, but this match had been so exhausting that we could only feel relieved. We shook hands with the other team—Brit girl’s hand felt like it was made of paper, which I found weird.

  After Clearwater had left the room, Sung called an emergency team meeting.

  “That was too close,” he said. Not congratulations or nice work.

  No, Sung was pissed.

  He talked about the need to be more aggressive on the buzzer, but also to exercise care. He said we should always play to our strengths. To make a blunder was to destroy the fabric of our entire team.

  “I get it, I get it,” I said.

  “No,” Sung told me, “I don’t think you do.”

  “Sung,” Mr. Phillips cautioned.

  “I think he needs to hear this,” Sung insisted. “From the very start of the year, he has refused to be a team player. And what we saw today was nothing short of an insurrection. He broke the unwritten rules.”

  “He is standing right here,” I pointed out. “Just come right out and say it.”

  “YOU ARE NOT TO ANSWER SCIENCE QUESTIONS!” Sung yelled. “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?”

  “Hey—” Damien started to interrupt.

  I held up my hand. “No, it’s okay. Sung needs to get this out of his system.”

  “You are the alternate,” Sung went on.

  “You don’t seem to mind it when I’m answering questions, Sung.”

  “We only have you here because we have to!”

  “That’s enough,” Mr. Phillips said decisively.

  “No, it’s not enough,” I said. “I’m sick of you all acting like I’m this English freak raining on your little math-science parad
e. Sung seems to think my contribution to this team is a little less than everyone else’s.”

  “Anyone can memorize book titles!” Sung shouted.

  “Oh, please. Like I care what you think? You don’t even know the difference between Keats and Byron.”

  “The difference between Keats and Byron doesn’t matter!”

  “None of this matters!” I shouted back. “Don’t you get it, Sung? NONE OF THIS MATTERS. Yes, you have knowledge—but you’re not doing anything with it. You’re reciting it. You’re not out curing cancer—you’re listing the names of the people who’ve tried to cure cancer. This whole thing is a joke, Captain. It’s trivial. Which is why everyone laughs at us.”

  “You think we’re all trivial?” Sung challenged.

  “No,” I said. “I think you’re trivial with your quiz bowl obsession. The rest of us have other things going on. We have lives.”

  “You’re the one who’s not a part of our team! You’re the outcast!”

  “If that’s so true, Sung, then why are you the only one of us wearing a fucking varsity jacket? Why do you think nobody else wanted to be seen in one? It’s not just me, Sung. It’s all of us.”

  “Enough!” Mr. Phillips yelled.

  Sung looked like he wanted to kill me. And I knew at the same time that he’d never look at that damn jacket the same way again.

  “Why don’t we all take a break over dinner,” Mr. Phillips went on, “then regroup in my room at eight for a scrimmage before the semifinals tomorrow morning? I don’t know who we’re facing, but we’re going to need to be a team to face them.”

  What we did next wasn’t very teamlike: Mr. Phillips, a brooding Sung, Frances, and Gordon went one way for dinner, while Wes, Damien, and I went another way.

  “There’s a Steak ’n Shake a few blocks away,” Wes told us.

  “Sounds good,” Damien said.

  I, brooding as well, followed.

  “It was a question about books,” I said, once we’d left the hotel. “I didn’t realize it was a science question.”

  “Crick wasn’t that far off,” Wes pointed out.