You swear you weren’t meaning to get a leg up on the competition.
But now you gotta fix the situation without drawing too much attention…
“Hello, old man! Hi there, old woman!” I said in my head as I tipped my proverbial hat to the elderly couple sitting at the table at the front of the relatively small room. “Don’t mind me,” I said aloud. “I’m just killing time until my old teammates show up for their turn.”
Back in December of ’99 I was a freshman in college, so I was still tight with my younger homies from the Rolla High School Scholars’ Bowl team–especially Jerome1Okay, so his real name is Jeremy–and yes, it’s true, I’m pretty much half-assing this whole ‘protecting the innocent’ schtick., the current senior and captain of the team. So when they traveled to Wichita right before Christmas break to try out for Hi-Q, you bet your sweet ass I hopped in ye’ olde Taurus SHO and drove the 2 hours from my college town to show them my full-throated support.
And maybe, just maybe, relive my glory days just a well bit. Have I ever mentioned that during my time at RHS I was a 3-time State Champion, was on the only Rolla team to take first place at every tournament in a season,2Unless the 2023 tea managed to accomplish this feat… and made the Sante Fe Trail All-League all 4 years of my career (sorta)? What? No, I haven’t? *stifles laugh*
Anyways…sorry, I forgot to explain what Hi-Q was…it was basically a Jeopardy-style tournament for 16 of the finest academic teams in Kansas. This was different than our regular quiz bowl business in two respects: first, it was televised. Sure, it may have came on at 7 am on Sunday mornings, but it was televised nonetheless. And secondly, they held open tryouts and invited any and all high schools to send a team, regardless of size.
Sure, Rolla could smack around other Division 1A schools all day long. When we would pick on someone our own size–specifically schools with an entire Freshman-to-Senior student body of 69 students or less–it was not uncommon for us to p*mp slap up ’em up side the cranium. Being a big fish in a little pond is nothing particularly special. But Hi-Q? That was our chance to take down some of the biggest dogs in the state. The year before I started high school, the Rolla team got runner-up, and ever since then the following iterations had been chasing that achievement…but sadly, the furthest any team I was on only made it to the second round. Even though I had never been able to take care of unfinished business, I would have been almost equally as content to vicariously bask in any victories Jerome, et al. might attain at this year’s Hi-Q. I may have not been officially on the team that year, but I definitely was full-fledged member in spirit.
And apparently I was a little over-eager, as I had showed up to the Community College that was hosting the tryouts for the morning session, unaware that Rolla wasn’t due to give it a whirl until the afternoon session.
“Ah, what the hell, I might as well see what kinds of questions they’re asking this year,” I muttered to myself as I sat down to watch some random school do their best to field the set of 50 or so morning-session questions this particular elderly couple was about to lob at ’em. Unlike regular competition, the tryouts only featured a single team at a time in a room with two moderators–and the top 16 scores throughout the day got the privilege of partaking in the real tournament held at a later date.
“Eh, not too many of us here in the audience,” I noted as I looked around to see what appeared to be a total of 6 or 7 other random-school supporters sitting with me. “Not that it matters…”
“Oh, I’ve been here since 9 am. Where the ----- have you slackers been?” I razzed Jerome when they finally showed up. “In fact, I sat in on one of the morning tryouts…y’know trying to get a feel for what kind of questions are on the docket this year.”
“No sh*t? So what was your take?” Jerome replied. “Was it all stuff we know like the back of our hands? Or was it obscure, fancy big-city type of stuff we can expect people from Wichita to come up with?”
It was pretty clear that he was carrying on the tradition of carrying a small-school chip on his shoulder.
“Mostly stuff that we practice regularly, and you better get those questions right lest I beat yo’ ass otherwise, I simultaneously assured and threatened him.
“That’s good to hear, good to hear…”
“Oh But there were at least 2 or 3 that I had never heard before today.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jerome looked at me inquisitively. “Such as?”
“Well, since you’ll get a totally different set of questions in the afternoon session, you might as well know that Margery Williams wrote The Velveteen Rabbit,” I intimated freely.
“Really? I never had a clue who had written that children’s classic. Heck, I barely recognize the name of that book, now that you mention it.”
“Yeah, I know right? What kind of snooty left-coast question is that? Anyways, um, lemme see. Here’s a few other bits of trivia I picked up today. Did you know that…?”
“Good afternoon, Ma’am. Good afternoon, Sir,” I greeted the elderly couple as nonchalantly as I could manage.
I turned to Jerome right before I took my not-so-randomly chosen seat.
“What the ----- are they doing here?” I half-joked through gritted teeth.
“Who?” he asked with a confused look on his face.
“This old couple, man…ha, ha…what a coincidence: this is the same room I was in earlier today. With the same elderly man and woman as moderators, too.”
“Hah. That’s mirthful,” Jeremy flirted with patronizing me. “Now if you excuse me, I gots me a Hi-Q to qualify for…
“Attaboy! Go get ’em, Tiger!” I straight-up patronized him back.
We all took our seats and let the proceedings get under way. I, for one, was eager to see what the set of afternoon session questions looked like.
About 3 questions in, an internal monologue started up in my head.
“Hmm…why am I getting a sense of deja vu? Ah! Maybe it’s because the answer to this question is…”
Right about then Jerome buzzed in. In unison, we said, “The movie Groundhog Day.”
Ah, yes, already it was the classic deja-vu-themed point of cultural reference.
“Wait a minute, now this next question seems oddly…familiar,” I thought to myself about Q #4. “That’s probably because the question asked what the term was for a vampire’s assistant. So that makes sense.”
Question Five was a different story altogether.
“What British author is best known for her work…” the elderly woman paused dramatically, “The Velveteen Rabbit?”
Jeremy looked back at me chuckling in mild disbelief with a look that clearly said “You gotta be ----- kidding me!”
I kinda shrugged back at him, with the expression on my face indubitably communicating, “How was I supposed to know they were going to ask the exact same set of questions during both sessions?!?”
To which he silently replied, “Well, I can’t unknow anything I may or may not have learned in the 30 minutes before I entered this room…”
“Wait!” I mentally reached out to him like Nic Cage trying to retrieve a loose ball of bio-toxins in the movie The Rock. “Don’t answer that! That contraband information can be traced directly back to me!”
But it was too late; he had already buzzed in.
“Margery Williams…I suppose,” he said, doing his best to pretend that this was foreknown factoid for him.
He looked back at me with something of a sheepish grin, implying “What’s a guy to do?”
I just planted my face in my palm, though I quickly looked back up at him with piercing eyes in order to send him a very clear message: “We’re in this together now, you cheating mother fucker.”
He kinda nodded. “We take this to our graves?” he said only with his eyes.
I nodded back. “To our graves.”
He then looked at the elderly couple then back to me. “And the eyewitnesses?” This time there was a certain sadness in his eyes.
We were long past the point of no return by now: we were no longer the two upstanding citizens that had walked into that room. I wiped a nascent tear from my eye–they were a precious and kind old couple, after all–and steeled my resolve.
With the slightest of nods and the gaze of a man who no longer had a soul, I telegraphed to Jerome those fateful words:
“To their graves as well…”
Which was a real shame, seeing as how, despite our bumbling cheating scheme and the ensuing cover-up, in the end Rolla didn’t even qualif for Hi-Q that year…
Content created on: 9/10 March 2024 (Sat/Sun)
Footnotes & References:
Awesome story. It’s weird how we care about our high school long after we are gone. I was happy to see Shawnee Mission Northwest boys won the State title in basketball, and go undefeated. But why do I care exactly – just because I graced those halls?