My Ex-Boyfriend From Kindergarten

Chapter 28: A Close Game

This is yet to be edited.

Maybe the seniors were doing so well in the quiz bee because they’ve already studied the things we and the juniors were still studying. They had an advantage, in that case. However, they really didn’t strike me as the type who would remember the lessons they were taught last year or the years before that. I wouldn’t even think they remembered the lessons they had last week based on their behavior. But the scoreboard doesn’t lie. So far, they’ve gotten ten out of fourteen questions right. There are two questions left. The juniors are ahead of us because they’ve gotten eight questions right and we’ve only gotten seven.

“For the next question, still in the mathematics category,” the emcee started. “What do you call a geometric shape that has 20 equal sides?”

“Contestants, you have ten seconds to answer,” the other emcee reminded us.

Nairobi started writing on our whiteboard right away. First, she spelled out isochadron. Then she bit her lip, shook her head, and erased it. She spelled it out again, this time it was icosadron. She stared at it for a while. Then she shook her head again.

“Relax, you got this,” I assured her.

“Something… something’s missing,” she started snapping her fingers in an attempt to remember. There was six seconds left… five seconds… four… then she stopped snapping her fingers. She erased the last part of what was written on our whiteboard and just before the buzzer sounded, icosahedron became our answer.

We both had our fingers crossed as Cairo raised our whiteboard. I looked over to the juniors. Their answer was isocahedron. However, our answer was identical to that of the seniors’. So that made me a little bit more confident in our answer.

After the emcee carefully examined our answers and finally announced that we and the seniors got the answer right, I almost jumped out of my chair. I was so happy that we were already tied with the juniors. The last question was critical. We had to get it right to advance to the next and final round. However, if the juniors get it right as well, we’ll have to go into a tie-breaker.

“The last question for the average round will come from,” the emcee paused to make sure that everyone was paying attention. “The science category,” he finally revealed.

“Listen up, contestants,” the other emcee said before reading the final average question. “What are the eight noble metals that do not rust?”

As soon as the emcee said “eight noble metals,” Cai started writing on our whiteboard. And for a good reason. Questions like that were more a test of how fast you could write than how much you knew. Since time was of the essence, I decided to help him out by writing down gold and silver, which were the only noble metals I knew. We finished writing the answers with about three seconds left on the clock. It was enough time to review our spelling. Thankfully, we noticed that Cai misspelled palladium, forgetting the second l. We were able to correct it before we had to raise our whiteboard.

My eyes darted to the juniors’ whiteboard. I almost fist pumped the air when I saw that they were missing one of the answers, osmium. I was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. We were heading to the final round. Cai, Nai, and I high-fived each other after the emcees announced our answers correct.

We heard loud cheering from our classmates on the bleachers. They raised our banner and started chanting, “Go for the win!” It was really motivating for me, and I’m pretty sure, for my teammates as well.

As we were already celebrating and being thankful for being in the final round, the seniors were just sitting there indifferently. It bothered me, the way they seemed like they weren’t even trying and they made 61 out of 68 points. We were trailing behind with only 44 points.