Diving Into The Wreck

No Other One

The day after Blake and I had our first recording session, I went straight to Mrs. Welch's classroom after school. I didn't quite know what to expect from my first day of Quiz Bowl. The only person I knew who was in it was Madeline, and I didn't even know her all that well. Everything about Quiz Bowl was completely new for me.

When I opened the door, Madeline and a short, dark-skinned boy were moving desks around the classroom. Another boy was standing on his tiptoes and writing on the whiteboard. Mrs. Welch was sitting at her desk, grading papers, probably including the pre-calc test that I was certain that I had failed at the time. I ended up getting a B.

All of a sudden, Madeline noticed me standing in the doorway. "Dani!" she exclaimed. "I'm so glad you came!"

The boy who was writing on the board had just finished writing "Episode VII vs. Star Wars Expanded Universe," whatever that was supposed to mean. He turned to look at me and then asked Madeline, "Do we really have a fourth person today?"

The first thing that popped into my head was how much Blake would have hated these people. He never missed an opportunity to crack jokes about how McKinley was crawling with nerdy kids with no fashion sense. Madeline's Quiz Bowl friends were exactly what he was talking about - they were the sort of kids who wrote Star Wars jokes on the whiteboard without a second thought. A part of me admired that.

"Yes, we do," Madeline said. "Tanner, this is Dani Bloomberg."

"This completely messes up my plan," Tanner said. "Devon was going to be Episode VII, and you were going to be the Expanded Universe, and I was going to moderate. Now we're going to have uneven teams."

"Wait, this isn't fair!" Devon exclaimed. "I want to be the Expanded Universe."

"Why don't you play, Tanner?" Madeline suggested.

"I could play, but then who will moderate?" Tanner said.

"Mrs. Welch, could you moderate for today?" Madeline asked.

"I suppose so," Mrs. Welch said.

Tanner walked up to her desk and handed her a packet of questions. "I promise I haven't looked at these yet," he said while Madeline and Devon set up two rows of desks facing each other, with a red or green buzzer sitting on each desk. We then chose teams: Devon joined the Star Wars Expanded Universe team, while Tanner and Madeline joined the Episode VII team.

"How do I even play?" I asked Madeline as I sat in the empty desk next to Devon, trying not to get distracted by Mrs. Welch's adorable sloth poster.

"Ask Tanner," she said. "He's the captain."

"The rules are kind of complicated, so we'll play a simpler version," Tanner said. "Is everyone okay with playing toss-ups only?" Both Madeline and Devon nodded. Tanner turned to me and said, "Just hit your buzzer if you know the answer."

That sounded easy enough, or so I thought until Mrs. Welch started reading. "This author wrote of an American sculptor who fell for the daughter of a Cavaliere, but died on his way to see her in Interlaken. In another novel, he wrote of a protégé of Olive Chancellor who is conscripted into the women's rights movement, but Verena falls for Basil. This author of Roderick Ransom and The Bostonians ..."

Madeline buzzed and said, "Henry James."

"How did you know that?" I asked.

Madeline shrugged and said, "I've been studying up on literature."

The next question wasn't any easier. "One of these structures that applies the fundamental theorem of arithmetic is named for Peter Shor. Donald Knuth designed one of these for matrices named X..."