The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [143]
Students from ten schools packed the auditorium; the schools from the morning round hadn’t scored enough points to threaten Strattville’s contention for the title. Students practiced trivia or did homework as they waited for the moderator to take the stage. Near Eli’s team, in the back of the room, a few students from another school practiced slapping imaginary buzzers.
The moderator called the teams to the stage and explained the competition format. Questions were worth ten points apiece. Each round would consist of two sets of toss-up questions, during which teams would buzz in to answer, and two series of questions directed to each team separately. Each student could compete in only one round. Because Strattville didn’t have enough members for four students to compete in each round, however, two of its groups, including Eli’s, had to proceed with only three students.
Eli’s group was up first. Eli sat in front of the buzzer, hoping that his round would be a geography round. As the moderator began with science questions, Eli’s team was silent. Then, “What is a talisman?” Eli buzzed in, then hesitated. What was the judge looking for? “A . . . charm?” Eli asked.
“Correct. Next question. “What’s the derivative of yx = 19 with respect to x?”
Buoyed by his success, Eli buzzed in quickly. “-y over x.”
“Incorrect.” Eli kicked himself. He hadn’t answered with respect to x.
His teammates answered a few other questions. When the judge directed questions to Eli’s team, Eli leaned forward in concentration.
“Who was the only nonelected president?”
“Ford,” Eli answered with confidence.
“Correct.” Eli’s teammates patted him on the shoulders.
“Where do Creoles live?”
“Louisiana,” Eli said.
In the final toss-up round, the moderator finally asked the type of question Eli had been waiting for. “What is the largest artificial lake in the United States?”
Eli slapped the buzzer. “Mead,” he answered.
“Correct.”
When Eli’s group returned to the audience, teammates cheered. The coach said they had tied for the highest points scored in the round. Eli was slightly disappointed, though. He could have done better. As the second round began, Eli was dismayed to realize that this was the round that focused on geography questions. He answered every geography question correctly in his head. On stage, Arrington, the perennial champion, wasn’t dominating the questions. Frostpike, another nearby school, was pulling ahead. Soon, it was apparent that Strattville and Frostpike were the leaders.
“In the Old Testament, what is the fourth of the Ten Commandments?” the moderator asked. From his seat in the auditorium, Eli triumphantly raised his fist in the air. Strattville’s most devout Catholic happened to be on stage. She buzzed in immediately. “Thou shalt honor your mother and father,” she said.
“Incorrect.”
“What?” murmured Eli and his teammates.
“No, she’s definitely right!” a Catholic girl whispered to Eli. As the game progressed, Eli’s teammates tapped their cell phones. Apparently there was some debate over the text of the fourth commandment, but enough sources agreed with Strattville that they believed they had grounds to contest if needed. For now, it was so unlikely that ten measly points would matter that they remained silent in their seats.
After the last round, Eli and his team were on edge while the moderator conferred with the judges. They hadn’t kept track—the questions passed too quickly—but they thought they had done well. They knew they had beaten Arrington, which was a major victory in itself. In fact, they thought, they might even have won for the first time in school history.
For Eli, this moment was bittersweet. He would miss Academic Bowl. Nowhere else did he feel like a leader, the kind of guy to whom people turned for advice and companionship. He hardly saw his Spanish camp friends anymore. He hadn’t been able to reach Dwight in months.