I Glimpsed My Future at a High School Speech Tournament

Original Oratory by James Davis

In every speech kid, I see a version of myself that I love with frightening intensity: 14 years old, a closeted freshman at Liberty High School with long curly Weird Al Yankovic hair, thick glasses, blisteringly cheap dress shoes, and something to say. 

It was the second week of the new millennium. The Columbine massacre was less than a year old, its aftershocks still rumbling in my hometown, Colorado Springs. That Columbine High School was still holding its annual speech-and-debate tournament struck my whole team as unlikely and courageous, a tribute to the value of our shared nerdy passion. Everyone had signed up to compete in at least one category, motivated by reverence, ambition, and, at least in my case, morbid curiosity. I imagined inspecting the walls for bullet holes and the corners of the halls for spent casings, a different sort of forensics.

This line of thinking was a distraction, though. Mostly, I wanted to win. Columbine was a Denver tourney, and Denver tourneys were a big deal: swanky, prestigious, competitive. I had never been to one, nor had I ever competed in this category, Original Oratory. Mostly, I had done Interpretation of Humorous Literature, putting on a little one-man show called “Bloodless Macbeth: A Humorous Reading or Skit.” It didn’t know exactly what it was, and neither did I, but I did okay with it. I placed third at a couple of novice tourneys, got Honorable Mentions at two varsity meets, but had yet to distinguish myself among the big dogs. Original Oratory, I thought, might be my chance. 

The Friday night before the tournament, I went down to the basement in my black pleather loafers to practice my speech. At the bottom of the stairs, an unplugged treadmill gathered dust, its belt stained from our dog Max’s pee from when my older brother, Mike, tried to make him run. The basement was Mike’s territory. His windowless bedroom occupied one corner, and a mess of his unfinished schoolwork, football equipment, and dime bags covered the green baize of our secondhand coin-op gulley table. To my great relief, Mike wasn’t home, leaving me free to rehearse in the empty family room.

I laid all five pages of my speech on the pool table beside Mike’s bong and set the timer on my digital watch. Despite the five A.M. wakeup call, I stayed up till at least midnight delivering the speech over and over to the basement walls. When Mike fought with Mom, he would sling the Bakelite balls into the plaster; I used the dents to practice my eye contact. My speech would be judged on thesis, evidence, word choice, and organization, but delivery was the most important, I knew.

Here’s what I remember of the speech, 25 years later:

The Gift of Individuality

Ah, individuality. Perhaps no gift is more precious. But wait a minute! Why do we treat it like a sweater from that aunt nobody likes?! [Pause for laughter.] Our individuality should be recognized for its value, both monetary and otherwise.

[walk left]

Individuality can be quite profitable. Take Macy Gray, for instance, the chanteuse whose inimitable, scratchy voice made her the subject of mockery as a kid [source: VH1, Before They Were Stars]. Or what about Tyra Banks, top modèle, whose classmates would make fun of her beanpole body and enormous forehead [ibid.]? They capitalized on what set them apart as individuals, and did it ever pay off.

[walk right]

Individuality can also help you resist people who want to take your money. I’m sure you’ve seen those horrible GAP commercials where a bunch of expressionless oatmeal-colored models sing Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” and then the screen says “Everybody in cords”? If you asked the average high schooler their opinion on school uniforms, 99 percent would probably say no way, Jose—because they want to “express themselves.” But do they really? Or do they just want to wear the uniform worn by the majority and enforced by corporate masterminds just trying to make another buck? As James Frank Dobie put it, “Conform and be dull.”

But conformity doesn’t just make you boring and take your money. [walk toward audience]

It takes your very soul, as exemplified in the poem “The Man in the Glass,” by Anonymous:

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years

And get pats on the back as you pass

But the final result will be heartache and tears

If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.

[return to center]

In conclusion: a metaphor:

A butterfly flutters toward a soothing white light. All the other bugs are doing it. Then: bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt [convulsions]. The once beautiful butterfly has become a fuming, indistinguishable corpse underneath a bug zapper. Don’t be like the butterfly who flew too close to the light. Revel in your individuality. Celebrate your true identity. And, as Fiona Apple so eloquently put it at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, “Go as yourself!” 

The real thing was better, I promise.

It had to be memorized, and it had to be under 10 minutes and 15 seconds; otherwise, I could not be ranked first in the round. By the time I finally went to bed, it clocked in around 10:10. It wasn’t perfect, but I slept with the satisfaction that I had authored it. It was complete, original, and mine. 

When my alarm screamed me awake at five A.M., I put on my not-altogether-very-formal tournament garb: an orangey plaid button-down tucked into wheat-colored corduroys fastened with a brown web belt that clashed with my black loafers. No blazer, no tie. I scarfed a bowl of Great Grains, threw on my thrifted houndstooth overcoat and backpack, hopped into a teammate’s car, and boarded the District 20 schoolbus idling in a Ramada Inn parking lot, packed full of teens from four different high schools, all of them in blazers, most of them in ties, spewing exhaust into the freezing morning air. The sound of my speech reciting itself in my head drowned out whatever was on the radio. 

When I remember forensics, I picture the Columbine cafeteria on a Saturday morning, suddenly and completely taken over by teenagers reciting their speeches to the walls between piles of backpacks and snacks and good-luck stuffed animals and Rubbermaid tubs of evidence for cross-examination debate, waiting for the nine A.M. Round One postings, which they will scan for their speaker numbers and disperse, antlike, to their sections’ designated classrooms, where they will each speak, clap for each other, and hope for the One, a digit their judge marks on a ballot designating them as the best, the funniest, the most eloquent. 

At the heart of every speech kid is a conflict between competition and care. Their world runs on ratings, rankings, ballots, and trophies. They disparage rivals who break to semis despite the corniness of their interpretation of ’night Mother or the shallowness of their views of South American trade policy. And yet, of the thousands of students in their high schools, they alone have read ’night Mother or have anything to say about South American trade policy. They care about clarity and storytelling and connection. They care about foreign and domestic policy, utilitarianism versus altruism, definition versus evaluation, comedy versus tragedy. They care about domestic violence, terminal illness, genocide, and structural racism. Most of all, they care about their teammates. They melt into little business-casual cuddle puddles on the cafeteria floors. They watch each other’s final rounds and applaud raucously at the awards ceremonies often beginning well past nine P.M. They share hotel rooms and bus seats and secrets. They cry into each other’s shoulder pads when they don’t break to semis or finals or nationals. They know the depths of this sorrow runs deeper than this one exclusion. 

Around the time I turned 11 or 12, Mike started calling me his little sister. He was disgusted by my soft, unathletic body, my love of jigsaw puzzles, my belief that it was past time our country had a woman president. He and his handsome friends would corner me at the bus stop and squirt lemonade onto my glasses. Eventually, I became too inured to wipe the syrup off the lenses. I was far from popular in middle school, but I was mostly left alone. My only real bullies were my brother’s gang, who, unfortunately, followed me home. My bedroom adjoined the driveway, where they would play shirts-and-skins two-on-two with the hoop mounted above my mom’s garage and shout taunts through my window whenever they caught me watching. “Like what you see?” some shirtless Justin would ask, tracing his nipple until I grew so full of rage at him and myself that I punched through the screen.

When I saw pictures of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, I saw my brother and his friends. They dressed similarly, backward baseball caps and Old Navy plaids unbuttoned over Unionbay t-shirts. I thought about their delight in cruelty, their love of first-person shooters. Their smiles were sneers. I was glad they were dead. I’d wished I’d killed them myself.   

But then I thought about punching through that screen. Or the time I lost it in the back of the R.V. on the way to my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, whaling on Mike in a sort of fugue state, snapped by some forgotten jab. I knew what it was to hold something unspeakable, to be pushed too far.

My speaker number at Columbine was 26B, one of about 70 Original Orators. I would give my speech in three prelim rounds for three different judges as part of three different groups of five other speakers, some of them very good. Luckily, tournament rules kept me from competing in the same prelim section as 26A, Maria Bennett, a Liberty junior whose speech was about persevering through the adversity of a dance injury and nurturing her other talents. She had placed in every varsity tournament that season, and she was poised to continue her streak. Each judge would rank the group of six from one (the best) to one of three fours and assign us speaker points from 50 to 35. The six orators with the lowest cumulative ranks at the end of the prelims, with ties broken by speaker points, would advance to Finals. 

Round One was in a sunny room with Spanish conjugation posters. I wrote my name, code, and speech title on the whiteboard with a black dry-erase marker. First in the speaker order, I took my place at the front of the classroom and got it out of the way, managing not to stumble once for the entirety of the speech. While I spoke, I watched the middle-aged white judge give time signals—three fingers for seven minutes elapsed, two for eight, one for nine. My speech ended right when he gave a fist for ten minutes. I soaked in the polite applause and sat down to enjoy the rest of the speeches. One of them was an incredibly moving story of the speaker’s childhood in Vietnam, the legacy of the French and American wars there and how they affected her family. She won the round, I was certain.

Round Two was in a choir room with tiered seating and no desks. The first speaker, a greasy-haired white boy, clutched a few sheets of notebook paper and droned a speech in favor of the legalization of marijuana that he had very obviously written in green magic marker. Everyone else had their speeches memorized. He seemed to be competing under duress. It was as if my brother had been conscripted onto the forensics team as part of some community service. He saw speech-and-debate as he saw me: derisively feminine. He bragged about the time he improvised a mock Poetry Interp performance in his English class after a female classmate had practiced her competitive interpretation of “Annabel Lee” for extra credit. “I can get up and pretend to be tragic, too,” he said after she ended her piece. Then why don’t you? his teacher asked, expecting, probably, for him to either chicken out or make an ass of himself. Little did she know how much he enjoyed the latter. He got up in front of the class and free-styled some lines about wilting flowers and bittersweet kisses, punctuating each sentence with a sweeping arm gesture or arabesque. To hear him tell it, the class’s applause after he took his final bow was deafening—and I didn’t doubt him. Had my brother had any actual interest in performing, he would’ve kicked ass at Humorous Interp. I told him as much, not to recruit him, but to corner him into some sort of appreciation for what I loved. If it worked, he kept it to himself.

Between rounds, I cruised the halls of Columbine, the pleather of my loafers digging into my heels. The library was still under renovation, paint tarps and plywood panels marring the face of the school’s otherwise spotless, airport-like interior, its almost Grecian color scheme of light blue and silver. I didn’t know a school could be this beautiful—how wide and clean and sunny its hallways, how spacious and modern its restrooms, how posh its jewelry-making studio! I had only ever competed in tournaments in Colorado Springs and farther south in Pueblo. Pueblo’s high schools seemed out of the ’50s; Colorado Springs’s, the ’80s. Columbine felt like it came from the future.

Round Three must have been in an art history room, for there was a poster of Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night, unless, I thought, this school also taught Dutch, which wouldn’t have surprised me. 

It was in this round that one of the speeches finally mentioned the massacre. I had expected more of this and was pleasantly surprised by my competitors’ reticence on the topic. I couldn’t quite suss out what this speaker, let’s call her 14C, was arguing by bringing it up, but the rhetorical gesture was, essentially, wow. “Look where we’re sitting today,” 14C effused. “Doesn’t that say it all?” 

I was confident I placed higher than 14C—her and Marijuana Boy—but the rest was up in the air. My respect for my competitors grew with every round. They were sharply dressed, smart, funny, sociable kids, most of them older than me and most of them girls, juniors and seniors at their schools all over the Front Range. They spoke eloquently about ideas I’d only ever heard discussed on 20/20: race, consumerism, environmental peril, foreign policy, workaholism, how to live a life well lived. Their brightness and sincerity were better responses to the shooting than any memorial I could have imagined.

By the end of Round Three, about five P.M.., the sun had mostly set over the Rockies. Satisfied but pessimistic about my hopes for advancement to Finals, I walked down the huge set of stairs to the cafeteria, which looked like a mall food court with all the storefronts grated. I gravitated back to my team’s tables, empty for now. Everyone was off in their own little worlds, finishing the prelims of their own little categories: Extemporaneous Speaking, Dramatic Interp, Lincoln-Douglas Debate. In the cafeteria men’s room, I adjusted my web belt, pushed my hair out of my eyes, breathed on my glasses and untucked my plaid to wipe the lenses. I bought a slice of cheese pizza from the Snacks table, chomped on some chocolate-covered espresso beans, and waited for Finals to be posted. Who knows? I thought. Stranger things had happened.

The Thanksgiving before the tournament, Mike got me drunk for the first time. My mother and soon-to-be stepfather were off on vacation with his family in Durango, leaving us full reign over her house, where it was Mike’s wont to throw keggers in her absence. In the empty garage, surrounded by a circle of dozens of Liberty football players and cheerleaders and burnouts and high-achieving stoners, I downed a foamy red Solo cup of Fat Tire, relaxing my throat as Mike instructed so the beer could pass freely into my body. His cheering when I dropped the empty cup was more intoxicating than the alcohol. His friends chanted James, James, James, and I felt like I did onstage at the end of a forensics tournament: accomplished, included, free.

What I didn’t want to admit about my brother at the time was how much I loved him, how much I wanted to be him. He was beautiful in high school, a varsity offensive lineman, well-built and mischievously handsome. He did not have my scoliosis; his acne was less severe than mine; his hair was straight, ruly, center-parted, mahogany brown. I would overhear girls in my class giggling about him during study hall—perhaps they didn’t know he was my brother, our last name being so common and our bodies differing so markedly. But in that garage, for the first time in years, I felt like his brother, not just in blood but in spirit.

Later that night, after three more cups, I was ready to barf. Mike taught me how to do this, too. Bent over Mom’s kitchen sink, he stuck his first two fingers instructively down his throat and regurgitated the better part of the Thanksgiving dinner we’d eaten together at our father and stepmother’s house that afternoon. Mike ran the tap, flicked on the garbage disposal, and left the sink so I could take my turn.

I woke up Friday on the living room couch next to a cluster of half-empties on the coffee table and my brother’s handsome Iranian friend Arya, who had passed out shirtless on our fireplace. “The brick feels good,” Arya explained. “Cold. Nothing worse than hot when you’re hungover. And nothing better than hair of the dog.” I looked over at Max, our black Lab mix, with a touch of concern before Arya picked up a Solo cup with an inch of ale flattening at the bottom and downed it like a shot. In the center of his chest was a deep concavity. I imagined filling that concavity with beer, lapping it up like Max did the night before when my brother filled a frisbee and set it on the ground of the basement like a water dish. Max got so drunk he started headbutting the closed door of my brother’s bedroom, desperate for the dark and quiet. I laughed. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Arya picked up another half-empty and handed it to me. “Down the hatch,” he ordered, and I obeyed. 

Lying down in a pile of bookbags, blankets, and peacoats in my team’s corner of the Columbine cafeteria, unshod, waiting for Finals to post, I took a moment to appreciate that I was coming of age at the dawn of a new millennium. The VHS was giving way to the DVD. The 13-note Nokia ringtone had invaded every public space. Britney Spears had declared she was “not that innocent.” I, too, was changing. 

I’d been growing my hair out since the beginning of freshman year, when I’d been cast as Riff, a guitar-toting beatnik in the fall musical, The Nifty Fifties. At the first read-through, I hammed up every syllable of dialogue like Ned Flanders’ dad. In rehearsals, I belted all four lines of my solo in “Rebel with a Cause.” One of two freshman given a speaking role, I got taken in by the theatre and forensics upperclassmen as a sort of pet. By January, my frizzy pouf had grown to a weighty, chestnut, ringleted mane I let my new friends run their fingers through. 

One of those upperclassmen was Matt Lira, a senior and speech team captain who T.A.’d for my Honors Algebra II class and took me under his wing. Matt competed in Foreign Extemp, the most hardcore of the speech categories. Extempers spent all tourney in the school library (or, in this case, the teacher’s lounge); for each round, they drew three choices from a pool of prompts, picked the one they wanted to speak on, and then had 30 minutes to research, outline, and rehearse a seven-minute speech, which they finally recited to a judge. “How will Ecuador’s economy react to the transition to the dollar?” “What is the future of English foxhunting?” That kind of thing. The best extempers’ delivery sounded completely fluid, as if they had written, revised, and memorized their speeches months in advance. Matt was one of those extempers. He’d gone to Nationals twice. He told me we were going together that summer.

Maria Bennett and Matt loathed each other—something to do with a friend of Maria’s whom Matt had spurned—and, because I had become Matt’s protégé, Maria was not too fond of me, either.

Around 6:30 P.M., when the O.O. Final Round roster was finally taped to the big plate-glass windows of the cafeteria, it was Maria who joined the mad huddle to scan the six finalists’ codes while I lay on the team coat pile and watched, too unsure of my odds to risk the disappointment. For about a minute, the crowd jockeyed for view, the din of the cafeteria punctuated every few seconds by a squeal or “Yes!” Maria’s voice was not among the squealers. She shouldered through the others and limped back to our team’s outpost.

“Check the posting,” she said, taking off her heels, her eyes refusing to meet my own.

By the time I made it up to the little white sheet of computer paper, the crowd had dispersed. Fifth on the list was a 26—and a B next to the number. 

I stared at it for a while. At first, I still thought it was Maria who’d made the cut and I had misremembered my own code. Maybe her disappointment and shoe-doffing were an elaborate ruse designed to humble me. But it didn’t take long to set in: 26B was me. It had been all along. And there I was, in Finals, at Columbine, with a speech I’d never competed with, never even rehearsed with our coach. 

The elation of this news was tempered by the realization that I had work to do, and soon—Finals started at 6:45. I noted the room number, found Matt and threw my arms around him (he’d made Extemp finals, of course), slipped my loafers back over my raw ankles, and offered Maria some breezy condolence before I clambered up the stairwell to give my speech. From the balcony above the cafeteria, I heard her let out a deep, primal “GODDAMMIT.” And I didn’t blame her.

I don’t have the ballots anymore, but I do remember my rankings for each of the prelims: one, two, two. A cume of five, just low enough to make the final cut. Maria got a one, two, three. There’s something sweetly sad about my retention of these numbers, evidence of a worth I still struggle to internalize. The facts are still so meaningful, so helpfully determinate of how good I was and, perhaps, still am.

It was around this time that I began to realize my memory made me beautiful in a way my brother’s social skills and athletic prowess and good looks made him beautiful. I had no trouble learning my lines for the Nifty Fifties, off-book by the first read-through. I soaked up the vocab lists for my French classes like a nice crouton in a crock of onion soup. And beyond words, I remembered feelings. I remembered the rules of the gameshows my brother would set up for me in the basement of the house dad and mom shared before the divorce, throwing paper airplanes at rows of toys worth 10, 20, or 50 points the farther they were from the staircase. I remembered him playing host, like Mike O’Malley on Nickelodeon’s Get the Picture. “I wrote this song,” he sang to me in the middle of the show, “to make you hap-peeee!” And I remember feeling very, very happy.

But I couldn’t remember feeling anything about Columbine—the shooting, not the tournament. Or, rather, I could remember feeling nothing: a certain nothing, an emptiness I have come to know intimately over the course of the 574 school shootings since April 20, 1999. It’s an emptiness roughly the shape of the cave in Arya’s chest. It’s an emptiness I have filled with beer and smoke and forensics scores from 25 years ago. It is beautiful in its inwardness, its frailty. And it’s never going away. 

The final round was, oddly, in the smallest room of any of the four rounds I competed in that day, a windowless nondescript mathematical-seeming room tucked away in some corner of the second floor. Of all the categories in speech-and-debate world, Original Oratory has among the most competitors but among the fewest observers. They flock in droves to final rounds in Humor or Drama Interp—people want to laugh, to cry. O.O., at its best, makes you go huh!, a sensation with a small cadre of appreciators. Such a cadre filled this modest classroom, making it seem even smaller than it was.

I was the fifth speaker of six in the final round and the only boy, including the panel of three judges. All six speakers were white. The judges took their time penciling in our names, speaker numbers, and speech titles in their packet of ballots before the oldest judge finally called the room to order with a round of applause for the finalists for advancing. She identified which of the judges would be giving time signals, the woman seated farthest in the back, and the round began.

The first speaker was a bob-haired, pants-suited gal I’d had in my first round. She was great—her speech had to do with not wasting too much time at work and spending more time with your family. “You can’t take it with you,” basically, was her thesis. She had the warm, professional cadence of a teenage Diane Sawyer. I felt proud to see her there, proud to be among such good company.

The third speaker was a tall, athletic blonde in a gray skirt-suit. Her speech was on the dangers of consumerism. Midway through, she cited the same GAP commercial my speech did, for more or less the same rhetorical effect: “Don’t be like those weirdos.” I saw the first speaker’s eyes dart toward me when the third speaker made the reference. She remembered my speech from Round One, I deduced, flattered.

The fourth speaker was dressed in a black top, gray skirt, black leggings, and black Doc Martens. Her speech was about the plight of the American Indian. It brought up the Trail of Tears and broken treaties and her experience volunteering on a reservation. It ended with about 10 seconds of her making the sound of a drum gradually fading into silence: “RUM pa-pa PUM, pa-pa pum, pa-pa pum.” She looked toward the carpet as her foot punctuated the final pum.

Thunderous applause. 

Two minutes or so of chicken-scratching while each judge fills out her ballot. 

The syncopated whisper of paper against paper as each turns to the fifth page of the packet. 

Finally, one calls for 26B. 

I take the front of the classroom crowded with applauding spectators. 

“Judges ready?” I ask, de rigueur. They nod. 

“Audience ready?” I ask. Unanimous nods.

Begin time.

I gave the speech I memorized, of course. But here’s the speech I should have given:

The Gift of Individuality

About a year ago, my brother pushed me down the stairs into our basement.

Well, kicked, actually. We were at mom’s house that night. She was working the graveyard shift at Lockheed and left Mike and me with a blank check for Domino’s, as usual. When the delivery guy rang the doorbell, I couldn’t find the check. I remembered calling in the order, cradling the receiver in my shoulder, writing down the total in digits and letters. I checked the dining table, the kitchen counters, in between the couch cushions, all the usual places.

The doorbell kept ringing. 

Mike stomped up, answered the door, asked the delivery guy to hold on, and told me to go downstairs to get a 20-dollar bill from a birthday card in his bedroom—he’d turned 16 a few days earlier. 

As I lifted my leg to step over the dog gate, Mike kicked me squarely in the ass.

I fell—onto the gate first, then sideways down the narrow well, landing against the treadmill at the bottom.

I could stand. I could walk to his room to find the card on his nightstand and pluck the bill from the sleeve with my grandmother’s handwritten declaration of pride. Holding onto the railing, I could walk back up the stairs and give my brother his money for our dinner. I could take a couple of slices out of the box to my room. I could lock the door.

Why did he do it? You might ask.

Because he could. Because he didn’t really like me all that much. Because somewhere, somehow, he learned that enacting his anger is better than questioning it, holding it in. Because my back was turned. Because no one was there to stop him.

It doesn’t matter why he did it. It matters that I survived. 

I don’t remember crying. I don’t remember hating my brother or wanting to hurt him back. What I remember feeling most distinctly was—nope. Nope: that most positive of negations, with its terminal plosive. No-p.

This won’t do at all, I thought.

I started spending more time in after-school activities:

• Theater rehearsals, where I was funny
• Forensics practice, where I was heard
• French club meetings, where I was talentueux
• AP study groups, where I was smart
• Choir trips, where I was loved.

Mom told me she was proud I was coming out of my shell. She didn’t know—and neither did I, exactly—how necessity drove the molting. I wasn’t going to be something to kick down the stairs. I couldn’t be.  

My brother once told me he got made fun of in fifth grade for saying his favorite snack was Wheat Thins. Then, he stopped eating Wheat Thins. This, I think, more than anything, explains why he kicked me down the stairs. He wanted me to stop liking my favorite snacks, in a matter of speaking, because they’re not everyone else’s favorite snacks. Because some jerk might make fun of me if he saw them in my lunchbox. 

Let me be crystal clear: I hate Wheat Thins. They are somehow both bland and too salty, and they cut the roof of my mouth. But you know what? I have never felt sorrier for my brother than when I learned he was too scared of another boy’s opinion to hold on to his own. I wish him Wheat Thins by the boxful. 

And me? I’ve decided to eat whatever crackers I want, with stinky French cheeses. I am going to love what I love, think how I think, be who I am. I am going to listen to the Rent soundtrack on repeat and wear my mother’s magenta sports coat and get a full-ride to college. I am going to be the weirdest, smartest, gayest James Davis there ever was—and there have been lots of us. And no matter how far anyone kicks me down, I will always get back up.

I have just finished reciting the poem by Anonymous when I see the head judge hold up one bent finger: 30 seconds till 10 minutes elapsed. I didn’t account for so much laughter. My speech takes on a new urgency. I see the 10-minute fist right at the end of the bug-zapper routine. As I utter the very last word of my speech, “yourself!”, I hear the head judge say “STOP,” the regulation signal that the grace period has elapsed. Any speaker who exceeds those 15 seconds cannot be the One.

After the applause dies down, I return to my desk and ask for my time, a standard nicety of forensics etiquette.

“10 minutes and 15 seconds,” the head judge says, matter-of-factly. Then: “Don’t worry. You won’t be zapped for that.”

The rum-pa-pa-pum speech came in second.

I hope everyone has experienced something like the sweet exhaustion of riding a schoolbus back from a speech tournament they’ve just won—taking off cheap dress shoes, blisters on heels, and lying across an acrid-smelling vinyl seat cover in the dark while the radio plays Top 40. Dehydrated, ripe with cortisol-rich B.O., I clutched a blue-and-silver first-place trophy the size of my forearm and read my ballots’ glowing comments by the light of passing street lamps. 

I went straight ones in Finals. That never happened, especially not to freshmen at Denver tournaments. The judges said I was a natural: Everything worked. 

“You’ve got it goin’ on!” one of them wrote. 

That night, Columbine High School became a site of transformative joy. It was where I learned I was good. It was where I fell in love with myself. Squinting in the lights onstage during the awards ceremony while each of the other five finalists’ names was read off before mine, I could catch the first few glimpses of a future in which I became my own person, loved by beautiful boys instead of ignored or tormented by them. A future in which my brother would become a friend, make amends for the ways he hurt me, and name his son after me. The brightness of this light washed out the tragedy such that I was slow to grieve what happened there, the senseless, brutal violation of children’s lives. I was so focused on saving my own.