State Championship Final — Saturday
You spend the whole year preparing for the one thing. Then the one thing is here and nothing you prepared is quite right and you have to use what you actually are instead.
Final || State || Climax || Courage
The final was in the main hall. Two hundred seats, most of them occupied — other competitors who had been eliminated but stayed to watch, coaches, parents, school administrators, a few people from the state debate association. It was the largest room I had ever debated in, and it had the specific acoustic quality of a large room waiting for something, the way concert halls had before the music started. We were affirmative. Franklin was negative. The same team that had beaten us by two points at regionals, the technically excellent team who argued from a framework so tight it was almost beautiful. Jamie and I had spent two hours the previous evening rebuilding our approach specifically for Franklin — had examined every element of what they did and had concluded that we could not out-technique them. What we could do was out-believe them. Which was the whole resolution, dressed up as strategy.
Dad was in the fourth row. I saw him when I walked in — he had closed the restaurant early, which I knew because he had texted me that morning: Rodrigo is running the lunch service. I’ll be there by ten. He was in his good shirt, the one he wore to things that mattered, sitting next to Abuela Elena who he had apparently brought without telling me, who was sitting very straight in her chair with the expression of someone who had come to witness something important. Priya was there, with Zara. Mrs. Callahan was at the coaches’ table. Two hundred people and the room with the specific acoustic quality and the two chairs at the affirmative table and the resolution on the screen at the front: RESOLVED: That authenticity requires courage. I sat down. Jamie sat beside me. “How are you doing?” they said. “Tell me something true,” I said, which was what they always said to me, returned. They looked at me. “I’m glad it’s us,” they said. “In this room. For this argument.” “Yes,” I said. “Me too.” The judges sat. The moderator stood. The round began.
I gave the constructive speech from the inside of my life. Not performing it — living it, arguing from the accumulated weight of a year of becoming more completely myself, of telling my dad and Priya and Jamie, of learning from Abuela Elena’s forty-seven years, of watching Priya say it out loud in a cafeteria at normal speaking volume, of listening to Dean say bisexual the way you said I like coffee, of filling the index card with the word Soon and meaning it. The argument landed in the room with the weight of something believed. I could feel it — the specific quality of a room that is receiving something real rather than something performed. Franklin’s negative constructive was excellent. Technically impeccable. It argued from a framework rather than from life, and the framework was strong, and for the first twenty minutes of the round I was not certain we were winning. Then Jamie stood for cross-examination. The looseness. The genuine thinking. The specific warmth of someone who was entirely themselves in the room. They dismantled the framework not by attacking it but by humanizing around it — by asking questions that pointed to the lived reality of the resolution rather than the technical architecture of the counter-argument. By the second rebuttal I could feel the room. The judges were leaning forward. When I stood for the final rebuttal I said the argument I had been building all year. Not the index-card version. The true version. The version that came from having learned, across one year of learning hard things, that authenticity was not the absence of fear and courage was not the absence of cost and that the room you most needed to be in was almost always the hardest one to enter and almost always worth it. Eight minutes. I sat down. The room was quiet in the way that rooms were quiet when a thing had been genuinely felt. Jamie was looking at me with the expression I would remember for the rest of my life — the full, open, entirely unguarded face of someone who was completely present in the best moment. The judges conferred for twelve minutes. When they announced the decision I heard it but I was also, simultaneously, aware of my dad in the fourth row standing before the announcement was finished, which was the most Carmen Reyes thing in the history of Carmen Reyes, and of Abuela Elena beside him with her hands pressed together, and of Priya and Zara and Mrs. Callahan’s over-the-reading-glasses look. We won. By three points. Jamie grabbed my hand. The room was full of sound. I held onto their hand and looked at my dad and he was looking at me with the warm, bright, proud expression that had never in my life made me feel like a version of myself but always like the real one. I thought: this is what authenticity feels like. Not the absence of the cost. The knowledge that the cost was worth it.