The Boy With the Index Cards
My whole life fits on index cards. The parts I show people, anyway.
Alex || Debate || Identity || Opening
Ihave a system. Every morning before school I lay out three index cards on my desk — one for the thing I need to accomplish, one for the thing I need to avoid, and one for the thing I need to remember about who I’m pretending to be. The third card is the most important one. I’ve been filling it out since eighth grade, since the night I lay in my bed at two in the morning and understood something about myself that I immediately decided I needed to manage rather than feel. Manage is the word. Alex Reyes does not feel things uncontrollably. Alex Reyes has a plan for everything, including himself.
The plan for junior year at Jefferson High, Portland, Oregon, looks like this: win the regional debate qualifier in October, advance to state championships in February, get recruited to at least three college debate programs, maintain a 3.9 GPA, and make it to June with nobody — not Priya, not Dad, not my own reflection — knowing the thing I have been carefully not knowing about myself for three years. That’s the plan. Plans are good. Plans are how you move through the world without getting ambushed by it.
My name is Alex Reyes. I’m seventeen years old. My dad, Carmen, runs a restaurant called Reyes on Southeast Burnside that smells like ancho chiles and slow-cooked pork and the particular exhaustion of a man who has been working since before I was born. My mom left when I was eleven, which I’ve processed thoroughly and don’t think about. I live in a house that’s too big for two people and have a bedroom covered in debate tournament brackets and Post-it notes with argument frameworks on them and exactly one photograph that I keep face-down in my desk drawer because looking at it makes me feel things I have a card specifically for not feeling. I am, by every visible measure, an organized and functional human being. I am the kid teachers describe as driven and classmates describe as intense and my dad describes as mi hijo brillante, my brilliant son, in the voice he uses when he doesn’t know what else to say.
I am also, and this is the part that doesn’t go on any index card, absolutely terrified. Not of debate. Not of school. Not of the future, which I have planned extensively. I am terrified of the specific moment when the thing I’m managing stops being manageable. When the card doesn’t cover it. When someone looks at me — really looks, the way that certain people do, with the particular attention that cuts through the organized surface — and sees what’s underneath it. I’ve been afraid of that moment since I was fourteen. I’ve been engineering my life to prevent it. And I was, until the first week of junior year, doing a genuinely excellent job.
Then the new debate partner assignments came out.
I was sitting in Mrs. Callahan’s third-period debate class when she read the list — Mrs. Callahan, who has the voice of someone who has spent thirty years making seventeen-year-olds uncomfortable with the quality of their thinking, who wears reading glasses that she peers over when she thinks you’re being intellectually lazy, who told me last year that I was the most technically proficient debater she’d coached in a decade but that I argued like someone who was afraid to actually believe what they were saying. I’m still thinking about that. I was sitting at my usual desk, second row left, with my notebook open and my pen ready, when she said: “Alex Reyes and Jamie Okafor.”
I looked up. Jamie Okafor was looking at me from across the room with the specific expression of someone who has already formed an opinion and is deciding whether to share it. Jamie had been at Jefferson since freshman year and we had never, in two full years of attending the same school, had a real conversation. I knew the facts: Nigerian-Irish, seventeen, nonbinary — the whole school knew this because Jamie had addressed it directly at the start of sophomore year, in the middle of homeroom, in the flat and unapologetic way that certain people address things that other people make complicated. They had stood up and said, simply: I use they and them. This isn’t a debate topic. Treat it like the fact that it is. Then they had sat back down and opened their phone like they hadn’t just restructured the social atmosphere of the entire room. I had, I realized in retrospect, been paying attention to Jamie Okafor from that moment on. Paying attention the way you paid attention to something that you didn’t yet have the vocabulary to explain to yourself.
Now Jamie was my debate partner. For the entire year. Including the topic that Mrs. Callahan wrote on the board while everyone was looking at their assignments: RESOLVED: That authenticity requires courage. I read it. I read it again. I looked at the card in my head — the third one, the most important one. I thought about the thing I had been managing for three years. I thought about authenticity. I thought about courage. I thought about the specific irony of a universe that would give me that topic in the same week it gave me Jamie Okafor as my partner, and I thought: This is not going to go according to plan. And I was more right than I knew.