Note: if you're not acquainted with the madness of extemporaneous speaking, click the spoiler.
__
[035, Enunciate]
If there was anything that Shuqiao hated more than Jehovah’s Witnesses and vaccinations, it was Akshay Sajid.
“You can’t, like, totally write off an entire race of people,” her best friend Zoe had told her. They were seated in the back booth of Village Inn, across from the kitchen—that way, Shuqiao could watch her food being prepared and make sure that the cook wasn’t slipping poison into her baked potatoes. “And Akshay. He’s all right. He has a sexy accent.”
Shuqiao sighed and stirred the strawberry syrup coagulating at the bottom of her lemonade. It sifted in lethargic chunks through the ice––overly abundant ice, considering that the thermometer perched on the frost outside read twenty degrees. She liked that she could play God through her beverages; though it was winter outside, she could make it Malibu in her cup. She wanted a miniature Al Gore to go with the paper umbrella—he’d be happiest there, amid melting icebergs. “Do I have a sexy accent?”
“You just sound British.”
There were only so many times Shuqiao could stand being accused of Britishness before she had to obliterate Akshay and his Sexy Accent, his curry in a thermos, his Muslim Youth For Zardari pin. His destruction had to be during speech, cornered in the back of a library where he was most nervous and vulnerable—Districts, preferably, where tensions ran high and the bathroom Ritalin trade blossomed. As she sewed buttons back onto her blazer, she watched him standing by the file box, organizing. A girl with a clipboard came by and began to thumb through them.
“Don't worry, I didn’t put any bombs in there.”
She giggled madly. “I bet you totally would,” she said, voice high-pitched and hysterical. “I mean, you’re just so…bomby.”
Akshay smiled at her and she stopped, hands numb, jaw slack with adoration and longing. Shuqiao had often thought it might be nice to make a life-sized cut out of Akshay and bring it with her to rounds—it would make most of her female and a good chunk of her male competition weak at the knees. They’d be reduced to puddles of wool and chino fabric, and she could mop them to the side of the room, give a wonderful speech, and be carried off by jubilant judges to Stanford, full-ride.
Shuqiao differed from her competition in style and execution, but more importantly, she hated Akshay. She hated his well-tailored suits and his big brown eyes and his perma-tan. She hated his organization and his activism and his niceness. She hated the fact that when she came in first, he always came in second.
She hated the fact that she hated him.
“Hey, Shuqiao,” he said. “Do we still need the Huckabee stuff?”
Be the Ann Coulter, she willed herself. He’s a Muslim. Hate him. Burn his country. Be the Ann, Shuqiao. Be the Ann.
He looked at her expectantly.
Become the outspoken white lady you know you can be. Hate him. Eat him. And his curry, too.
“Uh…no, I don’t think so.”
“Okay.”
When he wasn’t looking, she slammed her forehead into the table. As sparks of pain fired through her skull, she inhaled the disinfectant smell of the plastic to rid herself of any additional brain cells that she had missed. Revenge would have to come later.
She could not summon the courage for another try until standing up on stage, with the lights in her eyes. His cologne was still pungent, even after finals.
“It’s always an Asian who wins Districts,” he whispered to her.
Outwardly, she giggled. Inwardly, she cursed his subliminal subservience and all of the other sub-s he had become without her cue. He wasn’t supposed to know that she wanted him ashamed and beaten. He wasn’t supposed to know that she wanted him ashamed and beaten, like the others, to a wool-and-chino-fabric pulp.
In third place, from New Prague, Todd Delaney!
Shuqiao’s heart fluttered a little. She always won, but it was always a relief to be past the Boundary of Embarrassment—the boundary where she wouldn’t allow her mother to put the trophy anywhere besides the basement.
In second place, from Lincoln Northwest, Shuqiao Chang!
She stared, flabbergasted, at the acne-riddled boy who handed her her trophy. Who could possibly have gotten—
First place champion in extemporaneous, from Lincoln Northwest, Akshay Sajid!
An Asian had won Districts. A Southwest Asian.
As she numbly shook his hand, she tried to imagine what could possibly have gone wrong. They had both picked topics where they would get Children of Atrocities Points—the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the Sichuan earthquakes. They had both shamelessly exploited their heritages in the pursuit of pathos. However, Shuqiao had offered properly pronounced Chinese. Was that not enough for them?
She felt utterly alone as she boarded the bus, with Zoe attached at the mouth to an orator called Oliver. She sat by herself next to the window and folded her coat on her lap, looking out the window into a decrepit parking lot overgrown with weeds. The sun had long gone down and all that was left was the flickering light from the street.
“Can I sit here, Shuqiao?”
She looked up.
Crush him, burn him, slay his children—“Sure, yeah. Go ahead.”
She put her iPod headphones in and tried radiating waves of loathing in his direction, but he blithely turned on the reading lamp above their heads and sifted through his judges’ comments. They all had blue ribbons stapled to them—blue ribbons that belonged to her. She had a boxful of them at home to prove it.
He tapped the smiley face one of the judges had scribbled on her scores and said, “You kind of pwned.”
“You won,” she said.
“I won, but that doesn’t mean I pwned.”
Bomb him, skin him, mistake him for being Afghan—
“Kind of does.”
He laughed. He had nice teeth.
She twitched involuntarily. As the bus rolled down the interstate, it became engulfed in snores. Akshay was still reading. It seemed as if they were the only two that couldn’t sleep.
She ran her thumb along the click wheel until it felt like her head was going to explode—the same effect as smashing her head into the table, but without the bruises. When she felt a headache coming on, she lowered the volume and fell herself slipping deeper and deeper into her seat.
When she awoke, the overhead lights were glaring down at her, police flashlights in a midnight drug bust.
It was then she realized where she was. She was curled up on her seat with her head draped across Akshay’s slacks. He’d pulled her coat over her, but his legs were warm and he smelled like cologne, he smelled wonderful, he smelled--
“Comfortable?” he asked, grinning.
Shuqiao wanted to die.
