“Oh, Finley is going to wipe the floor with you guys,” he replied confidently. “I won’t even have to help.”
What?I thought.
“Go!” yelled Ms. Hernandez, and the room was suddenly buzzing. Colin immediately wrote down our home state. “Forty-nine to go. What’s our strategy?”
“Are you really that competitive?”
“No,” he said, writing down California, Oregon, and Washington. “Maybe. Yes. How are you on the Midwest?”
“Not as good as you think I am,” I said. “Put down Hawaii and Alaska.”
“My feeling is that you have a killer instinct. I have a sense for these things.” He was writing down states quickly as he spoke: all of New England, the Deep South, Texas, and the Gulf.
“Do the norths and souths, Dakotas and Carolinas,” I said. I noticed the girl with glasses behind him was listening to us and grabbed a pencil, gesturing not to talk. He shot me a thumbs-up, then pushed his desk closer so we were right next to each other, making room for me to add to the list. Instead, I found an empty spot on the page and started to draw a map.
You are brilliant,he scribbled, in between adding Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee.
Flattered, I started filling in the mid-Atlantic states, then moved west. I got hung up for a second on Arkansas and Michigan, but rallied. All around us people were shouting states, but we were stealthy, silent except for the scraping of his pencil and mine.
W’s andM’s,I scribbled, having run out of sure things I knew in the middle of the map.
Montana, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Minnesota,he added. Then he looked at me, eyebrows raised. I snapped my fingers.
Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah,I wrote.
“Four Corners!” he said. “Nice.”
“Shhhh!” I swatted at him with my hand.
“Oh. Sorry,” he said. I could feel him watching me as I bent my head back over the paper, thinking.
“Five minutes to go,” announced Ms. Hernandez. Colin looked back at the girls behind us.
“Keep your head in the game,” I said. “You want them to have bragging rights?”
Another smile. “I might love you,” he announced broadly. “Just saying.”
I couldn’t dwell on this—okay, maybe I did for a second—because we only had three left to go. “Come on, come on,” I said under my breath, running my pencil over my makeshift map.
Colin was biting his lip, thinking as well.Indiana,he wrote.Illinois.
One left. We looked at each other. Suddenly nothing mattered more to me than remembering this one last state.
A squeal from the laptop girls, and they huddled again over their paper. Colin looked at me. “They’re double checkers,” he said. “They’ve got it, there’s no—”
Idaho,I wrote down. I stuck up my hand. “We’re done!”
“We have a possible winner,” Ms. Hernandez said, walking over to us. “Pending my check.”
“We’re done too,” the girl with the black hair shouted.
“Too late, Kumara!” Colin hollered back. But I was only focused on Ms. Hernandez, running a finger down our list of states. When she reached the final one, she looked at me.
“He’s going to be insufferable now,” she told me. “You know that, right?”
But I didn’t care, wasn’t thinking about that one bit as she declared us the champs. Some people were clapping, some booing, but all I could focus on was Colin, grinning widely at me as he held up a palm for a high five. When I pressed my hand to his, he wrapped his fingers around mine, giving them a quick squeeze.
“Way to go, Idaho,” he said. In all the noise and commotion, I heard him as clear as day. Then I squeezed back.
