Middle School Domination: Or, Suck It Beeyotch!

This is the story of a man, struggling for notice and supremacy but always playing second fiddle, finally grasping that golden ring of fame and respect. This is the story of me.

Actually, it's the story of me as a middle-schooler during a quiz bowl, but doesn't that introduction sound awesome?

Before I get into the meat of this story about me kicking some mental butt, let me set the scene. I've been friends with Hank since at least the fifth grade. I rarely beat Hank in matters of academia. That's kind of the way most of my grade school career went. I was always a smart kid, but never THE smart kid. That title always went to my red-headed buddy. Of course it never really came between us in our friendship. I'm neither really that competitive nor that petty. However, the pain did smolder inside my chest for years as I watched Hank get the better grades, higher SAT scores, and better academic awards, and all the babe action that comes with those honors, even when I put up numbers that would have bested the best of any other graduating class except a rare few in my school system's history.

Yes, my school system was really small, but that actually made it worse. If I'd gone to one of those schools where the graduating class was measured in the hundreds and not a dozen or so over a hundred, I wouldn't have expected to have a chance. After all, I wasn't really trying to be the best. I just thought it would be kind of cool if I had been the best. It wasn't like I was going to express my dominance over my fellow man through athletics. I was competent, never dominant, in the area of physicality.

Scene setting end. Meat getting begin.

Despite my perennial coming in second to Hank, there is one glorious moment in which I symbolically beat his little butt up and down the school with my brain.

Or at least my reaction time, but we'll get to that.

Every year my middle school had a Spring Olympics week. The classes were divided into teams year-round and these teams would compete in sports, silly games like egg toss, and quiz bowl. Each time an individual or group won or placed, points were added to their team's total. I can't even remember if I participated in any of the main activities, but the big deal event at the end of the week was the quiz bowl. This bad mamma jamma was worth enough that a struggling team could come from behind to win the entire competition if they weren't too far behind to begin with. I had been selected to participate in this.

During the week, my team gradually fell behind. All the cool kids were on the other seventh-grade team. My team was mostly me and a bunch of white trash kids who were already worried they were getting pregnant. It was kind of like the Bad New Bears against the rich kids from across town, or in this case, the kids whose parents drank and did drugs during gestation and those whose parents didn't.

But finally Friday came around and I nervously took my seat on the stage at the front of the cafeteria. I sat next to four other kids from my team and on the other side of the stage was the crack squad assembled by the other team. They were the favorites and the middle school bookies had set the odds pretty high against us. They had Hank AND Nick and I was a bit of an unknown quantity.

Almost from the first question, I started the epic upset that would rock my hometown for the rest of its history. For question after question I was the first to buzz in. My rapid-fire thumb was unbeatable. The much slower thumb-work from Hank and Nick just didn't compare. It was a thing of beauty. By the end of the competition, they'd trained a video camera on my buzzer hand to record the techniques that they still teach potential quiz bowl candidates to this day.

Of course I didn't answer every question that I buzzed in for. I think it may have been a nervous twitch doing much of the work for me. Occasionally we turned a question over to the other team because no one at our table knew. Sometimes a teammate would bail me out, but I actually answered a bulk of the questions that I won the opportunity to answer.

Near the end of the competition, I started to relax, but by that time, my group's point total was unreachable. The final score was something like a googeplex to three or something. I was that good. I had nearly single-mindedly (and single-thumbedly!) led our team to a come-from-behind Olympic win. As I answered the final question of the competition, my classmates stormed the stage, thrust me up on their shoulders and carried me triumphantly out the doors of the school and onto the playground. They began chanting….

Actually, they clapped politely, and I actually got a lot of genuine congratulations and compliments from my classmates who really were quite happy to win and to see a team with Hank AND Nick actually lose. But for that one shining moment I was able to revel in the academic bukkake that I had subjected Hank to and saved that memory of his shocked little face for future comfort. It wouldn't happen again very often.

Even the fact that Hank remained bitter about this loss for years was actually quite comforting. He said my teammates won the game for me by keeping me from losing our team too many points for wrong answers after I buzzed in prematurely and that I was just buzzing randomly and got lucky, but I knew the truth. For once he got to see what it was like to finish in second place. Suck it, beeyotch.

Aspects of this story (such as the level of emotional pain I actually felt) may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect.