Perla slammed her palms down on her knees. “Hari, if you buzz that thing one more time, I will shove it down your throat.”
Hari’s thumb lovingly circled the buzzer’s button, poised to strike. “If you threaten the examiners, you will be disqualified.”
“Are the examiners going to go apeshit on a Taboo buzzer?” Perla snapped.
Meg daintily straightened the stacks of sample questions and realigned her highlighters. “I know it lights up your limbic system, but swearing is also an immediate disqualification.”
Perla threw her hair behind her ears and stared at the door as though imagining storming through it.
For privacy and comfortable seating, Meg and Hari had set us up in the lounge on the uninhabited top floor of the residence hall. I hadn’t realized how acclimated I was to the noise of my floor until we stepped off the elevator into silence. The blank-chalkboard doors that lined the hallway had no voices or music pulsing behind them. There were no muffled footsteps on the carpet. Even the communal bathroom was locked. Meg said that it’d keep anyone from trying to live up here.
The lounge was almost identical to the one on my floor, except that the walls were burnt orange instead of yellow. It was like studying inside of a giant pumpkin.
Meg and Hari had seated themselves in two of the room’s armless upholstered chairs, with a squat table set between them. My teammates and I sat across from them, cross-legged on the floor, with our binders piled out of reach against the wall.
Ten minutes into our mock Melee, I missed my binder.
Fifteen minutes in, I would have killed for it.
“Which language takes its roots from migratory farmers and Southwest Asian traders?” Hari asked Kate.
“Swahili.”
Hari’s thumb circled the buzzer again. “Name three of the languages from which Swahili takes its roots.”
“Arabic. Portuguese.” Kate rocked forward, the muscles in her shoulders roiling. Her narrow face started to purple. “French?”
Meep.
“The question passes to Galen,” Hari said.
This was my least favorite rule of the Melee. Not only could the categories switch on a dime, but questions answered incorrectly could get thrown to another team member, so there was no time to relax. It was a randomized attack. Even the smallest distraction could tank your score.
“Arabic, Portuguese, and German,” Galen said.
“Correct.” Hari glanced over at Meg, who marked Galen’s new score down in a notebook.
“Switch categories,” Meg said. She and Hari leaned left in sync like they were controlling a mecha robot together. Meg planted her finger on the page they were looking for. “Art history. Hunter, please name three of the members of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers credited with the creation of the impressionist movement.”
Hunter raked his hands through his hair. “Are all of the questions going to ask for three examples?”
“Would you prefer that they ask for all of the examples?” Hari asked.
“Nope. Three is great,” Hunter said quickly. “Impressionists: Monet, Degas,… Pissaro?”
Damn. I definitely hadn’t known that one. I made a note on the single piece of plain paper that the counselors had allowed us to keep. Leigh had titled her page “Additional Study Needed.”
I called mine “Crap You Don’t Know.”
“For full credit, you will need to know the first name of those artists as well,” Meg said to Hunter, wagging a highlighter at him. “Can you list them now?”
He shook his head and leaned over his list of unknown crap. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Jams bump their knees together.
“Ever,” Hari said, pulling my attention forward. “For what painting was the impressionist movement named?”
“Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise?” I swallowed. Even from however many hundreds of miles away, I was sure Grandmother Lawrence could feel me phrasing a statement as a question. Lawrences did not uptalk. It made one appear “flighty and uneducated.”
“Follow-up question,” Meg said. “Which French critic observed Impression, Sunrise to be more of a sketch than a finished painting?”
I tried to picture my binder and the notes I had jotted down while Cornell’s cocounselor had ignored us in our art history “class.” But nothing was there.
“I-I don’t know.” The words left my throat in a painful dribble, like water wrung from a towel. I closed my eyes against the sound of the meep.
“The question is passed to Leigh,” Hari said.
Leigh swung her head, her eyes focused on the carpet. “I don’t know the answer either.”
One of Hari’s eyebrows twitched as he checked Meg’s notes to make sure that our scores were updated. “The question is discarded after two failed attempts. The correct answer was Louis Leroy.”
Right. Like LeRoy Hall near the arboretum. I had made a particular note about that because I was almost positive that LeRoy Hall was one of the arts buildings. Balls.
“Switch categories,” Meg chirped. “Philosophy.”
She and Hari leaned in unison again, finding the proper quiz sheet in their stacks.
The mock Melee went on for another forty-five demoralizing minutes. Every ring of the buzzer set my teeth on edge. My Crap You Don’t Know page was filled to bursting with notes that got smaller and more squished together until I was writing upside down in the margins.
Finally, Hari tucked the buzzer into the pocket of his jeans. “That’s enough for today.”
Kate flopped forward, throwing her arms out as she pressed her face into the carpet and groaned. Jams scrubbed his face with his hands. Perla let out a series of sighed curses.
Hari frowned down the line of us, making sure everyone got their turn to feel his radiating disappointment. “An actual Melee skirmish can last anywhere from an hour to three hours. Right now, none of you had a percent-correct high enough to carry this team to a second round. Keep that in mind when you’re studying.”
“Tomorrow is a free day,” Meg said, as the team blearily went to retrieve our binders. “We’ll have check-ins throughout the day so we don’t lose anyone, but we won’t have a team meeting and you’re totally encouraged to take a full mental health day. There will be some field day games out, but it’s your day and you’re welcome to relax. You also have the rest of tonight free. It’s taco night in the dining hall!”
“I hate when they play good cop, bad cop,” Galen said, leading the way out of the room while Meg and Hari stayed to clean up the lounge. “It makes them feel like my parents.”
“I think my brain is leaking out of my ears,” Hunter said. “That’s not great.”
Leigh skipped forward, pressing the button on the elevator. “We’ve only been here for a week; of course we aren’t ready for competition. None of the teams would be ready to compete yet.” She stretched her arms over her head. “The dining hall can’t screw up tacos, right?”