scio-is-a-story

[scio-is-a-story]

West 12/14

West’s officers had just sent out the roster for Regionals. The one-team thing at Regionals was infuriating! Jess supported more high schools joining Science Olympiad, of course, it was an awesome opportunity and needed to be shared, but seriously, was it so impossible for New Jersey to create more spots for teams?

It had been bad enough the year before, when there were very few of Jess’s events - there were always only 12 events total at Regionals, such was the struggle of New Jersey where there weren’t enough event supervisors, like, ever. For anything.

Last year there were mainly events she didn’t do at Regionals, and she got thrown into WIDI which she didn’t really do and they did very badly, but at least everybody on the team had been there.

And now barely a week after their first Regional, people were being cut again.

Okay, so they weren’t proper cuts, the people who didn’t go to Regionals would still be able to try out for States, the team would definitely change as people whose events were none of them at Regionals - people who were very good at what they did - proved how necessary they were. Still, Regionals was supposed to be that competition that everyone got to go to if they passed first cuts, it was supposed to be a reward for getting past the first step!

This Regionals, the events were Anatomy, Astronomy, Chem Lab, Disease, Forensics, Heli, Microbe, Rocks, Towers, and WIDI. Plus Picture This and Protein as trial events. So, they had made their team of 18 people, and she was assigned to not only Heli - Heli she could do - but Picture This with Leo? Seriously?

Why were they even putting regular team members in the alternate spots, didn’t they remember the alternates weren’t counted as part of the 18? This should have been a way of getting more people involved, and here they were wasting those spots.

She angrily messaged Brian.

Jess looked down at her messages after sending them all. She might have sworn a few too many times.

“Brian what the fuck?”

“Brian wtf is up with the Regionals teams?”

“Ohmygosh Brian why the fuck am I doing Picture This with Leo I hardly know him. I’m not against Leo but I can’t fucking figure out that event in this little time without having a partner I’ve at least fucking worked with before.”

“Wtf you don’t need to put people on the main team in the trial events.”

“There were only fucking 18 people on that list you can have alternates separate I want you to fix that Brian wtf is going on.”

Well, Science Olympiad, people always got invested in it and people always got pissed as a result. Jess just hoped Brian could tell she was angry for the good of the team, and that was all. She would build her heli so that would beat East. And then she would figure out if and how she was going to do this Picture This stuff, and with who. Annoying, but she supposed somebody had to do it.

All there was to do was wait for a response from Brian or somebody else in power.

[scio-is-a-story]

East 12/3

Continued from West 11/22

Well. Apparently today was Cornell.

Lilibeth had very much wanted their team to go to Cornell, she had wanted them to go to any pre-winter break invitational, really, the Ivy League label didn’t actually matter.

All of East’s officers wanted them to go to more invitationals, of course. They had discussed that over and over in the group chat, they had all promised it back in their campaign speeches, they had really planned to do it... but they hadn’t.

MIT Regionals, of course, anyone would go to if they possibly could. Any team from anywhere, including a vast majority of those from freaking California.

Princeton and UPenn, okay, they had managed to get into, but those were local, and later in the season, and new so who knew if they’d actually be worthwhile competition.

Cornell was a reasonably well known early invitational, but any of them would’ve done. But of course they had no money. All year last year, everyone had said it didn’t matter about money, that wasn’t an object they had plenty, that it was all extra because they hadn’t been having to pay for Nats, that next year’s officers could focus not on making money but on using it for stuff. And yet in fact they couldn’t afford any of the invitationals in upstate New York. They didn’t have enough money for buses.

Lilibeth should have been studying anyway. Sure, they went to invitationals so they could compare themselves to other teams before they got to competition, and that was supposed to be extra motivation to study harder sooner, but all fall was still studying time. They needed to be working regardless.

But Lilibeth was too distracted by Facebook. West had been posting to a photo album - that was how she knew Cornell was today, it had originally been in her calendar but she’d taken it out when she realized they weren’t going.

Lilibeth was sure it’d hurt her more if she went through the entire album - she’d compare how well West was doing, how organised, how prepared they were, with how little motivation her team seemed to have - she’d see how successful and happy West was and experience it like a premonition of what March 7th was going to be - even of what May 21st was going to be!

But Sam was tagged in it - that was interesting. That was how the album had come up in her feed. Lilibeth hadn’t realised Sam did Science Olympiad, they’d always just been the sweet new kid at yoga - the only other kid at her particular yoga class, really. Well, this was something else to talk to Sam about?

Lilibeth tapped through the album. Jess had created it, although there were several other contributors, she noticed, and smiled. Jess seemed to come up a lot this year - that was fine, Lilibeth liked finding other people who also cared about Science Olympiad - she just hoped she’d be able to beat Jess when it came down to it, at competition.

It began with FOMO-inducing photos of stuff around Cornell. Goofy photos of other teammates, and donuts, and people looking at laptops and binders and textbooks - pretending to study for the camera? Studying very hard? It didn’t really matter, it was impressive either way. The effect was still there. Several screenshots from Snapchat, with funny captions, and a couple of photos of awards, because there always were. And that was impressive, too - Cornell was pretty tough to medal at, Lilibeth had heard. But they seemed to have a reasonable number of people up there.

It wasn’t just the photos about Cornell that were FOMO-inducing - their entire team, their entire existence, made Lilibeth wish her team would have a more inclusive environment.

She ex’d out of the album, and was about to close Facebook.

Lilibeth reconsidered, and sent Jess a friend request. Maybe it would be accepted, who knew? They had plenty of mutual friends, at least, even if they didn’t hang out personally.

Lilibeth couldn’t singlehandedly get East’s team to be like that at Regionals, let alone go back in time and get her team to have enough money to go to Cornell. But she was now extra motivated to study, for her part.

[scio-is-a-story]

West 12/2

Continued from East 11/24

“Leo, who should I give the permission slip to?”

“I can take it. But, seriously, Jess? This was due 2 days ago, you know that. You’re a junior, come on.” He flipped the permission slip back and forth in his hand. “Where’s your money?”

“Right!” Jess threw down her backpack and quickly went through all the Dunkin’ Donuts receipts in the top pocket to find the $60 check. Leo evidently noticed them.

“Yes, before you ask, we are definitely bringing donuts on the bus tomorrow.”

Jess smiled. Leo knew her well.

“Donuts?!” Sam’s excited voice behind her.

Jess grinned. “This will be your first competition, won’t it? You don’t know all of our traditions yet. Oh, this’ll be so much fun, you’re gonna enjoy it so much!”

Nick called out from the other side of the room, “Competition is fun, I agree, but you can’t do that unless you’re prepared! Pack event bags and study first, fun later!”

Jess winked playfully at Sam, but pulled them over to the event bags. “It’s supposed to be that there’s an event bag for each event, but the events change every year, and not everybody uses event bags, but... I know I had one for wind power last year, so we should be able to find it.”

Sam gasped as Jess threw the bags on the floor one after the other looking for the one labelled with their event.. “You have... our team name... on the backpacks?!”

Jess blinked at them. “Huh. I never much thought about it. The event bags have always just been here. Besides, sports teams, every person on the team gets a new bag, basically every year. Anyway.” Jess stood up again. “This is ours. You have the binder?”

Sam nodded excitedly, dashed off and returned with it. “I put the rules in the front pocket, and everything is organised by section and then alphabetically, and there are old tests in the back pocket, and -”

Jess shrugged. “As long as it’s usable to you, I’ll do any test questions I know I can but studying is basically your responsibility. But then again, you don’t have to worry about the build, I have that. Take out the rules, though - what other stuff are we allowed to have with us?”

Sam somehow flipped the cover of the binder open without dropping it, and read “pencils, pens, protractors, rulers, any type of calculator, and other similar tools may also be used during the event”.

“I’m pretty sure we also need goggles, so I’ll grab a couple of pairs of those. Alright, do any of your other events need a lot of stuff packed?”

“Dynamic planet is just notes sheets and a calculator, Remote Sensing again has that stuff plus a ruler and protractor...”

“Whatever, just keep enough rulers and protractors in this event bag and bring it with you everywhere. I’ll have extra goggles in my backpack just in case, and I’ll do impound so you don’t need to worry about it.”

“Impound...?”

“It’s a building thing. Don’t worry about it. Go study for all of your events.”

Jess left Sam to pack her EV and heli. They would sort anything else out tomorrow morning.

Continue to East 12/3

[scio-is-a-story]

East 11/24

Continued from West 11/22

When were they going to stop talking about politics? Of course it was nice to see Auntie June and Uncle Patrick, but when Auntie June and Uncle Patrick just went on and on with Mom about taxes, was she really seeing them enough for it to count? And it wasn’t even like Auntie June and Uncle Patrick had kids, cousins for Lilibeth to feel obliged to entertain and have more young people conversations with. She and Amanda had been placed opposite one another at the far end of the table from everyone else, so for them, it was like there was no more company than at the dinner table on any other day. Being kicked in the feet repeatedly by her younger sister was not Jess’s idea of a good, exciting, warm, happy holiday meal.

“Well, little Miss Amanda,” Uncle Patrick said suddenly, turning to face them, “What have you been doing since I last saw you, eh? Any sports you can beat me at yet?”

Amanda paused with her fork in the air. She furrowed her eyebrows. “In gym class at the beginning of the year we were doing soccer but the guys never pass me the ball even though I was okay at that but now they want us to play floor hockey and -”

“No, sweetheart,” their mother cut in, “He means, what are you doing after school? You don’t really do after school sports, do you, sweetheart, but you’ve been doing some other things? Tell him about those.”

“Yeah.” Amanda stopped and ate another forkful, as though she thought that was a full enough response, but their mother looked at Amanda expectantly.

“Well?”

Amanda swallowed and added a little bit more detail. “I’m on the science team and I have to study so we’ll be good and we’ll win the competition and go to more competitions.”

Lilibeth couldn’t help it. “There’s a middle school competition and a high school competition -” she began.

“Oh, yes, Patrick, Lilibeth does it too, you see. Lilibeth was on the States team last year, and they almost went to Nationals, and now she’s one of the captains of their team, and Amanda is following in her footsteps, we’re so proud.”

“No, Mom,” whined Amanda, “I would’ve done it anyway. Lilibeth didn’t do it in middle school anyway and we’re more better than the other teams than they are!”

“And, really, I’m only the secretary, it’s more logistic stuff than actual leadership. The execs are both seniors, they’re in charge.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Lilibeth, I never can remember any of that terminology you use. You’d better explain all of it to your Uncle Patrick and Auntie June, I would get too many things wrong, neither of you would ever forgive me,” their mother laughed, but Lilibeth was fine with that. Science Olympiad was one topic she was fine with speaking about for ages.

“So, basically, at competitions there are about 20 separate ‘events’ the team does. Some of those are building events - I’ve never done those, but the people who do, they’ll, say, build a car that goes a specific distance the fastest. Sometimes they have specific materials, I don’t know. And then there are also study events - Amanda and I do more studying stuff -”

“I don’t just study, I tried out for Crime Busters!”

Auntie June laughed. “Do they all have funny names like that?”

“Some of them have stupid names. Like Anatomasomething. Who even cares about that.”

Lilibeth winced. “Okay, so Crime Busters, that’s one where there’s a kind of activity you do, like a lab, in the competition. And then I think Amanda meant Anatomy and Physiology, which I do and which is actually really interesting, I get to learn about the human body, and this year I’ve been studying the endocrine system a lot which is really something I wouldn’t know otherwise. But overall, study events, that just means we learn a lot, and take notes, and then we take a test on it. It’s a great experience.” She smiled at Uncle Patrick.

“You take tests for fun?” Uncle Patrick asked incredulously.

“Shh, Patrick, imagine how much they’re learning, how good it’ll be for their careers.”

Lilibeth just smiled sweetly, not bothering to pull her mother out of her delusion. Adults were always thinking things like that. They didn’t make any sense. Loads of people did Science Olympiad, and not all of them became amazing scientists, and plenty of people did science-related things that were way better than Science Olympiad, so how could Science Olympiad possibly benefit them like that? Lilibeth did Science Olympiad because it was fun and interesting and social and she believed in her team. But whatever, let the adults believe what they wanted.

“But, like, the point of the competition,” she resumed her explanation, “is that in each event, they rank all of the teams, from first place down to however many teams there are, and then they add up the scores across all the events to decide which team comes first overall - like, if you come in first place in one event, then that’s 1 point, and if you come in second, that’s 2 points, and yeah.”

“I’m sorry honey,” Auntie June broke in again, “What were these events again? Why does Amanda not do that thing you do, that thing she couldn’t pronounce?”

Lilibeth was really enjoying this. She was decent at explaining it, she thought, in fact. “Like, there are 20 different mini competitions - those are the ‘events’ - and the team can only put a couple of people in each mini competition. You work with your partner to take the test - or build the thing, I guess, or whatever the goal is. And the points that pair gets in that event, ranked relative to the points other teams get in that event, they can get medals personally for that and then the ranking becomes the team’s score for that area. And there are 18 people on the team. So, like, not everyone does every event. Most people do like 3. And then you get to become really good at those 3.”

“And your team is the best?”

“Well...” That was always an awkward question. Really the correct answer was that Lilibeth hoped that would turn out to be true.

“Our team is the best but the high schoolers are baaaad and lose-ers.”

“Amanda, shut up. We’ve come first in the state many times in the past. Just because the middle school team has been the New Jersey champion for longer doesn’t mean we’re worse when the competition’s so much harder for high school. Anyway, this year, I’m an officer, so I’m trying to run things better than in the past, and I’m really hoping we’re going to win again. We have a chance.”

“That’s my girl! Although I still would have preferred if you were saying that about a basketball team or something.” Well. Salt. As though Lilibeth needed to be reminded that what she did was considered less legitimate than what other people did. The school wouldn’t give them as much funding, they only had one coach, people spent a lot of time working in each other’s basements or at the library because they didn’t have access to anywhere better. But it was a family dinner with people they didn’t get to see much, so she wouldn’t say anything rude. Same as earlier when the adults were discussing “important political stuff” that they assumed she wouldn’t know anything about, she hadn’t spoken during that.

“But, Uncle Patrick, me planning to win doesn’t really mean anything. There’s this other team in the state, the other local high school, and they’ve come first in the state tournament for the past 2 years. And they were generally second in the previous years, close behind us even when we did win. And we’re gonna have to work so hard if we want to win again, and I don’t know how well we can catch up.” Her voice was rising in pitch and her words sped up, but she wasn’t finished. “They have a lot of really dedicated upperclassmen, who have experience, even Nats-level experience - I don’t know them personally but I’ve seen them at competition. And so dedicated. Plus their juniors aren’t bad, I think they did a lot of the placing at States last year. I swear, even if they’re not a studier, there’s this one junior who has some of the same events as me and it’s really really possible they might beat me and that would be really really bad even though they’re a wonderful person!”

“Are they cute?” asked Amanda, suddenly perked up.

Why did she think that? In what way was that relevant?

“Ha!” erupted Uncle Patrick, “Star-crossed lover or some bullshit, eh? This boy from the other team, does he know you like him that much? Make sure to kick his ass anyway, though, yeah.”

“I’m not - it’s not actually - no, like, it’s just that -” Lilibeth tried to begin, but she knew she was blushing. Not that it meant anything, but whenever somebody accused you of having a crush on somebody you blushed no matter what the truth was, right?

“Patrick! Is that really appropriate language?” chided Auntie June.

The conversation moved on with other topics - there was no way the children would be able to remain in the conversation long, ever, that wouldn’t be allowed, of course not - but Jess kept thinking about it. What had gotten her so worked up about Science Olympiad - why was she so afraid of Jess in particular beating her?

And really, why had they assumed that Jess was a guy?

Continue to West 11/22 

[scio-is-a-story]

West 11/22

Continued from West 11/20 pt3

They started off on the right foot, Jess had been thinking.

She didn’t think they’d started the year off on the right foot prior to this, even if the meeting had started off on the right foot, but she had had a low opinion of the beginning of the year already. And there was time to pull the team together.

More of the officers had shown up than Jess had expected. The new members, of course they would be here because they were still desperate to make a good impression and not fall behind, but a decent number of returning members were there, too. Returning team members tended to be especially iffy, didn’t they, because they thought they knew everything, at least about the logistics and expectations of the club if not about their events, but they didn’t yet have the duty and obligation of an officer to motivate them to show up.

But the corner of the library where the meeting was happening was already crowded, which meant, well, enough people had come for a proper meeting, at least. There were in theory enough chairs for everyone, but some people had decided to sit on tables anyway. Jess could understand, she got told off for that regularly during school hours so after the end of the school day when there were fewer adults to be critical, why wouldn’t she take advantage of that? They were a rowdy team. That was what always happened.

And then Nick had gotten up and successfully projected the assignments for the various events - had used the projector with a hell of a lot less hassle than a teacher would have needed to get it functional, so it was a good thing they were more or less a self-governing club, Jess laughed to herself. Evidently Nick was not yet old and senile. Well, that was a start toward him becoming a successful team president.

For a few minutes everybody jostled to take photos of the screen, despite knowing that any information would be sent out soon enough. When everybody had taken enough photos to 

“Also guys, we’re going to send out a Google form tonight, to figure out who can go to Cornell invites. That’s at the beginning of December, we really want to send two teams so bus costs don’t get too crazy. Fill it out ASAP when we send it so we can finalize all of your events and you get as much time to prepare as possible.”

“Permission slips...?” prodded Leo.

“Oh, right. Those won’t be attached to the first email because we don’t know the cost yet if we don’t know how many people can go, but we’ll get those out as soon as we can after you respond whether or not you’re going. That way, you should all be able to get them back to us, and the money, by next week.”

Jess laughed aloud, then checked herself. Nick scowled. “I am aware that this club has struggled to get permission slips in on time in the past, but there is really no reason for anybody not to manage this. I expect everyone to be proactive this year, same as I expect you all to work hard from now until States, because both of those are going to be necessary for us to return to Nats for the third time in the row.”

Other than having to stand on a chair to get everyone’s attention to beg for somebody more to start studying astro because not enough people had tried out for it and they wanted backups who’d studied, otherwise, Nick’s announcements went smoothly.

Why was astro even an unpopular event this year? That never happened. Astro was one of those stereotypical scioly events everyone tried out for in their first year, at least.

But really, the meeting bit, the actual meeting bit, was not the problem.

The problem was that the meeting finished quickly - that was not a problem in itself, either, because it meant Nick had spoken efficiently. Short meetings gave more time to go home and build and start on their road to Nats. And once it was just before States everyone would be positively begging for short meetings, for meetings that just described the method for transporting builds and then allowed people to study for the next several hours with their partners. Before States, stuff would get done in all that time left over.

But oh, apparently nobody was ready to start working yet. Event with an invitational so soon, the tryout scores had not been insufferable, so evidently people had done some studying earlier and expected that to be good enough. They just felt like goofing off after the structured part of the meeting finished. They wanted to not go home and start working towards another victory at States, but to stay and socialize.

Okay, so Jess herself was a part of that, too. She liked Sam, really, having started to get to know them. It was perhaps annoying having to answer quite so many messages at certain ridiculous hours of the night, but overall if Sam was going to be a part of this club, Jess wanted to make sure they were properly involved. First year members, and underclassmen, they were definitely at a disadvantage. But this club was about a bunch of nerds finding that they had a purpose being nerds, so Jess was going to make at least one person belong, and she took a seat on the table where Sam was sitting to ask them if they were excited about their events?

Obviously the two of them would end up doing wind power together, because there hadn’t been anyone else on the list.

But there were only so many things Jess could gush about wind power, and as everyone else was goofing off and playing music much too loud to be acceptable in a library, with far too much cursing to be acceptable in a school library, even in the far corner away from the librarians, Jess left.

It may not have been that successful a meeting but West was going to have a successful Science Olympiad team this year, Jess would make sure of it. Jess would make sure everybody else was sure of it.

Continue to East 11/24

[scio-is-a-story]

West 11/20 pt3

Continued from East 11/20 pt2

Jess hadn’t noticed, but somehow Lilibeth had landed up in the chair opposite her, instead of on the floor. Lilibeth’s laptop appeared to have closed, too, so she presumably wasn’t working on whatever she’d claimed to be working. Neither was Jess for that matter, but she’d enjoyed this time nevertheless.

I mean, who could blame her, it wasn’t like just because she lived somewhat further from this library she didn’t deserve a chair, surely. Jess didn’t grudge her the chair.

But, she reflected, what had happened? Here she was going through screenshotted snaps from a girl who used to do SciOly at Autumn Hill High School and discussing the state of her own SciOly team with… “the enemy”.

They probably shouldn’t be doing that. It wasn’t doing her any good. It sounded like results at East had already been sent out. Jess really didn’t like that they had that head start. And she’d seen the photos on Facebook which Lilibeth had put in her album labelled Science Olympiad - she’d liked it, how could she not, they looked like a team already - but it was making her more insecure, hearing about how East had already started. Had already made headway.

And Jess knew that in her responses, she was hiding as much as she could. She wanted to look like a good builder, and she wanted their team to look good. They wanted to go to Nats so there was no way she was letting East know they’d won before they even started. She happily disagreed that, oh, I’m sure you’ll win, your team must be really good, when Lilibeth said she expected West to win, but other than that polite showing of modesty, Jess didn’t want to actually say anything.

So presumably Lilibeth wasn’t actually saying anything either. Who knew what state their team was actually in. Maybe Lilibeth didn’t realise the hints she was giving out about their status, maybe she assumed that all teams were like this - or maybe it was all faked.

Either way, and even though Jess had enjoyed this bizarre conversation so much, she figured it was better if she said she had to go home.

Continue to West 11/22

[scio-is-a-story]

East 11/20 pt2

Continued from West 11/20 pt 2

Lilibeth enjoyed watching the kids from West.

Officially, of course, she was not watching. She was editing her essay.

But she’d left her stuff at the previous table where she’d been sitting with Cara. And the original handwritten version of the essay was in that. Which left Lililbeth editing only the first paragraph, which she’d already written up. But every time she realised she should go get the essay the conversation above her became far too amusing. She was distracted far too frequently and far too easily, she knew, but it was brilliant.

Lilibeth didn’t push herself into their conversation. She wasn’t relevant. They were working on schoolwork, work she wasn’t a part of. They seemed to have AP Gov stuff, she thought she’d guessed from the conversation, although it really wasn’t clear which of the AP Gov’s. Or it could have been one of the AP histories. Lilibeth wasn’t taking APUSH until next year, she couldn’t say anything about whatever they were discussing.

There weren’t active typos in the sentence Lilibeth was looking at, so she rewrote it in a different order. At least it would look like she’d have tried, since at least things would have changed between the two drafts of their essary.

But their conversation had moved on. Just like Lilibeth herself, Jess and her group had become distracted. They were, of course, discussing medieval torture methods.

Lilibeth wondered how they’d gotten there. It hadn’t been that long since she’d forced herself to work on her essay, had it? She supposed she could see that there were connections, some connections, between torture, and indentured servitude, via slavery, especially in, like, totalitarian countries or whatever, but really, it seemed a strange direction to go in. Oh, sure, it was still history, so she supposed they were working on a humanities thing, related enough, at least.

But it was, in fact, intriguing. Lilibeth didn’t want to pay attention - she’d already used up her people-watching, fun-having time with Cara, hadn’t she? For one thing, Lilibeth had work to do; for another, she really didn’t have the right to be involved in this group of people, most of whom she didn’t know at all; and finally, the medieval torture methods they were describing were just disgusting. Horrifying. Sickening.

But that was what made Lilibeth keep listening. She really didn’t want to, but she could imagine it - bamboo torture, was that what they’d called it? She knew that bamboo grew quickly, and she could see that the tips of a very fast-growing bamboo shoot might be strong enough to break skin.

But who even invented these things? “Oh, let’s plant some bamboo and tie this guy I don’t like down on top of it.”

Like that was a normal way for anyone, even a power-hungry monarch, to think. It made her skin crawl just to think about it. Would she really have to continue to live in a world containing significant amounts of bamboo, having just heard what she had? Bamboo which grew fast, spread easily, was an otherwise invasive weed... bamboo which could grow straight through her, poke her skin first and then puncture right into her torso.

Eugh.

But they’d moved on, to other, bigger... bloodier things.

“What’s the name of the one that’s like Ms. Trunchbull’s closet, except real?” somebody asked.

“Ms. Trunchbull from Matilda?” Lilibeth laughed. “But you mean the Iron Maiden, I think.”

Oh. She’d spoken. But nobody seemed to have noticed - not in a, they ignored her contribution kind of way, or that people had been speaking over her even as she said it, or that she may as well have not opened her mouth at all because they didn’t think she was a part of the conversation.

No. They’d ignored her insofar as that they’d acted like she had been a part of the conversation all along. Like she was meant to be speaking with them. Like she belonged in this conversation. Like nobody could have had any other opinion on her involvement, or any expectation that she should’ve stayed out.

There were other tortures. The one dripping water on the tortured person’s forehead, of course they discussed that. And then they started getting fanciful, trying to combine the many tortures into one enormous all encompassing torture - such that, of course, the tortured person would die before they even knew what was happening, so that wasn’t really that much fun, but whatever, they weren’t really going to torture anybody, were they?

...were they? These were West people, maybe morality was different there.

Did kids at West talk about this stuff regularly, Lilibeth wondered - knowing of course, that the answer wsa no, but... East and West were rivals. One was supposed to think of West students as evil and stuff sometimes, right?

It would be so much fun to get back to East and say to the other officers, oh yes, over the weekend I had a lovely discussion with one of the girls on the West SciOly team I’ve competed against in events, a conversation about torture, murder, and other equally terrible things.

Continue to West 11/20 pt3

[scio-is-a-story]

West 11/20 pt2

Continued from East 11/20 pt1

Jess’s group project had been started. That was as much as she could say. They had a document open, a blank powerpoint presentation, and it had a title.. But it really was very hard to work in this group. They hadn’t been doing work on their own, which was why they’d agreed to meet up at the library on a Saturday, but evidently this wasn’t progressing either. If this went on, they’d just end up playing chicken with the document once they got home, with whoever cared the most about their GPA eventually taking over all the work.

Jess slapped the table. “Okay. What are we meant to be doing.”

It made sense to start straight from square one, if that was apparently where they were at the moment, right?

So everyone briefly collaborated. They opened up the document from their teacher with the project instructions. They looked at the rubric.

It was decided that since they still couldn’t agree on a topic, that they just create enough slides labelled with the things they intended to put on those slides, once they knew what their topic was going to be.

Oh, this was such a waste of time. This was why Jess preferred to make the decisions. To work alone, even. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust other people to produce quality work. It was just that it was so difficult to produce quality work when people couldn’t reach a consensus on what they were gonna work on.

Somebody mumbled incoherently behind Jess’s head.

“What?”

The voice spoke up slightly. “Sorry, if it’s not too much trouble...”

What? Who?

“I was bothering my other friend too much. If it’s okay I’m gonna sit here now. Hopefully that way I’ll get more work done.”

Jess turned around. It was Lilibeth standing behind her. Did they even really know each other well enough for Lilibeth to just introduce herself to this group who Jess was clearly working with? Jess had forgotten Lilibeth’s name for a while, for fuck’s sake!

But Lilibeth obliviously plopped down on the floor behind Jess’s chair and opened her laptop in her lap. Well, it hadn’t been that oblivious, really. Jess hadn’t actually given Lilibeth any indication that she really shouldn’t sit with them, and presumably the students at East were still human enough not to have mastered telepathy, whatever else they were. Still, it was annoying. Lilibeth sitting here would be just an added distraction for her group.

Jess turned back to the powerpoint, determined to ignore any more problems.

Really, though, this was extra motivation, Jess decided. She absolutely refused to be distracted by a girl from East - Jess most certainly was not going to look bad in front of an officer from the opposite team - Jess strong-armed her group into accepting indentured servitude as a good enough topic, and began their research by very deliberately typing the words “indentured servant” into the Wikipedia search bar.

But it was boring and irritating. Using only one computer screen, they were all forced to try to read through it at the same pace. Some people didn’t care about certain sections. Other people red far too slowly.

Jess took out her phone to escape the bothersome shared screen, and everyone else followed her lead of looking it up separately, agreeing that that meant other people could look up different Wikipedia articles on the topic, too, simultaneously.

But quickly, their “reading” devolved into spamming each other with links in the Facebook group chat. Why was it so necessary to have a Facebook group chat about everything?

Why did Facebook group chats always go so badly?

Continue to East 11/20 pt2

[scio-is-a-story]

East 11/20 pt1

Continued from West 11/20 pt1

Officially Lilibeth lived in East Fog-upon-Humboldt, yes. Her library, her official library, the one where her library card worked so she could check out books, that was East Fog-upon-Humboldt public library, Lilibeth accepted that.

But the library in West Fog-upon-Humboldt was so much more of a place to be. Maybe it wasn’t as good for studying on one’s own, because it had so many windows and so much air and so many people she knew. But it was a place where stuff happened. There was a Starbucks and a Cold Stone Creamery and a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Mexican fast food place.

Not literally in the library, of course. That would have been somewhat strange. But they were on the same street - several were even on the same block as the library. When her friends used to arrange to come to West Fog-upon-Humboldt, and, she didn’t know, go shopping or whatever it was they used to do in middle school, she couldn’t really remember anymore what they had been so passionate about in this area then, but she knew they had started in some shop or other and, no matter which shop it was, had ended up in the library. Because, one, it was so convenient when one was already in that area, and, two, it was in itself a nice place to visit. So many free-to-use computers - at East Fog-upon-Humboldt’s public library you could only get internet access if you had your library card so you could log in.

Of course Lilibeth always had her library card, but that wasn’t as useful if she was with other people, for group projects or computer games or pointlessly emailing back and forth while sitting right next to each other for the hell of it.

And the many tables in the West library! And the children’s section which was still fun to hang out in even as an adult, and...

Plus now she had memories associated with this library. Not only those ones from middle school, when she’d been a completely different person but at least this one interest was still the same, but last year doing wind power with Zach, they’d met here to take one of the practise tests.

Okay, so he wasn’t an all bad person, Lilibeth didn’t believe that, but off the record, she was kinda glad he’d graduated. The team felt a lot more comfortable without the stress he’d brought.

But it had been funny, what had happened when they’d met here. Now that she could look back on States and everything associated with it without wanting to cry from guilt - of course she still felt sad but it was more of an empty melancholy, a what-if-we-had-gone-to-Nationals-and-I-could-have-created-more-memories sort of melancholy or even nostalgia, but nostalgia for what hadn’t been instead of what used to be, which was really so much better than the screaming, crying, desperately bargaining guilt of before - it was funny, thinking about the partnership they’d been. While Lilibeth had been frantically trying to just buy a fancy frappuccino from Starbucks and get back to the library in time to meet him, what did Zach do when he showed up 4 minutes later than he’d said he’d be - 4 minutes later than Lilibeth had anxiously paid for her caramel frappuccino? Zach wanted them to go for Mexican fast food.

And they had, although only he had eaten any, and she’d sat there opposite him irrationally considered that somebody was going to confiscate her frappuccino and throw it away.

Well, Lilibeth wasn’t hungry today, at least not yet. But she was at the West library. She had some work today - revising an essay, and perhaps some of that chem homework she’d fallen behind on - but it wasn’t a big deal. She’d done her math and all the other important stuff yesterday. Today was a Sunday she could spend working or not working, enjoying the environment of the library. As long as there were still spots at the computers for her to work when she decided to - or even if some of the strange, modernist but surprisingly comfortable arm chairs were open - it wouldn’t matter if she spent a while people watching or something. There were often other people from East here, too, or possibly one of the few people she still knew from West, and if she ended up socializing, that still wouldn’t be a big problem. She was mainly just here to get out of the house for a change. It was fall, still, and soon it wouldn’t be, so it made sense to take advantage of being able to bike places while she could.

In fact, she could see Cara in a corner already. The seat next to her was taken but whatever. Lilibeth had no problem sitting on floors. They didn’t share any classes, but Cara was still one of her close friends, and Cara was quiet enough that Lilibeth might still get some essay revision done while near her.

Continue to West 11/20 pt2

[scio-is-a-story]

West 11/20 pt1

Continued from East 11/17

Jess had been chasing officers down in the hallway all week. She’d seen Leo on the way into physics class, and asked if she would be on the team.

“You were supposed to be walk-on to the States team, Jess,” Leo said disapprovingly. “I expected better. What even happened with wind power? But at this point with your performance, I just, I really don’t know, Jess...”

“I can improve!” Jess pleaded, “I’ll manage, I’ll improve, I just... please let me be involved, at least, I can coach other people still if I’m not good enough myself, and then I’ll work hard enough to make the States team, I promise -”

Leo shrugged. “See what the results say when they come out.”

And the results were - supposedly - coming out today. They’d said this weekend, and here it was, already Sunday, so they should be out.

It would be typical of the officers to not actually get them out until Monday, but that didn’t stop Jess panicking over the results already. It made it hard to focus on the work she was meant to be doing - if they’d said definitively, an email will be sent out at 7 pm on Monday, sure, she would be able to wait that long, but waiting without knowing when to expect an answer was much more frustrating.

Instead, she’d arranged to work on a group project in the library. At least there, the other people could criticize her if she spent too much time refreshing GMail.

But she didn’t want SciOly results to turn out like SciBowl results had!

She had asked Leo about those, too. They didn’t have a deadline for results to be out, but she’d begged him repeatedly for an estimate of when they would be.

One day he’d finally said, “Tomorrow.” Because he had to run the list past the coach. But then there was an email that day.

Jess had tried not to get her hopes up as she went to open it. There had been a lot of people at tryouts. They couldn’t all make the team. And some people had had a lot more experience with Science Bowl than she had, she knew.

But still. Jess had gone to all of the tryouts, showing effort, hadn’t she? And she’d improved over the course of the summer practises through tryouts. She would’ve been better if she’d been on the team last year and had gotten all that extra practise, yes, she had been sure, but that hadn’t been possible and there had still been several months, plenty of time, to get better this year before competition.

She had been as good as that without any experience, so surely if she’d gone to actual competitions Jess would have turned into a good competitor?

She had closed her phone. Passed it to the other hand. Opened it again.

But that had been more than enough stalling. She had known the results were set, and since she had had the ability to satisfy the curiosity she’d so obviously shown, all those times asking about the time of results, she hadn’t been gaining anything by waiting any longer.

It had only taken a moment to tap open the email. Jess had skipped the fluff at the beginning, of course, her thumb almost automatically and of its own volition scrolling down to the list of team members.

She would have spotted her name immediately if it had been there. A lifetime of searching for “Jessica Tsien” made it quite a recognizable arrangement of black pixels. So her name evidently hadn’t been there at all. That was how it was with one’s own name.

Jess had placed her phone on the pillow next to her. Very carefully. Balancing it, almost, although it had been a flat object not actually balancing on anything - there had been a normal force between the phone and the pillow at many different points across the phone’s bottom surface. The net torque on the phone had been zero.

Did balancing her phone like that really matter? Did thinking of it in terms of physics really matter?

Of course they hadn’t, but those small actions, those small thoughts - while she was busy with them, she hadn’t been thinking about what she’d actually just read.

She hadn’t been the best at it. But she would have had time to improve. She hadn’t been asking to make A team - she’d just wanted to make one of the teams. B team would’ve been fine - B team, and an alternate, sitting out at least once the majority of the matches if she were that bad, maybe even sitting out two halves in some of them if they thought somebody else were that much better. But she had still wanted to be on the team.

And then she had learnt that she wasn’t. And there had been nothing she could do to change that.

Jess had allowed herself to keel over sideways. She had landed on the pillow, but with her phone sticking into her forehead. She had rolled onto her back, then hugged her knees and rolled off her pillow onto her other side. Closed her eyes tightly, then opened them wide with raised eyebrows, then just let them glaze over as she absorbed the image of the wall.

What was she going to do with herself without SciBowl? And this was her junior year. The year that it was the most important that you, like, did stuff. Had important-looking stuff to put on your resume. Colleges cared about junior year. Running for officer positions in clubs senior year - which colleges would also care about - that cared about what you did junior year. And besides, almost nobody made the SciBowl team for the first time in their senior year. Either the Bowl officers thought it wasn’t worth it to train somebody and have them only compete for the school for one year, or it just so happened that if you hadn’t improved enough to make top 10 in your first 3 years, you wouldn’t be good enough to make top 10 in your 4th and final year. But whichever explanation it was, Jess had had to accept that she probably wasn’t going to be able to call herself a member of her high school Science Bowl team. Or, once she got to college, a former member of her high school Science Bowl team.

Jess had stayed like that for a while, but eventually forced herself out of it. She was supposed to be a pragmatist. She was supposed to be a junior,a strong junior, a fuck-all female junior who kicked ass in Science Club (if not in Science Bowl, then it would have to be in Science Olympiad alone), and lying on her bed really wasn’t helping her at all.

She had considered going to sleep, briefly - that would be somewhat helpful to, she didn’t know, probably her health, that was what they said, right, you need to sleep to be healthy? - but she most likely wouldn’t have succeeded if she’d tried. It would’ve just devolved into crying, or running her performance at every tryout over and over in her head, or something equally wakeful. Just then, sleep had not been possible.

Jess had pulled herself off her bed to the bathroom. Hopefully she hadn’t cried or screamed loudly or something - Jess probably wouldn’t have remembered if she had - so Amanda hadn’t become disillusioned with her strong, brave, intelligent, hard working older sister? But Jess had shut the door to the bathroom anyway, in case she felt like just dissolving onto a wall or the sink or a floor again.

Jess had plenty of makeup sets. She really enjoyed using them, although she seemed not to have enough opportunities to use them. She struggled to wake up on time to get herself that good looking in the morning. But then hadn’t been the morning. And even though nobody was going to see her that night, she was going to look good, because she deserved to look good even if Leo didn’t consider her SciBowl abilities to be amazing, and then she was going to begin to get shit done, and she was going to continue to get shit done all fucking year.

Jess had gotten some stuff done, she supposed, in the intervening time for Science Olympiad, but she still worried about the quality of the builds. Had she really been prepared enough to be top 4 in enough events? Surely she’d worked harder for first tryouts last year than the effort she’d put in now?

Jess didn’t want to go through the same feelings of uselessness over Science Olympiad results. She didn’t want to think about having to go through those feelings of uselessness. She decided to pretend to try to work on her group project while she silently panicked.

Continue to East 11/20 pt1

[scio-is-a-story]

East 11/17

Continued from East 11/13

Tyler came in excited. “Brian! Guess what? I came second in…”

Lilibeth stopped listening, but she wondered. How had Tyler found out all of that stuff? Here she was again wishing that their team would be team-like, fair, meritocratic, transparent - and yet apparently at least one of the officers was more or less giving out insider information. The results were still unbiased. Lilibeth promised that. She was sure of that. But wouldn’t it hurt people more who hadn’t made the team? Wouldn’t it give people jealous or angry about not making the team more of a leg to stand on, the idea that officers told people how they’d done?

Well, since he already knew, there was no way to cause him to forget. And the only people at the meeting were, of course, those who had been told that they were on the team - although hopefully the rest hadn’t yet been told every single detail of their coming to be on the team.

Well, somehow Cara had failed to find out that she’d made the team. That had been amusing. So many people had messaged Lilibeth both before results came out asking when they would be out, or after results came out to talk excitedly about how glad they were they’d made it.

Lilibeth was glad people could still be excited about results. That was a good sign, that they might be willing to work hard that year, they might care.

In Cara’s case Liliibeth had had to pull the email up on her phone during class to tell Cara she’d made the team - as though Lilibeth, an officer, wouldn’t have had that list memorized!

But, Lilibeth noted, Cara was at the meeting now. Cara had been made aware of her being on the team, despite having not checked her email yesterday apparently, and soon the meeting could get under way.

There hadn’t been much to say in her email to them, and now there wasn’t really much to say to them in person. Once it had quieted down, they put up a spreadsheet of the top 4 people in each event - since the officers had written the tests, they weren’t included, but everyone else was. That wasn’t to say that people’s events wouldn’t change over the course of the year, but as it stood at the moment, everyone here had shown skill in at least one of these topics, so they would presumably be building on that knowledge from here on.

With the spreadsheet up, Henry briefly went over the results for everyone. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think all of the events are up here. Our first invitational won’t be until January, after Regionals, so we promise, even if your events aren’t at Union County, we will find an event to put you on. Everyone will go to Regionals, and there are no A or B teams. And then we have several invitationals we’ve registered for this year, where we’ll start off with mixed teams but maybe stack later in the season, but we’re not worried about that yet. Exact Regionals schedules will come out soon but in the mean time, try to study for all of your events, and especially the ones where you’re on this spreadsheet.”

Everyone nodded, and waited expectantly.

“Uh…” Henry hesitated, and looked at Lilibeth for help. “Is there anything more we should tell them?”

“You’re the president?” Lilibeth didn’t mean to be unhelpful, but really, she had less power than he did.

“Well. That was all we really needed to say, so the rest of the time, you should start studying. At least this way you’ll have half an hour of time this week that you’ll have to devote to it. Especially newbies, if you want advice, now’s your time. Anybody else, if you want us to get you textbooks, building materials, anything, please come talk to us.”

Lilibeth looked around. She didn’t know if other people were going to listen or not - she felt for them in that it was the first meeting since they’d found out the team, and of course they deserved to celebrate, and obviously States was a long way away… but States would still get here much too soon.

Well, she could get her homework done. If anybody came to her with questions, she was open to them, but all of her studying materials were at home so it made more sense to just get the easy stuff out of the way while waiting for the bus to come.

Continue to West 11/20 pt1

[scio-is-a-story]

East 11/13

Continued from West 11/3

Sometimes being the secretary - the email-sender - meant getting to interact with everyone in the club, to try to get more people involved and feel welcome (and actually motivated to study).

Lilibeth wanted to maintain the sound of being approachable and encouraging, but at the moment she was the secretary who was supposed to email the club about who had been cut from Science Olympiad. She was the secretary whose email would be saying “you’re cut” to a solid 60 percent of those who had tried out.

She sighed. They had stalled so much in actually deciding the teams - a lot of people had been walk-ons from the beginning, and a lot of other people were nowhere near making the team, but so many people had done very well in one event, but had no other event. Or other people had been so close to the top 4 in several events, but not quite high enough in any of them. Henry had tried to make most of the decisions - he was supposed to, he was the president, after all - but the entire officership had gone back and forth over other people for ages. Plus there had been the question of dedication, which was difficult to judge this early in the season. Just because somebody had a sport and couldn’t come to meetings as regularly didn’t mean they wouldn’t spend hours at Saturday practises, and hours of their own time until 2 am, in the weeks before States. When it was necessary.

But she had sent everyone a schedule at the beginning of the year, to the entire club, saying that Science Olympiad tryouts ended on November 4th (not that they had - several people had squirmed out excuses for why they really really needed to take them on the 7th, but at least it wasn’t too many, and nobody had pushed tryouts any later than the 7th, thankfully) and that the initial pool of 36 people for Science Olympiad would be announced on the 13th. Which was today.

So despite the long time it had taken to choose the teams, and despite that she now wanted a long time to craft a good email with which to announce them, Lilibeth had to send it tonight.

“To all of Science Club:

Thank you for trying out for our Science Olympiad team this year. We were extremely impressed by the knowledge of everyone displayed on their tryout tests, as well as the huge effort that was put into studying and preparing for tryouts.

While we appreciate all of your efforts and hope to see you all come back next year, we are limited to 36 people between our two teams. Many of our team’s SciOly competitors who have been successful at all levels of competition did not make the team in their first several years. We hope everyone continues to work hard studying and improve, regardless of A and B teams for invitationals and regionals, as well as the single team for states, will be announced later.

Congratulations to all those who are on the team, you will receive another email soon with more information.”

It was good enough. How much variation could you put in an email like that? Lilibeth copied the list from the officers’ groupchat and hit send.

She blinked. The third paragraph, that sentence should read “We hope everyone continues to work hard studying and improve, regardless of the results today. A and B teams for invitationals and regionals, as well as the single team for states, will be announced later.”

Well, she had wanted to keep the email short while staying polite, and if she had been on the receiving end, Lilibeth would have skipped to the team list immediately. Lilibeth would have been refreshing gmail for hours already at this point, and fluff would be nothing but more stalling, the opposite of what she wanted. The list of team members being alphabetical was also pretty typical, so she honestly would have gone straight to the spot where her name belonged and checked that, and only glanced at the introduction later, if at all. There was no point sending another email to correct her mistake. There were other emails to send, she should work on that one.

The email to the accepted team members didn’t take long, though. All Lilibeth had to tell them was that regular Science Olympiad meetings were resuming this Thursday. And bcc’ing was no longer necessary, thank god. Everyone on the team was supposed to be able to contact each other.

They had spent so long deciding these teams already. Lilibeth just needed sleep. It was only 7, but she drowsily half-closed her laptop and rolled sideways on her bed. At least she seemed to do all of her work on her bed now, and could sleep so immediately. The laptop still being on her bed wouldn’t bother her - last year before States she had regularly fallen asleep with all the lights in her room on and a textbook open on her pillow, this wouldn’t be a challenge.

Before States was going to be like this, but many times worse. Her sleeping hours would get shorter over the course of the year, Lilibeth knew. If she could have a night of 12 hours sleep now, in November, that was something to be grateful for. The season had long started.

Continue to East 11/17

[scio-is-a-story]

West 11/3

Continued from East 10/14

“What are you here for, Jess? You’re not on my list of tryouts today, I didn’t get a test for you...”

“I just wanted to watch everyone else’s turbines!”

Nick considered. “I mean, I suppose you can... but don’t hover over other people’s shoulders and stress them out.”

Jess shrugged it off. “I love Wind Power, you know I do, and besides, I can help testing the builds. I built that stand, I know how to run it. I have experience with this event, please?”

“Is that going to show in your test score?” Nick looked at her pointedly.

Jess didn’t have to be there after school for Wind Power tryouts - she’d thought she was going to have a Doctor’s appointment, and had taken the written test on Friday during lunch instead.

Well, saying that she’d taken the test was somewhat generous. She had seethed about it. She knew that that was what Nick was referencing, but she wandered across the room to drop her backpack as though she hadn’t heard. There were discussions on the scioly.org forums about people going to invitationals and finding questions on the tests that they had written and uploaded to the test exchange. This was not that bad, but then again, it was worse. She thought she’d studied - she thought she had looked through the binder again. And here she’d been given a test that she’d helped write last year, and she couldn’t remember any of it.

But it was alright, she was mainly a builder, and she could either choose to build the turbine in competition, and mainly leave the studying to somebody else, or she could drop Wind Power altogether. She had so many other build events already, and they hadn’t even seen the New Jersey state schedule for this year yet. It was possible their schedule wouldn’t allow her to do Wind Power along with her other events.

But all of that would come later anyway. First round of tryouts was only to limit the team to 36 people, and as long as she was in that, she could decide the focus of the rest of her effort at some other point. She still had last year’s turbine, and although the rules had been changed so that particular build would no longer be allowed, she was sure she could still create something with comparable performance. She had tested that enough times with her CD stand and fan that it could serve as a baseline, even without being officially tournament ready.

“Are they doing written test first or build?”

Nick looked at his tryout schedule. “All the other events going on today are studying, so I was going to put the Wind Power people in the other room, and then that way since the test you helped write last year is only 25 minutes they won’t disturb all the other test people, and it makes more sense to put the build testing after so people can leave when they’re done I guess.”

“Perfect!” Jess marched over to the door to the other classroom. “I can watch over the other room, and it doesn’t matter if I see the test because I’ve already seen it.”

“Wait -”

Jess sighed and turned around. “Why not?”

“No, it’s just that - I’ve realised - there’s only one person signed up to take the Wind Power test today.”

Jess looked crestfallen, but then shrugged again. “Then I can get to discuss with them more about their build!”

“If you want, but... don’t intimidate them, okay?”

Jess rolled her eyes and grabbed a seat, pulling out her phone to play Battle of Polytopia. “Tell me when they’re starting.”

“Or, you could take the wind power person to start now. You’d have to time separately anyway, so you may as well start immediately. And then you can both be out pretty quickly. The wind power kid is... Sam Kim?” Nick looked up “Is Sam Kim here?”

An underclassman Jess thought she’d seen in the hallway at some point but definitely didn’t recognize from SciOly before stood up sheepishly. “Should I bring the turbine? Or... will that be later?”

“It’s in the box there?” The underclassman nodded. “Sure, bring it.” Jess spun around and held the door open for - Sam, that was his name, right? - to carry their box.

“Jess! The test!” Nick called after her. 

“Oh, right.” She took the one he was waving at her - cheekily verified that it was the same one she’d taken, not that the officers were likely to mess up quite that badly - and set a timer on her phone for 25 minutes.

She stopped and looked at Sam. “Your binder? Don’t you have notes?”

Sam blanched and ran quickly back to his backpack, pulling out a binder not filled with as much information as Jess was used to, but it was impossible to judge just based on that. Jess had probably sounded too incredulous, though, she reflected. Given she wasn’t even officially entitled to run tryouts like this, she really shouldn’t be frightening people away. She attempted what was supposed to be a soft, comforting smile.

“Anyway,” she asked hopefully, “Are you ready to start now?”

They nodded.

“Alright, you have 25 minutes, I’ll try to update you about the time later, or you can just use the clock over there.” Jess started the timer.

Nick came in halfway through the test to check everything was going smoothly. Jess took her feet off the desk when he requested it, but as he left again, she immediately swung them back up. She heard giggling when she did so, and looked up to find Sam trying to return their attention to their test, but otherwise, the written test was uneventful. Her phone alarm ringing hyped her up much more, though - the build was really what she was there for.

Sam brought out their box and Jess examined the turbine blades. “I get why you chose that shape for the aerofoil, but do you think the wood grain will increase drag too much? Have you considered any other materials?”

Sam squirmed.

“Meh, doesn’t matter. We’ll see how it does in the wind, okay?” Jess smiled again briefly. Sam could probably tell how fake it was, how unaccustomed to this she was, but at least she’d tried, right? Nick had told everyone they had to be supportive, and welcoming of new people. She was supposed to be a likable upperclassman builder. She was supposed to support the efforts of other builders, not put them down.

Jess attached the build to her CD stand - she was proud of that CD stand, she’d done a good job on it, it didn’t come apart like that stupid competition-provided one had at States last year, but hopefully that wouldn’t happen again at States and they wouldn’t use the same volunteer again - and started it spinning. It wasn’t any better than she’d hoped. The voltage readings on both low speed and high were lower than her readings from her turbine from last year by a lot. In an event where build scores were calculated as a fraction of the max voltage, it was especially important to have a build hold its own against the other teams. And they hadn’t placed first at States, let alone at Nats, so there was definitely a better way to do it.

Or, their build and study score combined hadn’t placed first. Jess turned back to Sam.

“So how do you think you did on the written test?”

“Em -” Their voice was far too quiet. Jess looked at them sternly.

“Sorry?”

“I don’t think my notes were really ready. I’ll - I’ll... improve them?”

Well, at least they’d taken it. Against the strong team East was sure to bring this year, in wind power and every other event, they were really going to need people putting in effort even for wind power if they were going to return once again to Nats. Having somebody who was willing to study for wind power, such a strangely unpopular event, and who at least admitted that their binder could use work rather than getting cocky about it, that was better than nothing.

But it wasn’t good enough yet, and it was already looking quite likely that Jess was going to have to do this event, and do it hard.

Continue to East 11/13

[scio-is-a-story]

East 10/14

Continued from West 9/18

Lilibeth was determined to win this year. She had put so much effort into making the team last year, and then so much effort into making the States team, and then all that practice before States to make sure they did well... and they hadn’t gone to Nats. She did exactly what they told her to, she had been told to come first in cell biology and not mess up wind power that badly - to master her part of the event, which was studying, so that an average build score would be enough to not hurt them on the event, even if they couldn’t place first - and she had followed those instructions as close as she could. Second in cell biology, as a sophomore when so many other competitors would have had so much more experience, that was impressive, and who could have done better, really? And fifth in wind power was following those instructions, really, even if West had come third and so out placed them in that one event. The margin they lost by was a lot more than just those two places, plus the event’s scores hadn’t been counted in the end. Everyone as a team together had failed, and then the seniors had graduated without having a win during their officerships.

So they didn’t want to lose again.

Lilibeth blinked and turned back to her computer screen. There was no use berating herself over last year’s results. Everyone was always going to do that, weren’t they, or at least, she did it over and over. There was a point to which holding herself responsible for her errors would help her do better, she knew, but Lilibeth often worried that she went past constructive criticism, and instead ended up in despondence. That didn’t help. Yes, there were people who could’ve been on the team if she hadn’t been, perhaps, but the officers had chosen her, and she had worked as hard as she could, and now it was this year.

But it was easy to get distracted by thinking about other things, because writing tests was hard. She’d barely done any studying for herself, but presumably she’d learnt something because she’d been writing all these tests? Some of them weren’t even for topics she did, though. Like, seriously, Invasive Species? Just because something was also biology and she knew a decent amount of biology - just because she did two of the other bio events - that didn’t make it automatically her job to test everybody else. She really wasn’t qualified. Invasives had replaced ento as a bio ID event, she knew, but without any experience, and lacking in time, all of the images were pulled from the first few Google image results, and the questions were similarly straight out of Wikipedia articles. If anybody had had access to enough paper to print the Wikipedia articles on every plant and animal, they would have every answer right there in their binder.

Well, it was the best test she was going to make at this point. Obviously it wasn’t Nationals quality but it would hopefully at least show if somebody had gone to the effort of printing out identification images. It was almost the length she wanted - at least red imported fire ants were cool, not the worst species to end on - so she checked the club email. Nobody was emailing yet about rescheduling events tryouts, but at least a few of them had filled out the Google Form. Presumably a whole flood of emails would come next week, Sunday, and almost all of them would say, “Can I do this next week?”

As the secretary, Lilibeth expected responding to the vast majority of them would be shrugged onto her.

Lilibeth was sure in the end both scheduled weeks of tryouts would be full, even though the second week, with makeups, was not supposed to have that many people. And even so, getting results out by their self-imposed deadline was going to be a struggle. Nine days from the end of tryouts to sending out that all-important email sounded like a lot, but she’d seen the clutter of spreadsheets previous years of officers had had to use for that decision.

She checked the responses to the Google form. Towers, Electric Vehicle, Robot Arm - those weren’t on there, because the builders had a different tryouts system. But of the events on the list, Wind Power, Hydrogeology and Remote Sensing had the fewest signups. She couldn’t really be surprised, but she had hoped to not be obliged to do wind power again. Not after losing last year, despite all her effort, and not only losing, but having all of her work invalidated by the scores being cancelled. That girl she’d seen at the car wash, Lilibeth couldn’t remember her name but she had been a part of the Wind Power pair which beat them last year, and evidently she had not graduated yet, so they’d have to try to build better than her if they wanted to do well this year, as well.

But the bio events she was writing tests for had, as always, plenty of interest. She changed tab back to the half finished invasives test. Surely West’s tests weren’t this bad. Surely West was done with tryouts already. Surely everyone on West’s team had studied so much more.

Here she was, already panicking about States and they had half a year to go.

Continue to West 11/3

[scio-is-a-story]

West 9/18

Continued from East 9/15

Jess signed up for a 1 pm shift, but she got there at 12:30. Perhaps it was odd to be excited about washing cars, but this was Science Club washing cars. The car wash hadn’t happened last year, but from what she remembered of the freshman year car wash, it was hype.

The previous shifts already had everything set up. Signs advertising - they could have been better drawn, but how much did she expect, what could you do - a short distance up the road from the fire station they were using in each direction, and soap buckets and sponges all lined up. Nick was busy scrubbing the bumper of a car, but as Leo went to pick up a towel, Jess stopped him and asked him what she should be doing.

“The sign in sheet is here somewhere...” he turned in a circle.

“Oh, I’m not signed up till 1 -”

Leo blinked at her. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll just record however many hours you do.”

“Well, okay, but after I sign in what jobs are there?”

Leo looked at the ground and then grinned. “We don’t have too many cars, there are already enough of us on them, but...” He broke off and smirked at Jess. “You can carry the signs up and down the street to attract business?”

Jess gave Leo an incredulous look. “I know,” he laughed, “it’s fine, you take that towel and follow after Nick and the others have washed it, I can be the billboard.”

The car Nick had been scrubbing earlier was halfway through being hosed down, so she did as Leo had suggested. At least she didn’t have one of the jobs were the underclassmen were most likely to be able to spray her. She could see that some of the people who’d been there for a while were wet.

They had a decent amount of business, maybe not completely full, and Jess didn’t know if they had to pay anything to use the fire station parking lot and so how much of a profit they would make, but people were coming. Mostly parents and a few seniors from school.

At 1 when the rest of the people assigned to her shift arrived, the sophomores did get too rowdy. She didn’t have a problem getting wet, not really, but it did make it seem kind of useless to be standing there with something to wipe water off the cars when so many people were going to spray them more either way.

“Leo!” she called out to him, out by the road, “We can swap if you want?”

“Are you sure? You didn’t want to do it earlier, so if you’d rather...”

“Nah, I changed my mind.”

Jess took the sign off him and wandered along the sidewalk. A car rushed past and she smiled at them, but they didn’t stop. She tried raising it over her head and waiving - and when she heard something coming from the other direction, turning the sign that way too, even though whoever was holding the sign at the other end of the road would have already waived at them.

She tried to continue to show enthusiasm but that wasn’t really her thing. That was part of why she hadn’t wanted to be an advertiser when she first got there, and she was right that it was definitely difficult to keep waiving at cars which really didn’t care.

Surprisingly, several minutes in, one of them slowed down, one that was not merely carrying another volunteer or another senior from West who’d promised their Science Club friend that they would, but rather than pulling into the parking lot, the car pulled over to the side. Jess hurried over to it, eager to have done at least a little bit of persuading the attendance of the car wash to improve.

The women in the driver’s seat leaned over her passenger as she rolled down the window. “I’m sure whatever cause you got here is great and all?” she began, and tilted her head up at Lilibeth. “And I think your price reasonable too. But I been reading, car washes is bad for the - for the water quality? If it goes in the storm drains? So, if you were gonna wash my car, would it be biodegradable soap? Because I don’t want to do something wrong if I don’t need to.”

Jess hesitated. “I don’t really know what type of soap it is - I wasn’t really involved in that part of it - I can run and ask somebody, if you’ll come -”

The woman shook her head. “That’s alright then, thank you but no, another day. I’m sorry, Lilibeth.”

She gave Jess a conciliatory smile and left.

Right. Lilibeth. That’s who’d been in the passenger seat. Jess hadn’t seen her since their competitions last year. But why would one of East’s Science Olympiad members support West’s car wash?

But that wasn’t the way to think. They had to make money from whoever would give them money, because they weren’t getting anything from the school. That was how it went. She would’ve been glad to have Lilibeth’s mum at the car wash, and she wasn’t going to hate Lilibeth for not succeeding in making it happen, but she was going to try to advertise more aggressively to even more cars along this road.

Continue to East 10/14

[scio-is-a-story]

East 9/15

Continued from West 9/13

Lilibeth liked meetings.

Even though it was the first real meeting - the school year was still new, this was only the 2nd Thursday! - they’d decided to take attendance. That stuff didn’t matter at summer meetings, those were only to try to catch the attention of new people before all the other clubs could get to them and steal them away. “We take effort into account when deciding teams, guys!” and all that fluff from the past few years, when she wasn’t an officer, Lilibeth hadn’t really known whether or not she was supposed to actually believe it. She hadn’t asked yet, either (as the only non-senior officer, and the only female officer, and not having that important an officership anyway, she didn’t want to let on how unsure of herself she was), but whether to actually be useful or just for show, it had become Lilibeth’s job to sit at the computer and meet everyone. They’d claimed it was more efficient to have one person typing in everyone’s name and marking them present than to allow a great blob of confused people to hover over the keyboard, but it now meant more wasted time trying to find out the spelling of their names. Plus the great blob of confused people had just moved back a few feet further from the computer, and was now almost blocking the door to the science room, rather than being on her side of the desk.

Still, there was no rush. These people would all be on the SciOly team soon - or, many of them would be, but those who weren’t she hoped would still find some way to be involved - and she wanted to be able to greet them properly. To gently remind them of deadlines. To respond to their emails when they were confused without making them more uncomfortable.

Or maybe she was the only one who had been so excessively terrified of sending emails to the officers when she’d been a freshman. But the officers had been experienced, and knowledgeable, and scary, and... loud.

Whether or not this year’s team members were as intimidated by upperclassmen as she’d been - and regardless of the rest of the personalities of the rest of the officers - at least Lilibeth herself was not a loud officer.

Plus this way she could catch up briefly with all the people who’d come back!

In a way it was keeping track, though, rather than catching up. She was an officer, she needed to be able to check that all the people the team was going to need were here. And, notably, some people from last year - from last year’s State team, even, those people who had contributed significantly to whatever success they had had - hadn’t shown up today. The first day perhaps it was okay. They would only be going over basic information, it would all be repeated in an email she needed to set a reminder to send later, this was mostly for the underclassmen. But she needed to be sure all those people from last year would still be on the team; people with past experience was always useful.

Henry was not the most exciting president, she felt when they got started. Yes, he was good at SciOly, he knew a lot about it, but she would have preferred somebody else to do the speaking.

Not herself, of course. She wasn’t really into that. Her place made sense, standing by the side watching everyone else, figuring out the social groups which had already formed - SciOly, even if it was formed of a bunch of people who shared an interest (she hoped!) in science, had so many internal divisions. It was interesting. She wondered if any of the friendships could be made to work out in their favor for WIDI - they always struggled with that event.

Henry kept paging through the powerpoint, but Lilibeth looked down at her shoes and sighed. She felt those internal divisions even more than the rest of them, didn’t she? Not only was she a girl, and a short girl, not imposing at all, or stereotypically a science genius, but she looked so different. She stood out in all of last year’s photos. There were a decent number of South Asian students in the club, but even next to them, her appearance was very noticeable. At least today she’d successfully relaxed her hair.

And while she was actually taking tests nobody would be looking at her. She was excited to move ahead to that part.

“If you say you’re going to drive the club harder than a pack of mules next year, nobody’s going to vote for you, Lilibeth.”

Well, she hadn’t said that in her campaign speech, had she? And she’d won her election. But now that they’d gotten past that point, she was going to drive them however hard it took to beat West, harder than a pack of mules or not.

Continue to West 9/18

[scio-is-a-story]

West 9/13

Jess got up onto the table. “Quiet down guys!” There were a lot of new people this year. That was good. And most of them looked like underclassmen. They’d lost a lot of good seniors last year, so new people were gonna be necessary to carry them to Nats again.

The seniors laughed. “Jess, you’re not even an officer,” they chided her, not loud enough for most of the students to hear, “or a senior.”

Jess shrugged. “It was necessary.” She turned back to the rest of the club members again. “Guys, we’re gonna have a great year, so I’m gonna let the president get started as soon as possible. Listen to him!”

Nick raised his eyebrows at her skeptically, but the rest of the club responded. The dynamic level of the room settled down until only a few scattered troublemakers - better known as over-hyped underclassmen, good at science but not perhaps so good at behavior, of course - were still gossiping or whatever they were doing. Jess jumped off the table, then reconsidered, putting her hands out to push herself back so she was sitting on the edge, swinging her legs. Perfect view of the room. Presumably teachers would soon start telling her to not sit on tables, but not too long after that they would give up trying to change her behavior. That was how it always was. She may as well get through that stage with the Science Club coach as quickly as possible - she was going to be in this room a lot this year.

Nick peeled himself off the wall. “Welcome, all of you! I’m so glad to see so many new and returning members. As Jess said -” he paused to tilt his head at her teasingly again - “I’m Nick, I’m the president...”

He searched around momentarily for Leo, and they all went around with the introductions, and then the powerpoint was shown behind them, and all that boring stuff they did every year, which made Jess prefer the years she could have skipped the meetings and just read the emails. The car wash - she’d forgotten about that, she supposed. But still, reading a reminder that it was coming up soon would have been just as effective as hearing Nick and Leo talk about it.

But she was still supposed to be there. Upperclassmen weren’t allowed to do that stuff. Upperclassmen had to set positive examples, even when they were builders and would have been more useful working at home; there were no build materials here. Her only real purpose was to introduce herself, because building dues wouldn’t be collected for a while, and build tryouts wouldn’t start until a long time after that. No tryouts would start until a while after. Of course there was the officers’ pride in being able to say that not only had they won at States last year, they had won the last 2 years in a row. It had been a long time since anyone at their school had been able to say that about Science Olympiad.

Imagining being an officer next year introducing little froshbabies to a team that had won the past 3 years, Jess smiled. At the moment she could say that every year she’d been in high school, West had won States and gone to nats. She really wanted that to continue. They were going to be the year that created a streak and motivated their younger replacements to keep that shit up.

As long as East didn’t pull their shit together faster and better. Who were their officers and returning members? Jess couldn’t remember.

But they would find out soon enough, wouldn’t they, when they started coming up against each other at competitions. It really wouldn’t be that long. It was never that long, there was never enough time to prepare for Science Olympiad the way you wanted to.

Continue to East 9/15