Holly Black (20 page)

It’s an interactive show. When Tara serenades Willow, we blow magic bubbles. When Buffy walks through the fire, we raise our lighters high.

And we sing. We sing along.

Except when Dawn appears on screen. At the urging of the host, the audience boos, hisses, and glories in attacking her (even though it was Xander who summoned the tap-dancing demon in the first place). You can’t even hear the soundtrack.

Megan looks baffled.

Eric, though, has to be the loudest person in the building. “Go away, Dawn!” he shouts, cupping his hands over his mouth like a megaphone. “Loser!”

Very mature. He’s definitely trying to piss me off. Who the hell does he think he is? What makes him think he’s so cool, anyway?

Besides, it’s not just my
name
he’s jeering. It’s every newbie, every little sister who wasn’t there before. It’s the lesser sibling…the one blamed for everything…my God, it’s
me
.

Not that anyone else seems to care.

“Get off the screen!” shouts the guy behind me.

“Screw you, Dawn!” screams a girl down in front.

“Die, Dawn, die!” someone yells from down the aisle.

At that, I decide I’ve had it. I’ve had it with Eric. I’ve had it with Megan. I’ve had it with everything. I’m frustrated. I’m furious. And I’m wired on sugar.

I drop my spoon and wipe chocolate from my lips.

I duck beneath the long table in front of my row and run to the stage, snatching the wireless microphone from the host on my way.

“You can’t do that!” Ryan exclaims, snagging my arm.

“Get the hell out of my way,” I say, enunciating carefully, “or I’ll tell Colonel Green you deflowered his daughter in the backseat of your Volvo last fall after the A&M game.”

Ryan turns pale—brow ridge, square jaw and all, and for the first time, he really sees me. “Okay.”

“I need the stage.”

“Okay,” he says again, backing away.

As I block the screen, the hisses and boos grow louder, and for a moment, I’m blinded by the projector light. Then I’m in the spotlight.

“My name is Dawn!” I shout into the microphone, and my voice sounds loud, louder than I expected. Loud enough to be heard over the soundtrack.

“Your name is Dawn.” I go on, in an only slightly more sane tone, realizing as I say it that metaphor isn’t my best hope.

“So what if she’s awkward? So what if she whines about her sister? Are you honestly telling me that you have
never
whined?”

The crowd’s reply? More jeers, laughter, and a possible death threat from a man wielding a quesadilla.

“Come on!” I try again. “A lot of people didn’t like Wesley in the beginning. A lot of people didn’t like Tara in the beginning.”

I scan the crowd again. The hardcore
Angel
fans are listening now. The Willow–Tara ’shippers, too.

“We’ve all been like Dawn,” I argue. “We’ve all felt out of place. Sure, here, here, you belong. Here you’re among your own. But what about out there?”

“Out there, people like her”—I point to Megan—“look down on you, judge you, and scorn you. She isn’t even here for
Buffy
! She’s here for her waiter-boyfriend!”

Is it working? It’s not working. Is it? No. Only a few heads are nodding.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. I don’t know what I was thinking. My sugar high has worn off.

“We must stand together!” I raise my fist, defiant. It’s my last, best shot to convince them. “We must embrace our inner Dawn!”

Silence. Gaping, lonely silence.

It feels like the end of the world.

Just as I’m ready to hand off the mic and slink away, Megan stands and begins to clap. Slowly at first, but loud. Really loud. She looks me in the eye, then gives a small nod and a knowing, appreciative smile.

Like we’re sisters or something.

In the next moment, Eric is standing beside her. And he’s cheering, too.

Then Megan offers up this amazing two-fingers-in-her-mouth piercing whistle. I didn’t even know she could do that. It’s gloriously non-prissy. It’s fantastic!

That’s when it happens. Maybe it was my argument. Maybe it was my scary zeal. Whatever the reason, as soon as Megan whistles, the crowd is on its feet.

They’re blowing bubbles. They’re raising their lighters high.

They’re cheering through their fangs…

For Dawn Summers, for themselves and each other, for every sibling who got tossed into a situation beyond her control.

For me.

And for my sister, who whistles again…

Once more with feeling.

Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Bryan Lee O’Malley.

by
david levithan

I am haunted at times by Sung Kim’s varsity jacket.

He had to lobby hard to get it. Nobody denied that he had talent—in fact, he was the star of our team. But for a member of our team to get a jacket was unprecedented. Our coach backed him completely, while the other coaches in the school nearly choked on their whistles when they first heard the plan. The principal had to be called in, and it wasn’t until our team made Nationals that Sung’s request was finally heeded. Four weeks before we left for Indianapolis, he became the first person in our school’s history to have a varsity jacket for quiz bowl.

I, for one, was mortified.

This mortification was a complete betrayal of our team, but if anyone was going to betray the quiz bowl team from the inside, it was going to be me. I was the alternate.

I had been drafted by the coach, who also happened to be my physics teacher, because while the four other members of the team could tell you the square root of the circumference of Saturn’s orbit around the sun in the year 2033, not a single one of them could tell you how many Brontë sisters there’d been. In fact, the only British writer they seemed familiar with was Monty Python—and there weren’t many quiz bowl questions about Monty Python. There was a gaping hole in their knowledge, and I was the best lit-boy plug the school had to offer. While I hadn’t read that many of the classics, I was extraordinarily aware of them. I was a walking CliffsNotes version of the CliffsNotes versions; even if I’d never touched
Remembrance of Things Past
or
Cry, the Beloved Country
or
Middlemarch
, I knew what they were about and who had written them. I could only name about ten elements on the periodic table, but that hardly mattered—my teammates had the whole thing memorized. They told jokes where “her neutrino!” was the punch line.

Sung was our fearless leader—fearless, that is, within the context of our practices and competitions. Put him back into the general population and he became just another math geek, too bland to be teased, too awkward to be resented. As soon as he got the varsity jacket, there was little question that it would never leave his back. All the varsity jackets in our school looked the same on the front—burgundy body, white sleeves, white R. But the backs were different—a picture of two guys wrestling for the wrestlers, a football for the football players, a breast-stroker for the swimmers. For quiz bowl, they initially chose a faceless white kid at a podium, probably a leftover design from another school’s speech-and-debate team. It looked as if the symbol from the men’s room door was giving an inaugural address. Sung didn’t feel this conveyed the team aspect of quiz bowl, so he made them add four other faceless white kids at podiums. I was, presumably, one of those five. Because even though I was an alternate, they always rotated me in.

I had agreed to join the quiz bowl team for four reasons.

(1) I needed it for my college applications.

(2) I needed a good grade in Mr. Phillips’s physics class for my college applications, and I wasn’t going to get it from ordinary studying.

(3) I did get a perverse pleasure from being the only person in a competitive situation who knew that Jane Eyre was a character, while Jane Austen was a writer.

(4) I had an unarticulated crush on Damien Bloom.

An unarticulated crush is very different from an unrequited one, because at least with an unrequited crush you know what the hell you’re doing, even if the other person isn’t doing it back. An unarticulated crush is harder to grapple with, because it’s a crush that you haven’t even admitted to yourself. The romantic forces are all there—you want to see him, you always notice him, you treat every word from him as if it weighs more than anyone else’s. But you don’t know why. You don’t know that you’re doing it. You’d follow him to the end of the earth without ever admitting that your feet were moving.

Damien was track-team popular and hung with the cross-country crowd. If he didn’t have a problem with Sung’s varsity jacket, it was probably because none of the other kids in our school defined him as a quiz bowl geek. If anything, his membership on the team was seen as a fluke. Whereas I presumably belonged there, along with Sung and Frances Oh (perfect SATs, tragic skin) and Wes Ward (250 IQ, 250 lbs) and Gordon White (calculator watch, matching glasses). My social status was about the same as a water fountain in the hall—people were happy enough I was there when they needed me, but otherwise they walked on by. I wish I could say I was fine with this, and that I found what I needed in books or food or drugs or quiz bowl or other water-fountain kids. But it sucked. I didn’t have the disposition to be slavishly devoted to popularity and the popular kids. And at the same time, I was pretty sure my friends were losers, and barely even friends.

When we won the States, Sung, Damien, Frances, Wes, and Gordon celebrated like they’d just gotten full scholarships to MIT. Mr. Phillips was in tears when he called his wife at home to tell her. A photographer from the local paper came to take our picture and I tried to hide behind Wes as much as possible. Sung had his jacket by that time, its white sleeves glistening like they’d been made from unicorn horns. After the article appeared, a couple of people congratulated me in the hall. But most kids snickered or didn’t really care. We had a crash-course candy sale to pay for our trip to Indianapolis, and I stole money from my parents’ wallets and dipped into my savings in order to buy my whole portion outright, shoving the crap candy bars in our basement instead of having to ask my fellow students to pony up for such a pathetic cause.