Don't Call Me Ishmael (10 page)

For the rest of the debating Workshop I concentrated on taking as many notes as possible and on keeping my attention firmly fixed to the front. If ever I wavered and let my eyes drift anywhere near a certain red T-shirt, Orazio Zorzotto would either clasp both hands over his heart and look to the heavens with fluttering eyelids or seize his chest and gasp in silent pain as if an arrow had just struck him.

That night as I lay in my bed I thought about what Razza had said. It was stupid, of course. I wasn't in love. I mean, how could I be? I knew nothing about Kelly Faulkner except her name and I wouldn't have even known that if it hadn't been for the name-tags they gave us. (I pinned mine under my jumper just in case someone had a bad reaction to it like Barry Bagsley's.)

No, I definitely wasn't in love. That was for sure. All that Romeo and Juliet stuff–making dopey faces through fish tanks or saying weird things like, ‘my lips two blushing
penguins are' or whatever it was–just didn't happen in real life. Though I suppose Razza had a point in a way. I admit I was
looking
at Kelly Faulkner quite a lot, but I definitely wasn't
perving.
Kelly Faulkner wasn't even the perving type. She was different. Not freaky or weird like Razza said, just different. She wasn't one of those girls who seem to spend all their time just being beautiful and then don't have any time or energy left to be anything else. No, I wasn't a perver and she wasn't a pervee and I
wasn't
in love. So what was it about her? Why couldn't I keep my eyes off her?

I thought about the first time I saw her
-really
saw her. It was during that first session. She was part of a debate that the presenter put together as a demonstration for us. When she stood up to speak, the thing I noticed straightaway about her was her eyes. How weird was that? I never pay attention to people's eyes. Most people I talk to could have grapes hanging from their eye sockets and it wouldn't strike me as strange. And as for colour … who notices stuff like that? Not me.

But with Kelly Faulkner's eyes it was different. I couldn't help but notice. They were so pale blue that it looked like they were made of ice–but not cold like ice-just clear and shiny, and when she smiled her cheeks pushed up and made her eyes disappear into narrow slits that seemed to sparkle with light … or something like that. As I said, I don't really take in much about people's eyes.

But noticing things about someone's eyes isn't
love
, is it? It's more like … interest or … curiosity. Like how I found it
interesting
that Kelly Faulkner had tied her hair back into two
small pigtails and that she wore a red clip in the shape of a butterfly and that she had a few light freckles around her nose. And how I was
curious
about the way she tucked some loose strands of hair behind her ear and the way the back of her neck was slightly pink from the sun.

And I suppose I was even more
interested
and
curious
whenever she smiled and I had to stop myself from smiling right back at her because she looked so happy. And I guess it was the same when she spoke and her voice made me think of bubbling water or when she got her words mixed up and she giggled and bit her top lip and made a goofy face and yet still somehow managed to look … well … perfect. You see, that was the strange thing about Kelly Faulkner. Everything
about
her was perfect-even that daggy red T-shirt with the black outline of an Indian chief on the front. After a while you couldn't imagine her wearing anything else. I guess that's what made her so
interesting
and why I couldn't stop watching her–she was just so perfect at being herself.

That night I had a stupid dream where Kelly Faulkner and I were friends and we'd go over to each other's houses and talk and joke around and once she laughed so much her eyes crinkled up into slits and she had to hold her stomach and rest her head on my shoulder till she recovered. Like I said, really stupid, but the thing was, it seemed so real that when I woke up on Sunday morning, just for a second or so I thought it
was
real. But then I remembered, and it was gone. Just like when you turn off the TV and all the colours disappear and everything just goes grey and silent.

For most of Sunday I wandered around looking for something to do. I tried watching TV in the lounge room. I tried listening to music in the rumpus room. I tried kicking a ball around the backyard. I tried reading on the veranda. I even tried doing some homework in my room. But everywhere I went seemed grey and stale–just one more place where Kelly Faulkner wasn't. As a last resort I even tried talking to Prue, but she said she was halfway through
War and Peace
and wanted to finish it before the next day.

At last I went to my room and flopped back on my bed. Surely Razza couldn't be right after all, could he? It was impossible. It didn't make sense. What would he know about love? Wasn't
he
the one who was perving at all the girls yesterday and giving each of them a RBR? Then it dawned on me. Of course–the Four Steps of Effective Rebuttal! I would destroy Razza's stupid ideas and give him back some of his own medicine.

Let's see. One: Razza says I'm in love with Kelly Faulkner. Two: This is totally false because … because … be … suddenly I found myself thinking about the shape of Kelly Faulkner's blue jeans and the way her lips parted when she smiled and her cute white teeth.

An awful pain ached in my chest. I lay there and waited for it to pass. There was nothing else I could do. I was on the receiving end of a mega download from the website of luuuuuurve.

I decided that my best course of action was to try not to think too much about Kelly Faulkner-what was the point in torturing myself, right? Instead I focused on debating. The way I figured it, the chances of me getting anywhere with Kelly Faulkner were infinitesimal, whereas the chances of us winning a debate were only microscopic. I decided to stay in the realm of exceedingly slim possibility.

By Monday we had our first topic–
That our leaders today rely more on image than actions–
but from the start it didn't look too promising.

The problem was, despite Scobie's best efforts, I don't think we had quite grasped the idea of teamwork. While he desperately tried to keep everyone on task and I attempted to take down any relevant points, Ignatius tossed up chunks of useless information that exploded like fireworks, distracted everyone's attention and then disappeared without a trace, Bill sat comatose as if he'd been deep frozen in some space pod which was
at that very moment hurtling towards some distant outpost of the universe, and Orazio divided his time between complaining about the topic, cracking jokes, sharing his insights on ‘hot chicks' and paying out on the rest of us.

Here is just a small sample of what I mean.

Yes, everything seemed to be coming together nicely.

Somehow, thanks to Scobie, we managed to pull some kind of a case together and scramble to our first debate. Ignatius was first speaker, Orazio was second, Scobie was third and Bill Kingsley (when it was brought to his attention by a dig in the ribs from Razza) was chair. I was the cheer squad. The amazing thing was that we won.

Prindabel knew his speech quite well but delivered it with all the passion of a chemical equation, while every now and then pulling out some obscure fact in a way that was every bit as unexpected and pointless as yanking a rabbit from a hat. Orazio was far less prepared, adlibbing most of his speech and trusting (wrongly, as it turned out) that his wit and natural charm would gloss over any weaknesses. To say we were ordinary would be generous–we aspired to ordinary. Fortunately for us, our opposition from Bugner High School made ordinary look stupendous. They reminded me of three guys who'd been dragged off the street and thrown into a police
line-up. The only thing that stopped the audience from rising as one and demanding a halt to proceedings on the grounds of unnatural cruelty was the presence of James Scobie.

When Scobie spoke, it was like someone turning on a light in a darkened room. Everything that up until then had been vague and confusing suddenly snapped into focus. You could almost see people rubbing their eyes with the surprise of it all. First Scobie explained the topic (I'm sure that most of the audience had no idea that all the speakers had, in fact, been discussing the same subject). Then he rebuilt the opposition's case from the tangled wreckage they had left in order to systematically and thoroughly dismantle it so that it could never possibly be reassembled. Finally he reviewed our case while at the same time making Prindabel and Razza seem like learned men. ‘My second speaker Orazio showed with indisputable logic how … ‘ By the time he had finished there was really no need for an adjudicator's decision.

After that first unexpected victory, the mood in our debating meetings changed. At last we started to get an inkling of what we were trying to do. In the next debate Bill Kingsley replaced Ignatius as first speaker. This was a tactical move by Scobie. We were affirmative for the second debate, and as first affirmative speaker Bill Kingsley wouldn't have to rebut at all. This was crucial, since in our meetings we had discovered that Bill seemed incapable of coming up with a counterargument of any kind. His response to a possible opposition argument was invariably, ‘That's quite a good point, actually' or ‘Everyone's entitled to their opinion'.

This time our opposition was St Phoebe's Girls College, and another amazing thing happened–we won again. This was despite Bill Kingsley reading his speech from beginning to end and Razza as chair introducing one of the girls a little too enthusiastically with, ‘It is my pleasure–and I do mean
pleasure–
to call on the second speaker from St Phoebe's.'

Even though we had improved from last time, the difference again was Scobie. It was like having Ian Thorpe swimming the final leg for you in the under sevens floaties relay. As long as we could keep the opposition vaguely in sight, we knew that Scobie would reel them in and eat them up.

Just as he did in the third debate, when, even more amazingly, we defeated Harrison Grammar.

Three wins from three debates automatically put us into the semi-finals. We couldn't believe it. Miss Tarango was ecstatic. We could even afford to lose the next debate and still make it through. We were cruisin'. It was a case of no stress, no pressure, no problems and no worries.

Stay that way?

No chance.