The Giving Quilt (27 page)

The day of the tournament arrived. Early that morning, students and parents met at the Ames residence to take inventory of their equipment and carpool to Grosse Pointe South High School, twenty miles and a world away from Westfield. Jocelyn silently rehearsed her pep talk as she drove Anisa, Rahma, Niko, and Niko's mother in her car, the children's excited chatter in the backseat doing little to ease her own nervousness. She hoped the new members of the team wouldn't be intimidated when they entered the impressive school building and caught their first glimpse of their opponents, most of whom would inevitably hail from wealthier neighborhoods and more desirable school districts. Not for the first time, Jocelyn was thankful for the Imagination Quest team T-shirts and the mandatory $150 budget that provided some measure of fairness. Some of their competitors could indeed have afforded a computerized targeting system if the rules had not restrained them.

Each team was assigned a holding area in the hallway outside the gymnasium where the tournament would take place. Jocelyn went into the school first to locate theirs, after which she returned to the parking lot to help carry equipment and lead the others to their home base. While Niko's mother and Tashia's aunt watched their belongings, Jocelyn led the team to a relatively quiet spot near the cafeteria to rehearse their skit. Other teams in Imagination Quest T-shirts in a rainbow of hues occasionally passed, searching for their own rehearsal spaces. Jocelyn watched the competitors sizing up one another and was relieved when her daughters and their teammates continued practicing, calm and focused.

The Direct Delivery challenge was third on the schedule, so when the team believed they had prepared as much as they could, Jocelyn led them quietly into the gymnasium so they could watch from the bleachers as other teams presented their solutions to alternate challenges. They observed the other performances intently, occasionally nudging a teammate and whispering in an ear. When the second challenge was half over, Jocelyn waited for a break between teams and led her students to their holding area in the hall outside.

“What did you learn from watching the other teams just now?” she asked them.

“Talk loud during the skit,” said Rahma. “Half the time I couldn't understand what anyone was saying.”

Her teammates nodded. It was true that the acoustics in the gym were less than ideal, and only the tournament announcer had a microphone. “Excellent point,” said Jocelyn. “What else?”

“If you mess up, pretend you didn't and just keep going,” Niko said. “Maybe the judges won't notice.”

Other teammates chimed in with more ideas, and when they had finished, Jocelyn said, “I think you left out something very important.”

“What's that?” asked Anisa.

She smiled. She was so proud of each and every one of them. “Have fun out there.”

They all grinned back at her, and she saw them exchange amused, tolerant glances. Adults were always saying stuff like that, when kids knew the point was to do their best and to win.

An announcement rang out over the PA system summoning the Direct Delivery competitors to move their equipment from their holding areas to designated staging areas along the walls of the gym. As the students pulled on their scientist costumes—long white coats borrowed from the WMS chemistry lab—Niko's mother clapped her hands for their attention. “Before we go in,” she said, looking around at the group, students and parents alike, “I think we should have a round of applause for Coach Ames, without whose leadership, patience, and dedication we wouldn't have made it this far.”

Jocelyn felt a familiar pang of wistful longing. “I know Coach Ames would have wanted to be here with you,” she said, managing a tremulous smile. “You've all worked so hard and you've accomplished so much. I know when you go out there, you'll do him proud.”

She raised her hands to applaud her husband in absentia, only to stop short when she realized the students were looking up at her in puzzlement, the parents with sympathy and compassion.

“Mama,” said Anisa softly, “
you're
Coach Ames.”

Jocelyn's hands fell slowly to her sides as their applause filled the hallway. Blinking back tears, she smiled, murmured her thanks, and led them into the gym.

Managers and parents were permitted to help their teams transport materials from the holding areas in the hallway to the staging areas in the gymnasium, but only members of the team could carry items needed for the competition into the “arena” in the center of the gym. Fortunately, the catapult, mirrors, targets, and beanbags were light enough for the team to manage easily, although it took Niko and Anisa working together to carry the catapult. In the center of the arena, a barrier had been constructed of milk crates draped in olive-green tarps, narrower and slightly higher than the pile of folded gym mats they had practiced with had been. To Jocelyn's relief, Tashia noticed the difference and pointed it out to her teammates responsible for firing the catapult and setting the floor mirrors in place so they could adjust accordingly.

When the announcer gave a five-minute warning, the parents hugged their children, wished them good luck, and found seats in the bleachers. As team manager, Jocelyn was permitted to remain in the staging area. Quietly, she helped the kids check and double-check their materials, and when they were confident that everything was in order, she offered them a few last-minute reminders and lots of encouragement, keeping their nervousness at bay with little jokes and teasing. Glancing around, she noticed other coaches doing the same—and some of them looked more apprehensive than their students. Jocelyn supposed she might too, but she tried to maintain a serene, confident façade. Noah had always made everything look so easy. He had never mentioned heart-thumping trepidation as the minutes counted down.

And then the last one ticked away, and their session of the tournament began.

They were the fourth of nine teams to perform, so they sat on the floor and watched their first three rivals present their solutions. The first team had configured a network of long cardboard tubes that they extended over the top of the barrier and raised or lowered as needed to roll hacky sacks through to the landing zone. They too used mirrors to find the targets, but they had chosen small mirrors held by team members standing at opposite ends of the barrier rather than the longer, full-length mirrors propped up against boxes the WMS team had devised. They hit only three large targets, but their skit was amusing and had the audience laughing, which could compensate for the loss of points if the judges scored them generously.

The second team's skit impressed Jocelyn even more, appealing to her love of history and mythology by taking inspiration from the siege of Troy. They used a slingshot contraption that turned out to be surprisingly accurate, perhaps because their targeting system was a wooden ladder concealed by cardboard cutouts designed to resemble the Trojan Horse. One team member merely climbed the ladder, peered over the barrier, and told the slingshot operator where the targets were.

The third team had constructed a precarious scaffold out of PVC pipe, which the smallest member of the team carefully scaled with a fishing rod and reel clasped in one hand. The scaffold shook whenever its young occupant moved, and Jocelyn could not follow the plot of their skit because their dialogue was frequently drowned out by gasps of alarm from the audience. After striking their targets a remarkable fifteen out of twenty times, they managed to complete their presentation without injury or major structural collapse, but they ran almost thirty seconds over the allotted time, which would reduce their final score.

The team carried their rickety structure from the arena, and as the judges completed and turned in their scoring sheets, Jocelyn had time for one more quick word of encouragement for her students before they took the stage.

Jocelyn felt as if she held her breath for the entire seven minutes and twenty seconds of their performance. The catapult worked better than it ever had in rehearsals, striking large targets eight times and small targets six. The youngest member of the team forgot a crucial line in the skit, but Anisa and Niko covered for her so smoothly Jocelyn had good reason to hope the omission had escaped the judges' notice.

Almost before she knew it, the last beanbag was hurled over the barrier and struck the last target dead center, and the last line of dialogue was spoken. Anisa, as team captain, called out, “Time!” to signal the end of their presentation to the IQ official operating the stopwatch. Applause thundered down from the bleachers as the judges jotted notes on scoring forms on clipboards. Swiftly, calmly, the teammates cleared their materials from the arena and returned them to the staging area, where Jocelyn waited, their bright eyes and broad grins revealing that they knew they had done well. They managed to contain themselves until the last entry in the Direct Delivery round was complete, but as soon as they finished returning their materials to their holding area in the adjacent hall, they broke into cheers and high-fives and enormous sighs of relief.

They were ravenous from the stress and activity of the long morning, so Jocelyn and Tashia's aunt led them off to the cafeteria, where they celebrated with burgers and fries. They went over their performance note by note, critiquing themselves, teasing one another over small mistakes, and exultantly recapping their best moments. Eventually, however, the adrenaline wore off and they quieted down, realizing that it would be several hours before the final results were announced.

The news was worth the wait. They had taken first in their division, outscoring the second-place team by twenty points out of one hundred. They would take home a marvelous trophy and move on to the state tournament the following month.

Jocelyn gave the team two weeks off to rest and recuperate before calling a meeting to prepare for the state tournament. Over pizza and soda around the Ames's kitchen table, Jocelyn read the official rules and guidelines for the state competition, which were almost identical to those for the regional level except for the locations and dates. “You're allowed to make whatever changes you'd like to any part of your presentation,” she told them. “You have to stick to the same challenge, but you could come up with a completely different solution if you want.”

“We don't want to,” Anisa and Niko said in unison, and to Jocelyn's relief, the others promptly agreed. They wanted to practice with the catapult some more, and they thought they should revise some parts of their skit—a few lines that were supposed to be jokes didn't get a laugh at regionals—but otherwise they wanted to stick with what had worked so well for them the first time.

Over the next two weeks, they practiced their revised skit until they knew every line by heart. They painted the boxes that propped up their mirrors a reddish brown to resemble Mars rocks and fine-tuned the catapult. And then, ready or not, the day of the state tournament arrived.

Once again the students and parents met at the Ames home early on a Saturday morning to load their equipment and carpool to the tournament venue at Michigan State, a ninety-minute drive away. The students riding along in Jocelyn's car seemed confident and full of anticipation, showing none of the jittery nerves Jocelyn felt. She hoped they would perform as well as they had at regionals, and she thought it quite likely that they would do even better since they'd had additional time to prepare. But then again, so had every other team. She knew, and had tried to warn her students, that the competition would be much tougher this time around. They could not afford to go into the tournament overconfident, expecting to win or to offer anything but their very best effort. She wished Noah were there to advise them.

But no, she suddenly realized, she didn't want that. She didn't want to relinquish her coach's position, which over the past few months had transformed from a job she had undertaken only because no one else would to a role she enjoyed and treasured. She wished Noah were there—as she always, daily, minute by minute, wished he were there—not to take over for her, but to advise her, to encourage her, so she could be the Coach Ames the children needed.

She would have to do the best she could on her own.

The state tournament was the previous competition magnified in every respect—the beautiful campus, the scale of the venue, the skill of their rivals, the stakes. None of the children had mentioned nationals on the drive to East Lansing, nor did the subject come up as they located their holding area in the Intramural Sports Circle building, but everyone, even the youngest sixth grader in the tournament, knew a spot in the nationals awaited the teams that earned the highest scores in each division. And every one of them wanted to go on to nationals. They had all worked too hard to have their journey end any other way.

As before, the Direct Delivery competition was scheduled third out of the five rounds, but the venue was too crowded with parents—and the teams too determined to fit in as much last-minute strategizing and rehearsing as they could—to watch the other challenges from the bleachers. Jocelyn and the other parents tried to keep the team focused and relaxed, but tension and excitement permeated the entire building, and their nervous anticipation steadily increased as the morning passed.

At last the second session ended and the Direct Delivery competitors were permitted to move their equipment to their staging areas. Jocelyn and the other parents quickly helped the team gather their materials and haul them into the gymnasium, a vast space at least half again as large as the regionals venue, with twice as many bleachers, filled with spectators in school colors holding banners and waving signs. With a pang, Jocelyn realized that she should have tried to organize a contingent from their school, but now it was too late. Next year, she vowed. Next year she would arrange for a school bus to bring as many students and chaperones as were willing to make the trip. It would be good for the team to have a cheering section, and it would be great for the students to visit a university campus. Perhaps the trip would plant the seed of possibility in the imaginations of children who had not previously included college in their dreams of the future.