THE BOY I SWORE TO HATE

Three Seconds

The regional qualifier was held in Westbrook Hall on a Saturday morning that smelled like floor polish and other people's anxiety.

Eight teams. Four rounds. Single elimination after the group stage. The winning partnership moved forward to the semifinal bracket; everyone else went home and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of their Saturday.

I had been to competitions before, solo events, debate rounds, the kind where you stood at a podium and performed confidence at a panel of judges. This was different. This was a table for two, a shared buzzer, and two hours of having to trust that the person beside me would hold up his half.

I didn't trust Marcus Reid.

But I'd spent three weeks watching him work, and I trusted his competence, which was a different thing and would have to be enough.

We sat down at Table Four. The moderator gave the standard briefing, format, scoring, protest procedure. Marcus had his hands flat on the table. Still. I had mine in my lap because I didn't want him to see them.

"You're doing the thing," he said, without looking at me.

"What thing?"

"Where you go very still when you're nervous. You've been doing it since we walked in."

I turned to look at him. "I'm not nervous."

He met my eyes briefly. "I know," he said. Which wasn't agreement, it was something else, something that landed closer to I'm not either and we're going to be fine, neither of which he'd actually said, and I was not going to spend the next two hours parsing Marcus Reid's subtext.

The moderator called the first round.

We started.

Round one was sciences. Our strongest combined area, we'd known this, planned for it, built our opening strategy around coming out of it with maximum points. It went exactly the way we'd mapped it. Marcus took the chemistry questions; I took biology; we split physics by sub-category the way we'd agreed. Clean, fast, no hesitation.

The team across from us, two Legacy boys from St. Clarence Prep, blazers pressed, the particular confidence of people who'd won this round before, looked at each other after the third question.

We were ahead by four points. In round one. Against St. Clarence.

Round two was history and politics. This was the one I'd been less certain about, our overlap was good but our gaps were different, and a gap at the wrong moment cost more than the point value of the question. Marcus read me before the first question landed. Just a look, quick and assessing, and then he shifted his position slightly, leaning forward, taking point, which was not what we'd planned but was the right call, because his political history knowledge was deeper than mine and he'd just decided to cover me in real time without making it a conversation.

I let him. I picked up the questions he left and covered the ones he didn't reach.

It worked.

Round three was literature and language. My strongest individual category. I felt the session shift as soon as it started, this was ground I knew cold, and knowing it changed something in how I moved, how fast I reached for the buzzer, how certain my voice came out. I answered six consecutive questions without pause. On the seventh, I hesitated, contemporary European drama, a specific playwright I'd reviewed but not deeply, and Marcus said the answer one beat after I buzzed, quietly, just for me. Not showing off. Just covering the gap.

We won the group stage with the highest point total of the morning.

The elimination rounds were faster and uglier.

Quarterfinal: a team from Danton Academy who were technically good but slow on the buzzer. We beat them by twelve points. They were gracious about it, which I respected.

Semifinal: Hartley Grammar, two girls who were fast and vicious and had clearly decided their strategy was to rattle us. One of them kept making eye contact with me before questions, a deliberate, destabilizing stare. I stared back. Marcus answered the next four questions without looking up from the table.

Final: St. Clarence again. This time they'd adjusted. Their captain was a boy named Elliot Chen whose buzzer speed was the fastest in the room and who knew it. The first two questions went to him. I felt the rhythm of the match shift and I saw Marcus feel it too, he went very still, the way he'd been at the start of the morning, and then he changed his approach entirely. Slower on the buzzer, making sure of the answer before committing. Trading speed for accuracy.

I followed his lead.

We gave up two more questions. We won by three points.

The moderator announced the result and for a moment the room was just sound, chairs moving, the St. Clarence team going quiet, scattered applause from the Hawthorne section where a handful of students had come to watch.

And then Marcus Reid turned to me.

It was involuntary. That was the only explanation. We both turned at the same moment, toward each other, the way you turn toward the person beside you when something significant just happened, before your brain has caught up with your body's instincts.

He looked, I don't have a better word for it, lit. Not the performance of triumph, not the curated satisfaction of someone ticking a box. Just genuinely, unguardedly lit, like the competition had stripped something back and what was underneath was a person who cared about this as much as I did.

I felt my face do something similar. I could feel it happening and I couldn't stop it fast enough.

"That last sequence," he said. His voice had lost its usual measured quality. "When you covered the Romantic poets and I took the industrial policy questions back to back, that was exactly—"

"I know," I said. Because I did know. Because it had been the smoothest thirty seconds of the whole match and we had both felt it at the same time and we were both, right now, lit up about it in the same way. "The handoff timing was—"

"Perfect," he said.

We looked at each other.

Three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough for something to pass between us that was genuine and uncomplicated and completely at odds with eleven months of everything else.

Then I remembered.

I remembered the scholarship announcement and the hallway and the smile I'd been told about and the donor records Maya had printed and the whisper campaign that had followed me through a year of Hawthorne's west-wing corridors. I remembered that I didn't trust this person. That performing well in a competition together was not the same as being on the same side. That warmth shared under pressure had a way of feeling like more than it was.

I looked away first.

"Good round," I said. Professional. Controlled. The voice I used when I needed my face to say nothing.

A beat of silence. When I glanced back, the lit quality was still there in his expression but it had company now, something quieter underneath it. Something that looked, for just a moment, like disappointment.

"Good round," he said.

He stood and shook hands with the St. Clarence captain. I did the same. We accepted the advancement card from the moderator and walked back toward the Hawthorne section separately, with two feet of hallway between us, and the three seconds folded closed behind us like they'd never happened.

Maya was waiting at the entrance.

"You won." She grabbed my arm, delighted. "Elena, you actually won. Against St. Clarence, in the final, do you know what their record is?"

"We won," I said. The correction came out automatically. "It's a partnership."

She glanced past me to where Marcus was speaking to someone on his phone, blazer back on, the unguarded quality entirely gone. "Right," she said. "The partnership." Something in her voice I didn't examine. "How was it? Working with him?"

I thought about the buzzer exchanges and the real-time adjustments and the thirty seconds of perfect handoff timing and three seconds of turning toward each other like it was instinct.

"Fine," I said. "Functional. That's the point."

Maya nodded slowly. Watching Marcus across the entrance hall with an expression I couldn't read clearly. "Just make sure it stays that way," she said. "Functional."

I followed her gaze to where Marcus had ended his call and was sliding his phone into his pocket. He looked up at that moment, not at Maya, at me, and for just a second there was nothing calculated in it. Just a look. The kind that didn't have an agenda.

Then he turned and walked toward the car park.

"It'll stay that way," I told Maya.

I almost meant it.