Page 12 of Caribbean Crush

The second hint came when Shelby grabbed my hand and forcibly yanked it down. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “We aren’t friends with the enemy!”

I paid for that wave.

My buzz-in thumb was arthritic by the time I made it home that evening, and I’d had my head chewed off for losing to Hillandale. Never mind that Shelby herself had cost us the win, wrongly answering three easy questions.

What followed after that day was a tension-filled quiz-bowl season that saw us neck and neck in the standings with Hillandale. We’d perpetually swap first and second place with them depending on the week.

As far as Shelby knew, the most interaction I had with Phillip was onstage when we’d stand across from each other, posed behind our respective tables, buzzers in hand, facing off in a way that felt deeply, life-alteringly serious, but was, in fact, not.

However, the truth is Phillip and I formed an illicit friendship that Shelby never found out about. On tournament days, I liked to eat lunch as far away from Shelby and the crew as I could get, which usually meant finding a weathered bench outside, facing an all-but-empty school parking lot. I’d repeated this same routine a few times up until one day, while I was working through a turkey sandwich my grandmother had packed me, when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of someone approaching my bench, and I looked up to see Phillip standing there. He’d taken off his blazer and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. He looked shy. His eyes didn’t quite meet mine when he pointed to the opposite end of the bench and asked if he could sit.

I jolted into action, quickly shoving aside my bag to clear a space for him. “Of course, yeah.”

He sat, and though it was clear he meant to join me—there were plenty of other empty benches outside he could have claimed—we didn’t immediately rush into conversation. Deep in the throes of middle school, we were still sprucing up our social skills. Seasoned conversationalists? Not even close. We were all but silent as Phillip unloaded his lunch. I carefully appraised his decadent spread: warm pasta, fluffy garlic bread, proper silverware. The sight of his expensive name-brand soda convinced me to push my Dr. Cola off to the side of the bench, out of view.

“Turkey?” he asked, referring to my sandwich.

I held it up. “Yeah, with provolone.”

It gave me great pride to proclaim I was eating a type of cheese one step up from childish American.

“My favorite,” Phillip said with a small smile.

His blue eyes were so kind behind his glasses that I couldn’t help but match his smile with one of my own as I pointed at his food. “Your lunch looks good too. I love garlic bread.”

His dark brows shot up. “Oh! Want some?”

He was already holding out a slice for me to take, and in return, I offered him the other half of my sandwich. Though he was perfectly willing to give me some of his pasta, I was too embarrassed to accept it. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself slurping spaghetti in his presence, but we did go halfsies on my chips and his brownie.

I can’t even recall what we discussed that day. Our respective schools? Our current classes? Our interest in quiz-bowl trivia? The only thing that lingers now is the warm feeling I had while sitting there with him, indulging my little crush and hoping that maybe he felt the same way about me.

From that day on, Phillip would always seek me out during lunch on tournament days, and though we became friends, I never dared to tell him that I thought he was cute or hinted that I would have liked us to move beyond that. I mean, talk about a wasted opportunity. All those unsupervised hours! We could have been making out in public school bathrooms, making out under public school bleachers, making out in public, period. But instead, we were playing adversaries. Shelby kept a tight leash on me and the rest of our team, ensuring there was no possible way I was going to cross enemy lines, and she scared me enough that I wasn’t even tempted to try to see Phillip outside of our secret lunches. There’d be other boys down the road, surely. Right then, staying on Shelby’s good side was all that mattered to me.

I didn’t care all that much about the quiz-bowl team, but I did care about keeping Shelby happy, and at the end of our season, when we were at district finals and only one team could advance on to compete at regionals, she wasn’t going to stand idly by and let fate decide for us.

“We’re going to sabotage them.”

I still remember the three of us—her minions—looking at her like she was talking complete gibberish.

“What do you mean, sabotage them?” I asked.

She looked around, worried for a second, before leveling her gaze on me. Her eyes felt like two sharp daggers. “Keep your voice down, idiot. You want us to get caught?”

Well ... it didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. We’d only be held responsible for attempted sabotage, not the real thing. The tournament organizers would threaten to call our parents; we’d be released from the competition, forced to take the L, and then we’d get to go home early. It kind of sounded nice when I thought about it ...

Shelby pulled a small plastic tub of peanut butter out of her bag.

With a villainous smile, she informed us that Jake, one of the key players on Hillandale’s team, had a severe peanut allergy.

I remember gasping in horror. “You could kill him!”

“Oh, relax,” she said with an exaggerated eye roll. “Fine, if you’re too much of a pansy for that, I also brought some laxative stuff my mom uses sometimes.”

She went digging in her bag for it.

“That’s still horrible.”

“It’s just going to make him poop his pants. Big deal.”

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