spelling bee

short story

I became my school district’s spelling bee champion by accident. The achievement certainly didn’t correlate with my general behavior in school.

When it was time for math or science, I’d open up my textbook and stand it straight up on my desk, then lay whatever paperback I was reading flat behind it.

“Steven,” my teacher would say. “I know you’re not following along.”

“Yes I am,” I’d say, not even bothering to look up from my copy of My Side of the Mountain. “This is just how I like to have my textbook. Standing straight up like this, see?”

“Oh, we’ll see. We will see when you fail the test.”

Then I’d fail the test, which was fine by me. Why anyone would want to be good at something as boring as math or science was beyond me. They didn’t tell a story.

In English or history, I’d read the textbooks and assigned novels front to back in the first few weeks of school and their narrative nature somehow allowed me to internalize all the knowledge within them. Whenever the teacher asked a question I was always the first one with my hand up, too eager in overcompensating for my mathematical and scientific deficiencies.

One day after being the only hand-raiser for multiple questions in a particularly languid session about the local Iroquois, I was hit in the back of the head by a note folded paper-football style labeled “OPEN”.

Inside it said: “SMART-ASS”.

Muffled laughter from the perpetrators. I stopped raising my hand and stopped even pretending to pay attention and read my paperbacks under my desk during those subjects too, outwardly and undisguised.

“Wait, why does Steve get to do whatever he wants during history?” the thrower of the note asked. “Why doesn’t he have to pay attention?”

“Steven, could you please just...” started the teacher.

“Because I already know all the answers, dumbass,” I interjected. This stamped me a one-way ticket to the principal’s office.

Eventually this sort of excessive disregard meant they called my parents, which was the one threshold I had been loath to cross. The chiding of my schoolteachers, the administration, and the system in general was nothing but gentle spring rain upon the pane compared to the fear I felt for the monsoon of my parents.

All of these calls would inevitably start with “Steven is a smart kid, but...”

The solution was to send me up to the 7th grade English and history classes (which helped), and assign me a tutor for math and science (which did nothing except perhaps cause a poor sophomore girl to give up tutoring).

The day of the spelling bee arrived and of course I had forgotten all about it. Normally I would have taken the chance to intentionally crash out early and read or play Gameboy, but there was something to the competitive aspect of the spelling bee that motivated me, that quelled my impatient urges to disqualify myself for the sake of something more interesting, to hold a prize to bring home to my parents in place of the phone calls that were threatening to become in-person meetings.

It wasn’t so much that I was great at spelling. I had simply read so many books that there were few words at our grade level that I could not recall having read before. Once I got the hang of the inane manner of relaying back the spelling to the proctor, I knew I was going to win:

Restaurant.

Gnarled.

Subtle.

Island.

Reluctant.

Knapsack.

I was disappointed that my classmates did not challenge. As champion of my elementary school, the next week I was brought to the high school auditorium to face off with the other elementary school winners from our district:

Conscience.

Supersede.

Rhythm.

Impose.

Accommodate.

Victory was assured, and with it a small little plastic trophy to go on the shelf with all my green participation ribbons from various other events, the lone piece of hardware amidst mediocrity.

I had qualified for the Scripps National Spelling Bee State Finals for New York State. If I won there, I’d be in the national finals on ESPN. ESPN!

They sent me through the mail a little study book that supposedly listed all of the possible words that might come our way in the competition. It would be impossible to study and learn them all, I thought, and so—why try?

“Did you study like I said you should?” my dad asked in the car on the way to Albany.

“Kinda,” I said, my own half-committal way of lying. I flipped through it, trying to figure how one would even impress upon themselves such rote, uncontextualized knowledge.

By the time we arrived at The Egg, I’d gone back to playing my Gameboy.

The Egg. An absurd building, appropriately named and thusly shaped, as if laid there by a post-Modernist, brutalist bird, tilted asymmetrically on its side and supported by a column that seemed far too thin to do so with integrity.

It smelled like big state bureaucracy inside. I took my place on the stage among what felt like a million other sweaty kids from all corners of New York State, mostly Asian and Indian kids from the city, but the boy next to me was from some place called Lockport, which I’ve since learned might as well be in Ohio.

“Are you nervous?” he asked, a red-head with the first hints of pubescent body odor wafting off him.

“Nah,” I said, and this was true.

The first round served to weed out the kids who were overwhelmed by the occasion, who might’ve known how to spell the words but were awed into simple mistakes or poor recitation. Whatever precociousness I had in school translated well to the stage and the spotlight. My name was called and I stepped up there like I was born for it.

Fennel, was my first word. I nearly scoffed. Fennel? Who were they kidding? I’d been to the grocery store.

“Fennel. F-E-N-N-E-L. Fennel.” I confidently whipped out, hands behind my back, the high pitch of my voice wavering between flagrantly overconfident and whiny.

Quarantine. Merchant of Venice. From seventh grade English.

Malicious. Series of Unfortunate Events. Villains were often ‘malicious’, according to author Lemony Snicket.

Benevolent. Dickens. I hated Dickens, and I hated Great Expectations. Once again from seventh grade English.

At this point, there were only a quarter of us left, and I was already addicted to the dopamine rush from the applause after each spelling. But I knew I was getting lucky with my words thus far. There were many words dispersed to my competitors that I would never have known. The hits kept coming for me, though:

Karaoke. I’d seen it on a neon sign outside a bar my mom and her friends always went to.

Pyrrhic. I knew this was a kind of victory won by armies of old, it was in a video game I played. The crowd seemed astounded by this one.

Aphasia. My grandpa had this after his stroke. It was listed as a symptom on his paperwork.

Glossolalia.

This one I did not know. I was, as I might put it now, fucked.

“Uh, origin and meaning?” I asked, because I’d heard that was a trick for when you needed more time. Apparently glossolalia meant ‘speaking in tongues’.

Speak. In. Tongues. That was it! Just spell it like it sounds.

“Glossolalia. G-L-O-S-” Two S’s? I stumbled into it. “S-O-L-A...” I meant to say two ‘L’s at the end but didn’t. “-L-I-A?”

Confirmation of correctness. An eruption from the crowd. I was into the final four.

Mnemonic. Another lucky word. A device I’d never used to learn anything, let alone spell any words. All you needed to know was the silent M. Otherwise it was almost the same as demonic.

The final two. I could almost hear my parents’ comingled pride and incredulity. A word away from ESPN. Just me and some fifth grade girl named Anna Dorsey, homeschooled from Westchester.

How it worked with the final two was a trading off of words: she’d get one, but if she got it right, I’d still get a rebuttal, and if I got it right, she’d have to be right in her own rebuttal or the title was mine and I’d soon be appearing on national television with QB—Tom Brady—Questionable crawling across the ticker tape below my face.

Anna Dorsey’s word: Phalanx. I salivated over this one. I read it in my school library’s copy of Who Was?: Alexander the Great. He conquered the world with the P-H-A-L-A-N-X.

She got it right.

My turn:

Ferric.

What the heck was ‘ferric’?

“Relating to, or containing iron, specifically with a valence of three.”

Ah. So it was a science word. What even was a ‘valence’?

“Ferric. F-E-R-R-I-C...K? Ferrick?”

It felt like someone slammed a big, blaring red button and yelled “WRONG!”

In reality, everything was very gracious and friendly. They made us shake hands and, judging by our awkwardness, it was the first time either of us had seriously shaken anyone’s hand.

“Nice job with phalanx,” I told her, as we stood awkwardly while an adult said something at the podium.

“Thanks. I remembered it from my flash cards,” she said, through a mouth so full of teeth-binding metal and rubber I was surprised she could enunciate anything.

What started with brash apathy had ended with investment, and I felt an unexpected disappointment in not winning. It was probably for the best I didn’t get to the final, though, as I watched it with my dad and I would have been out in the first or second round. I could never spell syzygy or esquamulose. (Apparently, my word processor can’t spell these either.)

On the elevator with my parents on the way back down to the parking garage from The Egg, my dad gripped my shoulder.

“I’m very proud of you, son,” he said. “You were so close! But how did you get those other words and not ferric! It seems kind of easier to spell, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Why would I know ferric? I don’t think they teach that in fifth grade science,” I said.

“Like you would know anyway. You don’t pay attention in science class,” my mom pointed out. She was a frequent complainer when it came to the amounts they paid my hapless tutors.

We got in the car. “You’d know it if you studied. If you studied that book they sent you, you would have won for sure. You got so far without even studying. Imagine what you could do!” my dad said.

I flipped to the ‘F’ section in the study book, a glorified dictionary. Ferric was there, of course.

“You’re so smart, Steven, imagine what you could do if you studied. If you tried,” my mom said.

The truth was that my success in the spelling bee seemed more a matter of chance. So many of the words I received were ones I happened to know through exposure. If I had gotten phalanx and the homeschooled Anna Dorsey had gotten some other word, I might have won. If I had gotten concupiscence instead of mnemonic, I wouldn’t have been in the final two.

And I thought, if I really am THAT smart, wouldn’t I know how to TRY?

---

thanks for reading this story involving spelling. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.

---

BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

• Why do you think Steven deliberately avoids trying in some subjects? Is it because they are ‘boring’ as he says? Or because he struggles in those subjects?

• Do you think that Steven is failing himself some way? Or that his parents and/or the system are failing him?

---

thanks for reading PNP, where we definitely cannot spell ‘syzygy’. if you liked this story, you might also like my novel, the big T, posted here on Substack:

the big T