The Girl at the Pool - Part 2

I had a debate today. It was at a public high school. My partner was the one that I had discussed in the previous post "Incompetence". As I had said before, he is amazing, both as a person and as a debater. Anyway, since I don't know if I mentioned this in the previous post, and because I'm too lazy to look back, I want to mention the fact that he is extremely insecure. He's one of those people who constantly belittles themselves. I hate that, but oh well.

As a joke, he had downloaded Queen's song "We are the Champions", to prove that he was sure that we were going to win. A pretty unexpected move, coming from him. Then, when we finally begun our debates, he joked around again - saying something about how we should walk out of the awards ceremony if we aren't first place. Right, this was a joke, but it did have some merit. I knew that he was fed up with always losing, and more than anything, I knew that he deserved to win. There wasn't one person at that debate that was better than him - not one! The boy was flawless, he had every single little aspect of debate down. In fact, my peer agreed. She said that if she were a judge, she'd ask to have her scoring region moved beyond 95/100, just so that she could give him a higher mark.

Anyways, after the last round was over, I was happy. I knew that we had done really well, I knew that he had done better than me and I knew that, as a team, we deserved to win. Anybody would've known that. Also, the topics at this debate were the worst topics I have ever had to debate. The person who made up those topics is most likely retarded, or really scared of generating any controversy. So I told him that he deserves first place, as an individual speaker. Being the good religious boy that he is, he said that he hopes I win first place speaker, and I said "no, you deserve it more" and so on.   After a little bit, we all took group photos and reflected with our coaches on how our debates went.

We finally made it to the awards ceremony and they started calling the top ten individual speakers, and the top five teams, or something like that. They begun with the tenth best individual speaker, and worked their way up. They called me as number six, which was totally unfair, as I had done much better than sixth place, but regardless I didn't say anything. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best for my partner. First place wasn't far from reach. Obviously, I was wrong because they called him as second best speaker. That was unacceptable, he had deserved better. He can't stand up for himself and so I would. I yelled out, in a very un-debatey way, something along the lines of "he should have gotten first place and I should've gotten better, this isn't fair and this sucks! The judging is so biased"

Then, I heard a highly functioning sociopath yell out something along the lines of "I agree! He should've gotten first place!" A little bit of reenforcement never hurts. My partner was accepting his ribbon and staring at me like "what the hell is wrong with you, crazy lady?" But he never actually said anything, but let's be clear, the way someone looks at you speaks louder than his/her words. I knew that he didn't really approve, but I really didn't care. He is insecure and has an issue with fighting for his rights. So let's clear the air completely, my partner is not retarded, he has the ability of telling right from wrong, but he sadly has no backbone, like many other people in North America. The "highly functioning sociopath" is not from North America, so he's pretty tough, I guess. However, it may just be the fact that he is a sociopath.