Chapter Twenty-One - Finding My People

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Finding My People

“IT WAS THE one spot on my schedule where, instead of dreading it, I was waiting for it.”

This one’s for the nerds.
The trivia warriors. The wild cards.
The kids who accidentally memorized every country that borders Greece and didn’t know why until it finally came in handy.

This one’s for Academic Team.

I joined junior year, the same time I started Latin.
And I loved it.
I loved it.

It wasn’t a big group.
We weren’t flashy.
But we had soul. We had fun.
It was just a bunch of people who knew weird stuff bouncing energy off each other like live wires.

My very first match was just me and one other girl. Two of us.
We faced a full team and wrecked them.
Like, we straight-up obliterated these poor kids.
And after that, I leveled up. Fast. JV to varsity by senior year.

And my senior year team?
Fire.
Me, the Latin mentor, this wickedly smart girl from AP Latin, and a rotating squad of brainpower.
We weren’t just good, we were sneaky good.
You didn’t expect us to win. Then we did.

We beat schools that were supposed to be “better.”
And when we lost, we lost with energy. With chaos. With laughs.
We went down swinging.

My specialty?
Being the wild card.
Not the guy who knew everything, but the guy who could answer anything.
Geography. Pop culture. Obscure video game consoles. Roman history. 80s music.
The magic was: you never knew what I’d know, but I always knew something.

We had this one tournament called Trash, for all the random, ridiculous stuff.
And it was just me and one other girl versus full teams.
And we. Cooked. Them.

Comic books, music, gaming, retro trivia, we were locked in.
She’d bounce off my gaps, I’d bounce off hers.
Perfect balance.

We had rituals.
Cane’s Chicken if we won.
Rolling down a hill if we won a match.
That hill roll? Legendary.

The teacher who ran Academic Team, also my Latin teacher, was my home base.
She got me. She let me use her fridge for leftover Buffalo Wild Wings.
She let me use her microwave when no one else would.
She was that teacher. The kind you remember forever.

There was this one day I showed up to her class 30 minutes late.
I had been talking with another teacher about college, life, all the big stuff.
He wrote me a pass. I figured she’d be cool with it.
She wasn’t.
And honestly? I respected that. Because she cared.

She built a space where we could be brilliant and weird.
She gave us somewhere to shine.

Academic Team was more than a trivia match.
It was a second home.
It was where I found out that being smart and strange was a superpower.
That all the random knowledge I’d carried my whole life wasn’t useless.
It was waiting. For this. For us.