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Elements of fiction jeopardy11/10/2023 ![]() He’d had his braces tightened right before he’d left for California, sitting with a gaping mouth as Dr. He could also sing the first four bars of its national anthem: “Lightning flashes over the Tatras, thunder pounds wildly / Let us pause brothers, they will surely disappear / The Slovaks will revive!” Robbie could not only find it, he could tell you its capital, major exports, GNP, and national bird. Most 16-year-old Americans couldn’t find, say, Slovakia on a map. If Geography was a category, he would dominate. For his part, Robbie sat in a folding chair, twanged thoughtfully at a rubber band that stretched taut from a hook on his braces, and considered his chances. Yun endured his mother’s preening while his father read to him from the periodic table of elements. She hugged herself and rocked back and forth gently, mouthing along to a downloaded dictionary. Amanda sat in a corner wearing a giant pair of headphones. Like athletes before the Super Bowl, each contestant had his or her own unique pregame ritual. It almost made him empathize with Yun, whose mother hadn’t let him into the studio until she’d licked the palm of her hand and slicked his hair back with it. He saw the fear in Yun’s eyes, the greatest fear of all for overachieving children of immigrants: disappointing their parents. Yun’s parents were Korean and had accompanied him into the greenroom to fuss over him until his number was called. The other boy, Robbie could tell, came from a background more similar to his own. Angela, the girl, was from New Hampshire, and when she told Robbie she attended the Concord Academy, a prestigious boarding school with a price tag of over $40,000 per year, her clothing, which was all stiff cotton and pastel piping, and the fact that she had pronounced the word “homage” the way a French person might, began to make perfect sense. In the green room, Robbie met his competition. ![]() He clutched the almanac in his pocket in the same way his mother clutched her perfumed rosary. Outside, the air was warm and dry, the airport rimmed with palm trees which, Robbie informed his impressed family, are the only flowering plant in the order monocot. They’d arrived in the vast confusion of LAX and everything had amazed them, especially the luggage wheel, which had magically dumped their bags onto the conveyor when the plane landed. Two rows back, his tios entertained themselves by ordering mini bottles of Jack Daniels and watching out the window the swirly jags of the Rocky Mountains. On it, he’d calmed his mother-who worked at O’Hare airport but had never been on an actual plane and had sat, pale and rigid, clutching her rose-perfumed rosary beads-by explaining to her the history of American aviation and the laws of physics and engineering that ensured they would stay afloat until they landed safely in California. Robbie’s first plane ride had been the one out to Burbank two days earlier for a live taping of the Teen Jeopardy tournament. He glowed with youth and intellect and promise. ![]() ![]() The space between his newly plucked eyebrows made him look debonair and inquisitive. He held it up and considered himself: The makeup had brightened his face and obscured his pimples. He made it from the cranium to the coccyx before she handed him a mirror. While the lady took from her tray a big, fluffy brush and began to sift orange powder across the bridge of his nose, Robbie tried to ignore the ticklishness and began to list, in his mind, the names of all the bones in the human body. He thought of his uncles, Tio Rafael and Tio Luis, waiting in the audience on the other side of the greenroom and how, when he told them about this, they’d laugh and affectionately call him a homo. She was leaning over him, a pair of not-unpleasant sun-spotted breasts hanging in his face, her perfume something spicy like his older teachers wore. It felt wet and thick, but strangely soothing, as the makeup lady brushed it across his cheeks and forehead. Robbie Guajardo had never worn makeup before.
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