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Despite being on the debate team three years and counting, Grantaire has never once taken part in any debates.
This is the way she prefers it: she maintains the club’s minimum number of participants to continue receiving funding, and in return they don’t ask her to participate or mention the way she hasn’t attended a practice sober since sophomore year. An ideal arrangement.
Nevertheless, every Thursday, Grantaire is there and waiting for the van to their weekly meet. She may be wearing sunglasses at 4PM, she may have missed all of the classes of the day, she may have a mysterious stain on her wrinkled polo that only one person in three years (and counting) has ever made the mistake of asking about, but gods be damned, she is there.
This year’s topic is something or another about reducing the sales of arms to foreign powers. It’s not worth her time or energy to have an opinion on it, so she doesn’t, but their affirmative and negative teams spend the whole ride to their neighboring district sounding out neg’s counterplan. Their school’s team is known for their counterplans.
The school they arrive at is one Grantaire has been to before, though she can’t remember why. Another debate meet, of course, but she remembers the outside darker and louder, and a part of her brain knows that if she circles around to the left side of the building, she’ll be able to sneak into the lunchroom but that the refrigerators and freezers will all be locked — a football game, then, or one of their dances. Or Joly, Bossuet, and her getting bored one night. Anyone’s guess, really.
They file into a lunchroom with white tile walls and blue-yellow checkers near the ceiling. The floor is the same ugly orange-brown speckled tile half the schools in this region have, and she muses over the prospect of some bulk sale that may have occurred decades ago that the entire state pooled their school repairs budget over purchasing enough surplus to last them well into the 21st century.
It’d require an ounce of coordination between schools and budgets, so it’d never happen, but it’s fun to think about.
It also takes until pairs are being divided off for their debates to get bored with. They’d been the first school to show up — another claim to fame — so before they finally begin splitting off, the aff and neg teams have already moved past counterplans and onto much more gripping topics like the latest MCU movie and, uh. Books, maybe. Grantaire hasn’t really been paying them much mind.
In fact, as school after school is called and the room continues to empty, Grantaire realizes that she hasn’t been paying much mind to anything besides the pencil-filled ceiling. She looks around the cafeteria, taking enough inventory to confirm that it’s just stragglers and a handful of coaches left now besides herself, and finds the person with the clipboard who’d been calling names before.
They’re talking with someone — another coach, or maybe a principal or a janitor — when she sees them, which is just fine because their clipboard is still in-hand. She crouches beside it, ignoring the looks it earns as she scans down the list and —
There. Room 182.
When you get right down to it, all schools are set up pretty much the same. It’s probably some combination of basic engineering and design principle, but what matters is that between that and the freshman-friendly signs, Grantaire finds the room she’s after with probably only a minute lost to an unplanned detour through the tech ed wing.
The door is shut, and she doesn’t want to give the moderator a reason to kick her out (again), so Grantaire takes a moment to get as close to composing herself as she ever does before quietly turning the door’s handle and carefully swinging it open.
Her freshman year, Grantaire had joined the debate team as an excuse to stay out of the house a little longer, before she’d discovered all of the other miraculous ways she could waste time. The other members that year were aggressively inclusive but nice enough, and when the girl from aff who promised she could do things with her tongue that to this day makes Grantaire blush to recall was split off to debate the freshman team from a school Grantaire had only known about in theory, she’d followed.
The girl’s tongue would later prove every inch as formidable as she’d promised, but that particular evening, everything had wilted under sheer force of the angelic blonde on the opposing team. Her arguments hadn’t been particularly well-constructed, and the neg team ultimately lost for bullshit semantics that only matter in moderated school debate settings, but after that day, Grantaire knew she was hooked.
“Affirmative, ready?”
“Yes,” confirms that same blonde, three years older and more composed. Her partner, a tall woman who’d joined the blonde’s side and hadn’t left it starting sometime their second year, nods in agreement.
“Negative, ready?”
“We are,” answers the other team.
“You may begin,” announces the moderator as Grantaire slides into a seat behind and to the left of them.
The blonde whispers something to her partner before standing, notes firmly attached to her clipboard as she approaches the podium. When she gets there, she looks out into the room and catches Grantaire’s eye, pausing at her. A perfect eyebrow raises, neither in surprise nor confusion. Acknowledgment, perhaps. After three years, they’ve never spoken, but they both know where they stand.
“Is something the matter?” asks the moderator.
The blonde’s eyes linger a half-beat longer before turning to the moderator. “Nothing at all.
“I affirm the resolved: the United States federal government should substantially reduce direct commercial sales and/or foreign military sales of arms from the United States.”