The post Graig's been waiting for

My second conference short story came to me in the middle of the night. That is to say, roughly 8:30 AM until 9:05 when “High Times, Hard Times” from Newsies, sung by my two younger brothers, entered the dream first as a whistle and then, as I began waking up, the song.

About the dream, the most important thing I must stress is this: it was vitally important that we win the game. It was The Game, after all, the only one that mattered: yelling out more synonyms of each particular word called out by the referee than the other team.

Let me begin.

I started out the day on my own. The first several tournaments were always held to weed out the illiterate and test the mettle of the survivors. From the beginning, the rule was: lose two games, and you are out. Everyone got one second chance. Only one.

As the morning wore on, I watched the friends I came with slowly disappear and drift off to adjacent rooms one by one, to continue watching the contest via its live, in-house broadcast some thoughtful higher-up had set up.

The individual rounds ended with me and five others coming out on top. Only six, out of perhaps two hundred that had contested.

“Pick your teams,” the referee said. “The final rounds will be played on two teams of three members.”

“The next few minutes are the crux point,” a woman’s voice said animatedly. The reporter and her cameraman had showed up for the last several individual rounds and had been annoying everyone ever since. “Who will take home the trophy for the Battle of Words 2012?”

Everyone ignored the camera as the cameraman panned our faces and the stiff, bored face of the referee. When the ref saw he was being filmed, he smiled – but only a little. And it looked false. It made unusual wrinkles in his forehead and cheeks that weren’t normally there.

One of the six left in the game was familiar to me and probably all the others in the group. He called himself Hammer, and he had won three of the past Battles of Words in a row. Two of the players, a guy and a girl, immediately flocked to Hammer, but I stayed where I was. I’d met him before, and it had only taken all of twenty seconds to realize he had an ego large enough to have its own gravitational pull and many moons with red-caked lips and high-pitched giggles that called themselves fans.

I would sooner lick a bathroom floor than be on his team.

“It looks like it’s going to be Graig, Billy and Jess facing down Tim, Tina and Hammer for the win,” the reporter said into her camera. “An unusual lineup; only Hammer has ever won the Battle trophy, and he’s done it now for three years in a row. The last few rounds today will determine whether that streak will continue.”

I exchanged glances with my new teammates. Graig gave me a smile. Billy just cocked his head sardonically.

There could be problems with that one, I thought, but there was no time to dwell on such thoughts, because the referee was pulling out a fresh thick stack of note cards. The final games were about to begin.

“The end tournament is best-out-of-three.” His voice was as flat as his expression. “It begins… now.”

So the bored referee had a sense of the dramatic flair. I didn’t have time to give that much thought before he called out the first word: clever.

Hammer began the round with the most cliché synonym imaginable. “Smart!”

“Witty,” I challenged.

“Intelligent!”

“Intellectual.”

“Brainy!”

“Bright!”

“Intelligent!”

A loud buzzer went off. The referee waved his arm to punctuate the end of the round. “Repeated word violation. First round goes to Graig, Billy and Jess.”

I barely had time to taste our success when round two was in full swing. Here Graig and the other members of Hammer’s team proved their worth, throwing out words as fast as each could think. Hammer finally stumped us with cinematic production, a pretty creative synonym for movie, considering who it came from.

Billy stood stoic the whole time with a half frown on his face. Before the referee could start round three, I quickly called a time out – teams were only allowed one – to find out why.

“What’s your problem? I saw you in the earlier rounds; your vocabulary is more than big enough to be competitive,” I demanded of our deadweight team member.

He shrugged, giving me an incredulous look. “We’re up against Hammer. We’re going to lose. Why even try?”

“Did you come to this competition to lose?” Graig asked. “We can beat him.”

“I didn’t really expect to get this far,” Billy began, but I cut him off.

“Lies! Listen to Graig. We can win this. But only if we work together.”

“Time!” the referee called. “Teams, ready.”

“Ready!” Hammer said confidently.

“Ready,” I replied with one last, stern glare directed at Billy.

“Ready,” I heard Graig and – this was a bit of a surprise – Billy repeat under their breaths. When I looked back at Billy again, he shrugged but sent me a hint of a real smile.

So the final challenge began. The culminating word was theatrical. Graig and I didn’t even have to say a word; Billy was ready with a new word each round, confounding the other team after about six back-and-forth passes between him and Hammer.

“That’s game!” the referee shouted. Graig and I hugged each other and patted Billy on the back.

“I knew we could do it!” Graig said.

The reporter’s microphone found its way to my mouth right under my nose. “You’ve just beaten a boy who won three years in a row,” the woman said. “How does it feel?”

“Great,” I said. It was all I could say. "Really great."