The Giving Quilt (28 page)

As the teammates pulled their white lab coats over their blue-and-orange Imagination Quest T-shirts, they surreptitiously looked around the gym, checking out the competition. Jocelyn could not resist doing the same, and she observed several variations on themes she had seen at regionals, as well as a few entirely new devices. No one else had made a catapult as far as she could discern from a quick glance around, which could possibly help the team score additional points for originality. One team had constructed an elaborate yet elegant system of pulleys and levers, while another had built a scale model of the Statue of Liberty. Whatever its purpose, delivery device or targeting system, Jocelyn couldn't wait to see that team's skit. She glimpsed structures with mirrors and bungee cords, ladders and stomp rockets, amazing in their diversity, creativity, and whimsy.

Then she felt a hand on her shoulder, and a low voice said close to her ear, “What the hell is that?”

It was Isaiah, the carpenter and father of one of the seventh graders, and he was glaring across the arena at a team gathered beneath a large piece of equipment inconveniently left in their staging area. “I don't know,” she replied, studying it, trying to figure out what purpose it served. It resembled an L rotated ninety degrees clockwise, at least ten feet tall and twenty feet long, with a diagonal brace at the juncture and a heavy square base to keep it from toppling over. She had spent a fair amount of time in school gyms but had never seen anything like it. She was about to remark that the building custodians should have taken greater care to move university equipment out of the way before the tournament when a man in a red-and-gold Imagination Quest T-shirt led two similarly clad children to it. As if demonstrating how to move it out of their way, he placed his hands on the vertical post and feigned pushing it. When the two children, a brown-haired boy and girl who looked enough alike to be siblings, did as he had shown them, the structure glided smoothly forward, and Jocelyn realized two important facts simultaneously: The structure was on wheels, and it was the red-and-gold team's delivery device.

Jocelyn gaped.

“Unbelievable,” Isaiah muttered, shaking his head. “We all signed the same Code of Conduct. They knew the rules.”

“Children could not possibly have built that,” said Jocelyn, unable to tear her gaze away.

“Build it?” Isaiah's voice rose in contempt. “Those kids couldn't even lift the pieces.”

Jocelyn's heart sank as she realized he was absolutely right. Around the base of the enormous gallows—for that's what it resembled, with all the symbolic implications for her own team that it entailed—red-and-gold-clad children kicked hacky sacks back and forth, squealing with laughter when one rolled away and a child had to go racing after it. Nearby, adults Jocelyn assumed were the team parents chatted and snapped photos and checked the battery charges on their camcorders, perfectly at ease. Not one shot a furtive glance to any of the other teams; not one winced with embarrassment at the obvious, enormous disparity between their children's equipment and that of every other team present.

Suddenly Rahma was at Jocelyn's side, staring across the gym, awestruck. “Theirs is so much better than ours,” she breathed.

Jocelyn put her arm around her younger daughter's shoulders. “We don't know that for sure. It's big. That's all we know.”

The rest of the team had gathered around. “I can't believe kids made that,” said Tashia, wide-eyed.

“They didn't,” said Anisa flatly, turning her back upon the red-and-gold team and the anomaly too large to be contained within the boundaries of their staging area.

“What can we do?” Tashia's aunt asked Jocelyn.

She didn't know. “It's the judges' concern, not ours.” She turned to the students, who had gathered in a circle around her. “Listen carefully. Don't let that contraption intimidate you—that, or anything else any other team brings into the arena. Don't worry about what anyone else is doing. You have a brilliant solution to this challenge. Focus on presenting it as well as you can. Everything else will take care of itself.”

“But that thing . . .” Tashia's voice trailed off as she gestured across the gym. Niko quickly pushed her hand back down by her side before the other team noticed, but she was too upset to glare at him.

“We don't know what that thing can do,” said Jocelyn. “It might not work. Put it out of your mind.”

A parent spoke up. “She's right. They'll probably be disqualified anyway.”

For a moment the students brightened, but then Niko's mother pointed out that the red-and-gold team obviously hadn't been disqualified at regionals. The children's smiles faded. “There's an entirely different panel of judges here,” said Jocelyn, wishing the concept of disqualification hadn't been mentioned. She didn't want their victory to be awarded on a technicality; she wanted them to win on their own merits. “Put it out of your mind,” she repeated. “You can't control what anyone else does. You can only control how you react. Ignore them. Concentrate on what you've come here to do.”

Some of the students nodded, and she was glad to see that their gazes were fixed on her instead of the contraption across the way. Their faces were determined and serious, and at that moment she knew they would present their solution better than they ever had before.

And so they did. Their skit drew laughter and applause from the audience, no small feat considering that it was comprised almost entirely of people who had come to support their rivals. The catapult worked beautifully; they struck ten large paper bag craters and eight small, and if not for a minor targeting error, which they promptly corrected, they might have hit all twenty. When they left the arena, they were obviously, and rightly, pleased with their performance. They had risen to the occasion and had shown extraordinary grace under pressure, and Jocelyn could not have been happier for them or more proud.

Two other teams performed, and then the red-and-gold group's turn arrived.

They needed almost every member of their team to wheel the contraption into place; the base and the vertical post were on the launching-zone side of the barrier, which the long arm extended over, covering the entire length of the landing zone on the other side. Even from a distance their costumes appeared to have been expertly sewn. As they finished setting up, Jocelyn put on a mask of polite interest and clenched her hands together, preparing herself for the worst, but her jaw dropped when one of the team members entered the arena carrying a leaf blower. The audience murmured with expectation and Jocelyn quickly regained her composure. She exchanged looks with Isaiah and the other parents, enough to see her own consternation reflected in their eyes. Then she took a deep breath and steeled herself for their presentation.

It was astonishing to behold.

The way Isaiah explained it afterward, the gallows contraption must have contained various PVC tubes of different lengths, each measuring a particular distance from the barrier. The team members with the periscopes noted the location of the targets on the grid and called out that information to the brown-haired brother and sister operating the delivery system, who moved it along the barrier accordingly. When one of the pipe openings in the long horizontal arm was aligned with a target, the boy inserted a hacky sack into an opening in the vertical post, held the end of the leaf blower firmly against the opening, and, with a mechanical roar and a rush of air, shot the hacky sack through the tubes and out the other side, where it fell neatly, dead center upon the target. The leaf blower occasionally drowned out the actors performing the skit, which appeared to be something about bees and pollination, but the judges stood much closer and might not have had any difficulty hearing. Not that such a small flaw would have affected their score in any significant manner; they hit all twenty of their targets well within the time allotted.

The outcome was all but certain, but afterward, as they picked at the sack lunches they had brought from home, loaded their cars, and waited for the judges' verdict, Jocelyn urged her team not to lose hope. They would know for certain soon enough. She wouldn't admit it aloud, but it seemed impossible that they could win unless the red-and-gold team was disqualified—as they ought to be. Surely the administrators would see what was obvious to everyone else. Those children could not possibly have built that delivery system without adult assistance—but even supposing they were a team of engineering prodigies who had designed every feature and cut each plastic pipe and driven every last screw on their own, they could not have done so within the $150 budget. The leaf blower alone would have guaranteed that.

The wait seemed interminable. As the team's gloom deepened and speculations grew wilder, Jocelyn waited for a break between presentations and led her students back into the gym, where they founds seats high up in the bleachers and watched the last session, the fifth and final challenge, called Stop the Presses. Using only newspaper and glue, teams were required to build a bridge capable of supporting weight in the center. Points were awarded for the length of the bridge and the amount of weight that could be stacked upon it before it collapsed. Jocelyn remembered her team considering that challenge the previous autumn. Although they ultimately rejected that challenge in favor of Direct Delivery, they had considered it seriously enough to have already figured out that it would be necessary to find a perfect balance between a longer, weaker bridge and a shorter, stronger one.

Jocelyn could well imagine what the red-and-gold team parents would have done had they chosen Stop the Presses instead. Perhaps they would have created a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, capable of sustaining not only dozens of chrome scale-calibration weights placed in the center but gale force winds and earthquakes. Their skit would have been a reenactment of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, complete with period costumes that would put an average community theater group to shame.

Jocelyn watched the final groups perform and waited for it to be over.

The first session's runners-up were announced, and then the first-place team was called down to the arena to claim their trophy and a certificate of honor announcing that they had qualified for the nationals to be held in Washington, DC, in June. Then the second challenge's awards were presented. And then, at last, the Direct Deposit results were revealed: The Westfield Middle School Wildcats took second, outscored by the red-and-gold team by eighty points.

Jocelyn's students were crushed but not surprised.

“I knew it,” said Tashia with a sigh, leaning back against Anisa, who sat behind her on the bleachers.

“I can't believe it,” said Isaiah, his eyes glinting with disgust and anger. “This isn't right.”

“Should we take it up with the judges?” asked Tashia's aunt.

Jocelyn searched her memory for the proper protocol, and when the specific details eluded her, she withdrew the rules packet from her purse. “‘All judges' decisions are final,'” she read aloud. “‘Participants desiring a more detailed explanation of the results may contact the national IQ office forty-eight hours after the conclusion of the tournament.'”

“This is bull,” muttered Isaiah, shaking his head. Abruptly he stood, made his way past the people sitting in the row between him and the stairs, and climbed down from the bleachers. His son looked from Isaiah to Jocelyn and back, his brow furrowed anxiously, but when Niko put an arm around his shoulders, he stayed put, watching worriedly as his father stalked out of the gym. Through the open doors, Jocelyn spotted him pacing back and forth, shaking his head, thoroughly disgusted.

The parents briefly and quietly conferred, and they decided to leave without waiting to hear the results of the final two sessions. Isaiah joined them as they left the building, but he said not a word.

Driving home, Jocelyn wondered if they should have stayed to discuss their concerns with the officials anyway, regardless of the policy listed in the rules packet. Deep down, she doubted it would have done any good, and she was too weary and heartsick for a fight. All the way back to Westfield, her young passengers discussed the day, and the consensus was that they'd had a great time, they'd done their best, they'd given an awesome performance, and they'd been robbed—of first place, and of a trip to nationals.

“I hope those parents are proud of themselves,” said Anisa. “Big accomplishment, beating a bunch of middle school kids.”

That got a laugh, but then Niko said what they were all thinking: “It's just not fair. It's not right.”

“I know, baby,” his mother replied quietly from the front passenger seat.

Niko wasn't finished. “Everyone knows they didn't do their own work.
They
know they didn't do their own work. How could the judges let them win? How can they take that trophy home knowing that they cheated? How can they not feel bad about that?”

Jocelyn and his mother exchanged a look. Neither of them had a good answer for him, for any of the children in the backseat, for the rest of the team members, who were probably having similar conversations in the other cars. All Jocelyn could promise was that she would contact Imagination Quest in two days and request the detailed scores. That might give them some answers, although it wouldn't change the outcome.

She wondered what Noah would have done.

Two days later, she steeled herself and called the national office for the detailed scores. The IQ representative immediately e-mailed them to her so she could review them as they talked. “Your team did exceptionally well,” the representative said. “They should be very proud of themselves.”

“They are,” said Jocelyn, more defiantly than she had intended. And indeed the judges had been effusive in their praise for the team's innovative design, their stage presence, and their clever scenario. If not for the red-and-gold team, or rather, their parents . . . “However, I have to say that they were disappointed that the first-place team didn't appear to have followed the rules.”