It’s important to realize at this point that I was still thinking about Walker. In fact, I was still texting him while visiting colleges the March of my sophomore year, hoping something will happen between us all the while gaslighting both myself and Rina into thinking, or hoping, that we were just friends.
But in order to understand my obsession with Walker, we need to first psychoanalyze my first debate crush: Drey.
Well, technically, my first ever debate crush was Andrew before SpiderSmart went online during COVID, but that was a two-week thing that ended with him thinking he could pull pretty girls. He still brags about it to this day, five years later. It’s a little sad.
I met Drey through an online debate tournament. He was spectating one of Rosie and I’s rounds, and in the chat, he said something about being surprised that “this SpiderSmart team wasn’t cheeks.” That, of course, implied that the rest of SpiderSmart was indeed cheeks, and none of us were about to let that slide. We each DMed Drey like crazy, jokingly asking to be friends, calling him cheeks too, trolling him. He blocked most of our team members, but I don’t know what it was about him—the implicit challenge, the praise, even—that led me to pursue an actual conversation with him.
COVID hit me like poison gas in that it slowly sucked away my spirit along with any hope of external interaction. My parents put extremely strict internet controls across my electronic devices, so the only people I could continuously talk to were debaters: essentially SpiderSmart and Drey. It didn’t help that I became severely depressed during this time with no one to talk to about my issues; my friends were forcefully cut off from me, and my overbearing parents were the reason I was depressed in the first place. I had no siblings. It was logical that I would turn to the next best thing: Drey.
Drey was two years older than the then-thirteen-year-old me, and it acted as almost a goal. Perhaps my need to overcome all else and clamber to the top started with him—I was desperate to prove myself. I don’t remember much of what we talked about, just that it lasted a mere two months from July to September and that at some point, I started a “series” of diary-entry-esque paragraphs I would send him, Rant With Sherry (RWS). It started with him asking about what music I listened to and transformed into a way I let him in, a way he became someone, the only one, whom I trusted.
At first, RWS was unsolicited. Sometimes he complained about my daily rants, but soon, he began asking for them if I hadn’t written one yet. I took this as encouragement.
Of course, SpiderSmart, especially Rosie, knew that Drey and I were still talking. At some point, when one debater was harassing Drey about what was going on between us, he told him that I was his significant other. Stupidly, I took this as some roundabout way of flirting. Stupidly, I let him into the SpiderSmart Debate Discord server and got my admin perms taken away. I did a lot of stupid things when I was thirteen and infatuated. I still think about that sometimes and feel a strange mix of guilt and indignance; it’s embarrassing, after all, that I was captain during SpiderSmart’s golden years, and I don’t have admin on the server.
Eventually, Drey blocked me. Not only that, I found out he’d sent a screenshot of my very first RWS entry, the one of song recs, to Rosie. I’m not sure if he’s sent any more around, if to humiliate me was why he began asking for them, but maybe he was fifteen and stupid too.
Debaters tend to date each other, which is extraordinarily unsurprising. It’s cliche but fitting: debate is a lifestyle, and only those who have lived this life can truly understand what it means to live as a debater. The activity takes up so much time and energy and brainpower that many call it a full-time job, and some spend up to a hundred hours a week on it. Non-debaters don’t understand the heartbreak of a judge screw or the triumph of finally getting a bid to the Tournament of Champions (TOC). My passions are so strongly tied with debate that I find it hard to connect with someone on an intellectual level without bringing up the activity. Debaters therefore stick together, furthering the insularity of the community and dating around in their little space-time bubble away from the real world.
I was confronted with this much later near the end of my junior year, but before this year, I loved the debate community.
Camp at NSD the summer before junior year was not as exciting as my first real endeavor into dating in debate during my first year at NSD, but it was for Rina. In our lab, Rina and I grew close to the only guy, John, and subsequently, Brooke, his partner. Here’s how it all started:
My first impression of John was quite negative. Walking into NSD, all the memories of Walker flooded back, and simply being on-campus again felt like a nonstop heartbreak. John was whiter than Walker, taller than Walker, already had his nails painted, and was considerably cuter than Walker, though I didn’t care much about that. The first time John opened his mouth, I thought he was pretentious. So it goes.
My first interaction with John was with Rina by my side. The three of us had been sent to prep outside of our lab room, and Rina and I were play-bickering, as we often did, in front of John. He seemed bewildered and unsure of whether we were serious, and when we clarified that we were indeed joking, he seemed to let out a breath of relief. So it began.
In the beginning, I thought John liked me. It was the little things: late at night, when he snuck over to our dorm (Rina and I shared a room this time), he would always allot to sit on my bed. When the three of us stood together, he would rest his elbow on my head—though I hated, and will always hate, the underlying, implicit power dynamic that came with that. During the free day, when we went to watch the new Barbie movie, he leaned into me so that our shoulders were touching. Both Brooke and Rina said they thought there was something between us. And I liked John. Obviously.
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