By Chi Siegel

Featured Art: Residuum by Brooke Ripley

The answer was Pandora, obviously. The moderator had begun the question with, “Who opened . . . ?”—and that’s when you buzz, Jillian thought. Come on, this is novice-level. No one buzzed, though, until the third word of the next clause.

So, Team California isn’t going to field a novice team worth shit this year at Nationals, Jillian concluded—she was the Roman general sighting Hannibal’s elephants in the Alps and forecasting doom for the whole army. She nudged Adam beside her. He smirked back, shaking his head, a little, Yeah, we’re boned.

They were sitting side by side next to Trey at the back of a repurposed high school gymnasium; for the California State Latin convention, the school host had set up rows of white folding chairs, all facing a stage erected at one of the walls. Onstage, three teams of four students each were seated at long tables arranged in a concave arc facing the audience. The moderator, a Latin teacher from one of the convention’s other attending high schools, read questions into a mic at them.

After the novices’ final round concluded, it was the intermediates’ turn. Jillian and Adam watched as the moderator read “What emperor wo . . . ?” and a girl at the leftmost table from some LA private school buzzed in. Jillian and Adam leaned forward in their seats. The girl said Caligula, the emperor nicknamed for the soldier’s boots he liked to parade around in as a kid before he grew up to be a madman. The girl answered the two bonus questions after the toss-up on her own, her teammates’ faces as blank as marble statues.

The girl went on to nail almost every question from one through twenty. “She’ll do,” Jillian said. Trey grunted, his face buried in a book of Quintilian verses and his long, thin limbs knotted up around themselves. He was not to be moved. Jillian and Adam would have to approach this girl after the round ended on their own.

There was a fifteen-minute break before the advanced finals, at which point Jillian, Adam, and Trey would all have to go onstage to their separate school teams’ tables and play against each other. Each of them had other team members from their schools, but they were merely ornamental.

Jillian and Adam caught the girl coming down from the stage into the audience level as soon as the match ended and greeted her.

“I’m Oriana de la Cruz,” the girl said.

Why’d she full-name herself like that? wondered Jillian. Thirteen-year-olds are so weird. Oriana looked even younger up close.

Adam smiled and responded before Jillian could. “Adam Cutler. And this is Jillian Chu.”

A quick conversation later and Oriana was locked in as their fourth and final team member to represent California for the national convention that summer. Oriana preened under their attention; Jillian knew that she would have behaved similarly if two older kids had approached her at that age and tried to get her on their team. Jillian felt a little more certain about the advanced team’s fate as Oriana skipped away from them to tell her parents in the audience about the development. Suck on that, Jillian thought in the vague cardinal directions of Florida and Virginia. Vae victis. Woe to the conquered. She took her seat onstage and

grinned at Adam and Trey across the other tables.

*

They all had similar origin stories. Jillian’s seventh-grade Latin teacher Mr. Mackinaw had been her Prometheus, the one who had introduced her to Certamen, which had the sweet and addictive burn of competition around something that Jillian was, as it turned out, incredibly good at. “It’s called Cer-TAH-men,” he’d said after catching her copying out massive conjugation and declension tables into her notebook’s pages just for fun, the sense of everything slotting so neatly into place addictive to her.

The game’s name was pronounced with a hard “C”—they used classical Latin pronunciations for everything. And so, she slept and ate The Private Life of the Romans, memorized every major event in the Aeneid, Iliad, Odyssey, Metamorphoses, and Theogony, and flirted with a Texas Certamen superstar to copy his flashcards. Jillian swiftly set her sights on national domination once the state had been made hers, arranged the Californian teams of four that would compete at the novice, intermediate, and advanced levels at the national convention every summer. The Harvard- or Princeton-bound advanced California players who were graduating out of the circuit were relieved to pass on the mantle to a ferocious thirteen-year-old. “Don’t bother with Edith Hamilton,” they told her. “Get yourself the Meridian Handbook or Pierre Grimal.” Jillian could soon recognize Dolus from Dolius and the Dioscuri from Dionysus, recite the emperors backward and forwards, along with their wives, concubines, and grisly deaths. Of the 33 murdered Roman emperors, her mind would helpfully recite to her at mealtimes or in the shower, around 30 were killed by sword or dagger, and 26 by their own soldiers.

During the team’s first practice in April, Oriana in turn shared her own account of how she’d recently come to be a Certamen player. She’d been fiendishly fascinated by the Greco-Roman pantheon and the tales of gods’ whims and tantrums from eons ago, and so her Latin teacher had referred her to a quizbowl-style competition she could enter and likely excel at. And here she was now.

“What software are you using to study?” Adam asked. “Anki,” Oriana said.

“Ah, a woman of culture. I’m an Anki guy myself.” Oriana grinned back.

“And I use Quizlet,” Jillian said, even though neither had asked her. “Let’s get going.”

They were practicing an old set of questions from an online database—the top of the set read “1999 Advanced Finals.” Their practices were usually more casual, lacking the elaborate buzzer set-up that formal rounds had. The four of them would slap the table with their open palms whenever they wanted to buzz.

“Who—?” Jillian read, and then Adam’s hand slapped the tabletop, cutting off the toss-up. “Adam, shut the fuck up—” both she and Trey said at once.

A few had risen to the top of the state with Jillian. She and Trey had met during their first national convention in the dry heat of Las Vegas four years ago. Trey was the same age as her, hailing from a small boys’ school in Irvine. He had memorized the entire first book of the Aeneid by setting it to a song from the Backstreet Boys and could speak Latin as an actual language without having to fumble through sentence formation and translate in his head. No—the words sprang fully-formed and wearing armor from his brain. He was indifferent toward Jillian until the final night of that Las Vegas convention, when they were nearly caught breaking curfew together. Chaperones had forced entry into a boys’ dorm room where some seniors had managed to smuggle in a bottle of red wine. Once the party was busted, Trey and Jillian sprinted into the night away from the patrolling schoolteachers and had hidden among the shrubs of a nearby garden. They tried an awkward kiss but soon realized they’d both rather just talk, and talk they did, until dawn.

But now, Adam was making a nuisance of himself. “Tiberius!” Adam shouted. “Romulus!” Oriana was giggling again.

Jillian simply moved on to the next question. “Who told a cautionary tale of spurning a lover’s advances—?”

Oriana slapped in. “Vertumnus.”

She could have been a little faster, Jillian thought. “Excellent,” she said. Adam high-fived her.

Now, Jillian began looking curiously at both Oriana and Adam. Jillian had spent a year with Adam after she’d caught his eye as a rising sophomore to his rising junior two years ago when the convention was in Texas. During the school year, they would meet up after classes ended, taking alternate turns on the city bus. She’d jerked him off in a copse of trees at the far end of her school’s football field. He’d eaten her out in his school’s tiny, deserted library, overly stiff jabs of his tongue over her vulva that brought little pleasure, though she did fake an orgasm to reward him for being the first one to cross that bridge with her (even though this only reinforced the same technique until they broke up, as Jillian dreaded the awkwardness that would have arisen if she’d started giving him contradictory feedback). Once the novelty of their sweaty stroking had worn off, their silences over Skype stretched on, and a decisive phone call brought their relationship to its predictable end the following summer. They went back to being friends who occasionally quizzed each other over the weekends.

Jillian noticed now that Oriana was sitting nearer Adam, that Adam had also scooted closer to her, and that they were slapping the table aiming for the same spot.

*

After April, their team met again in May and June in anticipation of July’s convention. Jillian kept a watchful eye on their progress to make sure they still had subject matter coverage across the team. “Adam, give state mottoes a review. You’re a little rusty,” she’d said in May. Adam molded easily around Jillian’s authority, preferring to take direction rather than to direct. She also wanted to gauge Adam and Oriana’s dynamic.

He and Oriana always sat next to one another, but until June, there wasn’t any indication that they were speaking much outside of practice. As the summer waxed on, though, the pair’s inside jokes began bubbling up from them like a spring between questions. Oriana’s face, sunflower-golden, turned to keep Adam in perpetual view as though he was riding across the sky in a blazing chariot himself.

This isn’t jealousy. That thought was what Jillian spent the second day of the national convention stewing over while she took exams in Eastern Kentucky University’s main gymnasium, which had been filled with hundreds of rickety foldable tables and plastic white chairs. She used the mindless activity of bubbling in a scantron sheet to think back to the previous year, the national convention at Wake Forest, just before she and Adam had broken up, when they had stumbled around a too-well-lit dance floor in the university auditorium during the final night’s celebrations. She’d had to grip his arms and lead him stiffly from step to step. She also thought about the boys that had come before even Adam, gawky and lanky seventeen-year-old nerds who invited her to cram flashcard sets in the basements of the university buildings and taught her instead how to stick a tongue down a throat.

She wanted to interpose herself between Oriana and Adam, or Oriana and whatever other boy. Oriana had the delicate, angular body of a barely teenaged girl and seemed so insubstantial that she might float away if Jillian didn’t always keep tabs on her. She made sure to invite Oriana every time that the California delegation was going to Chipotle as a group, every time they were going to play a game of Egyptian War, or whenever they were brainstorming pranks to play on the Massachusetts delegation. But even still, sightings of Oriana and Adam outside of contest cramming and Certamen were fleeting.

“Wait up.” Jillian followed Oriana out of the auditorium. They’d both finished the Vocabulary exam at around the same time. In the entrance hall for the gymnasium, they could see through the glass doors on either side of them a drowned world—a summer storm had started, and scattered figures in the distance were all running for shelter. A chaperone who had come into the hall from outside squelched across the tiled floor toward the bathrooms. “Hey,” Oriana said. She was texting, probably trying to figure out if Adam was still in the auditorium.

“You’ve been having fun? Your first convention, right?” “Mm-hmm.”

“Everything good?” “Yup.”

“Okay.” Jillian was going nowhere. “So, you and Adam, are you—” Oriana giggled. “You should ask him.”

“He’s, uh, you know. Graduating, right?”

“So?” She had Oriana’s attention now. “He’s really smart.” She sounded almost defensive. “He’s helping me a lot with studying for the contests.”

“I just mean—you know, he’s kind of mature. I just want to make sure you’re being, like, careful, and just, like . . .” She was running out of momentum. Oriana was watching her circle the conversational drain.

Jillian knew what Oriana was about to ask next before she’d even opened her mouth, a strange, cold smile twisting across the younger girl’s face to form the words. “Are you je—?”

“No,” Jillian said. “I’m not.” She turned to leave.

“Adam told me that you guys—” Oriana called after her. Jillian pushed the entrance hall doors open and shut them immediately behind her so she wouldn’t have to hear from Oriana whatever it was that she and Adam had done. Her T-shirt soaked through instantly in the pound of the downpour, and she began the walk alone to the dining hall for lunch.

*

At dinner, Jillian sat with Trey and some of the other boys from Trey’s high school and ate boiled potatoes with ketchup and a soggy slice of turkey. Trey was running the numbers on their team’s odds. “We’re currently second by point total from the group stages, and Florida is playing their semifinal round against Ohio, which will be a tough matchup,” he reported. “We’re up against Massachusetts and Texas next, which I think we can handle.” Trey always transformed over the course of the convention: he would arrive on Sunday claiming to be paying no heed to others’ performance, as he was simply there to demonstrate his own academic excellence, but by the final two days, he was out for blood.

“Cool,” Jillian replied, half listening. She’d just caught the eye of a familiar looking face from across the room. With a jolt of recognition, she finally placed him as Ralph, with his high, angular cheekbones and sweeps of curly brown hair, now hanging shaggy around both ears instead of cropped short as it had been years ago.

She last saw him in-person when she kissed him goodbye at the end of her second national convention. She’d been an eighth grader right on the precipice of high school, a daunting prospect that she had already termed in her head as “real life,” compared to the pale imitation of middle school, which she was so done with. He had been graduating into the great unknown of college—he had already spent years as a Certamen superstar and created master study guides for entire subjects during his time in high school, whole thousand-year, comprehensive timelines of Roman history periods that were still being circulated among Certamen players today. They spent the final evening hiding out by the athletic fields in the dry, windy heat of Fargo in the summer with his hands crawling across all the corners of her skin and her own hands fumbling for his new and strange crevices. She flushed as she remembered these things, but her warmth subsided as soon as they made accidental eye contact, at last, and he looked abashed, almost rueful, as he pursed his lips and gave her the half-smile of a man walking his dog outside in the winter and seeing a neighbor from down the street that he didn’t want to stop and talk to go the other way. She tore apart the potatoes on her plate and distracted herself by mentally reviewing the weapons that different types of gladiators carried. A retiarius would carry a rete, a weighted fishing net, as well as a tridens and sometimes a pugio, a dagger. She imagined standing up in this dining hall, clad in not much more than an arm-guard, shoulder-guard, and loincloth, and stabbing Ralph’s head with a tridens.

She bit her lip. He must have been done with college by now, or nearly. What could he possibly have to say to her now? She tuned back in just as Trey was also looking at Ralph. “I remember when that guy beat us in Fargo,” Trey said. “I heard someone say he’s a Computer Science major now. So, we could definitely take him, I bet. He probably doesn’t remember shit anymore.” Jillian laughed aloud.

*

They won by a whole-team effort. During finals, Adam picked up an abbreviations question that the Florida team fumbled—‘s.m.p.’ was an abbreviation on tombstones, not in legal documents—and netted the bonuses with Oriana’s help. Trey managed a tricky translation that involved the future plural imperative on an irregular verb, and Jillian helped puzzle through the bonuses, translating the Virgil quote “dux femina facti” properly and idiomatically as “A woman led.” The line referred to the Aeneid’s Dido, who eventually killed herself when the Trojan hero Aeneas left her and Carthage behind for better horizons. Virginia’s team was far behind them in point total, but Florida was keeping up. Jillian then delivered the final blow.

“Who sacked S . . .?”

Jillian buzzed, and the moderator stopped speaking. S . . .? She had five seconds. Her mind slotted in the details just in time. Saguntum, the trigger of the Second Punic War. “Hannibal.”

They thumped each other on the back and whooped as the final scores were read out—even Trey cheered, suspending his aloofness, just for a minute. They posed in front of the plastic tables on the stage to get their photo taken by one of the California chaperones. “We did that!” Jillian crowed as the photographer departed the stage. This was glory, this was all that she had wanted from the last five years. “Let’s—”

Already, the two of them were off. Jillian watched Adam help Oriana down from the stage, and they half-sprinted, half-skipped out of the auditorium.

“I guess we’ll see them at dinner,” Trey said. He added, “Or not, even.” “Gross,” Jillian said. They both mimed gagging at each other.

She and Trey went to find their fellow Californians in the auditorium’s raised seats—they were all still cheering, waving arms and several foam pool noodles they’d purloined from the university’s aquatic center and chanting the lyrics of an old Roman drinking song. She and Trey received their due of high-fives and fist-bumps. They left to get dressed for the final night’s dance.

*

She sat across from Oriana on the way back to the airport. The bus had blue upholstered featureless benches rather than distinct seats; Jillian spread out on one with her back to the bus wall, and Oriana mirrored her on the other side. Trey was somewhere toward the front of the bus—he got carsick sometimes—fast asleep, as both he and Jillian had stayed up too late playing increasingly unhinged rounds of cards with delegates from Louisiana and Tennessee.

Oriana was texting on her phone’s flip-out keyboard. Adam’s family had already arrived to claim him—each year, Adam usually went directly from national convention at the end of July to a family vacation at the beginning of August, camping somewhere remote. Jillian overheard Adam blithely wish- ing Oriana well, having just said farewell to him herself since he wouldn’t be around at convention events anymore. He had invited Oriana to come and visit him in college. He did not look back from the rental car.

Jillian watched out the bus window as Eastern Kentucky University faded away into thick green foliage and low, undulating hills on either side of the road. Something felt caught in her throat as she looked over the lush verdure so characteristic to the South, so Elysian, that surrounded their bus on all sides as they drove back to the main highway. She imagined the reverse of the underworld ferry journey—the boat she was in departing the harmonious, evergreen afterlife and rowing them back into the real world.

Oriana sported a new hickey high on her neck and wore what was likely the lowest-cut T-shirt she owned—a wrinkled scoop-neck—to show it off like a war trophy. Oriana’s upper back curved against the bus wall and she met Jillian’s gaze evenly. Jillian thought about all the names she’d memorized in excruciating detail for the exams, for Certamen—Persephone, Callisto, Danaë, Leda, Cassandra, et cetera. Oriana would know them all, too, and be the one to carry the torch onward once Jillian graduated next year. There was a lineage there.

---

Chi Siegel is the co-founder and managing editor of sinq, a print creative arts mag- azine by and for the Sino diaspora. She is a Lambda Literary fellow and an alum of the Kenyon Winter Workshop. Her short fiction can be found in or is forthcoming from Extra Teeth, AAWW’s the Margins, Longleaf Review, and other places. She was shortlisted for the CRAFT Literary short fiction contest 2023.