The Botany of Blame

Galen had been twenty-eight for exactly two weeks when the tie happened, and he would think about that for the rest of the night.

The venue had packed out around eleven, chairs stacked, the scoreboard already photographed by a dozen people who wanted proof that a regional championship had ever ended in a dead heat. The committee had already declared them co-champions and gone home, so the tiebreaker was pure pride, off the record. Galen stood by the exit with his coat half on and watched Stacy sign the results sheet with a pen she'd clearly brought for the purpose. She was twenty-nine, a botanist, and she wrote her name the way she did everything, like the paper owed her money.

Three years of this. They'd met at a smaller tournament when she was twenty-six and he was twenty-five, and they had not spent a single friendly minute together since. People at the venue had stopped trying to seat them apart because it made no difference. They found each other anyway. It was gravity, or spite, or something that had never gotten a proper name.

She pocketed the pen and walked over to him.

"Well," she said. "Shed?"

"That's the tiebreaker venue, yeah. Unless you want to flip a coin in the parking lot like animals."

"Your shed. Your ground. I want it on paper that I agreed to that." She said it fast, already moving toward the door, and he had to catch up.

Outside, the cold hit like a hand. It was the kind of Swiss night that made the lake below the town look black and solid, and the mountains behind it made no sound at all, which somehow made them worse. The walk to the rental shed took ten minutes along a road with no lamps on the last stretch. Neither of them talked for most of it. Galen could hear his own breathing and, once, the far-off clatter of a chair inside the venue being put on a table.

"Congratulations on the tie," Stacy said eventually.

"That's not a thing people say."

"It's a thing I say. It's funnier." She had her hands in her pockets and her chin down against the wind, and she still managed to walk like a person leading a parade nobody else could see. "You had the sports question. You had it, and you choked on the year."

"I did not choke. The year was ambiguous."

"There's no ambiguity in 1972!"

"There is if you read the question the way I read it, which is fast, because some of us don't waste four seconds savoring the card."

She made a noise that might have been a laugh in a better mood. The gravel crunched under them. Up ahead the shed sat dark against the treeline, a low wooden building with a rolled steel door and a side entrance, and Galen felt the old familiar flip in his stomach, the one he only ever got near her or near a starting buzzer. He'd stopped trying to figure out which one it was.

He managed the side door, and the smell of the place came out to meet them, rubber and lake water and the pine oil he wiped the hulls down with. Inside it was all stacked kayaks in racks along the walls, paddles bundled in pairs, life vests hanging like a strange orange audience. He'd left a card table in the middle with a lamp on it. The lamp was the only light. He turned it on and the whole room turned orange and small.

Stacy looked around with her hands on her hips.

"This is your empire," she said. "This little playhouse."

"It's a place of business."

"It's a shed, Galen. You run a shed. There are boats in it and a table that's clearly been dragged here from somewhere sad." She ran a finger along the table edge and looked at it, judging the dust. "You couldn't have booked the venue annex like a normal person?"

"The annex closes at eleven. The shed closes whenever I say."

"And this is why you lose."

"This is why I don't lose, actually, is the thing." He shut the door behind her and threw the bolt, mostly out of habit, and heard her pause at the sound of it. She didn't say anything about it, and he didn't explain it. The wind had picked up outside. Somewhere above the door frame a wind chime he'd hung in the summer was ticking softly, starting to wake up.

They set up the way they'd agreed at the venue. One stack of cards, face down. One lamp. Two chairs that he'd brought from his apartment in the spring and never taken back, which he had not planned tonight around, and which he now definitely had planned tonight around, in the sense that he'd thought about them once and then felt ashamed.

Stacy sat. She was small, always had been, maybe a head shorter than him seated and worse standing, and she had a way of taking up more space than her size allowed, elbows out, jacket still on like the room would have to earn her comfort. He sat down across from her and the table was just wide enough that their knees didn't touch. He noticed that fact and then made himself not think about it.

"House rules," he said. "Alternate categories. No phones. First to a three-question lead takes it."

"And no takebacks!"

"There's no such thing as takebacks in trivia."

"There is if you're you." She reached over and cut the deck before he could. Her hands were quick. "Because here's the thing I've been holding all night, Galen. Since we're at your shed, with your bolted door."

He waited. Above the door, the chime gave a real ring now, one full clear note, and the wind was rising off the lake in gusts that came through the gaps in the door frame.

"Last year," she said. "Regional semifinal. My buzzer dies in round three. Dead, mid-question, with me sitting on a forty-point lead in the category. The tech guy opens it up and the battery clip is loose. Just loose. Not broken. Loose."

Galen kept his face still, which took actual work.

"I checked the replacement clip," she went on. "Same part number. Same manufacturer. The one that was in it was newer than the rest of the wiring. Somebody had been in there."

"Could've been the tech guy."

"It was you."

It wasn't a question, and he'd known for a year that this moment was coming, and he'd imagined denying it, and now that it was here he found he didn't want to. That surprised him. The lamp made her eyes orange and she was watching him the way she watched a scoreboard.

"Yeah," he said. "It was me."

Stacy sat back. For a second he thought she was going to stand up and leave, and he realized he'd have let her, and that the year of not knowing what she'd do with it had been worse than this.

"You cost me a final," she said.

"You cost me two finals. The geography blunder, and the year before that."

"Those were legitimate."

"So was my battery clip. It's not my fault your tech guy does sloppy work." He heard himself smiling and didn't stop it. "You've known for a year. You didn't report it. You waited. That's the part I could never figure out."

"Because reporting it gets you a fine and me nothing. I want the final." She pulled the top card off the deck and held it face down, tapping it against the table. "And I want it tonight, in your little playhouse, with your door locked so there's no weather excuse and no tech guy and no committee. Just the two of us and a stack of cards."

"Those aren't tournament conditions."

"No. They're better!" She set the card down between them, still face down, and left her hand on it. "And you should understand something before we start, Galen. I'm not reporting the clip. Not tonight, not ever. That's off the table, and so is everything else outside this shed. I didn't come here for a trivia match."

The chime above the door rang again, three notes this time, and held.

"I came here to beat you at something that matters," she said. "And I already know what the last question is."

Galen looked at the card under her hand, and then at the bolt he'd thrown himself, and felt the flip in his stomach again and finally, after three years, put a name on which kind it was.

"Then ask it," he said.

Stacy didn't ask it, and Galen didn't push. He reached into his jacket instead and pulled out a single card of his own, creased at one corner, and stood up, and Stacy's eyes followed the card and not him, which he understood, because he'd watched her do the same thing at every tournament for three years. Then he reached up and took the wind chime down off its hook above the door frame.

It was a cheap thing, five brass tubes on a piece of fishing line, and it rang once more in his hand, almost polite about it. He hung it from the edge of the lamp's clamp on the card table instead, where the heat of the bulb stirred a small current of air, and it kept up a slow irregular ringing, one note, then two, then a pause.

"Timer," he said. "Each round lasts as long as the chime rings. When it goes quiet, time's up. That is the entire system. No phones, no watches, no committee."

"You hung a wind chime in a rented shed in the Alps," Stacy said, "and now it's an official timing apparatus."

"It was hanging there before you got here. I'm just promoting it."

She laughed, one short sound, and he realized it was the first time he'd heard her laugh in three years of competition, and that he'd have remembered it if he'd ever heard it before, and that he'd wanted to hear it more than he'd wanted any trophy he'd actually won. He sat back down and pushed his card across the table face down, next to hers.