By: Candace Lu

It was the week before Thanksgiving break and the teachers seemed to have given up on making us do work. The field trip that had happened on Wednesday to the local high school had been completely ruined by the horrible math test that had happened right after. Thursday was an empty day, a day to waste time until Friday. There was a small, suppressed feeling of excitement looming over everyone. Friday was Team Day. Team Day was filled with games and a pep rally, as well as an early dismissal. After school, we would have a whole nine days off from school. I hadn’t really cared much about it; it was just an excuse to not do schoolwork.

Although, I thought it would be a bit discrediting toward our advisory if I didn’t join in on some of the hype. As a result, on Friday, I dressed in all black, our advisory color, and decided to clap lightly to the beat of our chant instead of lip-syncing.

Since I’d had zero-period Spanish, me and everyone else got the honor of helping our Spanish teacher, Mrs. Doherty set up her tic-tac-toe, bottle flip game. The students in front and behind my table set up our nine desks in rows of three at the front-right side of the room. The middle desk had four strips of blue tape forming a tic tac toe symbol and the front desk had an E on it. When we were all finished, me and my friend, Ankitha, suddenly realized the E at the front of the desks we set was actually a 3… or not, the table across from ours had a snake on it, unless it was a 2, although, it definitely didn’t look like one.

After a while, our Spanish teacher placed us in groups of eight and let us test the game out. My group had four girls and four boys; I knew two of them. A girl named Puga, who sat behind me and was in my advisory, and a boy named Seth, who sat next to me. The game was played with four bottles of blue liquid, four bottles of dyed yellow liquid, and two clear bottles, halfway filled with water. You would flip the clear bottles and if it landed upright, you would place one of your blue or yellow bottles on the tic-tac-toe board until someone won. We decided to play girls against boys, and for the first three games, the boys completely crushed us. Then, it was me against Seth. I flipped the bottle way too lightly at first and it barely even turned. The second time, I’d tried flipping it with greater strength. The bottle slipped out of my hand and almost hit someone on the other side of the room. After the incident, I made sure that I had a good hold on it when I flipped it. Then, by a sheer amount of luck I got three bottles on the board. I actually thought it was fun, and Mrs. Doherty was one of the most hated teachers, ever. The boys won the next game, during which Puga and Seth were busy clapping in each other’s ears, while I watched, laughing.

When zero-period ended, Ankitha, Puga, and I headed toward our advisory, Mr. Rowe’s. When we got into Room B17 we went immediately to our assigned seats. After the daily bulletin was read by the Cougar News Network (CNN), Mr. Rowe started to joke about how our team captain, Tushar, was wearing blue not black. The team captain basically had the schedule and would lead us toward our next game. Mr. Rowe then proceeded to make us practice our chant, “Rowe, Rowe Advisory, Room B17, merily, merily, merily, merily, Sutter’s but a dream”. It was really terrible.

Soon after, Mr. Rowe set up his game, we watched a clip from “Napoleon Dynamite” and then he quizzed us on random facts that happened. Honestly, it was incredibly boring. Our class ended up getting one question wrong, Tina was the llama, not the grandmother.

Then, Tushar led us to the next game in Room C8, Mrs. Brown’s class. In Room C8, we played a game consisting of us making paper airplanes and seeing who’s airplane went the farthest. Everyone would split into teams of three and everyone in their teams would make different colored airplanes and there was a contest for each color: purple, pink, and blue. I joined up with Ankitha and Shayla. I chose purple, Shayla got pink, and Ankitha picked blue. I was first to throw, I got second in the purple contest. Shayla threw hers next and it went about half my distance. Ankitha’s plane … just didn’t go very far. The game ended rather abruptly, we had to get to the pep rally.

The pep rally was exactly as I’d expected, a bunch of people trying to hype themselves up with on real reason to. When we got to the gymnasium, we sat on the ground and watched the advisory next to us, Mrs. Bannister’s, do weird things. She was throwing one of her students in the air and giving him a piggyback ride on her shoulders. After leadership calmed everyone down, the games began.

The first game was a hula-hoop game. Twenty people in each advisory would hold hands and create a chain. The first person in the chain would go through a hula-hoop, then the next person, and the next, until the hula-hoop got to the end of the chain and it would go from the last person to the first. Puga was last in the chain, so I stood at the end with her for moral support, I wouldn’t participate in any of the games. When it got to Puga, she did the stupidest thing in the world, she kept on holding on to the hula-hoop as it went back to the first person in the chain. We got fourth place.

Next, was the three-legged race. It was pretty self explanatory and very confusing. I didn’t even know what place we got.

Then, came the game everyone looked forward to, the mummy wrap. Basically, two students would wrap their advisory teacher in toilet paper. We were doing pretty well, the toilet paper didn’t break at all, but we were very, very slow. Imagine a person typing very slowly, not making a single mistake, that was our class. I thought it was a waste of toilet paper. Surprisingly, Mrs. Doherty’s advisory won.

Finally, there was another three-legged race, with the teachers instead. Mr. Rowe got paired up with Mr. Gebhart, a rather large man. Like the other race, it was very confusing and I didn’t know what place we got either. It was a sad way to end the pep rally.

I walked with Shayla, Ankitha, and Puga toward the blacktop. Puga and Ankitha walked incredibly slowly, so we were late to the very important discussion everyone was having.

Apparently, Tushar, the team captain, was missing. After a lot of discussion, Mr. Rowe sent someone to go find him. When they came back it was more than just Tushar. Everyone circled around him and Mr. Rowe began to interrogate him on why he’d been missing with an imaginary mic. Tushar gave a very wild excuse and we gave up on getting answers, so we switched to a different problem. Tushar was most definitely not the team captain anymore, so now we had to choose a new one. Three people were voted as candidates: Duke, Eva, and Khanh. Suddenly, I became one of them. Mr. Rowe then interviewed us why we should be the new team captain. Eva stated that she got an A on the grammar test we all failed. On the other hand, I hadn’t failed, which made Eva’s statement incredibly annoying. Khanh gave examples of how she’d basically been the team leader the entire pep rally and I didn’t care, so I said so, but I made it very clear that I’d passed the grammar test. For some reason, Duke wasn’t interviewed and Khanh was chosen as the new team captain. Then, there was a 10 minute bathroom break.

When the bathroom break was over, we headed toward Mr. Garza’s. He told us random facts about him, Mr. Rowe, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Bannister. Next, he split our class into two groups.

One person from each group would come to the front of the room and they would play trivia. If you got the question right you would get a point. Then, you would try to shoot a ball into a basket attached to the whiteboard, if you got it in you get another point. We were ahead of the other team when it was my turn to shoot. I missed by more than a foot.

The last games were tug-of-war and flag tag with Mrs. Bannister. We would play against Mrs. Iversons’s advisory. We played tug-of-war first. At first, it was girls vs girls. We won, although I didn’t think I was much help. For boys vs boys, Mrs. Iverson’s class won. When it was class vs class, they won yet again. Seth, who was on the other team, slid his hand across his neck in a universal symbol. It was then that I decided I would crush them, no matter what.

Next was flag tag, and I’m pretty useless during P.E., but I had a plan. When the game started, everyone was at a standstill. Nobody moved across the halfway point of the court, except me.

I walked over and asked if anyone wanted to pull my flag. They hesitated for a few seconds, then pulled my flag, my team was nonplussed. I sat down and smiled, there was a small rule that most people didn’t take advantage of; you could pull other people’s flag when you were down, and I’d placed myself in a perfect position where I could pull flags. After they got used to my presence, I pulled a bunch of flags. They ran away like frightened rabbits, it was pretty funny. I snatched up every flag I could. In the second half of the game no one came toward me. It was probably because I was surrounded by people who’s flags I’d pulled and no one wanted to step on us. I’d noticed that people tended to favor the sides of the court in the later half of the game, I would try the edges in the second game. We ended up winning, of course.

For the second game, I went to the sides and asked the same question I’d asked before. They hesitated a lot longer than before, although they pulled it in the end. Instead of waiting like I’d done before, I pulled the flags the minute I’d sat down. They already knew my strategy, I needed to pull as many flags as I could. We won, again. Then, me and Puga walked up to Seth and she clapped in his ear, like she did during Spanish, he yelped and did the same to her.

When I looked back and saw that everyone was sitting down, I slid back to our side of the court and began to pay attention to what Mrs. Bannister was saying. There was a slight burn on my kneecap. After a while, I looked at my knee, the fabric of my pants was ripped and my kneecap was scraped. I’d groaned, I wouldn’t be able to wear the pants anymore.

And that’s how I ended Team Day