Robbie was the best damn speaker I’d ever seen. He was clever, and he was witty, and he had a way of breaking down information into nice, neat packages wrapped with silver bows that just made everything make sense. It was his voice that really captured me. He’d speed up real fast and his voice would crackle with excitement and the whole room would instinctively lean in, hanging on the edge of their seat... Then his voice would go even, low, and slow like he was giving the State of the Union address. Up and down, up and down, he spoke like a rollercoaster ride and by the time he was finished, all you could feel was wonder that in seven minutes he’d taken the world’s dullest foreign affairs topic and not just impressed you with his knowledge; he made you feel. Robbie sure took home his fair share of trophies– his junior year he’d managed to clinch first at the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton invitationals. By the time I met him his senior year he was basically just taking a victory lap. I would watch him in the outrounds after I dropped preliminaries and I’d take note of every dip in his voice, of every great choice of words, of every single movement he made.
I tried talking to him once. I ran out after him once he finished his speech and nearly crashed into him in the hallway trying to catch him before he disappeared. I was nervous as hell. I could barely string together a sentence; he was such an intimidating figure.
“I, uh, just wanted to, uh, tell you that I think you’re a really really good speaker. Like, the best I’ve ever seen. I hope I can be as good as you eventually.”
He grinned at me. He spoke for a while, and when I’d try to cut in and say something, he'd commandeer the conversation again and guide it where he wanted to go. He spoke, and he spoke, and he kept on speaking ‘til he shook my hand and told me it was nice to meet me and walked away. I never even told him my name. He never asked.
As my novice year progressed, I started getting good enough to break at tournaments myself. When I didn’t break in my event I’d walk over to a friend’s outround and cheer them on instead. Friends come quick in debate. You put a bunch of kids who all have the common trait of never ever shutting the hell up with each other for hours on end and it’s near impossible to manage not making friends with ‘em all. At some point I stopped going to Robbie’s rounds entirely. He was still just as impressive as he was before, and I would’ve kept going if he and I had become friends, but our short interaction had left a bad taste in my mouth and I’d rather watch a real friend win.
Information spreads fast among kids in close quarters, and debate competitions filled with the county’s most talkative teens are especially good conduits for information. I learned about Robbie in bits and pieces from kids on his team, other seniors that’d competed with him for years, and the bits of gossip that circulated around tournaments just as quick as the flu.
Robbie had a real bad stutter as a kid. That, and a high-pitched voice that all-too-often waxed lyrical about oil shortages and crypto and tax policy or whatever the hell he was reading about that day to other twelve year olds who really couldn’t give a shit less. His parents made him try out a debate class in the seventh grade, and he got real good, real fast. Someone’d finally given him an algorithm for human interaction; an equation he could solve for emotional appeal. He kept debating for the next six years and he just kept getting better. There wasn’t anyone he was friends with though, not really. Nobody really disliked him and no one minded much when he would walk up to talk to them but it was that damn speaking way of talking that always bit him in the ass. He’d try to talk to people in the same way he gave speeches; and he sounded intelligent and eloquent and you’d get lost in the world he spun until he guided the conversation to its end and walked away. The novices were taken by this kind of talk. When you don’t know much about talking and speaking it’s easy to confuse the two and chalk up your confusion to your mistake in not understanding him ‘cause he just sounded so damn good, but the varsity knew better. There’s a real difference between talking to and speaking at someone and when you know the difference between being spoken at, in whatever pretty language, and being talked to like an equal, that kinda behavior is a real put off. No one really hated him for it ‘cause they knew he couldn’t help it but no one put up with it for more than a couple minutes either. Most speakers of his caliber could count on a couple admirers and friends to come watch him give his championing speeches, but not Robbie. No one but star-struck novices like me ever spectated his rounds, and they never lasted too long either.
Robbie’d sit outside his round, reading the news, oblivious to everything around him. He didn’t seem too bothered by his lonesomeness, so I just left him be. He graduated that year. I haven’t seen him since. I still think about poor Robbie and his perfect speeches. Those bastards taught Robbie how to speak, but they never taught him how to talk. They gave that freak-loser kid with no friends a pile of books and told him they’d teach him how to make people like him, and he studied them with discipline, and all it ever got him was a pile of trophies.