The Last Word Lost

Has your mind ever gone completely blank? Probably. But has your mind ever blanked onstage in front of 2,000 people? Not to mention the twelve television cameras broadcasting a live feed to another fifteen million people in three different countries.

That was a fun Thursday night.

I should have been the youngest person ever to win the Continental Spelling Masters. Instead, I will be a footnote on some Wikipedia page. Fourteen-year-old Myles Jasper holds the unique distinction of being the only participant in the history of this spelling bee who couldn’t utter a single letter.

Let me tell you, folks: SHIT HAPPENS. The story of my rise to the brink of greatness and epic collapse began six years earlier on the baseball field.

******

“Big hitter at the plate,” my coach yelled to the outfield. “Everyone move back.”

My bigger concern was the five glasses of cherry Kool-Aid I drank at dinner. My bladder felt like an overfilled water balloon, one wrong move and it would burst all over left field. Any spectator would attribute the fidgeting and discomfort to the fact Ben Baker was at the plate. The guy looked like he should be in junior high, not playing Rookie Sr. division ball with a bunch of seven and eight-year-olds. Ben wore a size six men’s cleat, and I could see his mustache from 200 feet away.

I thought that closing my eyes and biting my lip would help ease the impending eruption from within. At that moment, the metallic ring of Ben’s bat echoed across the field, followed by the roar of parents jumping on bleachers.

The next thing I remember is the smell of bleach and latex. My eyes fluttered open to a roundtable of doctors and nurses hovering over my hospital bed.

My baseball coach broke through the circle of white coats and scrubs. He spoke rapidly with a hint of terror in his voice, “Jesus’ boy, how do you feel? You took a line drive square off the noggin.” He paused to catch his breath. “And you pissed your pants in left field.”

******

At first, the headaches were unbearable. It felt like the left side of my brain was a smoldering pile of embers, relentlessly being prodded by a fire poker. I spent two weeks in my grandparent's spare room with a sleep mask over my eyes before the pain was manageable.

“You need to exercise that brain of yours,” my grandma said, dropping a stack of books on the nightstand. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ought to help with the atrophy.”

I was more interested in the Sylvania 13-inch TV/VCR combo on the dresser near the foot of the bed. I watched as the machine swallowed an unlabeled Memorex tape, and after some grinding and winding, the movie Ghostbusters started. Within minutes I heard a brand-new word. One of the scientists asked a lady if she was menstruating.

Among the books my grandmother placed on the nightstand was the Concise Oxford Dictionary. At the bottom of page 890, I found menstruate: (of a non-pregnant woman) discharge blood and other material from the lining of the uterus at intervals of about one lunar month. GROSS.

A few days later at breakfast, my grandma asked if I would like some orange juice with my toast.

“Fill that glass to the meniscus,” I replied.

“Meniscus? Where on earth did you pick up that word Myles?”

Page 890 of the Concise Oxford Dictionary flashed in my mind, vivid as if the thick text was right in front of me. “I saw it in the dictionary. M-E-N-I-S-C-U-S. Meniscus. The curved upper surface of a liquid in the tube.”

Turns out I could remember every detail of that page. Like a tattoo, the words were permanently inked into my hippocampus. I began reading the dictionary front to back, each definition was effortlessly scanned, filed, and easily retrieved.

My grandma would quiz me. “Page 351, thirteenth word down in the first column?"

“Currawong. C-U-R-R-A-W-O-N-G. A crow-like Australian songbird with mainly black or grey plumage, a robust straight bill, and a resonate call.”

******

When a baseball traveling at 60 miles per hour rattles your skull, and you suddenly develop superpowers, doctors become very interested.

For the next year, I was either in school or the hospital. Multiplication tables followed by a blood test. Photosynthesis coupled with a CT scan. Proper punctuation, then an electroencephalogram (page 461: the measurement and recording of electrical activity in different parts of the brain).

“We might have an answer about the boy's condition,” the doctor said. “Mrs. Jasper, have you ever heard of a savant?”

“Page 1273,” I interrupted. “S-A-V-A-N-T. A learned person.”

“That’s right Myles,” the doctor acknowledged, then returned to my grandma. “We believe your grandson has Acquired Savant Syndrome. There are only a handful of documented cases, but typically people exhibit scholarly skills after an illness, or in Myles's case, a brain injury.”

Physically, I didn’t feel any different. However, a prepubescent boy with a photographic memory is nothing short of social suicide.

“Is bezique even a real word?” Tommy Sanders asked during classroom free time.

“Of course,” I said confidently. “It’s a trick-taking card game for two. Your turn, what are you going to play?” 

“I can spell cat,” Tommy replied. “It’s really no fun playing Scrabble with you.”

My friend also found it unenjoyable that I would constantly interrupt discussions of movies or TV shows and correct them on character dialogue or the fact it was a waxing moon, not a full moon. Eventually, I wasn’t invited to anyone's birthday party.

On the flip side, school is a breeze when you have all the answers. Countless textbook pages and handwritten notes appear on demand, developing in my mind like a freshly spit-out Polaroid picture. I skipped grades and had my high school diploma by the age of 11.

Around that time, I entered the spelling bee circuit. No surprise—I won every school, city, county, state, and national competition. They called me Myles the Magnificent, the boy who never missed a word.

Behind the scenes I trained hard, reading and rereading the Concise Oxford Dictionary to ensure I didn’t miss anything. When I turned 14, I was finally eligible for what they call the Super Bowl of spelling bees, the Continental Spelling Masters. It features the top under-18 spellers from Canada, the United States, and Mexico. 30 competitors square off in a televised match-up for a $100,000 cash prize. That’s where we began my little story.

******

The auditorium buzzed with anticipation. Thousands of family members, mentors, reporters, and general spelling enthusiasts blabbered away, their voices blended into a symphony of excited trepidation.

On stage, the other competitors were sweating so profusely under the spotlight that I expected their collective nervousness to radiate like a rainbow. I, however, felt as confident as a four-year-old boy wearing a Batman costume. I sailed through to the finals with ease but had to face Vayna Mishra for the title.

She was a couple of years older than me and gorgeous, a striking combination of grace and determination. Her dark eyes conveyed an intellect well beyond her years and that long black hair framed her face with a warm confident smile. Of course, that’s not the picture that is permanently etched into my brain. After a competition in Delaware, I confused her admiration for flirting and tried to kiss her. Now I’m forever stuck replaying that expression of disgust: furrowed brow, narrow eyes, and the corner of her mouth pulled so far back, she was baring teeth like a rabid dog.

I couldn’t look as she took the podium and easily spelled staphylococci. The awkward tension between us was somewhat relieved as I approached the microphone, the crowd started to cheer for Myles the Magnificent. Fans were about the witness the best of the best win his first major championship.

The moderator calmed the crowd down, then spoke gently, but firmly, “Your word is zymurgy.”

I mentally searched for the word in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, but something was amiss. I hit a wall. Zymurgy wasn’t anywhere to be found. The final word at the bottom of page 1664 was zoo. After that was an ad for the dictionary on CD-ROM and a couple of blank pages. I didn’t know what to do.

“Can I have a definition?” I said sheepishly.

A hush fell over the crowd. I had never uttered those words before.

Even the moderator looked confused, peering from left to right at his associates. “Zymurgy. The study or practice of fermentation in brewing, wine making or distilling.”

Nothing! The embarrassment heightened my body temperature by a few degrees. The spotlights overhead burned my skin. Sweat trickled down the side of my head. I felt exactly like a grocery store rotisserie chicken, basting in my own juices while the hungry customers watched from afar. Not a single letter exited my mouth before the timer reached zero.

“I guess that means,” the moderator started, hesitated, and sounding confused, “Vayna Mishra is the winner.”

An odd combination of applause and baffled murmuring reverberated off the walls of the auditorium. The decibel level was several times below normal for this type of moment. Tears streamed down Vayna’s face as she leaped high into the air as if there was a trampoline on the stage. Her family rushed the stage and the celebration turned into a rugby scrum.

All the while I stood at the podium, too shocked to move, as $100,000 slipped away from me and into the abyss. Years of reading and competitions, all for nothing. 

******

The days that followed the Continental Spelling Masters were spent hanging up on nosey journalists and avoiding the reporters staked out on the front lawn.

I examined the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and upon closer inspection, I discovered the faint, jagged tear where the final page containing zymurgy was ripped out. Should I have known there were more words following zoo? I’m not exactly a genius, just someone cursed with a photographic memory.

I interrogated my grandma. “Why was there a page ripped out of the dictionary?”

She strenuously searched her memories. “I think it might have been from when we ran out of toilet paper during a big snowstorm and your grandpa needed something to wipe with.”

How about that folks? I lost the Continental Spelling Masters because: SHIT HAPPENS.