Both Sides Now - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peyton Thomas is a freelance journalist with bylines in Pitchfork, Billboard, and Vanity Fair. He was a 2016 Lambda Literary Fellow, studying under Benjamin Alire Sáenz. He lives in Toronto, and Both Sides Now will be his debut novel.

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chapter one

“Sorry—we’re the Soviets? You and me?”

“Come on, Finch: When have I ever steered you wrong?”

He’s got a point. In all our years of debating together, Jonah Cabrera has only steered me right. In my bedroom, back home, there’s a bookshelf that groans and sighs and threatens to split under four years of blue ribbons and gold medals. It’s an inanimate testament, that shelf: Listen to Jonah, and you, Finch Kelly, will go far.

Still, I’m skeptical. “You want us to role-play as Stalin’s cronies?”

“Oh, no. Not his cronies.” Jonah swivels to the blackboard, scrawling his points in white chalk. “It’s 1955. Stalin is six feet under. The Cold War’s getting colder. Eisenhower just rolled out the New Look.”

I watch him, hunched over my desk and chewing hard on a yellow No. 2. “Remind me what the New Look was?”

“More nukes, more cove-ops,” he says, standing tall, sounding sure of himself, “and way more American propaganda getting piped past the Iron Curtain.”

“Got it.” I pull the pencil—now a beaverish twig—out of my mouth and take some notes. I won’t lie: He’s selling me. “Keep talking.”

In ten minutes, the two of us will stride out of this classroom and onto the Annable School’s Broadway-sized stage. We will stand before hundreds of spectators, and we will argue, in speeches lasting not more than eight minutes, that every nation on Earth—no matter how rich, poor, or prone to the incubation of terror cells—deserves endless nuclear weaponry.

Do we actually believe this? God, no. Least of all Jonah, the clipboard-toting, signature-gathering student-activist bane of our local power station’s nuclear existence. Among the many buttons presently dotting his backpack, I can see a little one, the color of sunshine, reading: NUCLEAR POWER? NO THANKS! But still, he stands before the chalkboard, doing his utmost to build the case for Armageddon.

“Both teams—the U.S., the U.S.S.R.—they’re fully ready to plant mushrooms all over the map,” says Jonah, with a grand sweep of his arm across the chalkboard. “And the only reason they’re not raining burning hell all over the planet . . .”

“. . . is mutually assured destruction.” I glance at my stopwatch: eight minutes left, scrolling faster than I’d like. “This idea that the only defense against nuclear weapons . . .”

“. . . is more nuclear weapons,” Jonah says. “Because why hit the Russkies when you know they’ll hit you right back?”

As he says this to me, Jonah scribbles a series of suggestive illustrations on the blackboard: smoke, flames, innocent civilians disintegrating into radioactive ash.

If the whole Greenpeace thing falls through, he might have a future as an artist.

Of course, if either of us wants any kind of future at all, we’ll have to go to college first. And if we best the Annable School in the final round of this tournament, the North American Debate Association of Washington State will award us an enormous, gleaming trophy—one that would look great on college applications and, more urgently, on scholarship applications. Jonah’s mom is a registered nurse. My dad’s on his sixth month of unemployment and his seventh step of Alcoholics Anonymous. Neither of us can afford to shake sticks at this particular hunk of golden plastic.

“Okay, but, Jonah, Annable knows exactly how to refute that case.”

“Not if we run the case in the 1950s,” Jonah pleads. He’s literally a blue-ribbon pleader; he is very convincing. “Come on, Finch. Time travel? Ari is never going to see this coming.”

He’s talking about Ariadne Schechter: the Annable School’s prodigy of a debate captain, my worst enemy, my arch--nemesis, the freshwater to my salt. I despise her. I truly do. For so many reasons. Her noxious lavender vape fumes. Her unironic love for one milk-snatching Maggie Thatcher. And, not least of all, her early admission to Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. I settled for a purgatorial deferral letter. I’m still upset about it. 

I think I’d be less upset, mind you, if Ari’s dad hadn’t donated forty million dollars to erect the Schechter School of Sustainable Entrepreneurship on a high cliff at the edge of campus.

But I can’t fall into that swirling vortex of a grudge just now. Not unless I want to lose this round, and this state title, and fall even further out of Georgetown’s good graces.

“This ‘pretend to be commies’ angle is definitely . . . creative.” I’ll give him that. It may be the only thing I give him. “I’m just worried it’s too creative. Rule-breakingly creative. The kind of creative that’ll send Ari whining to the judges.”

“Okay, point one: You’re never not worried,” Jonah says, perching now on the teacher’s broad war-chest of a desk. He gets like this when he’s antsy—pacing, snapping his fingers, sitting on anything but, God forbid, a chair. “And point B: You know we need to spice it up this round. End of the day. End of the weekend. Everyone’s five seconds from falling asleep.”

“You included, apparently,” I say. “You just said ‘point one’ and ‘point B.’”

“Did I? Damn.” He flashes me a sheepish grin, and then a yawn, his arms flying high above his head. “Guess we need to get creative, then. Wake ourselves up”

“By arguing the whole round in Russian accents?”

“Who said anything about accents?” he says, all innocent.

“I saw you in The Seagull last semester, Jonah. I know you’re dying to flex your dialect work.”

“But . . .”

“Not the time,” I tell him. “Not the place.”

“Fine. No accents. Serious business only.” Jonah, still fidgeting, drums his knuckles against the top of the teacher’s desk: sturdy antique oak, the furthest possible cry from the particleboard and plastic of our own Johnson Tech, ninety minutes away on the outskirts of Olympia. “If we go with the standard case here—like, define ‘this House’ as NATO, or whatever—we basically have to argue that more nukes are a good thing.”

“Right. Hard case for anyone to make. Especially you, tree-hugger.”

“But if we set the debate in the Cold War? Cast ourselves as the Soviets? Make Annable argue for the U.S. of A.?” Rocking to and fro on the desk, he disrupts a decorative apple—World’s Best Teacher, etched in the glass. It teeters. I hold my breath. “We don’t have to hash out all the boring, entry-level arguments,” he says. “We don’t have to touch M.A.D. We can run a more historical case. Talk about communism.”

The apple steadies itself. I exhale.

“And capitalism,” I say, and sit up straight, and snap my fingers. “And the Truman Doctrine, and HST, and . . . oh, oh! If we can link that last one to de-Stalinization, we could even . . .”

His hand finds my wrist, halting my Ticonderoga.

“Knew I’d get you on board.” He winks. “Comrade.”

I’ve never met a president, but...