I walk up to the front of the room. Everyone is watching, besides the girl who didn’t show up. I look around the room to see four people staring at me. I can feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins. My legs start to shake, but not enough for anyone to notice. I think to myself “I’ve done this a like a million times I’ll do great.” Eight minutes later, I’ve given my speech with plenty of mistakes, but for some reason, it’s not enough for me to notice. I walk back to my seat. We wait for the judge's response. After a suspenseful minute, she tells us we can go. Thanks to that girl who didn’t show up we got to leave early. I walk out of the room confident in myself and what I had just performed. I think to myself this might the time I break my streak.
As I walk down the hallway I run into my friend and we start talking about our rounds. I tell her that someone in my round didn’t show up, so I’m finally going to break my streak. I don’t know what she thought, but she didn’t look interested. Eventually, we make it back to the cafeteria also know as home base, the only I place feel like I’m not being judged. After a couple minutes, I see a tsunami of children flush into the room and swallow the cafeteria whole. I don’t think much of it until I realize why they were swarming the cafeteria. They had just posted finals. I rush over to the mosh pit of people and jump in. After a couple seconds of drowning in people, most of them begin to disperse. Some looking like someone had just died and others who look like they had just won a million bucks.
As I approach the wall that is filled with sheets of paper I look for one that says poetry, my category. I was so confident I was going to final, so I was a little upset when I didn’t see my name on that piece of paper. It didn’t take me long to get over it and move on. After finals, it was time to get on the bus. I see some of my fellow speechies with their critique sheets and I wanted to see mine. I walk over to Mrs. Winget, one of the speech coaches, and asked for my critiques. When I finished reading my critiques I gave them back and didn’t think much of it. They didn’t really phase me because I could think about was that my five five five streak was over. For the people who aren’t in speech five five five is the worst score judges can give you. That means I was the worst in every time I gave my speech that day. I couldn’t have gotten a five in the room where that a girl didn’t even show up. I was certain this was my day, I knew it was my day. Nothing could bring me down until I saw my scores.
For the third time in a row, I had gotten a five five five. All that was going through my head was this wasn’t fair. The words this wasn’t fair played over and over and over again in my head. It eventually stopped when I realized that I had been beaten by a girl who didn’t even show up. I was devastated and enraged at the same time. I didn’t know whether to punch something or lie on the floor and start crying. I felt like the hulk after a breakup. At the end of all those emotions, I cried. When I got on the bus I was still very sad but I wasn’t as angry. My friend, the same one I was walking down the hall, had also had gotten a bad score. Instead of crying with them I pulled myself together and began making jokes about what had happened to me. After the first two or three jokes, my friend looked a lot happier.  From that day on I knew that when other people feel sad, that sometimes it’s better to comfort them with jokes about my problems because there is always something funny about being beat by a girl who didn’t even show up.