But I stayed

Chapter 1: Belief in a system

Tim's mother arranged her orchids on the dimming window and turned to look at him, oatmeal ladle in hand.

"It'll be great. Just stab them. Don't think too much." she said, as half-heartedly as she sounded. The recurring losses were catching up with her, too.

"I'm nervous," Tim replied. "What if lose to Madeline or Sam? Or Mirabelle? They're all so much smaller than me, it's embarrassing."

"Then don't lose. We don't send you there to float around and be an idiot." His mother turned back to her orchids. "Are the bags in the car?" she added, while inspecting a leaf.

"Yeah. When will dad be back?"

"Yes, he's late today."

"Oh, no, we're going to be late! I hate it when we're late, Coach always yells at us in front of the whole class." Tim almost began crying--that's how much his coach hated him.

Tim ate his oatmeal--unsubstantial food for a crazy sport like fencing--and took some deep breaths. He was still furious from losing to Madeline last time, although she had cheated and misrepresented the score. She really thought she could pick on him.

Sam wasn't any better. Despite the fact that they were supposed to be teammates, Sam would ignore him and refuse to fence him.

Mirabelle was someone he could probably never beat. She was flexible and smart, and acted completely harmless the whole time. Tim knew that her strategy was going to be difficult to crack. 

But the kids weren't that bad. It was the miserable sport.

Fencing. 

The most wonderful and the most horrible sport in the world. It was so hard and so confusing. Nothing about it was fair. If you started late, you would never catch up to the child prodigies. Most people started at six, or five. Tim had started when he was twelve. They had years of experience ahead of them. The rules, too, weren't meant to be fair. If you made a little mistake you didn't even know about, that was it. You're a failure. Sure, it was fun and exciting, and like a drug that would slowly kill you.

The coaches were aggressive and overly hyped-up about it. They would act mysterious like they knew all the secrets to winning, but they were big phonies in reality.

And that was Tim's world.