Forensics Published Piece

I sat quietly in the classroom. It felt so big and spacious. Me and my friend, Arya waited silently till it was our time to perform. We were third in line to perform. This was my first forensics competition and I was so nervous. A forensics competition works like this: you perform in a class room with other people in your category. You have to perform for three judges in three different rounds. In each round you go up to a table and draw for order. When you draw you get a piece of paper with a number. That number tells you when to go. Then you go up and perform for a judge. The judge ranks all the people in the category. then after all the rounds are done, you go to awards and see what place you were in. then you get the comments the judges wrote about your piece the next day.  I was in a duo (which is just one of the many categories) and I had a hilarious piece called action news by Jonathan Rand. All the other duos were really good. One of them was an episode of a popular T.V. show. Another was about a game of bingo.
"Hey Arya, are you nervous at all?" I quietly whispered.
 "I'm really nervous, but I know we can do great." She answered.
"We’ve worked so hard so we'll do great!" I said.
 "A1 duo" the judge announced. 
We quietly walked down the stairs to the performing spot. The other team from our school went up before us and was super amazing. They had good movements, great blocking, they were loud. I thought we were going to do great. I wondered what would happen if a chair fell over or some big distraction started happening.  But that wouldn't happen. We were going to do great, I quietly thought to myself.
“Judge ready? “Arya said.
“Timer ready?” I said.
“Wait one moment.” The judge said.
“Now go.” The judge said.
"It’s 5:59 and you’re watching WOMG action news..." Arya and I said. 
Oh No, we started, I thought. But we were doing great, I thought again. I thought we were going to win. Actually, I KNEW we were going to win. 
It felt like my lips knew exactly what to say without me even thinking about it. I thought I had been practicing a lot, so I knew exactly what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. 
We were close to the end of our piece. We only had about two paragraphs left. We were almost done.
"Achoo!" I heard in the audience.
Our coach had told us to not get distracted. So we didn't. We kept going.  We put our heads down and finished. I felt my fingers wiggle. I felt so happy. I thought we had done amazing.
About five minutes later everyone gathered in the Media Center of the school for awards. Since it was our team hosting the competition, our coach came up and talked a little about awards and placements. 
"We are giving awards to places 1-3." Mrs. Basset said.
“At least I'd get a medal no matter what I because there's only three duos,” I thought to myself.
The man announcing the awards had started speaking.
"First category, poetry. In 3rd place, Charlie Anderson. In 2nd place, Kate Adams-Boone. In 1st place, Vanessa Brown!" The man said.
"Next category, Declamation...”
"Next category, DI...” The man told the crowd.
I dosed off for a while, not paying much attention. I saw a lot of different people come up for a lot of different categories. Some categories had a lot of people. Others just had one person. Finally I heard them announce duo.
"In 3^rd place, Layman and Mastrangelo." The man announced.
I realized that they were calling the duos by last name.
"In 2^nd place, Delewen and Greenfield."
"In 1^st place, Nelson and Goel!" said the man.
I thought I miss heard. But I didn't. We won! I was screaming with joy! Arya and I were so, so happy! We never thought we would win. We ran over to our parents and hugged them.
"We won, we won!" We screamed.
“Calm down!”Our moms said.

We were super happy we won. But we learned something important; if you dream and believe big, you will reach and achieve big!