Speech Competition Part Two

It was yesterday.

Guess what shy person broke to semifinals at her very first high school speech tournament?
*grins and nods enthusiastically* ME!
By the way -- to break is to make it to the next round.

Unfortunately, I did not break to finals. Bleh. I shall do better in three weeks at the next -- and last -- tournament.

Anyway, the whole story.
I got up at 5:56 am, because I had to be at the school at 7:00. And we had to be dressed up. *makes face* Red dress that I could survive the whole day in, black dress shoes, headband to match the dress, and a necklace my grandmother gave me for Christmas.
Add a blue drawstring bag with a yellow logo, and that was me on Saturday.

The contents of my bag:
My script. This was composed of three pieces of black construction paper with the words on white printer paper mounted on the construction paper, with the voices of the non-narrator characters highlighted in either blue or green. And the black sheets were in page protectors.
Two pencils.
A folded chemistry free response question, a folded blank sheet of notebook paper, a folded page with the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities, and a folded page with the beginning of my version of that first sentence. In short, that was the homework I chose to take.
A notebook. I read through everything I've written in it at least three times on Saturday, and I added some stuff. In French, because part of it was about how amazingly nice the team was and how that freaked me out a little bit. And I didn't want anyone else understanding that, so I wrote it in French.
A red water bottle, partially full until 11:35, when I drank the rest.
A cell phone.
*tries to think if that was it* Oh! Money. For lunch.

So we got to the high school, and despite the fact that I was clueless, I did understand that I had to go to the wall with all the postings on it, find my event, and find what time I had to perform and in what room.
I had to perform at 8:00. It was 7:40. *groan* I put down my stuff and went off to find my hallway. I was nervous, and I was pretty sure that no one I was competing against was doing this for the first time.
I went into the room when the judge got there, and there were...5 others, I think. The first one who went did very well, I though, except that she started out way too loud. A lot of people do that, actually. They yell the beginning, and while you want to start off strong, maybe not that strong...
I went fourth. There was one girl who went before me who I knew hadn't done very well, even if they didn't factor in her piece selection, which wasn't that great. There was also another girl who I thought had a confusing piece...but I had no idea what was being judged, so I didn't know if that mattered.
After me, there was one really good person and one okay person. The really good person went on to semifinals later.
Anyway, me. I walked up there, and I waited for the judge to look up -- which he commented about on his sheet later, as a good thing! *happy* It went well; I didn't leave anything out, and my speed was right. But I was nervous, because I could hear that the voices weren't as distinct as I wanted them...
I came out saying it went okay. Which is what I always say. We finished at 8:45.

I talked with people out in the cafeteria (which was where everyone who wasn't competing was), and I watched the wall, waiting for the postings about semifinals.
At 10:25, I turned and saw a group pointing, huddled around the prose section, so I went to look.
I made it to semifinals.
Better than that, I got first in my prelim room.

(To be continued)