I was 13, and a partner and I had made it, deep into the LEST Spelling tournament. LEST stands for Lutheran Elementary Schools Tournament – I’m attempting to come up with some sort of sordid or distasteful acronym that would also be suitable, but am drawing a blank. Anyway, there were only two other two-person teams left, and us: Team Trinity Lutheran, comprised of me, a gregarious fat kid with a talent for spelling, and a friend, who was one of those simultaneously cool, simultaneously nerdy kids who wouldn’t really recognize that as an asset until later.

While this obviously isn’t the national spelling bee, in which bedraggled children completely devoid of social skills commit to memory thousands of words foreign even to those who study for the GRE, we’d weathered some difficult words. Imagine our surprise and delight when the next word was called: “Please spell ‘misspell’”

We looked at each other, relief probably palpable, but then shadows of doubt began to creep across our prepubescant visages: misspell? Who spells misspell? Miss-pell? Mi-spell ? Mis-spell? Well, the answer is the last word in the list, and it seems terribly obvious to me now, but it was either nerves or a combination of spelling words for hours on end, but we blurted out “mispell.”

We lost.

My father hit the bottle that night. My friend killed himself. Ok, he didn’t really, and my father didn’t drink due to our mistake, either. But it still stunk to have to tell people you knew that, yes, we had been tossed out of a spelling competition because we misspelled mispell. Er, wait. We mispelled misspell. Aw, fuck it.

Screw you, misspell.