The seven us are sitting in Mr. Stones room, anxiously waiting to start our meeting. We start playing games, like Hangman and I Spy. Finally we hear the squeak of the back door to the Agriculture building. The teammates and Mr. Stone are sitting in a circle in the middle of the room talking about what our issues could be and what we are thinking what is gonna be interesting to all of us. We finally got it down to two options, Fracking and Pasteurized milk. Teammates and I made a final decision on what we wanted, Fracking.
We just kept laughing at the name and you hear someone say I love my fracking team. That was the moment that we all fell in love with the issue. We start preparing for our first CDE, a week from the day we had our meeting. We are starting to go to more and more places to start presenting our show. As we are walking into the room for districts, my nerves are jumping all over the place like a mexican jumping bean. This might be our last chance to be together, competing. We start walking into the room and stand there before three judges and start presenting.
We were all stuttering through our words, then it came time for questions. We are never really good at answering the questions that they were giving us. We starting walking out of the room, with the look of defeat on all of our faces, cause we are all thinking that none of us performed very good. We all hear them shout for Ag Issues, so we are starting walking towards them and they start announcing. They are announcing first and second and only the top three go on to the state level. The started announcing the third place winner and I could feel the grip on my hands tightening from my teammates.
They said it, they started announcing Centralia. Thats when the exciting moment actually hit us. We are state bound, our goal we set at the beginning of the year. We started pulling into the parking lot of Bradford farms, my nerves were kicking in. The rain was pouring down as we are checking in, then they make us walk from one building to the other. We are all dressed up, the girls wearing heels, and the boys wearing their nice dress shoes. When we finally get in there, after walking in the pouring rain and waiting for thirty minutes, we start presenting.
Then we are done presenting and answering the horrifying questions they ask us, we start walking out, this time we did not have such a look of failure on our faces. We were regaining all our confidence that we had once lost. We are standing there, holding hands, and waiting for them to call our names. The lights shining in our eyes like looking up at the burning sun. The roaring crowd just as anxious as we are to see how we actually did. They counted down, sixth place, fifth place. fourth place.
Then finally they reached first place and we all hear the joyous sound of them saying Centralia. I hear the cry of my nearby teammate, realizing that it was actually us. As I look off the stage into the crowd, I hear Mr. Stone scream like he had just saw a snake and his knees get weak as he fell to the stairs of the stage. State officers push us forward, we are all still in shock, while they are handing the end teammate the plaque. Then, we felt the push of people coming off the stage like a herd of elephants as we just stood there, still in complete shock.
