The Model of Elm Street (Part 4)

Judging took two hours. Three judges moved along the tables with clipboards, and two of them gave Elm Street about forty seconds each.

First place went to the downtown block with the working streetcar. Second went to the lit bridge. Third went to a model of the Civic Center itself, which Ethan thought was cheating in a way he couldn’t quite explain. Simone clapped for all three and then said nothing at all on the walk back to their table.

The third judge came back on his own. He was an older man who had built sets for a theater in Indianapolis for thirty years, and he didn’t look at the model from three feet away. He knelt down until his eyes were level with the street.

“Who cut these?” he asked, touching the edge of the roof with one finger.

“We did,” Ethan said. “The three of us.”

The judge looked up. Simone pointed to the back of the hall, where the woman from two doors down was standing by the coffee table, pretending she had come for the coffee.

“Everything else in this room came out of a machine,” the judge said. “Somebody drew one shingle, and the machine made it perfectly four hundred times. Yours are four hundred individual pieces of wood, and I can see the knife in every one of them. That’s the only thing on this floor I couldn’t order online.”

He gave them a small white card: Judges’ Award for Handwork. No streetcar. No first place. No photograph in the paper on Monday. Simone read the card about six times on the way back to the table, and the disappointment and the pleasure sat next to each other and neither of them won.

In front of the model there was a name card, printed neatly in Simone’s handwriting, with two names on it. She turned it over and wrote it out again, and this time there were three.

The woman two doors down read it over her shoulder.

“Spell it right,” she said.