Adam is the protagonist of The Topeka School. As Adam, a skillful debater, completes his senior year and prepares to go to college, many expect him to win the national debate championship in Minneapolis.

Adam’s chapters focus on his daily life as a teenage boy in Topeka. Adam is torn between his academic interests in the uses of language and the need to fit in with other guys in his high school. In addition to being a skilled debater, Adam has an interest in poetry, two interests which alienate Adam from the rest of his class: “The problem for [Adam] in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy” (127). Adam overcomes his potential ostracization by using his linguistic prowess to freestyle rap, impressing his schoolmates with rap that features misogynistic language and “totally inapplicable clichés” (127). Adam’s interest in rap and poetry stems from their potential to imbue language with a formal artistry. For Adam, poems are a form of “spells […] unmaking and remaking sense that inflicted and repelled violence” (126). Similarly, in rap, Adam “catch[es] a glimpse, however fleeting, of grammar as pure possibility” (256).

The Topeka School explores Adam’s conflicting feelings towards masculinity.