by Aubrey Rose
“Ready?” Mark stood on the steps under the awning, waiting for me.
“I’m never ready for these things.” Even after years of being at the top of my class, my stomach still turned over at the thought of being tested. Of being judged, and found wanting. Right now every nerve in my body stood on high alert.
“Don’t worry, you’ll do fine.”
“Where’s Quentin?” A few students filed into the auditorium, but Quentin was nowhere to be seen.
“He’s already inside. Wanted to get there early and sit in front. His roommate said the guy who won last year sat in front.”
“So he’s trying to set up the perfect initial conditions.” I rolled my eyes and Mark laughed.
I pushed my hood back from my head as we entered the building. Inside, a hundred students milled around the auditorium. Quentin waved to us from the front of the auditorium, and we walked toward him. Nobody else wanted to sit in the very front, it seemed, and Mark and I slid into the row right behind Quentin. Every other seat had the desk extended with a tablet resting on it.
“Check it out,” Quentin said. “Tablets like in the major hall lectures. Think they’re going to be watching us while we do the problems on these? My roommate didn’t say anything about working on a screen.” The tablets alternated on every other desk, so Mark sat down two seats over from me. He poked at the tablet, but the screen was locked.
“Wow,” I said, scanning the room. “I didn’t know we had this many math majors in our class.” I didn’t recognize half of the people there.
“There’s some physics and engineering people, looks like,” Mark said.
“Computer science too,” Quentin said. “Doesn’t matter. All of the past winners have been math majors.”
“Guess everyone wants a shot,” I said. My hopes withered. It seemed impossible that I could beat out all of these people for the prize. Even if I wanted it the most out of anybody there.
“I wonder what the questions will be.” Mark had given up on the tablet and leaned back in his chair. He looked so relaxed, like he was laying out on the library lawn in the summertime instead of waiting for the most important test of the year to start.
“Rick said that it was mostly number theory and combinatorics last year,” Quentin said, his arm draped over the back of his seat. “Starts easy, gets hard. Super hard. And the guy running it is a hardass. Kicked one person out last year before the test even started for asking if he could use a calculator.”
“No calculators?” I had mine in my jacket pocket.
“I don’t think we’ll need them anyway. The questions are mostly proof stuff. That’s what Rick said.” Quentin kept talking, the nervous energy coming out in his voice. “Hey, it’s nine already. Wonder where the proctor is? I wonder if he’s really that much of a jerk.”
“Good luck,” Mark said to me. He held out his hand toward me jokingly for a handshake over the empty seat between us. I shook it, and noticed a curious expression on his face. Like he wanted to beat me, but he also wanted me to win. He knew that for me, the stakes were high.
“Good luck.”
I sat, tension plucking my nerves, in the moment just before something good happens, where the promise of what could be meets the worry of what might not. Like the day you go to a new school, or the seconds backstage before you walk out and say the opening line that you’ve been practicing for months and months. Like the moment when you first open a book, uncertain of whether or not you’ll enjoy it. You decide to read the first page, and word by word it draws you in until you’ve reached the end of the first chapter without realizing it, then the second. Could the rest of the story live up to the promise? You’d have to wait and see.
“Oh, there he is,” Quentin said. “Wow, he does look like a hardass.” I turned to see the man walking into the auditorium and my heart stopped.
CHAPTER FOUR
Eliot. He held a tablet loosely in his hand as he walked down the aisle to the front of the auditorium. I sunk down in my seat, my throat suddenly seized up in terror.
“Don’t worry,” Mark whispered over to me. He mistook my reaction for fear of a different kind. “You’ll do fine.”
“Good morning,” Eliot said, his voice booming through the auditorium. Most of my professors needed a microphone to lecture in this hall, but his voice carried across all of the rows without any problem. Standing in the front of the room, he seemed much taller than before, more menacing. Everybody was instantly silent.
“My name is Dr. Herceg and I will be administering the test for the internship prize. Welcome.”
As his gaze scanned the audience, I bowed my head. Blood rushed to my face and I scrunched down even more, trying to use Quentin to block myself from view. Eliot was still talking, but his voice seemed to come from far away and there was a buzzing in my ears. I couldn’t pay attention.
Him! Eliot! It was his internship! The pieces clicked into place just like a mathematical identity. Of course. Why hadn’t I realized earlier? His accent. The piano. But more importantly, what do I do now?
I tuned back in. “You will be given the problems one by one. If you finish a problem early, continue to solve it in as many different ways as possible. I will be able to see all student work from here, anonymously.” He tapped the tablet in front of him. Quentin glanced back at Mark and raised his eyebrow.
“If I do not like what I see, you will be dismissed.” He held up his tablet, a red box reading DISMISSED on the top of the screen. His shirt was rumpled, his eyes red, and I wondered how late he had stayed at the piano. Echoes of the Satie lilted through my mind as he spoke. “If you are incorrect, I will dismiss you. If you are slow, I will dismiss you. If you are sloppy, unorganized, or uncreative in your work, I will dismiss you. Are there any questions?”
His eyes scanned the room, and before I could duck behind Quentin again, he saw me. I swallowed hard. He caught himself, doing a second take upon seeing me, then turned back to the other students.
“No? Then we will begin.” He moved back to the blackboard behind him and wrote the problem on the board, then read it to us out loud, the problem appearing on the top of our tablet screens. “Write all partitions of the number 13. Begin.”
My mind flashed back to my first discrete math class. I had always been good at math, but it was discrete that made me realize I loved it more than anything. And partitions were easy—just different ways of writing numbers as sums. Thirteen could be written as 10+3, or 5+6+2, or thirteen ones all added together.
I took a deep breath. The students around me scribbled furiously on their tablets, and I was worried about going too slow, but I was also worried about being sloppy and missing a partition. And to top it all off, I was worried about Eliot figuring out who I really was. I thought we would have to register at the beginning of the test, but he’d said it was anonymous—would he ask for our names at the end? Did he already know the student list somehow? Did he already know I had lied to him? Take it easy, Brynn. Step by step.
There were so many partitions. Start with the basic ones. 13. 12+1. 11+2. 11+1+1. I settled into an easy rhythm, breaking up the numbers in order and writing them down in separate columns. Not so bad, once I got everything organized. 10+3. 10+2+1. 10+1+1+1. I heard a chair behind me creak as a student got up. Dismissed already? Well, the physics majors probably didn’t even know what a partition was. I felt better, more certain, and I kept on working steadily. 9+4. 9+3+1. I had gotten down to the line of fives when a voice broke my concentration.
“Next question.” Eliot’s voice startled me. He erased the question from the blackboard and began to write another. My tablet screen blanked out the question as well as all of my work, and the second question appeared.
“What if we aren’t finished yet?” a student from a few rows back called out.
“You’re still here, aren’t you?” Eliot said. “Then you’re finished. Next question.” He drew a circle on the board and began to sketch out chords between the points on the c
ircle. “Let M be the midpoint of the chord PQ...”
I knew this proof. The butterfly theorem. The chords sketched out drew the shape of a butterfly in the circle. I quickly wrote out the proof, adding in the missing perpendiculars. I finished in only a few minutes and looked around the auditorium, surprised at what I saw. Already a third of the room had been eliminated. I leaned back in my chair but then remembered what he had said. We were being tested on creativity, and my proof was the most straightforward version. I panicked and went back to the problem. There must be another way to do it. I scrambled to think of another proof, maybe one based on angles. Maybe projecting the circle, or maybe thinking of it as a conic section...
Math was wonderful for me. It was an escape from the world which was messy and full of vague ambiguities a frightening muddle, into a new world of perfection. A world of lines which had no end, and points which were infinitely small, of curves that reached out always further and further into the plane, functions that repeated themselves in undulating waves which had no beginning and no end.
It was only in this clean, perfect space that I felt comfortable playing. In my imagination I could drift off into daydreams, and in math I could construct the realities that I wanted to live in. I worked for twenty more minutes until Eliot called time, but couldn’t finish a second proof.
“Next question.” I sighed as my tablet blanked out again. I must be doing okay, but this test stressed me out more than any other I’d ever taken.
The next question was even harder, involving some partial differential equations that I had just learned. I worked on it without success for a half hour, but when time was called I wasn’t even close to an answer. I gulped, waiting for the red DISMISSED bar to appear on my screen, but it never did. Eliot wrote the next problem on the board and we continued working on our tablets. Students left the auditorium throughout, a stream of dismissals at the beginning of every problem that trickled down as time went on.
Eliot sat quietly at the large desk in the front of the room, watching us through his tablet. Watching me. I stole quick glances up at him every so often, convinced that his eyes were on my screen. He wiped at his eyes with the sleeves of his rumpled shirt, occasionally frowning. With so many other students in the room, it was impossible to tell whose work he was following, but my imagination made me feel like I could tell. Some hidden sense inside of me activated and I knew that he was watching over me.
The problems became more and more impossible and I became more and more desperate, writing down any solutions I could think of, regardless of whether or not they were elegant or creative or hell, even right. I fell into the work with the kind of determination a marathon runner uses in the last mile of the race, throwing my all into a last desperate effort not to be eliminated.
“Stop.” Eliot’s voice broke my focus and I leaned back into my chair and closed my eyes, sighing deeply.
“Congratulations,” he said. He looked straight at me and I felt my skin burn red. Turning away, I saw that only three other students remained in the auditorium: Quentin, Mark, and one guy I thought I remembered from a combinatorics class. Quentin turned around to glance back at Mark and me, his eyes wide with pleasure. Hell yeah!
Eliot said something about interviews, and called Mark first. Mark crossed by me and gave my shoulder a squeeze, his face beaming with pleasure. We had done it! I smiled back at him and gave him a quick thumbs up. Eliot led him out to the interview and the rest of us waited.
“Hey, how did you do that last one?” Quentin said, turning around eagerly.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I tried to get it into a graphable form, but it wasn’t working.”
“Oh,” Quentin said. “So you didn’t finish it? That’s weird.”
“What, you finished all of them?”
“Mostly, or at least a partial answer.” Quentin continued talking about the last question, but a root of worry had dug itself into my chest and wouldn’t come loose.
What if Eliot knew which tablet was mine? What if he had rigged the test? I had been terrified of having to confront Eliot and tell him my real name, but worse than that was the possibility that I didn’t deserve the prize at all. Surely it wasn’t a coincidence that I still sat here in the auditorium. My palms gripped the armrests of the seat.
Eliot returned alone and called the other student, the one I didn’t know, for his turn. By the time Eliot came into the room to call in Quentin for his interview, my heart was racing. I wanted to speak up, but didn’t know how, and they had left the room before I could say a word. Now, alone in the auditorium, I cursed myself for being such an idiot. I couldn’t stay. Eliot would think of me as a complete liar when I told him who I really was. Not only that, I hadn’t even finished half of the problems. As much as I wanted to win, I didn’t want to win unfairly. My grandmother had always told me that cheating was wrong, and if I won the prize it would be by cheating. I could always find another way to get to Hungary.
Liar. Cheat. Liar. The words reverberated in my head. The lecture hall closed in on me and I gasped to breathe. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t.
My heart pounded in my chest as I rose from my seat. I crossed over to Eliot’s desk and picked up a scrap of paper, pulling a pen out of my jacket pocket to write a brief note.
Sorry. I don’t deserve this.
I didn’t sign the note. Who was I to him, anyway? Valentina was nothing more than a wisp of imagination.
I left the note on his desk, and before I could change my mind, I turned and ran.
Eliot reached his hand out to dismiss the first student, someone who hadn’t written down a single partition for the first problem. Surely Valentina would know what a partition was? A flash of anxiety surged through him. If she were the first student to be dismissed—
Never mind that. Eliot berated himself for being so biased. Perhaps it was for the best that he couldn’t tell whose work was whose. Valentina had been writing, anyway, or pretending to. He pressed the button on his screen, sending the dismissal out into the auditorium. He stared at his screen for a moment until he heard a seat creak, and then he looked up to see a boy rolling his eyes as he left.
Not her.
Eliot pulled himself upright in his seat, wiping at his weary eyes. The night before already felt far away, the stuff of dreams and magic. He had looked forward to the internship test because he knew he would see her. And yet he was scared, too, for what reason he could not tell. Perhaps he worried that she would fail. She did not seem like the kind of person to take failure lightly. Perhaps he worried more that she would win, and all that would mean for him.
He flipped through the students’ work on his screen quickly, dismissing all those who had nothing written down. Then he went back and dismissed all those who were simply writing down partitions in any random order. He did not want guessers. He did not want anyone whose brains were disorderly.
Valentina still worked on in the second row. Her dark hair fell over her face, obscuring her eyes. She held the stylus carefully, precisely, as though cutting one slice of cake in two perfectly equal pieces. As he scanned through the remaining students on his screen, he tried to guess whose screen belonged to her. Perhaps this one, with the delicate handwriting, the numbers slanted in a hurry toward the right of the page. Perhaps this other one with the sums in an orderly matrix. One student had written all of the partitions out already and was beginning to show the proof for a general case.
Enough. He deleted the problem set, erasing all of the answers. Anybody still here deserved to move on.
As the problems went on and he dismissed the students more slowly, he grew prouder and prouder of Valentina. She certainly would become a great mathematician if she kept at it. All of the remaining few students—four of them—had done a remarkable job in their attempts at finding the answers to unreasonably hard questions. He thought he knew which tablet was hers before erasing the last question.
“Congratulations,” he said, looking directly at V
alentina. She blushed and looked away. “You have passed the first round of testing. We’ll start the interview portion of the test now. Relax here; the interviews should take less than a half hour each. You first,” he said, pointing to the young man sitting next to Valentina. Eliot glanced back at the tablet on his desk. Although he wanted to be impartial, he knew that it would be hard to interview anyone after he had spoken with Valentina. He held out his hand to the young man who approached the front of the lecture hall.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Herceg.”
“Mark. Mark Joseph.” The boy shook his hand firmly and they walked out of the back exit of the auditorium to the empty classroom Eliot had chosen for the interviews.
“Very impressive. You and your fellow students. This is one of the finest test groups I’ve seen.” Eliot didn’t have to lie; the competition had grown fiercer each year, and this selection of students did not disappoint. Pasadena University, for all its administrative idiocy, certainly admitted some of the top mathematical talent in the country.
“Thank you, sir.” They sat in the student chairs, Eliot leaning back with his tablet in his lap. The boy scratched nervously at the side of his glasses.
“Mark Joseph. Any relation to the dean?”
“He’s my dad.” The boy stared down at his feet as though significantly embarrassed by having to reveal this fact. Eliot had to keep himself from laughing at the irony. After all that nonsense with Patterson, to have the dean’s son show up as a top candidate!
“Don’t worry, I won’t give preference one way or another. I only care about your math.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Which problem gave you the most trouble on the test?” he asked.
They sat and talked about the problems for quite some time before Eliot glanced at his watch and noticed over thirty minutes had passed. The boy impressed him, a good fit for the program and able to communicate his difficulties easily. A strikingly intelligent student. In any other year Eliot would have had his winner right there. And yet—
