Nazma sat on her bed, twirling a pen between her fingers. The faint smile from earlier had vanished, replaced by a sharp, focused gaze.
She reached for a large, thick-bound book. As she opened it, the book looked wide and sturdy on her lap, its green cover adorned with a striped pattern.
With swift yet precise movements, her fingers danced across the paper, jotting down the license plate of Zemiro's car in black ink.
She stared at the writing for a few seconds. A thin smirk, heavy with a brewing plan, began to spread across her face.
Slowly, she closed the hardcover book.
Tap.
She slipped it back into a cardboard box filled with large books, placing it at the very bottom so no other eyes could find it.
"One more piece," she whispered into the silence of the room.
Nazma was a true collector. Inside that box, books from various grade levels were lined up neatly, kept like hidden treasures.
They were all secondhand books belonging to her grandmother's eleventh child—her uncle—who was now well-established as a bank employee.
That stack of old papers was a precious motivation for her. She often looked at them with pure ambition; there was a deep longing within her to achieve the same success as her uncle.
Even though she was only in 7th grade, she studied lessons far beyond her school's curriculum. She often spent her time casually browsing through her uncle's chemistry books, trying to learn the chapter on chemical bonding—an 11th-grade subject.
Her eyes carefully observed the periodic table and the octet rule written there. She watched how atoms strive to achieve a stable electron configuration through ionic or covalent bonds. On her scratch paper, she attempted to calculate valence electrons and draw Lewis structures to understand how a molecule forms from the combination of different elements.
For a moment, she scribbled with her pen, filling the empty space between the Lewis structures she had just drawn. Suddenly, the faint creak of the door breaking the silence.
Endah stepped in and froze at the threshold. Her brow furrowed as her eyes swept across the scene before her.
Nazma's school uniform lay scattered haphazardly on the bed. Workbooks were strewn across the floor like footprints, and a towering stack of notebooks stood beside Nazma, nearly obscuring the girl who was still lost in her own world.
"Nazma, is this a bedroom or a book warehouse?"
Endah scolded her, shaking her head at the sheer messiness of the room.
Nazma jolted. Her pen slipped, ruining the neatness of the atomic structure she was building.
Her shoulders tensed.
"Knock before you come in," she said firmly.
She quickly shut the chemistry book. To her, the messy room was a system only she understood. The presence of someone else only disrupted the deep sense of thrill coursing through her, breaking the depth of her feelings while she was immersed in her books.
***
"Nazma, time for lunch! I've been calling you and you didn't answer," Endah replied, ignoring her daughter's displeasure.
Nazma huffed. The excitement that had enveloped her just moments ago shattered. It evaporated, replaced by a sudden surge of hunger.
"Fine!" she answered.
She hurriedly stacked her notebooks to cover the traces of her earlier scribbles.
Nazma headed to the dining room. There stood a large teak dining table. Its surface was wide and thick, with live edges that still retained the wood's natural shape.
She pulled out a dingklik—a small wooden stool—tucked under the table, and sat before her plate.
Endah placed a bowl of vegetables in the middle of the vast table.