1992
Age 13
The week after the presentation didn't feel like an ending, just a page turned without a crease. The posters came down, the projector was wheeled back to storage, and the hallways returned to their usual static: equations half-erased, flyers curling at the corners, students negotiating coffee and deadlines. The air had that spring quality where the sun looks warm until you stand in it too long.
Paige and I went back to the ordinary rhythm. Li in the morning, Kim in the afternoon, the library in between. Ordinary meant quiet again, and quiet was its own kind of progress.
Dr. Li opened the first post-competition lecture with a proof about optimization on curved surfaces. She drew a saddle on the board that looked more like a paper airplane and said, "Mathematics rewards those who notice the small errors before they matter." Someone laughed. She didn't. Paige wrote the line in her margin and underlined it twice. I saw the motion but not the words. Her hand blocked them. But I knew what she'd written. Li's lessons usually work better as proverbs than formulas.
After class, we sat under one of the big live oaks by the library. The benches were rough, carved with initials that had long since lost their owners. Paige balanced her notebook on her knees, sunlight sliding across the pages.
"Feels strange without a project," she said.
"You could start another one."
She smiled faintly. "You would."
I shrugged. "Systems don't like idleness."
She tore a page from her notebook, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it toward the trash can by the path. It missed by a foot.
"Margin of error," I said.
She gave me a look that was half warning, half amusement. "You're not funny, Stephen."
"I know."
The afternoon stayed soft around us. Across the lawn, Eugene Strange from Kim's lab was asleep under a tree, laptop half-open, headphones crooked over one ear. I stepped around him later on my way to the rec center and thought, Even dreams need debugging.
Kim assigned another three-day sprint that week. A stripped-down parser that refused to behave. Paige grumbled, but we both knew we'd do it. That's what happens when competence becomes reflex.
In the evenings I kept my training schedule. Tuesdays and Thursdays, rec annex, the same routine. The coach ran it like an equation. Warm-up, shadow rounds, bag rounds, stretch. No pep talks, no theory. Just form and timing. I liked the absence of evaluation. In class, every mistake waits to be graded. Here, it just existed and then passed.
Linguistics, meanwhile, was turning out to be a different kind of logic. Syntax trees instead of proof trees, but the same discipline underneath. The professor called them maps of meaning. I saw them as circuits: current traveling from noun to verb instead of voltage to ground. I liked how the structure hid inside sound, the way an algorithm hides in its output.
By Thursday, the parser assignment collided with Li's take-home exam. Paige looked at the calendar, frowned, and said, "This is impossible."
"It's just badly scheduled," I said.
"Same thing."
We divided the hours. She took the afternoon block. I took the night shift. I built us a schedule that ran to the minute, each segment labeled like a proof step. We kept to it. By 11:56 p.m., the parser finally produced clean output. I zipped the file, printed the log, and slid the disk into the submission box outside Kim's office at 11:59 and change. Paige dropped her exam envelope on Li's pile one door down.
"Margin met," she said.
"Barely counts if you say it out loud," I said.
The Call
Back in my room the light from the desk lamp cut a clean circle over the notebook. The dorm was quiet. Most people already gone for the night or pretending to study. I picked up the landline receiver, dialed home, and waited through the distance hum.
Dad answered first. "You're up late."
"Deadline," I said.
He chuckled. "Of course."
There was a pause while he shifted the phone. I could hear the clink of his coffee mug even though it had to be close to midnight there. "Your mom's here. Hang on."
A shuffle, then her voice. "Stephen. You sound tired."
"I'm fine."
"You eating?"
"Yes."
"Sleeping?"
"Also yes."
"Don't 'also yes' me," she said. "I can hear when you're running on fumes."
"I have structure," I said. "That's almost rest."
She sighed. "Structure isn't sleep."
For a few seconds we listened to the small line noise together. It reminded me of when I was younger, working puzzles at the kitchen table while the adults talked in the other room. Distant but steady.
"You sound good otherwise," Dad said, back on the line. "Still running?"
"Every morning," I said. "And Tuesdays, Thursdays I do boxing drills."
"Boxing?" Mom cut in. "Please tell me that's just exercise."
"It's exercise," I said. "And control."
"That's what I'm afraid of," she muttered, but she didn't sound angry. Just the kind of worried that keeps lamps on until the door clicks.
Dad said, "Proud of you, son. Second place is a strong start."
"How did you"
"Paige's mother mentioned it at church."
"Of course she did," I said.
They both laughed, and for a moment the distance between the two phones didn't matter.
"Get some sleep," Mom said. "And remember, you don't have to win every round."
"I know," I said.
"Goodnight, sweetheart."
"Goodnight."
When the line went quiet again, the room felt both larger and easier to breathe in. I set the receiver down and stared at the dial tone for a second before the click cut it off.
Outside, the sprinklers had finished their circuit. The pavement gleamed under the lamps. I sat by the window until the hum of the building became a kind of background proof that the world was still holding.
That's when I saw Paige crossing the courtyard, a shadow among shadows, hair pulled back, notebooks hugged to her chest. She didn't look up, and I didn't call out.
A few minutes later, we met on the path anyway. Two lines intersecting by coincidence.
"Do you ever think about what happens after all this?" she asked.
"After what?"
"Classes. Degrees. Whatever you're building toward."
"More of the same," I said. "Harder problems. Better tools."
She laughed once, softly. "That's a very Stephen answer."
"It's the true one."
"True doesn't mean complete."
I looked at her. "Neither do most proofs."
She smiled sideways. "Touché."
A breeze moved through the trees. Somewhere across the quad, a late bicycle chain rattled like dice. The night felt honest in its fatigue.
When she left for her dorm, I walked the long route back past the rec annex. The building was dark except for the hall light spilling through the doorway. Inside, the heavy bags hung still, shadows swaying slightly from the air vents. I stood there for a moment. Not to train, just to mark that I'd kept the rhythm.
Back in my room, I opened the day's notebook. The pages had become crowded with side notes. Stray symbols, sketches of circuits, half-phrased ideas. The margins were thicker than the main text now. Paige's handwriting lived there too, fragments from shared proofs and half-erased arguments.
I realized the margin was where the real thinking happened. The safe space before commitment, the line between control and curiosity.
I wrote one last note before turning off the lamp.
The proof lives in the margins first. The rest just follows.
The heater clicked once. Outside, a train passed through the dark, and its rhythm sounded almost like a metronome keeping time for the next problem waiting to be solved.
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