Sanjay looked down at my offered hand. His eyes narrowed with disdain. He didn't move an inch to receive my greeting. He just stared at my hand like it was covered in a contagious disease, giving me the ultimate snub.
I stared at him for a second. Really? We're doing this? I casually took my hand back, burying it in my pocket, and gave a careless shrug. "Suit yourself."
I grabbed Alex's wrist gently, directing her to walk toward the door. "Let's go, Alex. The gym is waiting."
"Wait!" Sanjay's voice rang out, louder and much more frustrated this time. He stepped out from behind the desk, blocking our path to the door. "Didn't you hear what I said? Please wait for some time. We need to solve this problem. It's a matter of academic integrity!"
I stopped in my tracks. I ruffled my messy blond hair, genuinely starting to feel annoyed. The one thing a lazy person hates more than doing work is being forced to stand around while other people do work.
I walked right up to the desk, closing the distance between me and Sanjay. He flinched slightly, avoiding direct eye contact when I loomed over the desk, but he held his ground.
I looked down at the notebook that was causing all this unnecessary drama.
I read the question scrawled at the top of the page in less than a second. Challenge: Find the dimensions of a rectangular garden where the area is 60 square feet and the length is 7 feet longer than the width.
Below the question was an absolute mess of numbers, crossed-out formulas, and erased pencil marks. It looked like both of them had been trying to flex their advanced knowledge to get the correct answer.
I could see Alex's neat handwriting on the left side. She was trying to use the quadratic formula to solve it. On the right side, Sanjay had attempted a complex factorial method.
I scanned their work. Wow, they are starting the advanced high-school curriculum already? I thought, genuinely a little surprised. They really are smart kids.
However, looking closer, I immediately spotted the problem. Both of their answers were completely wrong. They were so busy trying to use the most complicated, showy methods to beat each other that they had messed up the basic arithmetic. Alex had missed a negative sign in her square root, and Sanjay had completely botched his factorization by rushing.
The silence stretched for a few seconds as I stared at the book.
Sanjay smirked, assuming I was completely lost. "See? It's advanced algebra. Way over your head. So just sit down and—"
"The length is twelve, and the width is five," I stated flatly, not even looking up from the page. "Check it."
Sanjay's smirk froze. The words died in his throat.
Alex blinked rapidly, looking from my face to the notebook. "What?"
"Twelve and five," I repeated, my tone utterly bored.
Sanjay let out a loud, mocking snort. He shook his head, looking at me with pure pity. "Quit guessing, Luke. You're just pulling random numbers out of the air. Don't embarrass yourself just because you feel like you can't match us."
Alex, however, didn't mock me. A flicker of doubt crossed her face. She immediately opened her textbook, flipping through the pages frantically until she reached the appendix at the back where the challenge answers were secretly printed. Her finger traced down the column of numbers.
She stopped. Her breath hitched.
"Oh... my god," Alex murmured, her eyes widening behind her glasses. She looked up at Sanjay, then at me, looking absolutely shell-shocked. "Sanjay. Luke is right. The answer is twelve and five."
Sanjay's eyes widened to comical proportions. "What? No! That's impossible! Let me see that!" He snatched the textbook from Alex's hands, staring at the answer key as if it had personally offended his ancestors.
I sighed softly, picking up the pencil that was resting on the desk.
"Both of your methods are good in theory, but there's a problem in your basic calculations," I said, my voice calm, slipping instinctively into the tone I used when tutoring my college friends. "It's just that both of you are in a hurry to beat the other, so you're making careless mistakes."
I leaned over the notebook. In two short, perfectly neat lines, I wrote down the correction for Sanjay's factoring.
W(W + 7) = 60W² + 7W - 60 = 0(W + 12)(W - 5) = 0. Width cannot be negative. W = 5. L = 12.
Then, I moved to Alex's side, drawing a small circle around the negative sign she had dropped in her quadratic equation.
(-7 ± √(49 - 4(1)(-60))) / 2 = (-7 ± √289) / 2 = (-7 ± 17) / 2.10/2 = 5.
I dropped the pencil back onto the notebook with a soft clack.
Sanjay and Alex just stood there, leaning over the desk, staring down at the pages. They were completely paralyzed. Sanjay's mouth was slightly open, his brain failing to comprehend how the 'weird kid' from the regular classes had just effortlessly dissected a high school algebra problem in less than thirty seconds.
I stood up straight, crossed my arms over my chest, and looked down at my sister lazily.
"Can we go now?" I asked, putting a little exaggerated whine into my voice. "I'm starving."
"Ohhh..." Alex let out a breathy, stunned sound. She nodded mechanically, her eyes still glued to my handwriting on the page. "Yeah. Yes. We can go."
She hurriedly grabbed her textbook back from Sanjay's limp hands, shoved it into the bag I was holding, and stepped away from the desk.
I grabbed her hand naturally and turned toward the door. We walked out of Class 7-A, leaving Sanjay Patel standing alone in the quiet classroom, staring at the notebook as if it had just grown wings and spoken to him in Latin.
We walked down the hallway in complete, heavy silence. The energy radiating from Alex was intense. She was practically vibrating with unasked questions.
Finally, as we pushed through the double doors leading toward the school's front entrance, she couldn't hold it in anymore.
She stopped walking, forcing me to stop too. She looked up at me, her brown eyes wide with a mixture of awe, confusion, and deep suspicion.
"Um..." Alex started, her voice barely above a whisper. She swallowed hard. "Luke... when exactly did you learn how to do that? I mean... I've never seen you study a day in your life."